ending his rays
between their pillar-like boles, he revealed a world of blessed shadows
waiting to receive me. I had expected a pine-wood, but here were trees
of many sorts, some with strong resemblances to trees I knew, others
with marvellous differences from any I had ever seen. I threw myself
beneath the boughs of what seemed a eucalyptus in blossom: its flowers
had a hard calyx much resembling a skull, the top of which rose like a
lid to let the froth-like bloom-brain overfoam its cup. From beneath
the shadow of its falchion-leaves my eyes went wandering into deep after
deep of the forest.

Soon, however, its doors and windows began to close, shutting up aisle
and corridor and roomier glade. The night was about me, and instant
and sharp the cold. Again what a night I found it! How shall I make my
reader share with me its wild ghostiness?

The tree under which I lay rose high before it branched, but the boughs
of it bent so low that they seemed ready to shut me in as I leaned
against the smooth stem, and let my eyes wander through the brief
twilight of the vanishing forest. Presently, to my listless roving
gaze, the varied outlines of the clumpy foliage began to assume or
imitate--say rather SUGGEST other shapes than their own. A light wind
began to blow; it set the boughs of a neighbour tree rocking, and all
their branches aswing, every twig and every leaf blending its individual
motion with the sway of its branch and the rock of its bough. Among
its leafy shapes was a pack of wolves that struggled to break from
a wizard's leash: greyhounds would not have strained so savagely! I
watched them with an interest that grew as the wind gathered force, and
their motions life.

Another mass of foliage, larger and more compact, presented my fancy
with a group of horses' heads and forequarters projecting caparisoned
from their stalls. Their necks kept moving up and down, with an
impatience that augmented as the growing wind broke their vertical
rhythm with a wilder swaying from side to side. What heads they were!
how gaunt, how strange!--several of them bare skulls--one with the skin
tight on its bones! One had lost the under jaw and hung low, looking
unutterably weary--but now and then hove high as if to ease the bit.
Above them, at the end of a branch, floated erect the form of a woman,
waving her arms in imperious gesture. The definiteness of these and
other leaf masses first surprised and then discomposed me: what if t