an impertinence almost--some little
colored insect that sought to settle on a sleeping monster--some gaudy
fly that danced impudently down the edge of a great river that could
engulf it with a toss of its smallest wave. That Forest with its
thousand years of growth and its deep spreading being was some such
slumbering monster, yes. Their cottage and garden stood too near its
running lip. When the winds were strong and lifted its shadowy skirts of
black and purple.... He loved this feeling of the Forest Personality; he
had always loved it.

"Queer," he reflected, "awfully queer, that trees should bring me such a
sense of dim, vast living! I used to feel it particularly, I remember,
in India; in Canadian woods as well; but never in little English woods
till here. And Sanderson's the only man I ever knew who felt it too.
He's never said so, but there's the proof," and he turned again to the
picture that he loved. A thrill of unaccustomed life ran through him as
he looked. "I wonder; by Jove, I wonder," his thoughts ran on, "whether
a tree--er--in any lawful meaning of the term can be--alive. I remember
some writing fellow telling me long ago that trees had once been moving
things, animal organisms of some sort, that had stood so long feeding,
sleeping, dreaming, or something, in the same place, that they had lost
the power to get away...!"

Fancies flew pell-mell about his mind, and, lighting a cheroot, he
dropped into an armchair beside the open window and let them play.
Outside the blackbirds whistled in the shrubberies across the lawn. He
smelt the earth and trees and flowers, the perfume of mown grass, and
the bits of open heath-land far away in the heart of the woods. The
summer wind stirred very faintly through the leaves. But the great New
Forest hardly raised her sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow.

Mr. Bittacy, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness of
trees within. He knew all the purple coombs splashed with yellow waves
of gorse; sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with clear and
dark-eyed pools that watched the sky. There hawks hovered, circling hour
by hour, and the flicker of the peewit's flight with its melancholy,
petulant cry, deepened the sense of stillness. He knew the solitary
pines, dwarfed, tufted, vigorous, that sang to every lost wind,
travelers like the gypsies who pitched their bush-like tents beneath
them; he knew the shaggy ponies, with foals like baby centaur