hat
go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in the moving winds
like the weeds in submarine currents, all these set the mind working on
the thought of what you may have seen off a foreland or over the side of
a boat, and make you feel like a diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms
below the tumbling, transitory surface of the sea. And yet in itself, as
I say, the strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not to be felt
fully without the sense of contrast. You must have risen in the morning
and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the sun's
light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at even, the
unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness of the groves.

And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes. If you have
not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous pigeon, you
will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your window--for there are
no blinds or shutters to keep him out--and the room, with its bare wood
floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines all round you in a sort of
glory of reflected lights. You may doze a while longer by snatches, or
lie awake to study the charcoal men and dogs and horses with which
former occupants have defiled the partitions: Thiers, with wily profile;
local celebrities, pipe in hand; or, maybe, a romantic landscape
splashed in oil. Meanwhile artist after artist drops into the
salle-a-manger for coffee, and then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool,
and paint-box, bound into a fagot, and sets off for what he calls his
"motive." And artist after artist, as he goes out of the village,
carries with him a little following of dogs. For the dogs, who belong
only nominally to any special master, hang about the gate of the forest
all day long, and whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy, profit
by his escort, and go forth with him to play an hour or two at hunting.
They would like to be under the trees all day. But they cannot go alone.
They require a pretext. And so they take the passing artist as an excuse
to go into the woods, as they might take a walking-stick as an excuse to
bathe. With quick ears, long spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall
as a greyhound and with a bulldog's head, this company of mongrels will
trot by your side all day and come home with you at night, still showing
white teeth and wagging stunted tail. Their good humour is not to be
exhausted. You may pelt them with stones if you please,