all they will do
is to give you a wider berth. If once they come out with you, to you
they will remain faithful, and with you return; although if you meet
them next morning in the street, it is as like as not they will cut you
with a countenance of brass.

The forest--a strange thing for an Englishman--is very destitute of
birds. This is no country where every patch of wood among the meadows
gives up an incense of song, and every valley wandered through by a
streamlet rings and reverberates from side to side with a profusion of
clear notes. And this rarity of birds is not to be regretted on its own
account only. For the insects prosper in their absence, and become as
one of the plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm in the hot sand; mosquitoes
drone their nasal drone; wherever the sun finds a hole in the roof of
the forest, you see a myriad transparent creatures coming and going in
the shaft of light; and even between-whiles, even where there is no
incursion of sun-rays into the dark arcade of the wood, you are
conscious of a continual drift of insects, an ebb and flow of
infinitesimal living things between the trees. Nor are insects the only
evil creatures that haunt the forest. For you may plump into a cave
among the rocks, and find yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see
a crooked viper slither across the road.

Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading
beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden by
a friend: "I say, just keep where you are, will you? You make the
jolliest motive." And you reply: "Well, I don't mind, if I may smoke."
And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours
doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet
farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter,
encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the fern.
You cannot watch your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the
trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole
picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip through
the leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets the trees
a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies of light. But you
know it is going forward; and, out of emulation with the painter, get
ready your own palette, and lay out the colour for a woodland scene in
words.

Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a