the little ones hauling a long branch
behind them in her wake. That is the worst of what there is to
encounter; and if I tell you of what once happened to a friend of mine,
it is by no means to tantalise you with false hopes; for the adventure
was unique. It was on a very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat
grey sky and a frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall
here be nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much
hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green
pine-tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked boulders.
He drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated under a tree in an
open. The old father knitted a sock, the mother sat staring at the fire.
The eldest son, in the uniform of a private of dragoons, was choosing
out notes on a key-bugle. Two or three daughters lay in the
neighbourhood picking violets. And the whole party as grave and silent
as the woods around them! My friend watched for a long time, he says;
but all held their peace; not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept
choosing out single notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at
his work and made strange movements the while with his flexible
eyebrows. They took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which
was disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical wax-works. Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure might
have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange dragoon. And as
this hypothesis of his became more certain, the awful insolubility of
why they should be left out there in the woods with nobody to wind them
up again when they ran down, and a growing disquietude as to what might
happen next, became too much for his courage, and he turned tail, and
fairly took to his heels. It might have been a singing in his ears, but
he fancies he was followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter.
Nothing has ever transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they were
automata; or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself)
that this is all another chapter of Heine's "Gods in Exile"; that the
upright old man with the eyebrows was no other than Father Jove, and the
young dragoon with the taste for music either Apollo or Mars.

MORALITY

Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men. Not
one or two only, but a great chorus of grateful voices have arisen to
spread abroad its fame. Half th