ss along the wayside was soaked
with it, and the leaves of the slender young beeches sparkled with it,
and the bracken bending over the path on either side left its wetness on
my dress as I passed. Nowhere was there a single bit of gloom where you
could sit down and be wretched. The very jays would have laughed you out
of countenance if you had sat there looking sorrowful. Sometimes the
path was narrow, and the trees shut out the sky; sometimes it led me
into the hot sunshine of an open, forest-fringed space; once it took me
along the side of a meadow sloping up on its distant side to more
forest, with only a single row of great beeches between me and the heat
and light dancing over the grass; and all the way I had squirrels for
company, chattering and enjoying themselves as sensible squirrels living
only in the present do; and larks over my head singing in careless
ecstasy just because they had no idea they were probably bad larks with
pasts; and lizards, down at my feet, motionless in the hot sun, quite
unaware of how wicked it becomes to lie in the sun doing nothing
directly you wear clothes and have consciences. As for the scent of the
forest, he who has been in it early after a dewy night knows that, and
the effect it has on the spirits of him who smells it; so I need not
explain how happy I was and how invigorated as I climbed up a long hill
where the wood was thick and cool, and coming out at the top found I had
reached a place of turf and sunshine, with tables in the shade at the
farther side, and in the middle, coffee-pot in hand, a waiter.

This waiter came as a shock. My thoughts had wandered quite into the
opposite channel to the one that ends in waiters. There he stood,
however, solitary and suggestive, in the middle of the sunny green, a
crumpled waiter in regard to shirt-front, and not a waiter, I should
say, of more than bi-weekly washings; but his eye was persuasive, steam
came out of the spout of his coffee-pot, and out of his mouth as I
walked towards him issued appropriate words about the weather. I had
meant to go back to breakfast with Charlotte, and there was no reason at
all why I should cross the green and walk straight up to the waiter; but
there was that in his eye which made me feel that if I did not drink his
coffee not only had I no business on the top of the hill but I was
unspeakably base besides. So I sat down at one of the tables beneath the
beeches--there were at least twelve tables, an