e too stiff to rustle in the wind, and the birds are
dumb, and the ice has stilled the brooks. Set a lost child amid the
bare grey tree trunks of such a winter forest, in the dead silence
of a great frost, with no track near him but that which his own
random feet have made across the snow, and I think that there can
be nought lonelier than he to be thought of: and in the depth of
the forest there is peril to the lonely.

I had no fear of the forest till that day when I was lost therein,
for the nearer glades round our village had been my playground ever
since I could remember, and before I knew that fear therein might
be. That was not so long a time, however, save that the years of a
child are long years; for at this time, when I first learned the
full wildness of the woods of the great Andredsweald and knew what
loneliness was, I was only ten years old. Since I could run alone
my old nurse had tried to fray me from wandering out of sight of
those who tended me, with tales of wolf and bear and pixy, lest I
should stray and be lost, but I had not heeded her much. Maybe I
had proved so many of her tales to be but pretence that, as I began
to think for myself, I deemed them all to be so.

But now I was lost in the forest, and what had been a playground
was become a vast and desolate land for me, and all the things that
I had ever heard of what dangers lurked within it, came back to my
mind. I remembered that the grey wolf's skin on which I slept had
come hence, and I minded the calf that the pack had slain close to
the village a year ago, and I thought of the girl who went mazed
and useless about the place, having lost her wits through being
pixy led, as they said, long ago. The warnings seemed to me to be
true enough, now that all the old landmarks were lost to me, and
all the tracks were buried under the crisp snow. I did not know
when I had left the road from the village to the hilltop, or in
which direction it lay.

It was very silent in the aisles of the great beech trunks, for the
herds were in shelter. There was no sound of the swineherds' horn,
though the evening was coming on, and but for the frost it was time
for their charges to be taken homeward, and the woodmen's axes were
idle. Even the scream of some hawk high overhead had been welcome
to me, and the harsh cry of a jay that I scared was like the voice
of a friend.

It was the fault of none but myself that I was lost. I had planned
to go hunting alone i