ent forest,
feeling nearer to the truth and soul, as it were, that lives on in
it. They would feel as if they had got back to their original
existence, and had become themselves, as they ought to be, could
they live such life, untouched by artificial care. Then, how hurt
they would be if any proposed to cut down that oak; if any proposed
the felling of the forest, and the death of its meaning. It would be
like a blow aimed at themselves. No picture that could be bought at
a thousand guineas could come near that ancient oak; but you can
carry away the memory of it, the picture and thought in your mind
for nothing. If the oak were cut down, it would be like thrusting a
stick through some valuable painting on your walls at home.

The common below the South Wood, even James Thardover with all his
desire for improvement could not do much good with; the soil, and
the impossibility of getting a fall for draining, all checked effort
there. A wild, rugged waste, you say, at first, glancing at the
rushes, and the gaunt signpost standing up among them, the anthills,
and thistles. Thistles have colour in their bloom, and the prickly
leaves are finely cut; rushes--green rushes--are notes of the
season, and with their slender tips point to the days in the book of
the year; they are brown now at the tip, and some bent downwards in
an angle. The brown will descend the stalk till the snipes come with
grey-grass colours in their wings. But all the beatings of the rain
will not cast the rushes utterly down; they will send up fresh green
successors for the spring, for the cuckoo to float along over on his
way to the signpost, where he will perch a few minutes, and call in
the midst of the wilderness. There, too, the lapwings leave their
eggs on the ground among the rushes, and rise, and complainingly
call. The warm showers of June call up the iris in the corner where
the streamlet widens, and under the willows appear large yellow
flowers above the flags. Pink and white blossom of the rest-harrow
comes on bushy plants where the common is dry, and there is heath,
and heather, and fern. The waste has its treasures too--as the
song-thrush has his in the hawthorn bush--its treasures of flowers,
as the wood its beauties of tree and leaf, and the hills their
wheat.

The ring-fence goes farther than this; it encloses the living
creatures, yet without confining them. The wing of the wood-pigeon,
as the bird perches, forms a defined curve against