l together, I have said; and as the road turned and
wound among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke the light
up pleasantly. Sometimes there would be a colonnade of slim, straight
tree-stems with the light running down them as down the shafts of
pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to something, and led only
to a corner of sombre and intricate jungle. Sometimes a spray of
delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, the light lying flatly along
the top of it, so that against a dark background it seemed almost
luminous. There was a great hush over the thicket (for, indeed, it was
more of a thicket than a wood); and the vague rumours that went among
the tree-tops, and the occasional rustling of big birds or hares among
the undergrowth, had in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness,
that put the imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the
russet carpeting of last year's leaves. The spirit of the place seemed
to be all attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its breath to
number my footfalls. One could not help feeling that there ought to be
some reason for this stillness: whether, as the bright old legend goes,
Pan lay somewhere near in a siesta, or whether, perhaps, the heaven was
meditating rain, and the first drops would soon come pattering through
the leaves. It was not unpleasant, in such an humour, to catch sight,
ever and anon, of large spaces of the open plain. This happened only
where the path lay much upon the slope, and there was a flaw in the
solid leafy thatch of the wood at some distance below the level at which
I chanced myself to be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of
foreshortened distance, miniature fields, and Liliputian houses and
hedgerow trees would appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow
larger and smaller, and change and melt one into another, as I continued
to go forward, and so shift my point of view.

For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in the
wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and gobbling,
now and again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I advanced towards this
noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and I caught sight, through
the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure walls, and something like the
tops of a rickyard. And sure enough, a rickyard it proved to be, and a
neat little farm-steading, with the beech-woods growing almost to the
door of it. Just before me, however, as I came up th