anatomical specimen of a
pickled rabbit, so there's nothing to be done with the bits.

But he gets on my nerves. I come out solemnly with a pencil and an
exercise book, and take my seat in all gravity at the foot of a large
fir-tree, and wait for thoughts to come, gnawing like a squirrel on a
nut. But the nut's hollow.

I think there are too many trees. They seem to crowd round and stare
at me, and I feel as if they nudged one another when I'm not looking.
I can _feel_ them standing there. And they won't let me get on about
the baby this morning. Just their cussedness. I felt they encouraged
me like a harem of wonderful silent wives, yesterday.

It is half rainy too--the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the
remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest
subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the
roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much
stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them moving
and thinking and prowling, and they overwhelm me. Ah, well, the only
thing is to give way to them.

It is the edge of the Black Forest--sometimes the Rhine far off, on
its Rhine plain, like a bit of magnesium ribbon. But not to-day.
To-day only trees, and leaves, and vegetable presences. Huge straight
fir-trees, and big beech-trees sending rivers of roots into the
ground. And cuckoos, like noise falling in drops off the leaves. And
me, a fool, sitting by a grassy wood-road with a pencil and a book,
hoping to write more about that baby.

Never mind. I listen again for noises, and I smell the damp moss. The
looming trees, so straight. And I listen for their silence. Big,
tall-bodied trees, with a certain magnificent cruelty about them. Or
barbarity. I don't know why I should say cruelty. Their magnificent,
strong, round bodies! It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful
sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-blooded trees, with strange
tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming.

Trees that have no hands and faces, no eyes. Yet the powerful
sap-scented blood roaring up the great columns. A vast individual
life, and an overshadowing will. The will of a tree. Something that
frightens you.

Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got
a face. You look at the strong body of a trunk: you look above you
into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs: you see the soft green
tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you