wing, rather crowded trees and standing as it
were a little aloof--became even under the warmest sunset grey and
cold--and as if they waited....

And in the distant corner where the sand was, rose suddenly a steep
little hill, surmounted by a wild and splendid group of pines, through
which one looked across a vale of cornfields at an ancient town that
became strange and magical as the sun went down, so that I was held
gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy
spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the
distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and
luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow
streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is what it
must have been.

There are persons to be found mixed up in those childish memories,--Lady
Ladislaw, tall and gracious, in dresses of floating blue or grey, or
thin, subtly folding, flowering stuffs, Philip and his sister, Guy, the
old butler, a multitude of fainter figures long become nameless and
featureless; they are far less vivid in my memory than the fine
solitudes of the Park itself--and the dreams I had there.

I wonder if you dream as I dreamt. I wonder whether indeed I dreamt as
now I think I did. Have I, in these latter years, given form and
substance and a name to things as vague in themselves as the urgencies
of instinct? Did I really go into those woods and waving green places as
one keeps a tryst, expectant of a fellowship more free and delicate and
delightful than any I knew. Did I know in those days of nymphs and
dryads and fauns and all those happy soulless beings with which the
desire of man's heart has animated the wilderness. Once certainly I
crawled slowly through the tall bracken and at last lay still for an
interminable while, convinced that so I should see those shadows
populous with fairies, with green little people. How patiently I lay!
But the stems creaked and stirred, and my heart would keep on beating
like a drum in my throat.

It is incredible that once a furry whispering half-human creature with
bright brown eyes came and for a time played with me near where the tall
ferns foam in a broad torrent from between the big chestnuts down to the
upper mere. That must have been real dreaming, and yet now, with all my
sanities and scepticisms, I could half believe it real.

Sec. 2

You become reserved. Perhaps not exceptionally so, b