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PRY ae oS. Sek. 
., 
A HIDDEN WORLD. 3] 
Tn that silence which was not silence, a something 
—I know not what—assured us that the dead forest 
was in truth alive, and on the point of breaking forth = 
a 
into speech. We entered it full of hope, and believ- 
ing that we should discover some secret. We felt 
certain that to our inquiring spirit a great manifold 
Spirit was about to reply. Though fatigued by the 
walk, and in an infirm state of health, I felt great 
pleasure in the search I had undertaken in these pallid 
glooms. I loved to see before me a person deeply moved, 
and enthusiastically smitten by their great mysteries. 
Stick in hand, she advanced into this fantastic twi- a 
hght, interrogating the sombre forest, and seeking, as yD - 
Ss 
3 SS 
A ——-s 5 
it were, the Virgilian “golden bough.” 
I was about to quit the scene, and seat myself in 7} 
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‘ 
I 
a sunny opening, when at length a more successful 
Th 
Ml 
sounding in one of the ancient trunks brought to 
\ 
light a world whose existence no one would have 
suspected. 
At the summit of this trunk, cut off within a foot 
of the ground, you could very easily distinguish the 
p 
works wrought by the scolytv and weevils, the former 
y 
inhabitants of the tree, in conformity to the concentric 
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arrangement of the sap. But all this belonged to 
ancient history; a different condition of things now 
existed. These miserable scolyti had perished, having 
undergone, like their tree, the energetic action of a 
creat chemical transformation which excluded all life. 
All life, except one, and that the keenest—a consuming and burned- 
up life, it seems—the life of those beings powerful under an infinitely 
