276 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



tions untouched by man's hand, and are interspersed 

 with thorny thickets and wide sunny spaces, stony and 

 barren or bright with flowers. Here, too, are groves 

 of the most ancient oaks in the land, grey giants that 

 might have been growing in the time of the Conquest, 

 their immense horizontal branches rough with growth 

 of fern and lichen ; in the religious twilight of their 

 shade you might spend a long summer day without 

 meeting a human being or hearing any faintest sound 

 of human life. A boundless contiguity of shade such 

 as the sensitive poet desired, where he might spend his 

 solitary life and never more have his ears pained, his 

 soul made sick, with daily reports of oppression and de- 

 ceit and wrong and outrage. 



To the natural man they have another call. Like 

 the ocean and the desert they revive a sense and feeling 

 of which we had been unconscious, but which is always 

 in us, in our very marrow ; the sense which, as Herbert 

 Spencer has said, comes down to us from our remote 

 progenitors at a time when the principal activities of 

 the race were in woods and deserts. Given the right 

 conditions and it springs to renewed life ; and we 

 know it is this which gives to life its best savour, and 

 not the thousand pleasures, or distractions which 

 civilised dwellers in towns have invented as substitutes. 

 Here we are away from them — out of doors, and able 

 to shake the dust of such artificialities from our souls. 

 In such moods, in these green shades, we are ready to 

 echo every grateful word ever spoken of those who for 

 a thousand years in a populous and industrial country^ 



