WISTMAN'S WOOD 185 



be easily disproved from the place itself; for quick 

 eyes, peering here within the tangle of undergrowth, 

 or amid the deep interstices of the stony avalanche 

 from which this forest rises, shall find infant trees 

 ascending to the sapling stage, in full vigour of 

 promise. Others there are of larger growth, and one 

 may discover oaks at all ages, from the tiny seedling 

 sprung of last year's acorn to the patriarch that was 

 a sapling when the she-wolf made her home here and 

 killed the stone-man's cattle by night. Mice and 

 birds convey the acorns to great distances from the 

 wood, and upon adjacent heaths, a mile from their 

 birthplace, I have found the husks of the fruit. 



Granite and oak are clothed with lichens of a 

 colour exactly similar, and to the imagination, seen 

 thus jagged and grey together, one appears as endur- 

 ing as the other. The old trees, whose average height 

 is scarcely fifteen feet, are distorted, cramped, twisted, 

 and knotted by time. Their mossy limbs, low spread, 

 make a home for the bilberry, whose purple fruit 

 ripens beside the acorns; for the polypody that fringes 

 each gnarled limb with foliage ; for the rabbits, 

 who leap from the stones to the flat boughs spread 

 upon them ; and for the red fox, who, sunning 

 himself in some hollow of moss and touchwood, 

 wakes, as a wanderer assails his ear or nose, and 

 vanishes, like a streak of cinnamon light, into the 

 depths of the wood. Here, too, the adder rears her 

 brood ; the crow, with intermittent croak, flies heavily ; 

 a little hawk, poised in the sky, seeks the lizard 



