218 MY DEVON YEAR 



coloured carpet of sere needles with delicate shades, 

 that in their turn were brightened by direct reflection 

 from boughs and trunks aglow in the orange light. 

 Splashes of pale sky eastward broke through the 

 crowns of the wood ; traceries of moss outlined the 

 twisted roots at each tree-foot ; a bough of beech, 

 with dead leaves flaming, sometimes extended across 

 my path; and all things were soaked in the 

 diaphanous air. 



Silence is a condition most uncommon amid great 

 pines or firs, yet at this moment these forests, built 

 of both, breathed no sound, and the scent of such 

 places, always borne on the sigh of the least wind, 

 or won from the kiss of hot sunshine, to-day was 

 absent. Only a subdued twitter of tiny tits, travel- 

 ling in company along their aerial highways in the 

 tree-tops, broke the great silence. The woods sloped 

 to the North, and under their edges infinite peace 

 and extreme cold had already settled. There the 

 daggers of the frost were already stabbing in the 

 damp mosses and dead leaves ; while on the hill the 

 heath shone warm contrasted against the chill light of 

 the silvery-blue firs. In the deciduous underwoods 

 many leaves still hung ; but autumn colours suffer 

 an eclipse displayed within such sombre glades, for 

 the evergreens intercept sunshine, and the dying 

 foliage beneath is something robbed of its last 

 beauties. There is in these dusky places a cadaver- 

 ous rather than a splendid death, a bleaching and a 



