252 EVERSLEY GARDENS 



shafts holding up the warm dark roof, lessen- 

 ing away into endless gloom, paved with rich 

 brown fir-needle a carpet at which Nature 

 has been at work for forty years. 1 * 



Even on gloomy and stormy days the park 

 has its own strange charm, as one walks up 

 the dusky Fir avenue on the soft Fir-needles 

 glistening with rain. A murmur fills the air 

 above as of sea-waves breaking on a sandy 

 shore. It is the wet south-west wind soughing 

 overhead and lashing the writhing branches, 

 while all is calm below. One thinks of the 

 German fairy tales of one's childhood, and 

 half expects to meet the old woman who led 

 Hansel and Grethel captive, and to catch a 

 glimpse of her house with its gingerbread roof 

 and windows of barley-sugar. Anything might 

 appear in so eerie and moving an atmosphere of 

 strange sounds and dimly-seen shapes. But at 

 most we may chance upon a russet-coated roe 

 deer, a startled rabbit, or the great green 

 woodpecker, who inhabits the same hole in a 

 big Fir tree from which my brother and I tried, 

 and tried in vain, to extract one of his remote 

 ancestors. 



