44 IDLEIIURST : 



the ants, she says, will never stop even and look at 

 her, but always keep on running, running. Just 

 now she comes up with a history of a black bee 

 discovered in the act of choosing his lodgings; "he 

 went into, oh ; twenty or thirty holes in the green- 

 house wall ; he was so particular, and at last he found 

 one, just what he wanted, so he came out again and 

 turned round and went in tail foremost, and now 

 he's living there for good." It is to be feared that 

 he would prefer his hole in the old mortar to any 

 invitation of Alice's, even to the best bedroom in 

 the new dolls' house. There is another side to this. 

 " I do wish," says Alice, reflectively, " that I could get 

 into that hole and see what he's doing inside." A 

 piece of that other Alice's mushroom, on the diminish- 

 ing side, might alter the present relations con- 

 siderably. 



For myself, the incommunicableness of birds and 

 beasts is only part of a sense of alienation from the 

 whole natural world, felt more keenly at certain hours 

 of the earth and sky, under certain aspects of the 

 wide champaign, hill-horizons, dark woods. No man 

 can put his pride as man from him and win admission 

 into the mysteries beneath his feet. The more 

 intensely we feel the power of the earth, its brooding 

 light, its shadowed terrors, its sweet silence, its still 



