FOREST 



THE beechnuts are already falling in the forest, and 

 the swine are beginning to search for them while 

 yet the harvest lingers. The nuts are formed by 

 midsummer, and now, the husk opening, the brown 

 angular kernel drops out. Many of the husks fall, 

 too; others remain on the branches till next spring. 

 Under the beeches the ground is strewn with the 

 mast as hard almost to walk on as pebbles. Rude 

 and uncouth as swine are in themselves, somehow 

 they look different under trees. The brown leaves 

 amid which they rout, and the brown-tinted fern 

 behind lend something of their colour and smooth 

 away their ungainliness. Snorting as they work 

 with very eagerness of appetite, they are almost 

 wild, approaching in a measure to their ancestors, 

 the savage boars. Under the trees the imagination 

 plays unchecked, and calls up the past as if yew 

 bow and broad arrow were still in the hunter's hands. 

 So little is changed since then. The deer are here 

 still. Sit down on the root of this oak (thinly covered 

 with moss), and on that very spot it is quite possible 

 a knight fresh home from the Crusades may have 

 rested and feasted his eyes on the lovely green glades 

 of his own unsurpassed England. The oak was there 

 then, young and strong; it is here now, ancient, but 

 sturdy. Rarely do you see an oak fall of itself. It 

 decays to the last stump; it does not fall. The 

 sounds are the same the tap as a ripe acorn drops, 

 the rustle of a leaf which comes down slowly, the 

 177 M 



