THE END OF SUMMER 273 



seen, but in vain. For months the woods have been 

 homely and kind, companions and backgrounds to our 

 actions and thoughts, the wide walls of a mansion utterly 

 our own. We could have gone on living with them for 

 ever. We had given up the ardours, the extreme ecstasy 

 of our first bridal affection, but we had not forgotten 

 them. We could not become indifferent to the Spanish 

 chestnut-trees that grow at the top of the steep rocky 

 banks on either side of the road and mingle their foliage 

 overhead. Of all trees well-grown chestnuts are among 

 the most pleasant to look up at. For the foliage is not 

 dense and it is for the most part close to the large boughs, 

 so that the light comes easily down through all the hori- 

 zontal leaves, and the shape of each separate one is not 

 lost in the multitude, while at the same time the bold 

 twists of the branches are undraped or easily seen through 

 such translucent green. The trunks are crooked, and the 

 handsome deep furrowing of the bark is often spirally cut. 

 The limbs are few and wide apart so as to frame huge 

 delicately lighted and shadowed chambers of silence or of 

 birds' song. The leaves turn all together to a leathern 

 hue, and when they fall stiffen and display their shape 

 on the ground and long refuse to be merged in the dismal 

 trodden hosts. But when the first one floats past the eye 

 and is blown like a canoe over the pond we recover once 

 more our knowledge and fear of Time. All those ladders 

 of goose-grass that scaled the hedges of spring are dead 

 grey; they are still in their places, but they clamber no 

 longer. The chief flower is the yellow bloom set in the 

 dark ivy round the trunks of the ash-trees; and where it 

 climbs over the holly and makes a solid sunny wall, and 

 in the hedges, a whole people of wasps and wasp-like flies 



