WILD LIFE IN A SOUTHERN COUNTY. 255 



A succession of detached hawthorn bushes like a 

 hedge with great gaps grow in a line up the rising 

 ground the dying vines of the bryony trail over 

 them one is showing its pale greenish white flowers, 

 while the rest bear heavy bunches of berries. A last 

 convolvulus, too, has a single pink-streaked bell, 

 though the bough to which it holds is already partly 

 bare of leaves. The touch of autumn is capricious, 

 and passes over many trees to fix on one which stands 

 out glowing with colour, while on the rest a dull green 

 lingers. Near the summit a few bunches of the 

 brake fern rise out of the grass ; then the foremost 

 trees are reached, beeches as yet but faintly tinted 

 here and there. Their smooth, irregularly round 

 trunks are of no great height both fern and trees at 

 the edge seem stunted, perhaps because they have to 

 bear the brunt and break the force of the western 

 gales sweeping over the hills. 



For the first two hundred yards the travelling is 

 easy because of this very scantiness of the fern and 

 underwood ; but then there seems to rise up a thick 

 wall of vegetation. To push a way through the ever- 

 thickening bracken becomes more and more laborious ; 

 there is scarce a choice but to follow a winding, narrow 

 path, green with grass and moss and strewn with 

 leaves, in and out and round the impenetrable thickets. 

 Whither it leads if, indeed, anywhere there is no 

 sign. The precise sense of direction is quickly lost, 

 and then glancing round and finding nothing but fern 

 and bush and tree on every hand, it dawns upon the 



