174 THE BOOK OF THE OPEN AIR 



country finds its spring. Occasionally mer day, that the least sounds nearer 



a jay will screech through the upper at hand stand out against it with 



"boughs, or a green woodpecker escape intense precision and clearness ; the 



with dropping flight from bole to bole ; beetle can be heard scraping in the 



and sometimes, in the tufted, cloud-like loam on his subterranean way for long 



canopy, the ear and eye become dis- minutes before the needle-carpet parts 



tantly aware of a tribe of titmice above him, and he comes forth from 



twitching and chirping in subdued the grey sand to the light. Sometimes 



animation upon their way. But the a sharper rustling is heard by the 



lack of all undergrowth denser and attentive ear to disengage itself from 



more lasting than the stately, waist- the undercurrent of the murmuring 



high bracken makes most birds un- boughs ; and this is found to be the 



friendly to these woods, at the same city-noise of one of the great hills of 



time that it makes a hollow and solemn the large black ants, which stand, piled 



whispering-gallery of the great ranged of fir-needles, among the bracken on 



aisles between the red shafts under the floor of the wood, built often round 



their roof. In these halls of a thousand the core of an ancient honeycombed 



columns the voice rings strangely even stump, and sometimes as big as a small 



at noon ; yet, deep and constant as is haycock. At first, when we begin to 



the silence, there is rarely or never watch the surface of this great erection 



that utter privation of sound which of such tiny workers, all boiling and 



aches at times in a great wood of simmering with life, it seems a chaos 



beeches or a thicket of hollow yews, of activities entirely devoid of sound, 



Almost continually, on these expanses a stir as inaudible and interwoven as 



of wide, open heath-land, there is a the heat-dance that flurries over the 



draught of summer air, passing to spend sand outside the wood. Then, out of 



its murmurs on the lofty shore of the the silence that falls as our foot ceases 



pine-tops under the sun ; and far be- to disturb the pine-carpet, we hear 



low, on the dry, grey carpet among the tumult of the black ants' city rise 



the furrowed boles, the wood is full, plainly upon the ear, not in a single 



like a shell, of a song that underlies the note of sound, but with an infinite and 



stillness, and makes it a restful calm. microscopic complexity that is the 



Yet so low and even is this whisper- total sum and burden of a myriad 



ing of the upper pine boughs on a sum- individual lives. At such times, within 



