206 Wild Life in a Southern County 



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 impene- 

 trable 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 mind 

 that this is really a forest not a wood, where a few minutes 

 either way will give you a glimpse of the outer light 

 through the ash-poles. 



Other narrow paths if they can be called paths which 

 show no trace of human usage branch off from the 

 original one, till by-and-by it becomes impossible to re- 

 cognise one from the other. The first has been lost 

 indeed long ago, without its having been observed : for the 

 bracken is now as high as the shoulders, and the eye can- 

 not penetrate many yards on either side. Under a huge 

 oak at last there is an open space, circular, and corre- 

 sponding with the outer circumference of its branches: 

 carpeted with dark green grass and darker moss, thickly 

 strewn with brown leaves and acorns that have dropped 

 from their cups. A wall of fern encloses it : the path loses 

 itself in the grass because it is itself green. 



Several such paths debouch here which is the right 



