2 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



their largesse of sun and breeze, have an exhilaration 

 for spirit and body which, I admit, I do not find in 

 the quiet thick wood where timber and underwoods are 

 mixed. But there is a peculiar feeling of home about 

 a large, quiet wood, once we have spent years in it, 

 and come to care for it greatly, which never leaves us. 

 An intimacy between the wood and its inhabitant is 

 formed, and this grows very close. Home, perhaps, in 

 its more restricted and meaning sense must be actually 

 a house stored with present and past and with hopes 

 and thoughts of the future. A wood, however, grows 

 very homelike after a time. Many of its distinctive 

 and favourite scenes become as rooms in a house 

 where we were bred. We carry them about in 

 thought, and they are delightful to look at, often 

 when we have been absent for a long time from the 

 scene. In the mind's eye eye of such range and 

 power to focus a score of scenes in the depths of the 

 wood, and at its margin long and irregular and miles 

 round, can be commanded in quick succession at any 

 time; and the exact grouping of the oak and ash 

 trees, the rise and fall of the ground, knoll and hollow, 

 the very patches of tall bracken and the cover of 

 underwood, all are reproduced in the thought-picture 

 with faithfulness to Nature. If the old chair or corner 

 cupboard or bookcase at home can appeal to us as a 

 friend, the tree hi the wood home will awake often 

 the same feeling. We carry about memories of old 

 familiar trees for years with us for a lifetime indeed 



