THE WOOD HOME 7 



the coppices. I have fancied sometimes that the 

 very cart-ruts along the woodland sides are not so 

 deep as they were ! 



But when all has been said against these great 

 solid coverts of underwood mixed with timber the 

 eye for effect and the eye for profit seeing alike I 

 keep old fondness for them. Surely those woods 

 where Hazlitt could wander and lose himself as he 

 could wander and be lost in the deeps of his heart 

 were underwood in part ? The straight wands of 

 ash and hazel, the birch clumps with their grey and 

 brown stems miles of these, deeps leading into deeps 

 of underwood, with the oak-tops and sighing fir trees 

 at a height we never thought of reaching even in 

 climbing days, make a mystery that is found in few 

 other spots in homely England. Wild places often 

 seem to have personality after dark. It is as if the 

 heath and the marsh woke to a sort of consciousness 

 then. But the wood seems to have it even by day- 

 light, and among the wands of hazel and ash one 

 feels this most. Then those winding footpaths among 

 the underwoods, they grow most secret when the 

 branches in spring and summer are suffered to grow 

 across them. They are hardly artificial paths ; they 

 are half wild in the way they wind in and out, the 

 hunter or keeper who first trod them for a short-cut 

 through the shoots going round the stem or tree that 

 lay in front of him. There could not be a more 

 natural making of a woodland path ; the rabbits' run 



