240 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



bare white boles of the wood. A few creaking grackles 

 rowed through the sky, and in the distance crows 

 cawed on their way to some secret roost. Down 

 through the air fell the alto sky-call of the blue- 

 birds, and robins flocking for the night whispered 

 greetings to each other. Below me the brook was 

 full of voices. It tinkled and gurgled, and around 

 the bend at intervals sounded a murmur so human 

 that at first I thought some other wanderer had 

 discovered my refuge. It was only, however, the 

 mysterious babble that always sounds at intervals 

 when a brook sings to a human. It was as if the water 

 were trying to speak the listener 's language, and had 

 learned the tones but not the words. Now and again 

 the wind sounded in the valley below; then passed 

 overhead with a vast hollow roar, so high that the 

 spice-bush thicket which hid me hardly swayed. 



I leaned back against the vast thews and ridged 

 muscles of the beech, one of the generations upon 

 generations of men who pass like dreams under its 

 vast branches. One of my play-time fancies in the 

 woods is to hark back a hundred, two hundred, 

 three hundred years, and try to picture what trees 

 and annuals and men I might have met there then. 

 Another is to choose the tree on which my life-years 

 are to depend. Give up the human probabilities of 

 life, and live as long or as short as the tree of my 

 choice. Of course it would be a lottery. The tree 

 might die, or be cut down, the year after I had made 

 my bargain; and I used to plan how I would secure 

 and guard the bit of woodland where my life-tree 



