270 FORESTRY IN LITHUANIA. 



as a dead lifeless white. We walk every day, and no 

 sooner are the heavy double doors, which effectually seal 

 our house, heard to open, than half a dozen huge, deep- 

 mouthed cattle-hounds come bounding through the deep 

 snow to meet us, oversetting, with the first unwieldy caress, 

 some little one of our party, scarce so tall as themselves, 

 and even besetting the biggest with a battery of heavy 

 demonstrations, to which it is difficult to present a firm 

 front. Sometimes we take the beaten track of the road, 

 where peasants with rough carts, generally put together 

 with less iron than an English labourer would wear in his 

 shoes, pass on in files of nine or ten ; as often as not the 

 sheepish-looking driver, with his elf locks, superadding his 

 own weight to the already overladen little horse or where 

 a nimble-footed peasant woman, with high cap arid clean 

 sheepskin coat, plunges half-leg high into the deep snow 

 to give you room, and nodding, and showing her white 

 teeth, cheerily ejaculates Terre hommikust, or Good day. 

 Or we follow a track into the woods so narrow that we 

 walk in each other's steps like wild Indians, and the great 

 dogs sink up to their bodies in the snow whilst 

 endeavouring to pass us. This is the land of pines lofty, 

 erect battalions their bark as smooth as the mast of a 

 ship their branches regular as a ladder, varying scarce an 

 inch in girth in fifty feet of growth for miles interrupted 

 only by a leaning, never a crooked tree with an army of 

 sturdy Lilliputians clustering round their bases fifty 

 heads starting up where one yard of light is admitted. 

 What becomes of all the pruning, and trimming, and train- 

 ing the days of precious labour spent on our own woods? 

 Nature here does all this, and immeasurably better, for 

 her volunteers, who stand closer, grow faster, and soar 

 higher, than the carefully planted and transplanted children 

 of our soil. Here and there a bare jagged trunk, and a 

 carpet of fresh-hewn boughs beneath, show where some 

 peasant-urchin has indulged in sport which with us would 

 be amenable to the laws viz., mounted one of these 

 grenadiers of the forest, hewing off every successive bough 



