XXX Darkening Skies 



As autumn deepens into winter, the woods are 

 cleared fitfully but surely of their last patches of 

 bright foliage. The fallen leaves are wrapped 

 about the base of the thickets as a cover for hedge- 

 hogs and dormice in their winter nests, and felted 

 by the rains into a blanket for the shoots and 

 bulbs. The oak-tops gradually become the highest 

 notes of colour in the landscape as the elms grow 

 bare ; and the whole winter landscape assumes a 

 more subdued harmony under the darkening sky. 

 The oaks smoulder until Christmas, though with 

 the feebler glow of a dying fire ; and now the bare 

 trunks and withered undergrowth, that in summer 

 and autumn formed the dull background of the 

 forest landscape, stand forth with a new con- 

 spicuousness. In April the beech-boles were silver, 

 where the young leaves opened against them ; in 

 August they were black, beneath the heavy shades ; 

 but now what catches the eye is neither the silver 

 breadths of clean bark nor the dark rain-courses 

 of the drainage from the upper boughs, but the 

 greener flanks painted with wood-lichen, gleaming 

 in the absence of summer green. 



The bracken loses its orange splendour of October, 

 and sinks to pale russet under the December skies ; 

 but as the deeper russet of the oak is shed, again the 



275 



