LIFE IN A PINE WOOD 3 
summer, especially on warm windless days. They 
do not walk in their woods; they hasten to the 
gate which lets them out on the road and takes 
them to the village—or to some point from which 
they can get a sight of earth outside the pines. 
They are glad to escape from their surroundings, 
and are never so happy as when going away on 
a long visit to friends living no matter where, in 
the country or abroad, so long as it was not in 
a pine wood. I should imagine that Mariana 
herself, supposing that she had survived to the 
present day and had been persuaded to come 
down south to try the effect of living in a pine 
wood, would soon wish to go back to her moated 
grange on a Lincolnshire flat, for all its ancient 
dust and decay, with no sound to break the sultry 
noonday brooding silence save the singing of the 
blue fly i? the pane and the small shrill shriek of 
the mouse behind the rotting wainscot. 
So much for the human dwellers among the 
“crepuscular pines.” I am quoting an expression 
of the late lamented Henry James, which he used 
not of pine woods generally but of this very 
wood, well known to him too when he was a guest 
in the house. But he didn’t love it or he would 
have been a more frequent visitor; as it was, he 
preferred to see his dear friends—all his friends 
were very dear to him—when they were away 
from the twilight shelter of their trees in ever 
bright and beautiful London. 
I was perhaps more interested in the non- 
