Autumn Flues. 255 
with more tall bracken, thorn thickets, and maple 
bushes, and noting now the strange absence of living 
things. Not a bird rises startled from the boughs, 
not a rabbit crosses the way ; for in the forest, as in 
the fields, there are places haunted and places deserted, 
save by occasional passing visitors. Suddenly the 
bracken ceases, and the paths disappear under a 
thick grove of beeches, whose dead leaves and beech- 
mast seem to have smothered vegetation. 
Insensibly the low ground rises again, the brake 
and bushes and underwood reappear, but the trees 
grow thinner and farther apart ; they are mainly oaks, 
which like to stand separate in their grandeur. There 
is one dead oak all alone in the midst of the under- 
wood, with a wide space around it. A vast grey 
trunk, split and riven and hollow, with a single 
pointed branch rising high above it, dead, too, and 
grey : not a living twig, not so much as a brown leaf, 
gives evidence of lingering life. The oak is dead ; 
but even in his death he rules, and the open space 
around him shows how he once overshadowed and 
prevented the growth of meaner trees. More oaks, 
then a broad belt of beeches, and out suddenly into 
an opening. 
It is but a stone’s-throw across—a level mead 
walled in with tall trees, whose leaves in myriads lie 
on the brown tinted grass. One great thicket only 
grows in the midst of it. The nights are chilly here, 
as elsewhere ; but in the day, the winds being kept 
