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- 



