76 My Wood. 



indeed, much to your chagrin, if you are a true lover 

 of nature's quiet and shy recesses, is a signal of danger, 

 your footsteps are awakeners of fear, your advances 

 heralds of alarm, telegraphed, as it would seem, from 

 point to point before you. Nowhere hardly could one 

 feel more oppressed, as it were, in realising the truth 

 of Robert Burns's sympathetic words : — 



" I'm truly sorry man's dominion 

 Has broken Nature's social union, 

 And justifies that ill opinion 



That makes them startle 

 At me, their poor earth-born companion 



And fellow mortal." 



The wood lies along a kind of slope, broken up here 

 and there in its lower sweeps (probably by mould 

 or turf having been dug out in old days) into rough 

 irregular terraces, or crescents more correctly, and in 

 the protecting shelter of the higher ridges so formed 

 there are to be found colonies of the delicate white 

 hyacinth, clustering together, like a group of shy girls, 

 as if they eschewed more common haunts or coarser 



neighbours, 

 and preferred 

 ^>5^if\f^j ^L^^^^^-^ their own soci- 

 ety ; virginal, 

 pure, the most 

 ideal of wild 

 flowers. Truly, 

 the white hyacinth is the lady of the woods, if there 

 ever was one, with all the airy purity and soft shy 

 graceful retiring mien of maidenhood. One could 

 almost imagine, as one muses over their chaste and 

 inexpressible beauty, their pure and ideal outlines, 

 that nature had made them to show how plastic and 



