240 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
bare white boles of the wood. A few creaking grackles 
rowed through the sky, and in the distance crows 
cawed on their way to some secret roost. Down 
through the air fell the alto sky-call of the blue- 
birds, and robins flocking for the night whispered 
greetings to each other. Below me the brook was 
full of voices. It tinkled and gurgled, and around 
the bend at intervals sounded a murmur so human 
that at first I thought some other wanderer had 
discovered my refuge. It was only, however, the 
mysterious babble that always sounds at intervals 
when a brook sings to a human. It wasas if the water 
were trying to speak the listener’s language, and had 
learned the tones but not the words. Now and again 
the wind sounded in the valley below; then passed 
overhead with a vast hollow roar, so high that the 
spice-bush thicket which hid me hardly swayed. 
I leaned back against the vast thews and ridged 
muscles of the beech, one of the generations upon 
generations of men who pass like dreams under its 
vast branches. One of my play-time fancies in the 
woods is to hark back a hundred, two hundred, 
three hundred years, and try to picture what trees 
and animals and men I might have met there then. 
Another is to choose the tree on which my life-years 
are to depend. Give up the human probabilities of 
life, and live as long or as short as the tree of my 
choice. Of course it would be a lottery. The tree 
might die, or be cut down, the year after I had made 
my bargain; and I used to plan how I would secure 
and guard the bit of woodland where my life-tree 
