THE WOODS. 



149 



own limbs perhaps in the descent; and then, at last, 

 plunges headlong to the earth, with a thud and a great 

 muffled boom heard miles away ! Homer felt the maj- 

 esty of it centuries ago, and one of his finest similes 

 likens the death of Hector to the downfall of an oak. 

 A man can, it is true, in this way, by a few strokes of 

 the ax, undo forever the long, slow work of a hundred 

 years. Yet, in its place and within decent restriction, 

 there is no pleasanter labor than work in the woods, 

 especially beneath the leaves of autumn, in the cool of 

 the year; and there is no rude music more attractive to 

 the ear than the echoed chopping of an ax and the ring 

 and rasp of the crosscut saw. 



Thoreau, in "The Maine Woods," speaks of the 

 sound of a tree falling in a dense forest on a still night 

 as being "singularly grand and impressive," and thus 

 describes it: 



"Once, when Joe had called again, and we were listening 

 for moose, we heard, come faintly echoing, or creeping from 

 afar, through the moss-clad aisles, a dull, dry, rushing sound, 

 with a solid core to it, yet as if half smothered under the grasp 

 of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of 

 a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilder- 

 ness. If we had not been there, no mortal had heard it. When 

 we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, 'Tree 

 fall.' " 



Sometimes stones, even large rocks, will be found 

 almost totally concealed within the trees, having been 

 lodged there somehow in the past and been grown over 

 by the steady accretion of the years. I have seen rocks 

 of some size absolutely imbedded among the roots of 

 a great oak, which had wound its huge roots around 



