A HIDDEN WORLD 
31 
In that silence which was not silence, a something 
—I know not what—assured us that the dead forest 
was in truth alive, and on the point of breaking forth 
into speech. We entered it full of hope, and believ¬ 
ing that we should discover some secret. We felt 
certain that to our inquiring spirit a great manifold 
Spirit was about to reply. Though fatigued by the 
walk, and in an infirm state of health, I felt great 
pleasure in the search I had undertaken in these pallid 
glooms. I loved to see before me a person deeply moved, 
and enthusiastically smitten by their great mysteries. 
Stick in hand, she advanced into this fantastic twi¬ 
light, interrogating the sombre forest, and seeking, as 
it were, the Virgilian “ golden bough.” 
I was about to quit the scene, and seat myself in 
a sunny opening, when at length a more successful 
sounding in one of the ancient trunks brought to 
light a world whose existence no one would have 
suspected. 
At the summit of this trunk, cut oft* within a foot 
of the ground, you could very easily distinguish the 
works wrought by the scolyti and weevils, the former 
inhabitants of the tree, in conformity to the concentric 
arrangement of the sap. But all this belonged to 
ancient history; a different condition of things now 
existed. These miserable scolyti had perished, having 
undergone, like their tree, the energetic action of a 
great chemical transformation which excluded all life. 
All life, except one, and that the keenest—a consuming and burned- 
up life, it seems—the life of those beings powerful under an infinitely 
