The brown leaves
amid which they rout, and the brown-tinted fern behind lend something of
their colour and smooth away their ungainliness. Snorting as they work
with very eagerness of appetite, they are almost wild, approaching in a
measure to their ancestors, the savage boars. Under the trees the
imagination plays unchecked, and calls up the past as if yew bow and
broad arrow were still in the hunter's hands. So little is changed since
then. The deer are here still. Sit down on the root of this oak (thinly
covered with moss), and on that very spot it is quite possible a knight
fresh home from the Crusades may have rested and feasted his eyes on the
lovely green glades of his own unsurpassed England. The oak was there
then, young and strong; it is here now, ancient, but sturdy. Rarely do
you see an oak fall of itself. It decays to the last stump; it does not
fall. The sounds are the same--the tap as a ripe acorn drops, the rustle
of a leaf which comes down slowly, the quick rushes of mice playing in
the fern. A movement at one side attracts the glance, and there is a
squirrel darting about. There is another at the very top of the beech
yonder out on the boughs, nibbling the nuts.
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