Imagine my horror a few days later when I took some friends along to see the vegetables, to discover a legion of empty whisky bottles, labels intact, neck downwards in the soil, and dotted about the vegetable garden in all directions. The old man explained that they were put there to skeer they rabbits, as they was dreadful frit of bottles! But my friends refused to believe that so honest-looking an old Amos could have brought them with him! * * * * * The inside of the wood-house is as aloof as are the hills from our machinery-driven, smoke-begrimed, petrol-flavoured twentieth century. Even when work is in progress, here is no hustle; there are no short cuts to the other side of a larch log; the saw must go steadily, patiently, almost slowly, if it hopes to get through the tree at one standing. To step from the hot noonday glare, on a summer day, into the cool seclusion of these thick stone walls, is to enter a haven of peace and quiet that would seem to belong to the forest primeval rather than to this noise-stricken age. The window opening to the north excludes the fierce sun, but the yellow-washed walls give light and cheeriness. And the ivy, that ubiquitous plant that scorns all disadvantages, and overcomes every obstacle, has crept in under the red tiles and hangs in festoons from the dark rafters; while in other places its pale green shoots have found for themselves a way clean through the thickness of the wall, pushing along crevices and around the stones, till at last they have come to light on the inner side, where they immediately proceed to drape lopped trunks and big branches standing in the corner. It is no mere accumulation of timber and sticks that is housed within these rough old walls. The very spirit of the forest seems to permeate the place; everything is part and parcel of the big outside—the stones that pave the floor; the heap of cones in one corner, waiting to brighten up smouldering winter fires and set them all aglow; the solid sections of some sturdy oak, cut to just the right height for seats; the bark stripped from a birch-tree, silver white even now, with grey and pinkish paper-like peelings and black breathing marks; and the great brown branches of larch, a tracery of studded twigs and stems and cones, that have been placed across the end of the wood-house, and sweep the rafters at the top, looking, as you enter the door, like some wonderful rood-screen, dark brown with age, shutting off an ancient, yellow-washed chancel—though such a screen no mortal hand could ever carve!