John Rosedew laid his burden by, and began to think, or wonder, what was best to do. Long as he had lived amid the woods, he knew much more of classic sylvulæ and poetical arundines, than of the natural greenwood, and the tasseling of morasses. Bob Garnet would have found his way there, or in any other English forest, with little hesitation. From his knowledge of all the epiphytes and their different aspects, the bent of the winter grasses, the sense which even a bramble has of sun and wind and rain, he would soon have established his compass, with allowance for slope and exposure. The parson sat upon an ants’ nest, which had done its work, and feeling discharged, collapsed with him—a big nest of the largest British ant, which is mostly found near fir–trees. That nest alone would have told poor Bob something of his whereabouts; for there are not many firs in that part of the forest, and only one clump, high up on a hill, in the wood where John Rosedew had lost himself. But the man of great learning was none the wiser, only he felt that his smallclothes were done for, and Mr. Channingʼs fashionable cut gone almost as prematurely as the critic who had condemned it. “Let me now consider,” said Mr. Rosedew to himself, for about the fiftieth time; “it strikes me at the first sight—though I declare I canʼt see anything—would that I could not feel! for I confess that these legs are grievous; but putting aside that view or purview of the question, it strikes me that, having no Antigone to lead me from this, which certainly is the grove of the Eumenides—there is another ant gone up my leg—ʼingentis formica laboris.’ I wish he wouldnʼt work so hard, though, and I always have had the impression that they stayed in–doors in the winter. Mem. To consult Theophrastus, and compare him, as usual, with Pliny. Also look at the Geoponika, full of valuable hints—why there he is again, biting very hard or stinging. What says Aristophanes about the music of the gnats? Indelicate, I fear, as he too often is. Nay, nay, good ant, if indeed thou art an ant—— Why, what is that over yonder?” It was a dim light in the great hollow oak, “the Murdererʼs Tree,” as they called it, not a hundred yards from John Rosedew. The parson approached it cautiously, for he knew that desperate men, and criminals under a ban, still harboured sometimes in the Forest. As he drew nearer, the feeble light, glimmering through the entrance, showed him at once what tree it was, because the rays glanced through two dark holes under the bulging and beetling brow, which peasants call “the eyes of God.”