"Sit quietly," the governess said. "Let the forces creep in and stir about. Do nothing yourself. Give them time to become part of yourself and mix properly with your own currents. Effort on your part prevents this, and you weaken them without gaining anything yourself." Jimbo made all sorts of experiments with trees and rocks and water and fields, learning gradually the different qualities of force they gave forth, and how to use them for himself. Nothing, he found, was really dead. And sometimes he got himself into strange difficulties in the beginning of his attempts to master and absorb these nature-forces. "Remember," the governess warned him more than once, when he was inclined to play tricks, "they are in quite a different world to ours. You cannot take liberties with them. Even a sympathetic soul like yourself only touches the fringe of their world. You exchange surface-messages with them, nothing more. Some trees have terrible forces just below the surface. They could extinguish you altogether--absorb you into themselves. Others are naturally hostile. Some are mere tricksters. Others are shifty and treacherous, like the hollies, that move about too much. The oak and the pine and the elm are friendly, and you can always trust them absolutely. But there are others----!" She held up a warning finger, and Jimbo's eyes nearly dropped out of his head. "No," she added, in reply to his questions, "you can't learn all this at once. Perhaps----" She hesitated a little. "Perhaps, if you don't escape, we should have time for all manner of adventures among the trees and other things--but then, we _are_ going to escape, so there's no good wasting time over _that_!" CHAPTER XIV AN ADVENTURE But Miss Lake did not always accompany him on these excursions into the night; sometimes he took long flights by himself, and she rather encouraged him in this, saying it would give him confidence in case he ever lost her and was obliged to find his way about alone. "But I couldn't get really lost," he said once to her. "I know the winds perfectly now and the country round for miles, and I never go out in fog----" "But these are only practice flights," she replied. "The flight of escape is a very different matter. I want you to learn all you possibly can so as to be prepared for anything." Jimbo felt vaguely uncomfortable when she talked like this. "But you'll be with me in the Escape Flight--the final one of all," he said; "and nothing ever goes wrong when you're with me." "I should like to be always with you," she answered tenderly, "but it's well to be prepared for anything, just the same." And more than this the boy could never get out of her. On one of these lonely flights, however, he made the unpleasant discovery that he was being followed.