THE charm of Sussex woods, though you may frequent them at all times in and out of season, is that they are never the same woods from year to year. The great trees, indeed, keep their old familiar forms and stations, but the undergrowth of hazel, ash, larch, or silver-birch is periodically cleared away. This year, a certain hillside or deep hollow may be hidden under a thicket of growth impenetrable not only to the casual wanderer, but to the very sunlight itself; and next year the wood-cutters may have swept it clean, leaving only the forest trees to cast their shadows over a sunny wilderness that your eyes, though you have journeyed this way scores of times, have never yet beheld. Clearings wherein the children gathered primroses by the thousand one spring, are overgrown and all but impassable the next. The very paths and waggon-ways change their direction, as the woodmen vary the scene of their labours from year to year. And in the track of the copse-cutters, arise all manner of new plants; new birds come to nest; new sights and sounds throng about the way at every turn—so, in nearly all seasons, a strange new land is brought to your very feet, in the midst of things familiar, maybe, for a score of years. In the dead deeps of winter, nothing seems so remote, so hopelessly unattainable, as the March sunshine; yet here it is at last, and here I am, sitting on a hazel-stole softly cushioned with ivy, alone and deliciously idle, in a clearing I have just discovered in the heart of Windle Woods. All this part of the wood has lain untouched for a decade, perhaps, given over to the jays and magpies, and other wildest of wild nesting things. There is a green lane only a few hundred feet distant, and along it I have journeyed many a time during the past year, never dreaming that the clearing existed. And yet, no later than last April, the woodmen must have been here with their bill-hooks, hacking and hewing, and letting in the living sunlight where the earth had known no more than green gloaming on the brightest day.