Leaving the clearing at length, I went homeward by a roundabout way, through the oldest part of the wood. Traversing one of the shadiest paths, where the oaks grew thick together overhead, I came to a turn in the way. Just beyond, there was a single spot of sunshine lying on the moss-green path, and in it a squirrel gambolled, as though he were taking a bath in the yellow pool of light. Often throughout the winter I had come upon squirrels thus, tempted out of their warm winter-houses by some day of exceptional mildness. For the squirrel is no true hibernator. He sleeps through the cold spells, often for weeks at a stretch. But, like the hive-bees, warm weather at once rouses him from his dray, and sends him forth ravenous to his secret store of acorns or beech-mast. Old Tom Clemmer once told me of a custom regarding the squirrel which, in his boyhood, was rife in most Downland villages. On Saint Andrew’s Day, towards the end of each November, most of the Windlecombe men and boys used to foregather on the green, armed with short sticks, shod at one end with some heavy piece of metal. The party would then go out into the woods for this, the annual squirrel-hunt, or ‘skugging’ as it was called. The weighted sticks were thrown at the squirrels as they leaped in the branches overhead; and some of the folk, Tom Clemmer himself among the number, were famous for their skill at this pastime. Skugging, however, being essentially a poor man’s brutal sport, has been long ago suppressed. My squirrel in the pool of sunshine blocked the path, and there was no way round. I must perforce disturb him. I watched him clamber upward into the wilderness of budding oak-boughs, his glossy red-brown coat gleaming in the sunshine as he went. Presently, coming into a spacious valley of beeches, where the eye could wander far and wide, between the grey-green trunks, over a bare, undulating carpet of last year’s leaves—for scarcely anything will grow under beech—I caught sight of an object which drew my steps over to the near hillside. It was a spot of shining white painted about breast high on the smooth bark of one of the trees. I knew what it meant. It was the White Spot of Doom—the token of the woodreeve to his men that the tree was to be felled; and this was the time, when the sap was beginning to run strong and rinding would be easy, for the death sentence to be carried out.