To appreciate the detail of the spectacle, the throb and palpitation of so much fire, it had been necessary to descend among the forest glades, where were revealed the actual pigments of all this splendour and the manner of Nature's painting, touch by touch. Thence the scene, whose harmonies rang so subdued from the height of the Beacon above, resolved itself into a riot of colour. Larch and ash were already grey, and the lemon of the birch, the gold of the elm flashed out against the heavier bronzes and coppers of oak and beech. The wood smoke that rose so thinly seen from aloft, here ascended from a fire in a column of gentian blue under the sunshine, purple against shadow. Carpets of colour extended where the trees broke--textures of scarlet whortle and crimson blackberry, bright ivy, jewels of moss and glittering dead grass. The spindle flashed its fruits, and aglets and haws sparkled beneath it on briar and bough. There, too, the sheltered fern had not been beaten flat as on the open heaths above. It rose shoulder high, delicate in dead but unbroken filigrees, with many a spider's gossamer and iridescent web twinkling rainbows upon its amber frondage. The dusky regiments of the conifers intensified the blaze. Green, or glaucous green, or of a solid darkness, they massed, and, against them, stems of maiden birches leapt upward to the last of their foliage, like woodland candlesticks of silver supporting altar-flame within these far-flung sanctuaries. Intermittently Maynard allowed his thoughts to dwell upon these things spread under his eyes; and he even dipped sometimes into the communion of the trees and pictured all that lay beneath him; he could spare a moment to reflect upon the ceaseless battle under the splendour, and how every tree of these countless thousands had fought through half a century for its place in the sun. But for the most part his reflections turned upon himself, though unconsciously the outward pageant became enwoven with the inward gloom, as long afterwards he discovered.