Cricket, therefore, on the return for the summer half took a subordinate place, and obtaining “leave off” from it as a compulsory game, I spent the long summer afternoons in the enchantment of Savernake Forest. Here it was that the Staunton Collection began to lay more pregnant eggs in a receptive soil, for I trace to those sunny hours the betrothal of my soul to the goddess of trees and solitary places, to whose allegiance I have ever been faithful. Net in hand, and bulging with nests of chip-boxes I used to climb the steep down fringed with the secular beeches that form the outer wall of that superb woodland, pausing perhaps for a “blue” or a “small copper” on the way, but eager for entry into the temple of trees. Here underneath those living towers, the earth would be bare, but from the coverts where the sunlight fell only in flakes and shower-drops of gold, you passed into open glades of bracken and bramble, through which ran smooth grass-walks of short downland turf. In these sunny lakes of forest-enfolded open, a few hawthorns stood like snowy and sweet-smelling islands, and along the edges of the grass-rides hovered the speckled fritillaries. Then came a group of hazel trees to be beaten, with net spread beneath to catch the dropping caterpillars, and grey-trunked oaks, whose bark was to be diligently searched for slumbering dagger-moths, difficult to find owing to their protective colouring. Red-spotted burnets clung to thistle-heads, green hair-streaks (especially in Rabley Copse) must be put up from their resting-places before they were visible, and there too marble whites rustled their chequered wings in my net. Deeper and deeper into the forest would I go, and though I had every conscious faculty alert for pursuits and captures, yet all the time--and this is precisely why I have lingered with such prolixity over the Staunton Prize--the honey-bees of my subconscious self were swarming in with their imperishable gleanings. Cell after cell they constructed within me, and filled them with the essences that they culled from beech and fern and all the presences that subtly haunted the great forest aisles. There first did I hear the music of Pan’s flute with the inward ear, and with the inward eye did I see the dancing satyrs, and the dryads of the woods; and if, as most surely I believe, my disembodied spirit shall some day visit the places where I learned to love the beauty of this peerless world, how swiftly will it traverse the thyme-tufted downs of Wiltshire to breathe again the noble and august serenity of the forest, and see the fritillaries poise on the bracken at the edge of the grass-rides.