They had mounted from the back of the village at the turning into the road of the chateau. A few hundreds of yards had brought them to the fringe of the dense forest that rolled in terraces of high green down to the very outskirts of the hamlet. Thence they had passed, by tracks of huddled leafiness, into deeps and profounder deeps of stillness. The silence about them was as the silence of a peopled self-consciousness--as the under-clang of voices to a dreamer whose heart works in his breast like a mole. Every bird’s song was an echo; the germ of new life under every pine-cone seemed stirring audibly in its little womb. If a squirrel scampered unseen, if a rush of wings went by unidentified, the sound became a memory before it was past. Nothing of all beauty was material. The thurible of the sun, trailing clouds of smoke, was withdrawn into the sacristy of the hills; the music of the vesper hour fled in receding harmonics under a roof of boughs; long aisles of arborescence, dim with slow-drifting incense, held solitude close as a returned prodigal. Here was the neutral ground of soul and body; thronged with unrealities to either; full of secret expectancies that massed or withdrew to the shutting and opening of one’s eyes. The dusk formed like troops in the bushy hollows. Still M. de St Denys led his companion on. Suddenly he stayed him, with a hand on his sleeve. A sound, like the rubbing cheep of a polishing-cloth on wood, came to their ears from somewhere hard by. Stepping very softly, the two men stole into a clearing dominated by a single huge beech-tree--an old shorn Lear of the forest. At its roots a young boar was engaged whetting its tushes, that curled up like the mustachios of a swinge-buckler. The muscular sides of the beast palpitated as it swung to and fro. Now St Denys, with meaningless bravado, left his friend and walked up to the brute, that cocked its ears and was still in a moment. Ned caught the porcelain glint of its eye slewed backwards,--and then St Denys flogged out at the bristling flanks with a little riding-switch he carried in his hand. The pig fetched round; the young man uttered a shrill whoop and lashed it in the face; and at that the animal plunged for the thicket and disappeared. Ned went on to the tree. He thought all this a particularly thrasonical display, and would not appear to subscribe, by so much as referring, to it. “A mammoth in its day,” said he, looking up at the vast wreck of timber that writhed enormous arms against the darkening sky.