“Harry wanted to tell of the woods more than anything. He was afraid they might cut them down because of the war, and no one would know of the larks they had had there as boys. Wonderful old woods they were, with a lot of Spanish chestnut growing low, and tall old oaks over it. Harry wanted them to write down what the foxgloves were like in the wood at the end of summer, standing there in the evening, ‘Great solemn rows,’ he said, ‘all odd in the dusk. All odd in the evening, going there after work; and makes you think of fairies.’ There was lots of things about those woods, he said, that ought to be put down if people were to remember Daleswood as it used to be when they knew it. What were the good old days without those woods? he said. “But another wanted to tell of the time when they cut the hay with scythes, working all those long days at the end of June; there would be no more of that, he said, with machines come in and all. “There was room to tell of all that and the woods too, said the others, so long as they put it short like. “And another wanted to tell of the valleys beyond the wood, far afield where the men went working; the women would remember the hay. The great valleys he’d tell of. It was they that made Daleswood. The valleys beyond the wood and the twilight on them in summer. Slopes covered with mint and thyme, all solemn at evening. A hare on them perhaps, sitting as though they were his, then lolloping slowly away. It didn’t seem from the way he told of those old valleys that he thought they could ever be to other folk what they were to the Daleswood men in the days he remembered. He spoke of them as though there were something in them, besides the mint and the thyme and the twilight and hares, that would not stay after these men were gone, though he did not say what it was. Scarcely hinted it even. “And still the Boche did nothing to the Daleswood men. The bullets had ceased altogether. That made it much quieter. The shells still snarled over, bursting far, far away. “And Bob said tell of Daleswood itself, the old village, with queer chimneys, of red brick, in the wood. There weren’t houses like that nowadays. They’d be building new ones and spoiling it, likely, after the war. And that was all he had to say.