Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Jefferies, Richard, 1848-1887
The bellowing sound that comes now and then
is from the stags, which are preparing to fight. The swine snort,
and the mast and leaves rustle as they thrust them aside. So little
is changed: these are the same sounds and the same movements, just
as in the olden time.
"The soft autumn sunshine, shorn of summer glare, lights up with
colour the fern, the fronds of which are yellow and brown, the
leaves, the gray grass, and hawthorn sprays already turned. It
seems as if the early morning's mists have the power of tinting
leaf and fern, for so soon as they commence the green hues begin to
disappear. There are swathes of fern yonder, cut down like grass or
corn, the harvest of the forest. It will be used for litter and for
thatching sheds. The yellow stalks--the stubble--will turn brown
and wither through the winter, till the strong spring shoot comes
up and the anemones flower. Though the sunbeams reach the ground
here, half the green glade is in shadow, and for one step that you
walk in sunlight ten are in shade. Thus, partly concealed in full
day, the forest always contains a mystery. The idea that there may
be something in the dim arches held up by the round columns of the
beeches lures the footsteps onwards. Something must have been
lately in the circle under the oak where the fern and bushes remain
at a distance and wall in a lawn of green. There is nothing on the
grass but the upheld leaves that have dropped, no mark of any
creature, but this is not decisive; if there are no physical signs,
there is a feeling that the shadow is not vacant. In the thickets,
perhaps--the shadowy thickets with front of thorn--it has taken
refuge and eluded us. Still onward the shadows lead us in vain but
pleasant chase."
Next let us rise with the rustic and follow him as he begins his day's
work:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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