But we go on, still on. The trees press closer and closer. They are now great forest-trees. The wind soughs among them in utter melancholy. Far away, here and there, a thin spectre of moonlight glides between their branches. Have you ever felt at night in some deep glade the holy horror of the forest? If not, you have no Druid and no Dryad among your ancestry. You have never known with a shudder just how they sacrificed the victim on yonder smooth grey slab, by moonlight, to the Forest God! Think, on this very spot, the moonlight fell, even as it falls to-night, among the gleaming beeches, ere ever the Romans entered Gaul. Man has never sown or reaped his harvest on this sacred soil: it is still consecrate to the God of Forests. The beech-boughs rustle immemorial secrets; the oaks shoot up their mast-like columns to support the temple roof. And there is Something in the temple, Something vast and nameless. Something that sighs and laments and chills, super-human or anti-human, Something which has no place in any of our creeds. What is it, this obscure, religious dread, this freezing of the blood and tension of the spirit, that locks us in a holy awe amid the shades of the nocturnal forest? Who knows? Perhaps a dim unconscious memory of the rites of our ancestors, Celts or Germans; a drop of the heart’s blood of the Druid or the Alruna-woman, still alive in us after two thousand years. They say that children fear the dark because they are still haunted by the dread of prowling beasts; our babies long obscurely for the blazing camp-fires which kept the wolves and bears at bay; an old anxious forest-fear survives in them and forbids them to sleep without that bright protection. Brr!... I wish we could see the friendly glow to-night in the wood of Compiègne! At last, far off, there is in truth a glow as of a human beacon. ’Tis a blacksmith’s forge, and then some straggling houses. Again a space of scantier wood, and we clatter up the streets of the outlying faubourg. The streets grow steeper, the houses taller, our pace quicker and more exhilarating. And at last we draw up with a clack of the whip before the famous friendly Hôtel de la Cloche at Compiègne. V