Angry Mountain no doubt had its name from its looks. No one ever saw its head out of the clouds. When there is thunder it bellows terribly out of the wall of cloud on Angry. There is a great chasm in the side of it, "The Devil's Slice" they call it, which looks like the track of an avalanche. There are some who say that the hidden lake on top of Angry once emptied itself and swept a whole tract of boggy country before it down upon the villages and churches and farms and cabins. Angry Woods, that clothe the mountain base, have a bad name. People say that the kindly growths of other woods are sparse and thin there--that it is a place of gnarled old trees flinging themselves about in horrible attitudes--that it is damp and full of fungus--and that you never know when you may plunge into a bog-hole unaware, and be drowned there, and dried into a brown mummy, no one knowing your fate. I expect most of those who have visited Angry Woods have gone there by nightfall, and with their hearts in their mouths, prepared for all manner of horrors. By day the fear of Sir Rupert De Lacy and his bloodhounds is too great. Yet it would be quite in keeping with Sir Rupert's character, if he suspected an intruder in his woods by night, to let the bloodhounds loose. If some poor creature were torn to pieces by them, God help us, no one supposes that Sir Rupert would care; and, from the glimpse I once caught of him, I could believe any ill of him. That was before I had lamed myself, and become the weak and ugly duckling of the handsome Brandons. There is a great chestnut tree that has grown through the walls of Brandon Abbey and brought down the solid masonry before it. I had my summer withdrawing-room in the chestnut, and nobody knew for a long time. When we were all in the woods, Esther and Hugh, and Donald, and the twins and I, it used to be my sport to disappear into my tree, where the others could never find me. Delicious it was--like a world under the sea--in the midst of green leaves. When the boughs hung up their lamps in spring, and the leaves had just shaken out their delicate fans, I used to feel as if the chestnut tree were fairyland, and too beautiful for anything of earth. I used to read in the chestnut--I was always the reading one of the family--and used to love to hide in it while the others ran here and there calling me through the woods. The road runs under the Abbey walls. There used to be a fortified wall running round Brandon to protect it from the Irish chieftains, with whom afterwards we Brandons became such good friends, and even inter-married. The outer wall of the Abbey is an integral part of the old wall.