But, in Vilche Doly, there were heard, again and yet again, the thundering sound of falling trees, the clipping strokes of the axes, the harsh rough throbbing of the saws. They were felling the forest! Over forty men, hard at work, like a flock of woodpeckers, were assailing the trees, hacking at them with persistent fury. These fell, one after another, and the open space grew wider, as the fallen giants lay humbled to the ground, in longer and longer rows. Only in some places did a slender stripling, spared for seedlings, rise up in the midst of this desolation, as a tall thistle lifts its head over the lonely plain. But it seemed to stoop and mourn pitifully for its slain brothers.—The brushwood, too, that had been left untouched, and a few stunted trees which the ax had not deigned to sacrifice, also looked as though weeping over the dead. All round, upon the sheets of trampled snow, as if laid out to be wrapped in their shrouds, stiff and stark lay the murdered trees, and the heaps which had been their limbs, and the lopped crowns of the mighty trunks stripped of their boughs, like mangled mutilated corpses: while streams of yellow sawdust—the blood of the slaughtered forest, as it were—were sinking into the snow. In a circle about the cleared space, like men standing around an open grave, towered the thick unbroken forest, multitudinous and lofty, as friends and kinsmen might stand around, drooping, sorrowful, with muffled sighs, listening to the thudding falls, and gazing in dull bewilderment at this harvest reaped by inexorable Fate! With never a pause, the wood-cutters went onward. Slowly, in one long line, they worked their way into the wood, which barred the way with its seemingly indestructible wall of close-set trunks. Its immensity swallowed them up; they were lost in the shade of its branches; but their axes glittered through the gloom, and they hacked away tirelessly, and the stridulous uninterrupted rasping of the saws went on. Every now and then a tree would totter, and suddenly—like a bird caught in a snare—fall apart from its fellows and, tossing its arm wildly, crash down to the earth with a death-cry. And so another would fall, and a score, and scores upon scores! There fell enormous pine-trees, green with the moss of age; and firs, arrayed in their dark verdure, and spruces with their many outspread arms; oak-trees, too, fell, with dry russet leaves still upon them, and overgrown with gray lichens as with beards—ancients of the forest that the thunderbolt would not blast, and the lapses of centuries had failed to crumble, now succumbed to the ax! And of other and meaner trees, who can say which and how many were laid low?