There is a lonely wood where Meavy hides upon her way and whence her waters cry like siren voices from copse and thicket and the darkness under great trees. Hither she passes, amid mossy stones and through secret places curtained by green things. At the feet of Lether Tor there rise forests of oak and beech; and here, by day and night, through all times and seasons, two songs are mingling. The melodies change as the singers do; but they never cease. In summer the shrunken river tinkles to the murmur of the leafy canopy above it, and her voices ascend fitfully to meet the whisper of the leaf and the sigh of the larch; in winter the legions of the branch have vanished and naked woodland and swollen stream make wilder music. Then the trees lend their lyres to the north wind, and the rocks beneath utter strange cries that combine their choral measures with fierce throbbing of the forest harps above. The foliage fallen, Lether Tor’s grey castles and jagged slopes are visible, lifted against the west and seen through a lattice of innumerable boughs. Behind this mountain sinks the sun, now in an orange-tawny aureole above the purple, and now wrapped with sullen, lifeless cloud; now upon the clearness of summer twilights, and now through the flaming arms of a red mist. To-day, in August, this haunt of Meavy was a nest of light and cool shadows dappled together, a tent of leaves--dark overhead, where the sky filled the fretwork of the tree-tops, and alive at the forest edge with a glory of gold, where sunshine poured through loops and ragged, feathered fringes of translucent foliage. The leaves formed a commonwealth of song and gladness and harmonious concessions. Each integral of the arboreal courts advanced the same beauty, lifted to the same zephyr, glittered to the same sun and moon, drank life from the same dew, trembled to the same threat of autumn and of death. Beneath, through rifts in the bosom of the wood, the blue-green brake-fern shone and panted out her fragrance on the hillside. A colour contrast very vivid was thus offered through the frames of the forest; and beyond this region of rock-strewn fern there spread a haze of light and darkness--of indigo and silver blended about the shaggy knees of Lether Tor where it lifted to the sky.