Passing deeper into the wood, it is well to be a little careful while stepping across the narrow watercourse that winds between the stoles. Rushes grow thickly by the side, and the slender stream seems to ooze rather than run, trickling slowly down to the brook in the meadow. But the earth is treacherous on its banks--formed of decayed branches, leaves, and vegetable matter, hidden under a thin covering of aquatic grasses. Listen! there is a faint rustling and a slight movement of the grass: it is a snake gliding away to its hole, with yellow-marked head lifted above the ground over which his dull green length is trailing. Stepping well over the moist earth, and reaching the firmer ground, there the thistles grow great and tall, many up to the shoulder; it is a little more open here, the stoles having been cut only two years ago, and they draw the thistles up. Sometimes the young ash, shooting up after being cut, takes fantastic shapes instead of rising straight. The branch loses its roundness and flattens out to a width of three or four inches, curling round at the top like the conventional scroll ornament. These natural scrolls are occasionally hung up in farmhouses as curiosities. The woodmen jocularly say that the branch grew in the night, and so could not see its way. In some places (where the poles are full-grown) the upper branches rub against each other, causing a weird creaking in a gale. The trees as the wind rises find their voices, and the wood is full of strange tongues. From each green thing touched by its fingers the breeze draws a different note: the bennets on the hillside go `sish, sish;' the oak in the copse roars and groans; in the firs there is a deep sighing; the aspen rustles. In winter the bare branches sing a shrill `sir-r-r.' The elm, with its rough leaf, does not grow in the copse: it is a tree that prefers to stand clear on two sides at least. Oak and beech are here; on their lower branches a few brown leaves will linger all through the winter. Where a huge bough has been sawn from a crooked ill-grown oak a yellow bloated fungus has spread itself, and under it if you lift it with a stick, the woodlice are crowded in the rotting stump. The beech boughs seem to glide about, round and smooth, snake-like in their easy curves. The bark of the aspen, and of the large willow poles, looks as if cut with the point of a knife, the cut having widened and healed with a rough scar. On the trunk of the silver birch sometimes the outer bark peels and rolls up of itself. Seen from a distance, the leaves of this tree twinkle as the breeze bends the graceful hanging spray.