Ascending the slope of the down towards the trees, the brown-tinted grass feels slippery under foot: this wiry grass always does feel so as autumn approaches. A succession of detached hawthorn bushes--like a hedge with great gaps--grow in a line up the rising ground. The dying vines of the bryony trail over them--one is showing its pale greenish white flowers, while the rest bear heavy bunches of berries. A last convolvulus, too, has a single pink-streaked bell, though the bough to which it holds is already partly bare of leaves. The touch of autumn is capricious, and passes over many trees to fix on one which stands out glowing with colour, while on the rest a dull green lingers. Near the summit a few bunches of the brake fern rise out of the grass; then the foremost trees are reached, beeches as yet but faintly tinted here and there. Their smooth irregularly round trunks are of no great height-- both fern and trees at the edge seem stunted, perhaps because they have to bear the brunt and break the force of the western gales sweeping over the hills. For the first two hundred yards the travelling is easy because of this very scantiness of the fern and underwood; but then there seems to rise up a thick wall of vegetation. To push a way through the ever-thickening bracken becomes more and more laborious; there is scarce a choice but to follow a winding narrow path, green with grass and moss and strewn with leaves, in and out and round the impenetrable thickets. Whither it leads--if, indeed anywhere--there is no sign. The precise sense of direction is quickly lost, and then glancing round and finding nothing but fern and bush and tree on every hand, it dawns upon the mind that this is really a forest--not a wood, where a few minutes either way will give you a glimpse of the outer light through the ash-poles. Other narrow paths--if they can be called paths which show no trace of human usage--branch off from the original one, till by-and-by it becomes impossible to recognise one from the other. The first has been lost indeed long ago, without its having been observed: for the bracken is now as high as the shoulders, and the eye cannot penetrate many yards on either side. Under a huge oak at last there is an open space, circular, and corresponding with the outer circumference of its branches: carpeted with dark-green grass and darker moss, thickly strewn with brown leaves and acorns that have dropped from their cups. A wall of fern encloses it: the path loses itself in the grass because it is itself green.