Several such paths debouch here--which is the right one to follow? It is pure chance. On again, with more tall bracken, thorn thickets, and maple bushes, and noting now the strange absence of living things. Not a bird rises startled from the boughs, not a rabbit crosses the way; for in the forest, as in the fields, there are places haunted and places deserted, save by occasional passing visitors. Suddenly the bracken ceases, and the paths disappear under a thick grove of beeches, whose dead leaves and beechmast seem to have smothered vegetation. Insensibly the low ground rises again, the brake and bushes and underwood reappear, but the trees grow thinner and farther apart; they are mainly oaks, which like to stand separate in their grandeur. There is one dead oak all alone in the midst of the underwood, with a wide space around it. A vast grey trunk, split and riven and hollow, with a single pointed branch rising high above it, dead, too, and _grey_: not a living twig, not so much as a brown leaf, gives evidence of lingering life. The oak is dead; but even in his death he rules, and the open space around him shows how he once overshadowed and prevented the growth of meaner trees. More oaks, then a broad belt of beeches, and out suddenly into an opening. It is but a stone's-throw across--a level mead walled in with tail trees, whose leaves in myriads lie on the brown-tinted grass. One great thicket only grows in the midst of it. The nights are chilly here, as elsewhere; but in the day, the winds being kept off by the trees and underwood, it becomes quite summer-like, and the leaves turn to their most brilliant hues. The stems of the bracken are yellow; the fronds vary from pale green and gold, commingled, to a reddish bronze. The hawthorn leaves are light yellow, some touched with red, others almost black. Maple bushes glow with gold. Here the beeches show great spots of orange; yonder the same tree, from the highest branch to the lowest, has become a rich brown. Brown too, and buff, are the oaks; but the tints so shade into each other that it is hard to separate and name them.