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They were on a remote country road, cool and dim and quiet, in the very heart of the beech woods. Long banners of light fell athwart the grey boles. Along the roadsides grew sheets of feathery ferns. Above the sky was gloriously blue. The air was sweet with the wild woodsy smell of the forest. Jessamine lifted and clasped her hands in rapture. "Oh, how lovely!"
The gentle hillside above was clothed by plantations, and a grove of ancient beech trees, whose pale, smooth boles stood out from among undergrowth of lustrous hollies and the warm russet of fallen leaves. And over it all brooded the restfulness of the Sabbath, and the gladness of a fair and equal light.
The light grew: the boles of the trees came out, one by one, through the purple. The tangled mass down the creek took on a shade of green, and a faint breath came from the southward. The sorrel mare sniffed it, and stamped. Then silence again, a long silence. Could it be that the cane moved in the thicket? Or had my eyes deceived me? I stared so hard that it seemed to rustle all over.
Great boles of beech, heavy timber at the foot, thus end at their summits in the lightest and most elegant pencilling. Where the birches are tall, sometimes the number and closeness of these bare sprays causes a thickening almost as if there were leaves there. The leaves, in fact, when they come, conceal the finish of the trees; they give colour, but they hide the beautiful structure under them.
Some of the lower mountains are covered with them, giving rise to remarkably beautiful masses of pale, translucent green in spring and summer, yellow and orange in autumn, while in winter, after every leaf has fallen, the white bark of the boles and branches seen in mass seems like a cloud of mist that has settled close down on the mountain, conforming to all its hollows and ridges like a mantle, yet roughened on the surface with innumerable ascending spires.
He could not have passed it previously without notice of its sombre shade and massive boles. He would return a little distance, and look for the path his passage must have made in brushing through the thickets. Brought to a stand again. This time by a small creek gurgling deeply beneath matted shrubs. He had gone wrong must have diverged from his old course.
There is a little promontory jutting into the lake, and sloping down to a sandy beach, on which the waters idly lapse, and shoals of red-fins and shiners come to greet the stranger; the forest is untouched by the axe; the tender green sweeps the water's edge; ranks of slender firs are marshaled by the shore; clumps of white-birch stems shine in satin purity among the evergreens; the boles of giant spruces, maples, and oaks, lifting high their crowns of foliage, stretch away in endless galleries and arcades; through the shifting leaves the sunshine falls upon the brown earth; overhead are fragments of blue sky; under the boughs and in chance openings appear the bluer lake and the outline of the gracious mountains.
Our progress was very slow, but guided by occasional glimpses at the compass we never stopped but twice, once when we found ourselves apparently surrounded by tree boles and fallen boughs, and once when we got into swampy ground. Then we took the risk of lighting the lantern, and by its aid picked our way through these difficult places.
The weather began to moan and the boles of the pines to quake. And then there came war, a trouble out of the north, a wave of the breath of God to show inconsequent man that he who seeks to live by slaughter hath slaughter for his master. They hung over the fire while the forest cracked round them, and the flame smarted with the flying snow.
What ho, hot heart of mine: to beat thus lustily awhile, to feel in the red rushing blood, and then be ashes, can this be so? But peace, peace, thou liar in me, telling me I am immortal shall I not be as these bones? To come to this! But the balsam-dropping palms, whose boles run milk, whose plumes wave boastful in the air, they perish in their prime, and bow their blasted trunks.
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