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Tom had miscalculated the chances of interruption. Meta was lingering to track the royal highway of some giant ants to their fir-leaf hillock, when they were hailed from behind, and her squire felt ferocious at the sight of Norman and Harry closing the perspective of fir-trunks. "Hallo! Tom, what a guide you are!" exclaimed Norman. "That fence which even Ethel and Mary avoid!"
As soon as he was well through the fir-wood, where the closely-growing reddish fir-trunks brought to mind Pete's hiding-place, and consequently Pete himself, he found the broken ground rich with brambles clustering over the furze-bushes, and hanging down in the sandy hollows hot, sunny spots, where the black fruit, rarely gathered, hung in bunches, so that the basket soon began to grow heavy, and a division had to be made with bracken fronds to keep them from being mixed up with the mushrooms he gathered from time to time not big, flat, dark, brown-gilled fungi, such as grow in moist spots and rich old pastures, but delicate, plump little buttons, which he found here and there dotted about the soft velvety bits of sheep-cropped pasture hidden among the clumps of furze.
A dull darkness settles over the earth, a star or so can be seen; two hours later there is a glow of the moon. I wander up in the woods with my gun and my dog. I light a fire, and the light of the flames shines in between the fir-trunks. There is no frost. "The first iron night!" I say. And a confused, passionate delight in the time and the place sends a strange shiver through me...
Nothing was better known to Fancy than the extravagant manner in which these circular knots or eyes distorted everything seen through them from the outside lifting hats from heads, shoulders from bodies; scattering the spokes of cart- wheels, and bending the straight fir-trunks into semicircles.
The outer walls are constructed of fir-trunks, let into one another at the corners on the log-hut principle, and the interior is lined with boarding. In some parts, however, where timber is scarce the buildings are of stone.
The wintry sunlight, which struck upon her, tinted the old blanket dress a shining ochre, and the loose tress of red-gold hair, which had escaped from beneath her little fur cap, struck a dominant tone of glowing colour among the pale reds and russets of the fir-trunks and withered fern. Gordon shook his head reproachfully.
A little bar of light lay on the horizon in front of me, almost colourless. It was crossed again and again by the small fir-trunks that were little more than wands. A woodpigeon rose with a sudden crash of sound, flapping away against the branches. My pulse was dancing with delight my heart, too. It was like a game of hide-and-seek, and yet it was life at last.
The square log-house which stood some little distance from the lake looked well built and substantial, and the road that wound through the green oblong had been skilfully laid with rounded strips sawn off the great fir-trunks.
Up the hillside, in deeper shadow, was another little structure; a wooden shed with an open gable sheltering an altar with candles and flowers. Here mass is said by one of the conscript priests of the regiment, while his congregation kneel between the fir-trunks, giving life to the old metaphor of the cathedral-forest.
On returning from one of these walks to the column a curious circumstance occurred. It was evening, and she was coming as usual down through the sighing plantation, choosing her way between the ramparts of the camp towards the outlet giving upon the field, when suddenly in a dusky vista among the fir-trunks she saw, or thought she saw, a golden-haired, toddling child.
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