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There were thorn-trees and brambles everywhere; but there was no fruit, neither were there any flowers, nor even green leaves. The Frost-giants had been there. Idun was about to turn her footsteps homewards, when she heard a wild shriek in the tree-tops over her head; and, before she could look up, she felt herself seized in the eagle-talons of Old Winter.
"Do you see, Sanna," said the boy, "I had thought right away that we would have snow; do you remember, when we left home, how the sun was a bloody red like the lamp hanging at the Holy Sepulchre; and now nothing is to be seen of it any more, and only the gray mist is above the tree-tops. That always means snow."
His heart cries out bitterly, and his despairing voice echoes through the barren hills. As he advances the path declines lower and lower, till out of the shadowy depths the tree-tops seem climbing to meet him. The air he breathes is denser now, and respiration is easier.
Farther down we came out on the very break-neck brink of a vast amphitheater of hills, with "las ventanas," huge, sheer, rock cliffs shaped like great cathedral windows, an easy stone-throw away but entirely inaccessible to any but an aviator, for an unconscionable gorge carpeted with bright green tree-tops lay between.
He could have made himself quite comfortable with a bed of soft moss, but the fear of wild beasts disturbed his mind, and at last he determined to spend the night in a tree. He sought out a tall oak tree, climbed up to the top, and felt devoutly thankful that his big smoothing-iron was in his pocket, for the wind in the tree-tops was so high that he might easily have been blown away altogether.
"Fear not, Little Poplar comes." "It is his voice, Mademoiselle," and immediately the sleep flew out of Julie's eyes, and left them luminous as the stars shining beyond the tree-tops. "The chief is welcome," Annette replied; and Julie was upon her feet making a little voyage now in this direction, and now in that, in the endeavour to find him.
Ever since that time not a rook has built in the ancient grove; every year, however, one or another pair of young rooks attempt to build among the deserted tree-tops, but the old rooks tear the new nest to pieces as often as it is put together.
This great volume of indescribable sound amazing because of its intensity, coupled with the knowledge that it was created, for the most part, by creatures of almost microscopic dimensions was continuous, merely rising and falling at irregular intervals, like the sough of the wind through the tree-tops; but it was constantly broken in upon by other sounds, the most prominent of which was perhaps the croaking of innumerable frogs, sounding like the rapid whirr of wooden rattles and lasting continuously for a period of several minutes, and then ceasing abruptly, as though at a signal, to recommence as abruptly a few minutes later.
Bullets were singing across it and kicking up little spurts of brown earth where they struck. We had not gone a hundred yards when the German artillery, which the Belgians so confidently asserted had been silenced, opened with shrapnel. Have you ever heard a winter gale howling and shrieking through the tree-tops? Of course. Then you know what shrapnel sounds like, only it is louder.
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