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But I resolved that I should keep a bright look-out and make the little villains behave. For at an early age our Eden Valley boys were just savages, ready to mock and rend any one of themselves who was a little better dressed, who wore boots instead of clogs with birch-wood soles, or dared to speak without battering the King's English out of all recognition.
The lowest house-serf was conscious of being superior to this vagabond and perhaps this was precisely why they treated him with friendliness; the peasants at first amused themselves by chasing him and driving him like a hare over the open country, but afterwards they left him in God's hands, and when once they recognised him as 'queer, they no longer tormented him, and even gave him bread and entered into talk with him.... This was the man I took as my huntsman, and with him I went stand-shooting to a great birch-wood on the banks of the Ista.
There were birch-wood benches all around the room, a huge table under the holy pictures in one corner, and a huge stove covered with particoloured patterns in relief, with spaces between it and the wall.
I came as far as the spring; a cup of birch-wood lay on the grass, left by a passing peasant for the public benefit. I quenched my thirst, lay down in the shade, and looked round. In the cave, which had been formed by the flowing of the stream into the river, and hence marked for ever with the trace of ripples, two old men were sitting with their backs to me.
I passed through another hamlet where there was a high wooden cross. There were walnut-trees, and men were knocking down the nuts. The women here wore wide-brimmed black straw hats over white caps. I soon left these figures behind, and was alone in a birch-wood, where there were many yellow leaves between me and the blue sky.
They, for this purpose, take Moore's plan of lengthening their days, by "stealing a few hours from the night," and generally breathe out their tender vows, not beneath the "milk-white thorn," but by the soft dim light of the birch-wood fire; the older members of the family retiring and leaving the lovers to their own sweet society.
But no sooner was he out of the room and hunting blindly for the cigarettes, than his mind was filled with an aching concern for Noel, fleeing like that, reckless and hurt, with nowhere to go. He found the polished birch-wood box which held the cigarettes, and made a desperate effort to dismiss the image of the girl before he again reached Leila.
Never, indeed, had a heavier heart burdened the footsteps of the wayfarer, about to climb the slopes of Sulitelma. The Lure is a wooden trumpet, nearly five feet long, made of two hollow pieces of birch-wood, bound together, throughout the whole length, with slips of willow.
By the time he reached the ponds he was tired out; but instead of stopping at the largest of the three, where a picturesque group of old brier cottages brought a remainder of man and his world into the prairie solitude of the common, he pushed on to a smaller pool just beyond, now hidden in a green cloud of birch-wood.
The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farm-houses, so mellow in colour, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness of the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a wilderness but a paradise.
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