He turned away abruptly to look through the window.  He saw the great encircling mass of gloom that was the Forest, fringing their little lawn.  It pressed up closer in the darkness.  The prim garden with its formal beds of flowers seemed an impertinence almost—­some little colored insect that sought to settle on a sleeping monster—­some gaudy fly that danced impudently down the edge of a great river that could engulf it with a toss of its smallest wave.  That Forest with its thousand years of growth and its deep spreading being was some such slumbering monster, yes.  Their cottage and garden stood too near its running lip.  When the winds were strong and lifted its shadowy skirts of black and purple....  He loved this feeling of the Forest Personality; he had always loved it.

“Queer,” he reflected, “awfully queer, that trees should bring me such a sense of dim, vast living!  I used to feel it particularly, I remember, in India; in Canadian woods as well; but never in little English woods till here.  And Sanderson’s the only man I ever knew who felt it too.  He’s never said so, but there’s the proof,” and he turned again to the picture that he loved.  A thrill of unaccustomed life ran through him as he looked.  “I wonder; by Jove, I wonder,” his thoughts ran on, “whether a tree—­er—­in any lawful meaning of the term can be—­alive.  I remember some writing fellow telling me long ago that trees had once been moving things, animal organisms of some sort, that had stood so long feeding, sleeping, dreaming, or something, in the same place, that they had lost the power to get away...!”

Fancies flew pell-mell about his mind, and, lighting a cheroot, he dropped into an armchair beside the open window and let them play.  Outside the blackbirds whistled in the shrubberies across the lawn.  He smelt the earth and trees and flowers, the perfume of mown grass, and the bits of open heath-land far away in the heart of the woods.  The summer wind stirred very faintly through the leaves.  But the great New Forest hardly raised her sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow.

Mr. Bittacy, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness of trees within.  He knew all the purple coombs splashed with yellow waves of gorse; sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with clear and dark-eyed pools that watched the sky.  There hawks hovered, circling hour by hour, and the flicker of the peewit’s flight with its melancholy, petulant cry, deepened the sense of stillness.  He knew the solitary pines, dwarfed, tufted, vigorous, that sang to every lost wind, travelers like the gypsies who pitched their bush-like tents beneath them; he knew the shaggy ponies, with foals like baby centaurs; the chattering jays, the milky call of the cuckoos in the spring, and the boom of the bittern from the lonely marshes.  The undergrowth of watching hollies, he knew too, strange and mysterious, with their dark, suggestive beauty, and the yellow shimmer of their pale dropped leaves.