So through the steep and tortuous village to High Beech, and then leaving the road we wandered in among big trees and down slopes ankle deep with rustling leaves towards Chingford again.  Here was pleasanter walking than the thawing clay, but now and then one felt the threat of an infinite oozy softness beneath the stiff frozen leaves.  Once again while we were here the drifting haze of the sky became thinner, and the smooth green-grey beech stems and rugged oak trunks were brightly illuminated.  But only for a moment, and thereafter the sky became not simply unsympathetic but ominous.  And the misery of the wind grew apace.

Presently we wandered into that sinister corner of the Forest where the beech trees have grown so closely together that they have had perforce to lift their branches vertically.  Divested of leaves, the bare grey limbs of these seem strangely restless.  These trees, reaching so eagerly upward, have an odd resemblance to the weird figures of horror in which William Blake delighted—­arms, hands, hair, all stretch intensely to the zenith.  They seem to be straining away from the spot to which they are rooted.  It is a Laocoon grouping, a wordless concentrated struggle for the sunlight, and disagreeably impressive.  The trippers longed to talk and were tongue-tied; they looked now and then over their shoulders.  They were glad when the eerie influence was passed, though they traversed a morass to get away from it.

Then across an open place, dismal with the dun hulls of lost cows and the clatter of their bells, over a brook full of dead leaves and edged with rusty clay, through a briery thicket that would fain have detained us, and so to a pathway of succulent green, that oozed black under our feet.  Here some poor lost wayfarer has blazed his way with rustic seats, now rheumatic and fungus-eaten.  And here, too, the wind, which had sought us howling, found us at last, and stung us sharply with a shower of congealing raindrops.  This grew to a steady downfall as the open towards Chingford station was approached at last, after devious winding in the Forest.  Then, coming upon the edge of the wood and seeing the lone station against the grey sky, we broke into a shout and began running.  But it is dismal running on imperfectly frozen clay, in rain and a gusty wind.  We slipped and floundered, and one of us wept sore that she should never see her home again.  And worse, the only train sleeping in the station was awakened by our cries, and, with an eldritch shriek at the unseasonable presence of trippers, fled incontinently Londonward.

Smeared with clay and dead leaves almost beyond human likeness, we staggered into the derelict station, and found from an outcast porter that perhaps another train might after the lapse of two hours accumulate sufficiently to take us back to Gospel Oak and a warm world again.  So we speered if there were amusements to be got in this place, and he told us “some very nice walks.”  To refrain from homicide