Electronic Resource
E-book Under the greenwood tree
To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as
well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob
and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it
battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech
rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which
modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not
destroy its individuality.
On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was
passing up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a
plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence.
All the evidences of his nature were those afforded by the spirit of
his footsteps, which succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and
by the liveliness of his voice as he sang in a rural cadence:
"With the rose and the lily
And the daffodowndilly,
The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go."
The lonely lane he was following connected one of the hamlets of
Mellstock parish with Upper Mellstock and Lewgate, and to his eyes,
casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches with
their characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the dark creviced elm, all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the
sky, wherein the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their
flickering seemed like the flapping of wings. Within the woody
pass, at a level anything lower than the horizon, all was dark as
the grave.
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