Under the Greenwood Tree : Or, The Mellstock Quire

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

At thepassing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the hollywhistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles whileits flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed theirleaves, does not destroy its individuality.On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was passing up a lanetowards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a plantation that whispered thus distinctively tohis intelligence.

All the evidences of his nature were those afforded by the spirit of hisfootsteps, which succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and by the liveliness of his voiceas he sang in a rural cadence:"With the rose and the lilyAnd 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 withUpper Mellstock and Lewgate, and to his eyes, casually glancing upward, the silver andblack-stemmed birches with their characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, thedark-creviced elm, all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the sky, wherein thewhite stars twinkled so vehemently that their flickering seemed like the flapping ofwings.

Within the woody pass, at a level anything lower than the horizon, all was dark asthe grave.

The copse-wood forming the sides of the bower interlaced its branches sodensely, even at this season of the year, that the draught from the north-east flew along thechannel with scarcely an interruption from lateral breezes.