Nature is still, and I am still, standing concealed among trees, or moving cautiously through the dead russet bracken.

Not that I am expecting to get a glimpse of the badger who has his hermitage in this solitary place, but I am on forbidden ground, in the heart of a sacred pheasant preserve, where one must do one's prowling warily.

Hard by, almost within a stone's-throw of the wood-grown earthwork on which I stand, are the ruinous walls of Roman Calleva--the Silchester which the antiquarians have been occupied in uncovering these dozen years or longer.

The stone walls, too, like the more ancient earthwork, are overgrown with trees and brambles and ivy.

The trees have grown upon the wall, sending roots deep down between the stones, through the crumbling cement; and so fast are they anchored that never a tree falls but it brings down huge masses of masonry with it.