The mud-picture was enough to make him swing himself over and proceed.
The character of the woodland now changed.

The bases of the smaller trees were nibbled bare by rabbits, and at divers points heaps of fresh-made chips, and the newly-cut stool of a tree, stared white through the undergrowth.

There had been a large fall of timber this year, which explained the meaning of some sounds that soon reached him.
A voice was shouting intermittently in a sort of human bark, which reminded Giles that there was a sale of trees and fagots that very day.
Melbury would naturally be present.

Thereupon Winterborne remembered that he himself wanted a few fagots, and entered upon the scene.
A large group of buyers stood round the auctioneer, or followed him when, between his pauses, he wandered on from one lot of plantation produce to another, like some philosopher of the Peripatetic school delivering his lectures in the shady groves of the Lyceum.

His companions were timber-dealers, yeomen, farmers, villagers, and others; mostly woodland men, who on that account could afford to be curious in their walking-sticks, which consequently exhibited various monstrosities of vegetation, the chief being cork-screw shapes in black and white thorn, brought to that pattern by the slow torture of an encircling woodbine during their growth, as the Chinese have been said to mould human beings into grotesque toys by continued compression in infancy.