It was a relief to lay my hand on one of them, and feel that it was solid.

I half groped my way through them, and got out into the open field, by creeping through between the stems of what had once been a hawthorn hedge, but had in the course of a hundred years grown into the grimmest, largest, most grotesque trees I have ever seen of the kind.

I had always been a little afraid of them, even in the daytime, but they did me no hurt, and I stood in the vast hall of the silent night--alone: there lay the awfulness of it.

I had never before known what the night was.

The real sting of its fear lay in this--that there was nobody else in it.