The light that filtered through the dome of leaves was greenish, and as dim as on a winter evening.

But farther away, it was brilliant, and played around the edges of the leaves and accentuated their delicate pinking.

Later we reached the top of a barren slope, which was flat and smooth, and without a blade of grass to relieve the monotony of its colour.

Sometimes, however, we came upon a long avenue of beech-trees with moss growing around the foot of their thick, shining trunks.

There were wagon-tracks in these avenues, as if to indicate the presence of a neighbouring castle that we might see at any moment; but they ended abruptly in a stretch of flat land that continued between two valleys, through which it would spread its green maze furrowed by the capricious meanderings of hedges, spotted here and there by a grove, brightened by clumps of sea-rushes, or by some field bordering the meadows which rose slowly to meet the hills and lost themselves in the horizon.