Then I added aloud, in what was meant to be a cheery and sensible voice, but which sounded in my ears almost as strange as the wind: "Come, come, Basil, my dear fellow.

Where do you want us to go ?" "Why, up here," cried Basil, and with a bound and a swing he was above our heads, swarming up the grey column of the colossal tree.
"Come up, all of you," he shouted out of the darkness, with the voice of a schoolboy.

"Come up.

You'll be late for dinner." The two great elms stood so close together that there was scarcely a yard anywhere, and in some places not more than a foot, between them.
Thus occasional branches and even bosses and boles formed a series of footholds that almost amounted to a rude natural ladder.

They must, I supposed, have been some sport of growth, Siamese twins of vegetation.
Why we did it I cannot think; perhaps, as I have said, the mystery of the waste and dark had brought out and made primary something wholly mystical in Basil's supremacy.