Now could be beheld that change from the handsome to the curious which
the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter months.
Angles were taking the place of curves, and reticulations of
surfaces--a change constituting a sudden lapse from the ornate to the
primitive on Nature's canvas, and comparable to a retrogressive step
from the art of an advanced school of painting to that of the Pacific
Islander.

Winterborne followed, and kept his eye upon the two figures as they
threaded their way through these sylvan phenomena. Mr. Melbury's long
legs, and gaiters drawn in to the bone at the ankles, his slight stoop,
his habit of getting lost in thought and arousing himself with an
exclamation of "Hah!" accompanied with an upward jerk of the head,
composed a personage recognizable by his neighbors as far as he could
be seen. It seemed as if the squirrels and birds knew him. One of the
former would occasionally run from the path to hide behind the arm of
some tree, which the little animal carefully edged round pari passu
with Melbury and his daughters movement onward, assuming a mock manner,
as though he were saying, "Ho, ho; you are only a timber-merchant, and
carry no gun!"

They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through
interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots,
whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves; elbowed
old elms and ashes with great forks, in which stood pools of water that
overflowed on rainy days, and ran down their stems in green cascades.
On older trees still than these, huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs.
Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what
it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a
city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper
was interrupted; the lichen eat the vigor of the stalk, and the ivy
slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.