There remains the second best. I have thought that perhaps if I were to
attempt a series of detached impressions, without relation, without
sequence; if I were to suggest a little here the beauty of a moon-beam,
there the humour of a rainstorm, at the last you might, by dint of
imagination and sympathy, get some slight feeling of what the great
woods are. It is the method of the painter. Perhaps it may suffice.
For this reason let no old camper look upon this volume as a treatise
on woodcraft. Woodcraft there is in it, just as there is woodcraft in
the Forest itself, but much of the simplest and most obvious does not
appear. The painter would not depict every twig, as would the
naturalist.
Equally it cannot be considered a book of travel nor of description.
The story is not consecutive; the adventures not exciting; the
landscape not denned. Perhaps it may be permitted to call it a book of
suggestion. Often on the street we have had opened to us by the merest
sketches of incident limitless vistas of memory. A momentary pose of
the head of a passer-by, a chance word, the breath of a faint
perfume--these bring back to us the entirety of forgotten scenes. Some
of these essays may perform a like office for you. I cannot hope to
give you the Forest. But perhaps a word or a sentence, an incident, an
impression, may quicken your imagination, so that through no conscious
direction of my own the wonder of the Forest may fill you, as the mere
sight of a conch-shell will sometimes till you with the wonder of the
sea.
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