I've wished a thousand times, as I sit here before the fire and jot
these memories down in crabbed black on white, that I could conjure up
for you some speaking picture of this scene primeval in which the story
moves.

True, its hills and valleys are the same; the river keeps its course;
and in the west the mountain sky-line is unchanged. But here similitude
is at an end. You've hacked the virgin forest into shapes and fringes
where once it was an ample mantle seamed only by the rivers, and frayed
here and there at distant intervals by the settler's ax.

Beneath this mantle lay a world unlike the world you know. Plunged in
its furtive depths you felt the spell of nature's mystery upon you; the
mystery of the hoary wood, age-old, steeped in the nepenthe of the
centuries. In brightest summer day, which, in these forest aisles,
became a misty green translucence, the silence, the vastness, the
solitude laid each a finger on you, bidding you go softly all the way.
But in the twilight hour the real held still more aloof, and all the
shadows bristled with dim fantastic shapes to awe and affright the
alien-born.

I was not alien-born. From earliest childhood I had known and loved
these forest solitudes. Yet now, as when I was a little lad, the
twilight shadows awed me. Here it was a gnarled and twisted tree-trunk
so like a crouching panther that I sprang aside and had the steel half
out before the clearer vision came. There it was the figure of a man
gliding stealthily from tree to tree, it seemed; keeping even pace with
me as if with sinister intent.