On warm summer nights he would
sometimes take an old stick and wander out, hatless, under the pines,
for he loved this wood, and used to say he met all his old friends
there, and would one day walk in there never to return. His wife tried
to break him gently off this habit, but he always had his own way; and
once, when she followed and found him standing under a great pine in the
thickest portion of the grove, talking earnestly to someone she could
not see, he turned and rebuked her very gently, but in such a way that
she never repeated the experiment, saying--
"You should never interrupt me, Mary, when I am talking with the others;
for they teach me, remember, wonderful things, and I must learn all I
can before I go to join them."
This story went like wild-fire through the village, increasing with
every repetition, until at length everyone was able to give an accurate
description of the great veiled figures the woman declared she had seen
moving among the trees where her husband stood. The innocent pine-grove
now became positively haunted, and the title of "Wood of the Dead" clung
naturally as if it had been applied to it in the ordinary course of
events by the compilers of the Ordnance Survey.
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