"The rain! the rain!"
"The rain from the south-west that made me laugh my loudest! Raining all day, wetting my green feathers, wetting every green leaf in the woods beyond Lostwithiel. Raining until all the stony gullies were filled to overflowing, and the water ran and gurgled and roared until the whole wood was filled with the sound."
"No, no, woodpecker, I can't, I can't believe it!"
"It's true! It's true! Don't you see it coming, squirrel? Look at him! Look at him! Now, now! At last! At last! At last!"
Suddenly their sharp agitated voices fell to a broken whispering and died into silence. For the wind had lulled again. Looking closely at them I thought I could see a new expression in their immovable glass eyes. It frightened me, I began to be frightened at myself; for it now seemed to me that I really was becoming insane, and I was suddenly seized with a fierce desire to snatch the cases down and crush them into the fire with my heel. To save myself from such a mad act I jumped up, and picking up my candle, hurried upstairs to my bedroom. No sooner did I reach it than the wind was up again, wailing and shrieking louder than ever, and between the gusts there were the murmurings and strange small noises of the wind in the roof, and once more I began to catch the sound of their renewed talk. "Gone! gone!" they said or seemed to say. "Our last hope! What shall we do, what shall we do? Years! Years! Years!" Then by and by the tone changed, and there were question and answer. "When was that, squirrel?" I heard; and then a furious quarrel with curses from the squirrel, and "hullos" and renewed questions from the woodpecker, and memories of their life and death in Treve Wood, beyond Lostwithiel.
What wonder that, when hours later I fell asleep, I had the most distressing and maddest dreams imaginable!
One dream was that when men die and go to hell, they are sent in large baskets-full to the taxidermists of the establishment, who are highly proficient in the art, and set them up in the most perfect life-like attitudes, with wideawake glass eyes, blue or dark, in their sockets, their hair varnished to preserve its natural colour and glossy appearance. They are placed separately in glass cases to keep them from the dust, and the cases are set up in pairs in niches in the walls of the palace of hell. The lord of the place takes great pride in these objects; one of his favourite amusements is to sit in his easy-chair in front of a niche to listen by the hour to the endless discussions going on between the two specimens, in which each expresses his virulent but impotent hatred of the other, damning his glass eyes; at the same time relating his own happy life and adventures in the upper sunlit world, how important a person he was in his own parish of borough, and what a gorgeous time he was having when he was unfortunately nabbed by one of the collectors or gamekeepers in his lordship's service.
CHAPTER XV
SELBORNE