Bleak March in Epping Forest

All along the selvage of Epping Forest there was excitement. Before the
swallows, before the violets, long before the cuckoo, with only untimely
honeysuckle bushes showing a trace of green, two trippers had been seen
traversing the district, making their way towards High Beech, and
settling awhile near the Forest Hotel. Whether they were belated
survivals from last season or exceptionally early hatchings of the
coming year, was a question of considerable moment to the natives, and
has since engaged the attention of the local Natural History Society.
But we know that, as a matter of fact, they were of little omen, being
indeed but insignificant people from Hampstead and not true trippers at
all, who were curious to see this forest in raw winter.

For some have argued that there is no Epping Forest at all in the
winter-time; that it is, in fact, taken up and put away, and that
agriculture is pursued there. Others assert that the Forest is shrouded
with wrappers, even as a literary man's study is shrouded by dusty women
when they clean him out. Others, again, have supposed that it is a
delightful place in winter, far more delightful than in summer, but that
this is not published, because no writing man hath ever been there in
the cold season. And much more of unreal speculation, but nothing which
bore upon it the stamp of truth. So these two--and I am one of the
two--went down to Epping Forest to see that it was still there, and how
it fared in the dismal weather.

The sky was a greasy grey that guttered down to the horizon, and the
wind smote damp and chill. There was a white fringe of ice in the
cart-wheel ruts, but withal the frost was not so crisp as to prevent a
thin and slippery glaze of softened clay upon the road. The decaying
triumphal arch outside the station sadly lacked a coat of paint, and was
indistinctly regretful of remote royal visits and processions gone for
ever. Then we passed shuddering by many vacant booths that had once
resounded with the revelry of ninepenny teas and the gingerbeer cork's
staccato, and their forms were piled together and their trestles
overturned. And the wind ravened, and no human beings were to be seen.
So up the hill to the left, and along the road leading by devious
windings between the black hedges and through clay wallows to the hilly
part round High Beech.

But upon the shoulder of a hill we turned to a gate to scrape off the
mud that made our boots unwieldy. At that moment came a threadbare place
in the cloudy curtain that was sweeping across the sun, and our shadows
showed themselves for an instant to comfort us. The amber patch of
sunlight presently slipped from us and travelled down the meadows
towards the distant blue of the hills by Waltham Abbey,