“In detail, I cannot tell you, for I do not know⁠—except that I understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head keeper; but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up travelling and settled down here, he took a special interest in this wood, and for some unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall around it. This wall was never finished, but you shall see the ruins tomorrow in the daylight.”

“And the result of your investigations⁠—these stories, I mean?” the doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues.

“Yes, I’m coming to that,” he said slowly, “but the wood first, for this wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way peculiar about it. It is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer part in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large boulders⁠—old Druid stones, I’m told. At another place there’s a small pond. There’s nothing distinctive about it that I could mention⁠—just an ordinary pinewood, a very ordinary pinewood⁠—only the trees are a bit twisted in the trunks, some of ’em, and very dense. Nothing more.