Have you heard of the great Forest of Burzee? Nurse used to sing of it
when I was a child. She sang of the big tree-trunks, standing close
together, with their roots intertwining below the earth and their
branches intertwining above it; of their rough coating of bark and
queer, gnarled limbs; of the bushy foliage that roofed the entire
forest, save where the sunbeams found a path through which to touch the
ground in little spots and to cast weird and curious shadows over the
mosses, the lichens and the drifts of dried leaves.
The Forest of Burzee is mighty and grand and awesome to those who steal
beneath its shade. Coming from the sunlit meadows into its mazes it
seems at first gloomy, then pleasant, and afterward filled with
never-ending delights.
For hundreds of years it has flourished in all its magnificence, the
silence of its inclosure unbroken save by the chirp of busy chipmunks,
the growl of wild beasts and the songs of birds.
Yet Burzee has its inhabitants--for all this. Nature peopled it in the
beginning with Fairies, Knooks, Ryls and Nymphs. As long as the Forest
stands it will be a home, a refuge and a playground to these sweet
immortals, who revel undisturbed in its depths.
Civilization has never yet reached Burzee. Will it ever, I wonder?