Little Peter

'The pine forest is a wonderful place. The pine-trees stand in ranks like the soldiers of some vast army, side by side, mile after mile, in companies and regiments and battalions, all clothed in a sober uniform of green and grey. But they are unlike soldiers in this, that they are of all ages and sizes; some so small that the rabbits easily jump over them in their play, and some so tall and stately that the fall of them is like the falling of a high tower. And the pine-trees are put to many different uses. They are made into masts for the gallant ships that sail out and away to distant ports across the great ocean. Others are sawn into planks, and used for the building of sheds; for the rafters and flooring, and clap-boards and woodwork of our houses; for railway-sleepers, and scaffoldings, and hoardings. Others are polished and fashioned into articles of furniture. Turpentine comes from them, which the artist uses with his colours, and the doctor in his medicines; which is used, too, in the cleaning of stuffs and in a hundred different ways. While the pine-cones, and broken branches and waste wood, make bright crackling fires by which to warm ourselves on a winter's day. But there is something more than just this I should like you to think about in connection with the pine forest; for it, like everything else that is fair and noble in nature, has a strange and precious secret of its own.'

Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St Leger Kingsley (1852-1931), a Victorian novelist. Of her novels, The Wages of Sin and The History of Sir Richard Calmady were especially popular. Malet's early novels were genteel Victorian romances, but by the 1890s she was using the ideas of the aesthetic movement to explore more transgressive themes, such as adultery and sadism. Her later novels are proto-modernist in their explorations of marginal consciousnesses. Malet is most often compared to Henry James and Thomas Hardy.