Woman o the Woods...

'A moss-woman!' the haymakers cry,

And over the fields in terror they fly.

She is loosely clad from neck to foot

In a mantle of Moss from the Maples root,

And like Lichen grey on its stem that grows

Is the hair that over her mantle flows.
Her skin, like the Maple-rind, is hard,
Brown and ridgey, and furrowed and scarred;

And each feature flat, like the bark we see,

Where a bough has been lopped from the bole of a tree,

When the newer bark has crept healingly round,

And laps o'er the edge of the open wound;

Her knotty, root like feet are bare,

And her height is an ell from heel to hair,"

from The Fairy Family as quoted in The Lore of the Forest by George Allen, 1928.