THE DECIDUOUS CYPRESS AT HOME 21 r 



It is a tree with a past of picturesque traditions and 

 interesting associations. Halos of historical and pre- 

 historical romance surround it. It was the tree under 

 which Cortes, the Spanish conqueror, sat, brooded, 

 and sought inspiration after reverse in battle. Visions 

 arise to our minds round the fame of it, the days 

 when Montezuma and generations of Aztec kings 

 before him must have summoned Witenagemots 

 innumerable, and held Court revels without number 

 beneath its shade. 



As a curiosity in the vegetable kingdom, with its 

 buttressed trunk, with its woody protuberances 

 called " knees " standing out above ground or swamp, 

 and anchoring its weight reared upon unstable 

 foundations, with its huge, hollow, branching roots 

 spreading out at times like the legs of an eighteenth- 

 century music-stand, it presents an appearance 

 unrivalled and unequalled. 



It has created conceptions as to its appearance 

 from sightseers of a totally opposite character in the 

 different places of its growth. In its eerie, weird, 

 swamp homes in Florida and North Carolina, with 

 grey masses of Spanish moss hanging loosely on its 

 trunk and swayed to and fro by the w^ind, it has 

 been regarded by some of those who have had the 

 good luck to see it there as a sight dismal, doleful, 

 and desolate. Travellers have written of it as 

 Isaiah wrote of Babylon, '' fallen and forsaken." In 

 plainer English and to put it in brief, it seems to have 

 given most of its wandering beholders a bad attack 

 of the creeps. 



For those who have not had the good fortune or 

 opportunity of attending a more immediate at home 

 in its company, we strongly recommend a look at 

 the remarkable picture of a grove of it in Trees 

 of Great Britain (L. Elwes and Henry, vol. i. plate 53). 

 The scene as depicted there impels the idea that even 

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