FOREST TREE3. 29 



with their cheeks stuffed nearly to bursting with the precious 

 Beech-nut. The Beech does not dispense its fruit until after se- 

 vere frosts occur, when the burr either opens or drops from the 

 limb where it grew ; in the former case, after a smart frost at 

 night, the early morning breeze shakes them from their elevated 

 position, when they come rattling down upon the dry leaves like 

 showers of hail. Impelled by hunger, bears often climb and 

 gather the nut before it is ripe. I have frequently seen, during 

 my backwoods excursions, the topmost limbs broken off and pulled 

 in toward the trunk of the tree, some of them three inches in di- 

 ameter, until the whole of the top branches were furled in, form- 

 ing a tufted circle fifty feet in air. 



Burned and cracked, the Beech-nut makes a very good substi- 

 tute for coffee. " The leaves were formerly used in Britain, and 

 are to this day in some parts of Europe, for filling beds." Evelyn 

 says that " its very leaves, which form a natural and most agree- 

 able canopy all the summer, being gathered about the fall, and 

 somewhat before they are much frost-bitten, afford the best and 

 the easiest mattresses in the world to lay under our quilts in- 

 stead of straw ; because, besides their tenderness and loose lying 

 together, they continue sweet for seven or eight years long ; be- 

 fore which time straw becomes musty and hard. They are 

 by divers persons of quality in Dauphine, and in Switzerland I 

 have sometimes lain on them to my very great refreshment. So 

 as of this tree it may properly be said, 



" ' The woods a house, the : 1.' " 



"We can," says Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, " from our own ex- 

 perience, bear testimony to the truth of what Evelyn says here 

 as to the excellence of Beech leaves for mattresses, w 

 ways to think that the most luxurious and refreshinj 

 that which prevails universally in Italy, and which c 

 an absolute pile of mattresses filled with the elastic Bpathe oi' the 



