May Oak and Chestnut. 161 



like the trunk and limbs of Hercules ; and though for 

 his inflexibility he loses an arm now and then in the 

 hurricane, he lives to be a Methuselah amongst trees, 

 and dynasties rise and fall, empires are built and de- 

 molished, literatures flourish and decay, whilst he is still 

 green in his old place, unheeding the lapse of time. 

 His foliage is magnificent in mass and beautiful in the 

 individual leaf ; it is always worth drawing and painting, 

 both for its lines and shadows : it cannot be mean or in- 

 significant. Whether he is an aristocratic tree, or a tree 

 tainted with democracy, I am not subtle enough in social 

 distinctions to determine, but tradition informs us that 

 the chestnut of Mount Etna once sheltered a queen and 

 her hundred nobles, and is called for this reason the 

 ' Chestnut of the Hundred Horses.' In the comparison 

 of the chestnut with the oak, it is fair, too, that we 

 should remember what animals are fed by each. The 

 oak feeds h^rds of swine, but the chestnut supplies to 

 great multitudes of human beings a food as agreeable 

 as it is nutritious. There are countries where it is the 

 staff of life, and its alimentary importance is greater 

 than that of any other tree that grows, with the single 

 exception of the date. 



Amongst the shrubs which are almost trees, and 

 sometimes fully deserve to be called so, let me not 

 forget, in connection with the month of May, to mention 

 the bird-cherry primus, of which we have some excep- 

 tional specimens in the Val Ste. V^ronique, where they 

 grow to a height of sixteen or twenty feet, and have the 

 most perfectly graceful proportions. I have often much 



ii 



