460 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



scenery, and from the Tower Hill overlooks a pano- 

 rama of unrivalled beauty and great extent. 



It is, however, of the timber trees in the park that 

 we have now to speak, and as we are in possession of 

 a letter written in 1858, in which some allusion is made 

 to the subject, we begin with the following extract 

 from it : " It grieves me to write or utter one word 

 in depreciation of this terrestrial paradise, but a 

 tender regard for the truth will not allow me to leave 

 you in uncertainty as to the fact that its oak timber is 

 not the greatest of its beauties. The oak trees in the 

 park are comparatively few, and the largest is but 

 a trifle over ten feet, and a half in girth at about five 

 feet from its base. The principal growth is beech, 

 and, without doubt, the magnificent specimens of that 

 tree that abound within the Park fence, are not 

 wanting in beauty or variety, some dividing a few feet 

 from the soil into innumerable and enormous spread- 

 ing branches, each in itself equal to a very respectable 

 tree, others sending up bare shafts, forty, fifty, sixty 

 feet high, and ultimately rearing their heads eighty, 

 ninety, a hundred feet and upwards. One of the 

 latter, once a very conspicuous object and long known, 

 I understand, to the people of Stansted as ' Sir 

 Harry's walking stick,' was uprooted a few years 

 ago during a hurricane that fatally 'shivered the 

 timbers' of many other fine trees in the park, and 

 in its fall it displaced a huge mass of chalk, which, 

 being firmly held between the roots of the prostrate 

 trunk, presented the appearance of a fragment of wall 

 twenty feet high. This Brobdignagian walking stick 

 was seventy-five feet from the roots of the lowest 

 branch, and a portion of the trunk sixty-four feet 

 in length, may, for aught I know to the contrary, 

 be actually afloat at the time I am writing this, 

 and doing duty as a collier's keel. Another beech, 

 on the crest of a long ridge in front of the mansion, 

 was wrecked about the same time, and in order to 



