WILD LIFE IN A SOUTHERN COUNTY. 39 



work and not a quarter of a mile distant, is a small 

 clump of wind-harassed trees, growing on the very 

 edge. They are firs and beech, and, though so thor- 

 oughly exposed to furious gales, have attained a fair 

 height even in that thin soil. Beech and fir, then, 

 can grow here. Away yonder on another ridge is 

 another such a clump, indistinct from the distance : 

 though there is a pleasant breeze blowing, and their 

 boughs must sway to it, they appear motionless. With 

 the exception of the poplar, whose tall top as it slowly 

 bends to the blast describes such an arc as to make 

 its motion visible afar, the most violent wind fails 

 to enable the eye to separate the lines of light coming 

 so nearly parallel from the branches of an elm or an 

 oak, even at a comparatively short distance. The tree 

 looks perfectly still, though you know it must be 

 vibrating to the trunk and loosening the earth with 

 the wrench at its -anchoring roots. 



In more than one of the deep coombes there is a 

 row of elms out of sight from this post of vantage 

 whose tops are about level with the plain, where you 

 may stand on the edge and throw a stone into the 

 rook's nest facing you. On a lower spur, which juts 

 out into the valley, is a broad ash wood. Little more 

 than a mile from hence, on the most barren and 

 wildest part of the down, there yet linger some stunted 

 oaks interspersed among the ash copses which to this 

 day are called " the Chace," and are proved by docu- 

 mentary evidence to stand on the site of an ancient 

 deer forest. A deer forest, too, there is (though seven 



