January — Giant Brethren. 5 1 



positively mountainous owes to sylvan beauty nearly all 

 its charm and attraction, and even where trees abound 

 the whole dignity and character of some house or village 

 may be dependent upon the immediate neighborhood 

 of two or three venerable oaks or walnuts. And in the 

 heart of the forest, remote from any human habitation, 

 there may be scenes of the most striking grandeur, which 

 would be utterly ravaged by the destruction of some 

 venerable company of giants who have lived there side 

 by side for full five hundred years. There is one such 

 solitude in a narrow dell about a league from the Val 

 Ste. Vdronique. It is just at the end of a little valley, 

 where a streamlet glides down a grassy slope rounded 

 into the smoothest curves. On this slope stand twelve 

 gigantic brethren, chestnuts, which by a happy fatality 

 have escaped the axes of many successive generations. 

 They have no definite association with human history ; 

 they have dwelt together in this solitude undisturbed by 

 the fall of dynasties or the noise of distant battle-fields. 

 No king has ever sought refuge in their foliage, no gen- 

 eral has encamped or held council beneath their shade. 

 Only the birds have made nests in their world of leaves, 

 and the wild deer found repose in the coolness of their 

 shadowy seclusion. No poet has ever sung them, no 

 lover ever carved linked initials on their bark. And 

 yet the man would be dead to all sylvan feeling, who 

 could go into that valley, axe in hand, and look at these 

 ancient brethren with a base calculation of their price. 

 Can we not spare a narrow spot of ground, where ground 

 is worth so little, in order that one group of trees may 



