THE HOSPITALITIES OF NATURE. 



49 



its principal meal from it, while for its lighter refresh- 

 ment it is dependent upon its own resources. A beauti- 

 ful emblem truly it is, thus growing on our royal English 

 tree. According to the suggestive mythology of our 

 ancestors, which had, indeed, much in it of the deeply 

 philosophical, as well as of the practical and religious, 

 the oak was Hesus, the god best and greatest, strongest 

 and everduring ; and the mistletoe was man, weak and 

 poor, but living in him and clinging to his everlasting 

 arms. 



It would be difficult to enumerate the various kinds 

 of mosses, lichens, and ferns that show a preference for 

 the oak, and share its grand and liberal hospitality. 

 Its trunk seems as if made to harbour those lowly 

 Liliputian members of the vegetable kingdom whose 

 quaint forms and curious properties harmonize so well 

 with the fairy scenery of midsummer night dreams. 

 Unlike the smooth bark of the beech, made to keep all 

 visitors aloof, the bark of the oak is full of furrows, 

 crevices, irregularities, porches and out-buildings as it 

 were, where wandering seeds find lodgment, and first 

 tender growths can secure their hold against scorching 

 sunbeam and cruel wind. The huge patriarch, hoary 

 with years, whose life-time bridges across the whole 

 history of England, allows the tiny imps of vegetation 

 that are but of yesterday the perpetual infants, so to 

 speak, of plant-life freely to clamber over its roots and 

 arms, and hang upon its rugged bosses which time has 

 used so cruelly, reducing them almost to bone and 

 muscle, their emerald bracelets of moss, their plumes of 



