220 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



day for five and twenty years, yet never mentioned, 

 and which Loe says nothing about in his Yew Trees of 

 Great Britain and Ireland. The title of this work is 

 misleading : Famous Yew Trees it should have been, 

 since it is nothing but a collection of facts as to size, 

 supposed age, &c., of trees that have often been 

 measured and described, and are accordingly well 

 known. It is well, to my way of thinking, that he 

 attempted nothing more. It is always a depressing 

 thought, when one has discovered a wonderful or a 

 beautiful thing, that a very full and very exact account 

 of it is and must be contained in some musty mono- 

 graph by some industrious, dreary person. At all 

 events, I can say that the yew trees which have most 

 attracted me, which come up when I think of the yew 

 as a wonderful and a sacred tree, are not in the book. 

 Of my Hampshire favourites I will, for a special reason, 

 speak of but one more the yew in the churchyard of 

 Hurstbourne Priors, a small village on the upper Test, 

 near Andover. 



This tree, which is doubtless very aged, has not grown 

 an enormous trunk, nor is it high for an old yew, but 

 its appearance is nevertheless strangely impressive, 

 owing to the length of its lower horizontal branches, 

 which extend to a distance of thirty to thirty-five feet 

 from the trunk, and would lie on the ground if not 

 kept up by props. Another thing which makes one 

 wonder is the number of graves that are crowded 

 together beneath these vast sheltering arms. One may 



