TREES IN NATURE iii 



on, as Hamerton playfully says, a garb con- 

 formable " to the pretty spring fashions when 

 light green is 'so generally worn';" and then 

 "the very air of a larch-wood seems to be 

 suffused with a delicate green light that seems 

 rather to emanate from the innumerable multi- 

 tudes of thin short leaves than to be only their 

 colouring matter ". It is at this time, also, that 

 its flowers are to be seen, the **rosy plumelets," 

 as Tennyson calls them. 



Such are the trees that we most commonly 

 see ; those that are most in evidence in our 

 British landscape. They are all neighbours 

 and friends of my own. Most of them I see 

 every day, and am always glad to see them, 

 which is more than most of us can say of all 

 our human neighbours — or they, let us humbly 

 say, of us. At night, when in the house, I 

 like to think of the trees as gathered round it. 

 Sometimes they give no sound, at other times 

 the wind gives voice to them ; and in the storm 

 the sound rises and falls until one could fancy 

 it was the sound of breakers on the shore. 

 But there are other trees that we see, though 

 less frequently ; and we must not pass them by 

 wholly unnoticed We ought not, perhaps, to 



