174 TREES IN NATURE, MYTH & ART 



forest and the first rude artificial shelters that 

 man made for himself of tree-branches and 

 dried leafage. Kingsley would have liked to 

 believe that the Northern builders had imitated 

 the forest groves in which their forefathers had 

 worshipped. The earliest builders made their 

 houses of the trees which, and not merely 

 among which, they worshipped. This fact has 

 the greatest significance for much that is 

 clearly imitative of trees in modes of architec- 

 ture that, by millenniums, not by centuries 

 only, preceded the Gothic of the Middle 

 Ages. 



The beginning of architecture is illustrated 

 in buildings erected in our own time and in 

 our own country. Methods that in their 

 origin are prehistoric are still in use. Not long 

 since I found shelter, on the edge of a pine- 

 wood, in a rude cart-shed formed of birch - 

 poles, with pine branches and bracken for walls 

 and roof What is the rude cart-shed of to-day 

 was the dwelling of earlier times. The black- 

 and-white, timber-framed cottage, with its 

 thatched roof, is a palace compared with the 

 dwellings of British chiefs, which were guilt- 

 less of such fastidious luxuries as fireplace and 



