A CITY GARDEN 187 



a stout-hearted plane runs its roots under the pave- 

 ments and foundations and lifts its peeled branches 

 into the sometimes sunny air. Do not despise its 

 cracked and scabby bark. Only by throwing off in 

 great scales its smoke-choked skin can the plane keep 

 itself healthy in our peculiar atmosphere. And your 

 tall tree cutting the blue sky into diamonds with 

 translucent green is not everything. Right into this 

 middle of Cheapside that very bird of the wild, the 

 wood-pigeon, comes, builds its rustic nest in the 

 branches of the plane, and feeds squeaking youngsters 

 over the heads of the City men whose passing to and 

 fro keeps the pavement hot. The wood-pigeon that 

 men are lying in not very hopeful wait for now in 

 the thick of beech woods all over wildest England ! 

 Wood-pigeon, cushat, queest, says the book, but we 

 have heard it called quist, sometimes with a short 

 " i," but in the purest vernacular with the vowel as 

 open and uncompromising as in " ice." " What ! " said 

 a West countryman to a Yorkshireman he had met 

 in the far north-west of Canada, " thee dussent know 

 what quisteses be ? " and he laughed loud and long 

 at the limitations of some folk's knowledge. But we 

 have seen the eye of the Yorkshireman, just as the 

 eye of any other countryman, brighten at the sight 

 of the wild wood-pigeon walking the rare sward and 

 even the tiles of central London. In his "Visit to 

 Aesculapius," Sir E. J. Poynter has painted a group 

 of the ordinary courtyard doves, and then one portly 

 "quist" comes floating down to join them at the 

 feast. It may be that this wild bird among the tame 

 was put there as a tribute to the skill of the great 

 doctor, it may be that it just got there from a chance 



