TREES AND SHRUBS 119 



bling acorn-cups ; and when the birds the leaves are first budding in April 

 are still, and the squirrel, which drums on the boughs above ; and earth and 

 in anger at the wanderer's intrusion, sky grow merged in magical strangeness 

 stands at gaze for a moment on his on the hillside slopes where the blue- 

 shadowy bough, there swells upon the ear bells shed floods of colour in late May, 

 the droning murmur of the multitudin- before the shadow deepens as the 

 ous insect life that makes every great leaves increase, and the vaulted depths 

 oakwood its chosen and peculiar home, of the beechwood return to their 

 Beautiful, too, is a great wood of midsummer darkness and stillness, 

 beech, but with a beauty chiefly born Where the hanging front of the beech- 

 of the coolness and shadow of its wood faces the outer world, there are 

 remote, columnar aisles, and of the two short periods of the year, in mid- 

 very depth of its withdrawal from the May and mid-October, when its beauty 

 preoccupations of the outer day. In can hardly be surpassed. The newly 

 the midmost shade of the beech woods opened foliage has a tenderness of 

 little grows upon the dark and leaf- colour and a delicacy of outshaken 

 embittered soil but a few wiry bramble- form which no other British tree can 

 stems, or here and there the pale, fully equal, when massed on a great 

 uncanny bird's-nest orchids, which wood's edge ; and when, in a flaming 

 are parasitic upon the roots of the and rain-washed October, the orange 

 trees ; and except for a jay or black- and scarlet of the dying leaves is 

 bird that now and then startles the stabbed through by the sunlight, and 

 stillness as it slants upward, noisily tinged to a deeper purple and crimson 

 chattering, from ground to bole, the by the lustre of the underlying boughs, 

 life of the birds is concentrated in the it is the supreme moment of all autumn's 

 roof of foliage raised high above our splendour. 



heads. For charm of variety and The beech loves a dry hillside, with 



colour, a beechwood is most beautiful an underlying calcareous mass of chalk 



either from the outside, or at a point or limestone ; the oak endures most 



near its edge, where the large pattern vicissitudes of soil, but is nowhere 



of the chequered sunlight swings rhyth- more native and luxuriant than on 



mically across its floor. Here there are the wastes of wealden clay which 



often wide gardens of primroses and hold the rains in endless pools and 



white anemones, which bloom while runnels, but are naturally distinct 



