OF MANY THINGS 203 



lizard blend the archasopteryx sitting aloft and 

 raising the first crude attempts at bird music amid 

 the gingko's foliage ; while at its feet the maternal 

 dinosaur perhaps laid her gigantic eggs. 1 This 

 prehistoric tree may be yours for two shillings. 

 Can you hesitate ? If only for the sake of the im- 

 proving conversation arising from such a noble 

 spectacle, the plant should adorn every garden 

 capable of growing it. 



Round this corner is a fig tree, and you will observe 

 that I have caged him in. This was done to pre- 

 vent countless birds from depriving us of the crop. 

 Until the thought of building for this tree a house of 

 galvanised wire occurred to me, we had no figs worth 

 mentioning ; now the thrushes, blackbirds, and star- 

 lings sit outside when the fruit is purple and say 

 harsh things; but we eat the figs. The idea of a 

 cage is, I have since found, far from new. Gilpin, in 

 his " Forest Scenery," tells us how that the deanery 

 garden of Winchester held a great and ancient fig 

 tree in 1757. Through a succession of deans this tree 

 was cased up and sheltered both from robbers and 

 from frost. "The wall to which it was nailed was 

 adorned with many inscriptions in Hebrew, Greek, 

 and Latin, alluding to such passages of the sacred 

 writings as do honour to the fig tree. After having 

 been presented with several texts of Scripture, the 

 reader was informed by way of climax, that in the year 

 1623, King James I. tasted of the fruit of this fig tree 



1 Laid her eggs. If she did lay them. Experts differ concerning 

 dinosaur's family arrangements. 



