DAYS OF THE EVERGREEN 275 



often planted in damp hollows of woods, or in other hollows 

 which they make into woods later on. The gloomy orna- 

 ments of old-fashioned hearses were copied from the droop- 

 ing branches of the spruce ; and the darkness and silence 

 underneath them are the heaviest in all the woods, except 

 only under dense yew boughs. But where the sunlight can 

 strike to the ground athwart their many upstretched fingers, 

 they are by no means a gloomy tree on a bright day. Their 

 foliage is of a distinct yellow-green, with a brighter and more 

 springlike tone in it than in the blue-green needles of the 

 pine. Moss grows freely on the earth and the fallen boughs in 

 such a little clearing, and the wood-sorrel will bloom there in 

 spring. Pines prefer drier soil, and the soil beneath them is 

 seldom mossy, though it may be thickly strewn in winter 

 with russet fern. In spite of the monotony of Scots pines 

 grown in a thick wood, no tree develops a grander indi- 

 viduality in old age than when it has had space to develop 

 freely and to wrestle for a generation with strong winds. 

 Probably no British tree combines strength and picturesque- 

 ness quite so perfectly as an ancient pine. Its trunk is like a 

 tower, the spring of its boughs seems to wrestle against all 

 the winds, and yet it is fledged with foliage as light as 

 wandering clouds. 



There is the same wild beauty on a far smaller scale in 

 the least of the pines of Britain the common juniper. The 

 juniper will grow on most soils ; but it is far commonest on 

 unploughed chalk downs and commons on a chalky soil. On 

 the bare downs it generally forms a small bush, three or four 

 feet high, except where it finds shelter from the wind among 

 other shrubs, when it grows occasionally to fifteen or twenty 

 feet. In bleak situations its boughs are dwarfed and blown 

 over by the prevailing wind, and its gnarled and lichened 

 stems wrought by straining with the blast, like those of the 



