130 SYLVAN SKETCHES. 



both sides, indented about the edges ; having a nerve in 

 the middle, and many smaller nerves growing from it. 



It is a quick growing tree : " in little more than forty 

 years," says Evelyn, " it will yield a load of timber." 

 Marty n mentions " an Elm planted by Henry the Fourth 

 of France, which was still standing in the Luxembourg 

 Gardens in Paris when the Revolution broke out : but 

 whether it has survived that event," continues he, " I am 

 unable to say. This great monarch's famous contempo- 

 rary, queen Elizabeth, is said to have planted an Elm 

 with her own hand at Chelsea, where her father had a 

 palace, in which she was brought up when an infant. It 

 went always by her name, and I remember it a stately 

 flourishing tree, except that the top was decayed. It 

 stood at the upper end of Church-lane, near where the, 

 turnpike now is, and was a boundary of the parish on 

 the north side. It was felled, to the great regret of the 

 neighbourhood, on the llth of November 1745, and sold 

 for a guinea, by Sir Hans Sloane, Bart, lord of the 

 manor. It was thirteen feet in circumference at the bot- 

 tom, and six feet six inches at the height of forty-four 

 feet : the height was an hundred and ten, of which fif- 

 teen feet at the top were decayed ; the tree having suf- 

 fered in the hard frost in 1739-40 *." Another Elm was 

 planted in its place, which bids fair, if it does not meet 

 with any accident, to rival its predecessor. 



In the middle of the last century an Elm was standing 

 at Charlton, in Kent, about which Horn Fair was kept ; 

 the boughs spread to a distance of eight yards on every 

 side, although the trunk was not more than a foot in 

 diameter : this is now cut down, and a young tree planted 



* See Martyn's edition of Miller's Dictionary. 



