128 VOICES FROM THE WOODLANDS. 



leaves; but who among them have chronicled the noble 

 ash of Cranock, planted in the sixteenth century by Sir 

 T. Nicholson, Lord Advocate in the time of James VI., 

 when bearded men stood round with peaked hats and stiff 

 starched ruffs, thinking, it might be, of the Spanish armada, 

 or their young king's marriage with the Danish princess ; 

 a tree which now aspires to the height of ninety feet, and 

 twenty-one in girth at nine feet from the ground ? Neither 

 have they sung concerning the goodly ash in Woburn Park, 

 containing eight hundred and seventy-two cubic feet of 

 timber; nor of the hollow ash-trunk at Donirey, near Clare, 

 forty-two feet in circumference. And yet what subject 

 more worthy of poetic inspiration, than that same hollow 

 trunk ? a living cavern, but, in lieu of stones, a rough and 

 serried bark ; instead of ferns rooted in the interstices, a 

 few green leaves, showing that life remains ; and within its 

 ample precincts a little school of peasant children, gathered 

 from the contiguous cottages, and taught by one of noble 

 birth, to read in that holy book from which words of love, 



