HAWTHORN. 159 



some aged, and time-worn, and fantastically twisted, yet 

 still throwing out in spring an abundance of white or 

 pink blossoms. Others of great beauty or antiquity grow 

 wild in different parts of England ; but the most venerable 

 and continually resorted to, is an old hawthorn near the 

 village of Duddingstone, near Edinburgh. At three feet 

 above the root, this old trunk is nine feet in girth, and a 

 little higher up twelve feet more. 



The hawthorn will root from a truncheon like the poplar 

 or willow tribes. A large tree now growing at Fountain 

 Hall, in Haddingtonshire, is stated, on the authority of the 

 forester, a man of undoubted veracity, to have arisen from 

 a stake which he had driven into the ground with his own 

 hand, in making a dead hedge. Great was his astonish- 

 ment when the next year that same stake put forth branches, 

 and became a thriving tree. Thus, also, 



" Old stakes of olive-trees in plants revive ; 

 By the same method Paphian myrtles live." 



