278 Darkening Skies 



leaves. Only the results of disease, or mutilation, 

 or artificial culture, become disagreeably conspicu- 

 ous by the loss of the autumn cloak. Once the 

 solstice is past, and the light begins to gain at 

 morning and evening, we look impatiently towards 

 spring, and ask our trees for signs of quickening 

 life. While the days are still dark, and the riot 

 of autumn but lately past, their bare lines strike 

 fresh and unfamiliar, and there is sufficient pleasure 

 in their purely static strength. In winter, too, 

 we learn to pay fuller attention to the bark of the 

 trees, which is as different in every species as the 

 boughs. Given a square foot of bark from a well- 

 grown specimen, the observer of winter trees could 

 name them as easily as he could from the sight of 

 the naked boughs or the summer leaf. How the 

 wych-elm's differs from the elm's in its lower ridges 

 and more closely parallel furrows, or the horn- 

 beam's from the beech's, from the appearance as 

 of a wrestler's straining sinews beneath the skin- 

 like rind ; these and many other differences, hard 

 to describe in words, but unmistakable to the eye 

 as it gains in knowledge, are all part of the life of 

 nature which is observed most easily and fully in 

 the tranquillity of winter days, when the woods 

 are stripped of the veils and distractions of summer. 

 It is the strong and temperate beauty of the bare 

 lines of the trees which is most in accord with the 

 grey, even days of English winter, when there is 

 so little obvious attraction in the climate, but so 

 wholesome a recreation. Yet in the darkest of 

 December weather, when there is, as yet, not even 



