A ROTTEN ELM. 59 



There is another mistake, often committed by owners 

 of timber, who go to the other extreme, and in their in- 

 tense admiration of trees refuse to permit the felling of a 

 single one. Now in the forest or the woodlands, away 

 from the park or pleasure-grounds, the old hollow trees 

 are things of beauty, and to cut them down for firewood 

 seems an act of vandalism. But it is quite another thing 

 with an avenue or those groups which dot the surface of a 

 park. Here, if a tree falls and there is no other to take 

 its place, a gap is the result, which cannot be filled up, 

 perhaps, under fifty or sixty years. 



Let any one stroll along beneath a stately avenue of 

 elm or beech, such as are not difficult to find in rural 

 districts, and are the pride and boast — and justly so — 

 of this country, and, examining the trees with critical eye, 

 what will he see ? Three or four elms, I will say, are 

 passed, and are evidently sound ; but the fifth — a careless 

 observer might go by it without remarking anything un- 

 usual — is really rotten to the centre. At the foot of the 

 huge trunk, and growing out of it, is a bunch of sickly- 

 looking fungi. Thrust your walking-stick sharply against 

 the black wood there and it penetrates easily, and with 

 a little pushing goes in a surprising distance ; the tree 

 seems undermined with rottenness. This decay really 

 runs up the trunk perpendicularly : look, there are signs 

 of it above at the knot-hole, thirty feet high, where more 

 fungus is flourishing, as it always does in dead damp 



