14 MY DEVON YEAR 



village communities ; paints the progress of the 

 seasons for them against heaven ; thunders majestic- 

 ally to earth under their pigmy arms ; contributes to 

 their habitations ; furnishes their last pillow beneath 

 the daisies. A tree well typifies the eternal change 

 that keeps all matter sweet. To-day the thrushes 

 sing in its ancestral top ; to-morrow, at the ringing 

 music of the axe, it will fall to make men's coffins. 



The beech and her handmaiden, the silver birch, 

 represent the softer sex of woodland courts. Their 

 beauty none can dispute, for the fascinating delicacy 

 of the greater, and the gleam and droop of the lesser 

 tree, as its filigree falls in a cloud about the shining 

 stem, are sights that lull the weariness of Winter and 

 ameliorate those hours when the forests still rest 

 and impatient man longs to see them waken. Now 

 those pools and splashes of gorgeous copper that 

 spread beneath the beeches in Autumn have vanished, 

 and the splendour of them has sunk into the grey 

 and ghostly. Aloft the traceries twine, naked save 

 for a few dead seed-cases, that have long since scat- 

 tered their treasures of mast, yet clutch in death at 

 the branch that bore them. But the graceful sweep 

 and spread of the tree, leaping from its smooth ash- 

 coloured trunk to a fork of two or three main limbs, 

 and then rising to the crown and falling to the 

 earth in spray of pendulous branches the scheme 

 of the beech, its symmetry, beauty of line, down- 

 ward droop, and upward spring, can only be under- 

 stood at this season, or when the splendour of the 



