266 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



change of direction a tentative quest for the way 

 out of the shadow, yet all the crooks and turns uni- 

 fied by the impulse to grow, to keep on, each limb 

 a living melody. Where the great trunk broke into 

 limbs was solid strength; where these limbs, reach- 

 ing ever upward, finally dissolved in spray against 

 the blue-gray sky was lacelike delicacy a resonant 

 major chord, a whisper on the strings. I could 

 not find a limb that was uninteresting, a limb that, 

 if followed to its end, did not give the eye that sat- 

 isfaction of a living line which knows from the 

 beginning where it is going and is ever on the way. 

 And what a self-sufficient personality the whole tree 

 had! 



An even more interesting tree, I think, is a huge 

 old sycamore I pass on the way to the village. The 

 sycamore, of course, gains a winter charm (and, to 

 a less extent, a summer charm) over other trees, 

 because of its mottled bark, the great bare patches 

 of ivory-white, or even paper-white, alternating 

 with a soft snuff -brown on trunk and limbs. It 

 ascends smoothly, too, from its wide base, without 

 shouldering roots, giving it a certain air of trim 

 ease, even when it is a huge old giant. But my syca- 

 more on the village road, more than any I have ever 

 seen, has an oddity of branch growth which makes 

 me tip my head back every time I pass it and look 

 up to its ninety-foot-high top. Growing in the 

 open, it has a perfectly symmetrical crown, and the 

 mottled limbs, after they have reached the slender- 

 ness, say, of your wrist, begin to progress in a series 

 of explosions, each explosion sending out several 

 branchlets, exactly as you have seen a rocket burst 



