236 OCTOBER 



purpose is served by this double rejection. If these stems 

 fall before the time of heavy frosts, they are seized 

 voraciously by the worms, as ideal doorways ; and a 

 patch of adjacent lawn may look as if there were an under 

 ground stem sending up these queer spikes. In the 

 present season these careful worms have surpassed them 

 selves ; and one must infer from the number of fallen 

 leaves they have dragged down that such excessive 

 autumnal activity must add much to the total sum of 

 fertility, to the &quot; mellow fruitfulness &quot; of the soil that 

 spring will enjoy. 



The creeper on an urban wall, for all its colour, cannot, 

 of course, vie with the soberer colours of the country 

 side, nor may any sumach or rhus cotinus or narrow- 

 leaved berberis of the garden so satisfy the eye as, say, a 

 clump of beech and larch above the junipers on an else 

 bare Berkshire down, or a stretch of bracken on a North 

 Devon hillside : the partridge is a lovelier bird than the 

 parrot. The beech is the master, the favourite tree of 

 the season, with its smooth-grey trunk, its arms and 

 hands stretched out in a gesture of welcome, and, above 

 all, a harmony of colour, as defiant of analysis as a 

 melody in music. &quot; Chestnut Sunday &quot; is not more 

 generally celebrated than the pilgrimage to High Wy- 

 combe or the Buckinghamshire woods, where beeches 

 marvellously flourish. You see the tree in more artificial 

 salience on the edge of Salisbury Plain, where isolated 

 clumps stand out in as strange isolation as the Stones of 

 Stonehenge themselves separate and, for all their colour, 

 stark and monumental. Somewhere between these 

 woods and these small stiff plantations come such little 

 groves as guard the descent to Broadway, in the heart of 

 the Cotswolds. 



The beeches are splendid in England as indeed they 



