278 DECEMBER 



past an acre or two of half-year land, though few com 

 moners use its benefits. The church tower still rises pre 

 eminent from the midst of the nave, and the bellringers, 

 stripped of their coats, sound the Christmas peal with 

 rhythmic vigour ; and coat themselves and fix the ropes 

 tidily against the pillars when the bells &quot; fall &quot; and cease. 

 Many changes there are affecting for the worse the 

 several senses of nose and eye and ear ; but the village 

 quoted the other day as one of the best near London 

 remains an English village, and as such not only gracious 

 in itself where smithy and mill and cottage and shop and 

 larger houses consent to a mutual relation with hill and 

 tree and river ; but a social unit as little self-conscious as 

 the uncoated bell-ringers and happy in its own in 

 equalities. 



Roundabout the village flourishes in great quantity 

 that best of winter trees, the holly. By the side of one 

 narrow road is a real forest tree, no hedge bush, with as 

 round and bright a trunk as a big beech in Buckingham 

 shire, and being a male holly it is not threatened by the 

 knives and saws which have accompanied some lorry- 

 drivers from London. Little hollies and scrub oaks 

 spring up even ont he wide open commons, and if you 

 will you may dig up a score of seedlings under the low 

 boughs of other trees that the birds have selected for 

 thek feeding ground. You would see that, as in the 

 human inhabitants of this island, the female hollies, 

 which, of course, alone bear berries, were in great excess. 

 As with all the other kindly fruits of English earth, the 

 suns of a dry summer compound so rich a sap, so 

 precious a nectar, that it emerges not in leaf, but in 

 flower. In 1934 the sun still shone when the time came 

 for flower to set into fruit. Nor is that all. So open was 

 the weather, so plentiful the earlier and sweeter berries 



