28 Wild Life in a Southern County. 
yet unseen when you are actually in it, it refuses to 
be grasped. Still, there it is. The old people say 
that the king—they have no idea which king—could 
follow the chase for some forty miles across these hills, 
through a succession of copses, woods, and straggling 
covers, forming a great forest. To look now from the 
top of the rampart over the rolling hills, the idea is 
difficult to admit at first. They are apparently bare, 
huge billowy swells of green, with wide hollows, 
cultivated on the lower levels, but open and unen- 
closed for mile after mile, almost without hedges, and 
seemingly treeless save for the gnarled and stunted 
hawthorns—apparently a bare expanse; but more 
minute acquaintance leads to different conclusions. 
Here, to begin with, on the same ridge as the 
earthwork and not a quarter of a mile distant, is a 
small clump of wind-harassed trees, growing on the 
very edge. They are firs and beech, and, though so 
thoroughly exposed to furious gales, have attained a 
fair height even in that thin soil. Beech and fir, then, 
can grow here. Away yonder on another ridge is 
another such a clump, indistinct from the distance ; 
though there is a pleasant breeze blowing and their 
boughs must sway to it, they appear motionless. 
With the exception of the poplar, whose tall top as it 
slowly bends to the blast describes such an arc as to 
make its motion visible afar, the most violent wind 
fails to enable the eye to separate the lines of light 
coming so nearly parallel from the branches of an elm 
