Trees on the Downs. 29: 
or an oak, even at a comparatively short distance. 
The tree looks perfectly still, though you know it 
must be vibrating to the trunk and loosening the 
earth with the wrench at its anchoring roots. 
In more than one of the deep coombes there is a 
row of elms—out of sight from this post of vantage— 
whose tops are about level with the plain, where you 
may stand on the edge and throw a stone into the 
rook’s nest facing you. On a lower spur, which juts 
out into the valley, is a broad ash wood. Little more 
than a mile from hence, on the most barren and 
wildest part of the down, there yet linger some 
stunted oaks interspersed among the ash copses which 
to this day are called ‘the Chace’ and are proved 
by documentary evidence to stand on the site of an 
ancient deer forest. A deer forest, too, there is (though 
seven or eight miles distant, yet on the same range 
of hills) to this very day tenanted by the antlered 
stag. Such evidence could be multiplied ; but this is 
enough to establish the fact that for the whole breadth 
of the hills to have been covered with wood is well 
within possibility. 
I may even go further, and say that, if left to 
itself, it would in a few generations revert to that 
condition ; for this reason: that when a clump of 
trees is planted here, experience has shown that it is 
not so much the wind or the soil which hinders their 
growth as the attacks of animals wild and tame. 
Rabbits in cold, frosty weather have a remarkable 
