112 OUR WOODLAND TREES. 
tering Trees, gentle upland and leafy hollow, tell 
us that we have passed beyond the unpleasant 
concomitants of city life. 
Our route is to the New Forest. The line 
brings us within three miles of Lyndhurst. We 
are on the verge of the most beautiful woodland 
of South Britain. The midsummer sun has been 
pouring down his fiery rays upon town and 
country alike. But the evening has come—the 
early summer evening—and we have left the hot 
and dusty station at Lyndhurst Road but a few 
minutes ere the delicious coolness of the wood- 
land through which we take our way steals gently 
over us. We have gone but a short way along 
our road, fringed on each side by Oak and Fir— 
with delightful undergrowth of Hawthorn and wild 
rose, waving brake and clustering moss—when the 
beautiful form of a Beech taller than any we have 
yet seen in this the commencement of our wood- 
land rambles, and lying away a little to our left, 
tempts us to enter the coppice of which this Tree 
is the outpost. Around its boll, and clothing the 
ground for a considerable space beyond the outer- 
most of its gnarled roots, a thick carpet of moss 
