THE PINE TREE. 167 
quote the following letter, which he returned on receipt of 
the plants :— 
* RypaL Mount, 20¢h February ’45. 
“DEAR Six,—Your plants were received with much plea- 
sure, and you will be glad to learn that they are not injured. 
My garden lies in something of a hollow, and is yet covered 
with snow, but they are placed in a sheltered plot in front 
of the house, and will be transplanted to the garden as soon 
as the snow will permit. 
“You were quite right in inferring that the fir was a 
favourite tree with me, indeed, as perhaps I have told you 
before, I prefer it to all others except the oak, taking into 
consideration its beauty in winter, and by moonlight, and in 
the evening. 
“ Accept my sincere thanks for this mark of your attention, 
and even still more for your good wishes so feelingly ex- 
pressed.—I remain, dear Sir, faithfully yours obliged, 
“Wa. WoRDSWORTH.” 
Some of the best trees of the species in the kingdom stand 
in the county of Moray, near Forres. A tree on the estate of 
Brodie, lately felled, measured fourteen feet in circumference 
at three feet from the ground; the trunk was sound and 
shapely, with little or no taper to the height of about fifteen 
feet, where it ramified into a large head nearly seventy feet 
high, and fully ninety feet in diameter. The age of this tree 
was 150 years. It had lost its top in early life and having 
had ample space it ramified and spread like an oak. Its root 
inverted forms a prominent figure on the lawn at Blackfriars 
Haugh, Elgin, displaying a solid circular body of gnarled 
timber, eleven feet in diameter.1 The ground on which this 
1 This tree grew in the parish of Dyke, on the Hardmoor, the spot dis- 
tinguished by affording the scene of the mainspring of the drama of the ° 
tragedy of Macbeth. It was on the Hardmoor, on the western side of the 
park of Brodie Castle, where Macbeth and Banquo, returning victorious from 
an expedition in the Western Isles to wait on King Duncan, then in the castle 
of Forres, and on a journey to Inverness, are represented to have been saluted 
by the weird sisterhood. Banquo, impatient, after a fatiguing journey on this 
blasted, and to appearance boundless waste, thinks of the termination of 
his journey, and asks 
“ How far is’t called to Forres?” 
