THE COMMON ELM 43 



round ; often sending out one or two huge horizontal 

 Hmbs to a distance of thirty or forty feet from the 

 trunk, and generally forking above into ascending 

 branches, whose multitudinous branchlets and twigs 

 form a rounded top, towering over the green billowy 

 masses that spring from the limbs. Its bark is corky, 

 grey in colour, and scored by those grand vertical 

 furrows of age that mark the expanding rings of wood 

 within, and have earned for the tree the epithet of 

 " rugged." When bare of leaves, and standing black 

 against a dull wintry sky, the tiny twiglets on the 

 topmost boughs appear as delicate lacework, far 

 exceeding in fineness the minutest ornament of the 

 Gothic architect, and yet graduating downwards into 

 mighty beams, so as to suggest at once the strength 

 of Nature's framework and the delicacy of her finish. 



Amidst the fall of the early capsules in April the 

 leaves unfold, first on one spray, waving near the 

 summit, and then, wiihin a day or two, over the 

 whole tree, so that a veteran, perchance some three 

 centuries in age, appears before us in a clear green 

 robe, suggestive in its delicacy of perpetual youth. 



The 18th of April has been termed Ulmifron'des, 

 for then, in the south of England, the. tree is generally 

 in full foliage. In May its leaves have assumed a 

 darker, duller hue, and but for its charms of outline, 

 the Elm would be a heavy, monotonous item in the 

 landscape. In August and September, when other 

 trees are changing hue on every side, emulating in 

 the hectic and garish gaiety of decay the brilliancy of 

 spring, the Elm retains its sombre green; and," not 

 until the gales of the equinox have stripped its 



