THE DECIDUOUS. CYPRESS AT HOME ort 
It is a tree with a past of picturesque traditions and 
interesting associations. Halos of historical and pre- 
historical romance surround it. It was the tree under 
which Cortes, the Spanish conqueror, sat, brooded, 
and sought inspiration after reverse in battle. Visions 
arise to our minds round the fame of it, the days 
when Montezuma and generations of Aztec kings 
before him must have summoned Witenagemots 
innumerable, and held Court revels without number 
beneath its shade. 
As a curiosity in the vegetable kingdom, with its 
buttressed trunk, with its woody protuberances 
called ‘‘ knees ” standing out above ground or swamp, 
and anchoring its weight reared upon unstable 
foundations, with its huge, hollow, branching roots 
spreading out at times like the legs of an eighteenth- 
century music-stand, it presents an appearance 
unrivalled and unequalled. 
It has created conceptions as to its appearance 
from sightseers of a totally opposite character in the 
different places of its growth. In its eerie, weird, 
swamp homes in Florida and North Carolina, with 
grey masses of Spanish moss hanging loosely on its 
trunk and swayed to and fro by the wind, it has 
been regarded by some of those who have had the 
good luck to see it there as a sight dismal, doleful, 
and desolate. Travellers have written of it as 
Isaiah wrote of Babylon, ‘‘ fallen and forsaken.”” In 
plainer English and to put it in brief, it seems to have 
given most of its wandering beholders a bad attack 
of the creeps. 
For those who have not had the good fortune or 
opportunity of attending a more immediate at home 
in its company, we strongly recommend a look at 
the remarkable picture of a grove of it in Trees 
of Great Britain (L, Elwes and ‘Henry, vol. i. plate 53). 
The scene as depicted there impels the idea that even 
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