May 9, 191 8 
Land Sc Water 
^5 
The Tree in the Pool 
A Sketch 
IT is a curious tree. In my travels I had not 
heard of it. nor had I read of it in books. 
It grew in a hollow on the edge of a cliff 
overlooking the sea. , It grew in a pool of 
uncertain-looking water, around- which lay 
a narrow strip of treacherous swampy ground. 
To the rear of it ran a winding line of subtle- 
tinted moss, following the bottom of a shallow 
valley which ran itself out on the rolling plain. 
The trea. itself had no resemblance to any of the 
vegetation surrounding it. Around it, indeed, 
were a great variety of plants and stunted shrubs, 
forming, as it were, a great and varicoloured 
setting to the one really green thing that grew 
there. There were great areas of purple heather, 
toned and shaded in places by smaller patches of 
pink and still smaller patches of white. Then 
there were the intennediary strips of green, 
coarse grass and a good sprinkling of low-growing 
yellow-tipped gorse. The eye of the botanist, too; 
would have discovered a great variety of small 
and flowering plants, hidden away in a thousand 
most envious 'places — far more obvious to him 
perhaps than the tree that grew in the pool. 
In size it was not a big tree ; indeed, it must 
have been a very small bird that would have 
thought it a tree at all. But for some unaccount- 
able reason, one is constrained to think of it and 
term it as such. Perhaps because of its age But 
its appearance would suggest it as being the 
growth of a night, or six or seven nights at most. 
Something suggests its form. But no tree ever 
grew whose limbs and branches spread like these 
spread. However, one can but attempt to 
describe it, and in doing that perhaps make some 
distance towards a solution of its nature and 
origin. N 
The pool in which it grew was not deep — at 
least, it did not appear to be so to a fully grown 
man — although there is no saying how far one 
might have probed its uncertain substance, and 
ye^ failed to arrive at a solid bottom. At the 
surface, except for the gatherings that lay there, 
one could most certainly say it was water ; but a 
very little effort revealed a substance which none 
might readDy name or speak of with certainty. 
Nor could one say what relation it had to the 
roots of the tree. Perchance the roots pierced it . 
and gathered their nourishment from the simple 
earth, and unless they hung loose as in some 
floating mass of semi-fluid matter, this must have 
been so. But the latter conjecture is as feasible 
as the former, inasmuch as that the roots were in 
no way required as a support to the very weighty 
and cumbrous limbs. These had made of them-- 
selves their own support, and rested in the.swampy 
ground round the whole circumference of tlie pool, 
so that the pool lay completely overshadowed by 
a veritable network of limbs, leaves, and stems of 
vegetable-hke flowers. 
Wliat, then, could it be that gave this tree its 
attraction and made it so suggestive of sx> many 
unheard-of things, for one has to give rein to one's 
fancy, and the tree and all its associated sur- 
roundings take us into realms that are scarcely 
earthly. In a moment we discover ourselves in 
the toils of som:> enchanted spot or away irj some 
place inhabited by creatures other than men, or 
even it may be in the primitive ages of the world 
itself. Then, also, there surrounds the tree an air 
of present mystery as of some hidden presence 
clinging over the pool and in the undisturbed 
shadows of its limbs, thus hiding itself by reason 
of some unseemly truth it wished to keep con- 
cealed. And in this last suggestion there seems 
to be more than a semblance of reason, for what 
child, or nymph, or naiad, ever before saw a tree 
that grew up in the midst of the water, and in a 
pool which was fed by a moss-covered stream, 
and one to which there was no outlet nor the 
possibility even of one that was hidden. 
Again, appealing to the same sprightly denizens 
of the earth, which of them ever before saw a tree 
which had neither one trunk nor two, but twenty 
— each one of which ordered itself in a manner 
most suitable to the formation of the complete 
canopy of leaves and flowers, and whose flowers 
were neither red nor blue, but were rather an 
admixture of pale green, tipped with an indelicate 
white ; or a tree whose trunks and limbs were 
neither hard nor soft, but, instead, were formed 
of a fibrous grassy substance surrounding a heart 
of pithy white. Then there were the limbs that 
spread from the joints in regular circles ! And 
the leaves that spread from the limbs in paim-like 
order and the flowers that stood out at the top — 
round tips to hands of a hundred fingers ! Then, 
again, there were the vegetable wonders which lay 
in the shadows and away down among the intricate 
labyrinth of leaves and Umbs, and on the surface 
of the water, and beneath, down among the 
floating roots and suspended earth. 
In the poisonous air of some tropical jungle 
these things might have passed without comment, 
but on the edge of a sea-chff and in a country that 
supported nothing but stunted growths, one looks 
at them and wonders from whence they come 
and by what spirit they are upheld. 
But note the change that comes over them 
even as I write. The water takes on a forbidding 
hue and becomes spotted all over with the up- 
rising spins of hidden creatures. One lifts its 
head a little above the surface. It is green, and 
as its body draws further and further out it 
becomes spotted green and yellow — a long reptilian 
creature with snake-like scales and feet like those 
of a hzard. In the furthest shadow, the water 
teams with similar uncanny horrors— who writhe 
and turn about in the mud, and in the water like 
a mass of virulent vegetation. From the centre 
of the pool insects travel along the branches of 
the tree — backwards and forwards to the marshy 
b^nk as though burdened with some treasure. 
Bright-coloured flies hum among the branches 
and disturb the heavy air. A lizard springs from 
the bank and on to the largest hmb — and thence 
to the further shore. 
A moment later the waters begin to rise. The 
tree sinks deeper and ever deeper in the water — 
first the mass of its heavy limbs, then the middle 
leaves, and, last of all, its topmost flower ; when 
suddenly the earth, like the mouth of a monster, 
closes over it, and serpents, pond, and tree dis- 
appear fot ever. 
