tty, it is the most engaging and perhaps the most beautiful of
our native trees. We said that it was the most _individual_ of trees,
that its variety was infinite, for you never find two alike, whether
growing in a forest, in groups, or masses, or alone. We were almost
lyrical in its praises. But the solitary thorn was always best, he said,
and this one was perhaps the best of all he had seen: strange and at the
same time decorative in its form, beautiful too in its appearance of
great age with unimpaired vigour and something more in its
expression--that elusive something which we find in some trees and don't
know how to explain.

Ah, yes, thought I, it was this appeal to the aesthetic faculty which
attracted me from the first, and not, as I had imagined, the mere
curiosity of the naturalist interested mainly and always in the _habits_
of living things, plant or animal.

Certainly the thorn had strangeness. Its appearance as to height was
deceptive; one would have guessed it eighteen feet; measuring it I was
surprised to find it only ten. It has four separate boles, springing
from one root, leaning a little away from each other, the thickest just
a foot in circumference. The branches are few, beginning at about five
feet from the ground, the foliage thin, the leaves throughout the summer
stained with grey, rust-red, and purple colour. Though so small and
exposed to the full fury of every wind that blows over that vast naked
down, it has yet an ivy growing on it--the strangest of the many strange
ivy-plants I have seen. It comes out of the ground as two ivy trunks on
opposite sides of the stoutest bole, but at a height of four feet from
the surface the two join and ascend the tree as one round iron-coloured
and iron-hard stem, which goes curving and winding snakewise among the
branches as if with the object of roping them to save them from being
torn off by the winds. Finally, rising to the top, the long serpent stem
opens out in a flat disc-shaped mass of close-packed branchlets and
twigs densely set with small round leaves, dark dull green and tough as
parchment. One could only suppose that thorn and ivy had been partners
from the beginning of life, and that the union was equally advantageous
to both.

The small ivy disc or platform on top of the tree was a favourite stand
and look-out for the downland birds. I seldom visited the spot without
disturbing some of them, now a little company of missel-thrushes, now a
cr