owd of starlings, then perhaps a dozen rooks, crowded together,
looking very big and conspicuous on their little platform.

Being curious to find out something about the age of the tree, I
determined to put the question to my old friend Malachi, aged
eighty-nine, who was born and had always lived in the parish and had
known the downs and probably every tree growing on them for miles around
from his earliest years. It was my custom to drop in of an evening and
sit with him, listening to his endless reminiscences of his young days.
That evening I spoke of the thorn, describing its position and
appearance, thinking that perhaps he had forgotten it. How long, I asked
him, had the thorn been there?

He was one of those men, usually of the labouring class, to be met with
in such lonely, out-of-the-world places as the Wiltshire Downs, whose
eyes never look old however many their years may be, and are more like
the eyes of a bird or animal than a human being, for they gaze at you
and through you when you speak without appearing to know what you say.
So it was on this occasion; he looked straight at me with no sign of
understanding, no change in his clear grey eyes, and answered nothing.
But I would not be put off, and when, raising my voice, I repeated the
question, he replied, after another interval of silence, that the thorn
"was never any different." 'Twas just the same, ivy and all, when he
were a small boy. It looked just so old; why, he remembered his old
father saying the same thing--'twas the same when he were a boy, and
'twas the same in his father's time. Then anxious to escape from the
subject he began talking of something else.

It struck me that after all the most interesting thing about the thorn
was its appearance of great age, and this aspect I had now been told had
continued for at least a century, probably for a much longer time. It
produced a reverent feeling in me such as we experience at the sight of
some ancient stone monument. But the tree was alive, and because of its
life the feeling was perhaps stronger than in the case of a granite
cross or cromlech or other memorial of antiquity.

Sitting by the thorn one day it occurred to me that, growing at this
spot close to the road and near the summit of that vast down, numberless
persons travelling to and from Salisbury must have turned aside to rest
on the turf in the shade after that laborious ascent or before beginning
the long descent to the valley belo