when they come hand to hand, and which was once the life of
battle--seems to arise from the same feeling. Then, as the sharp edge
of the axe cuts deep through the bark into the wood, there is a second
moment of gratification. The next blow sends a chip spinning aside;
and by-the-bye never stand at the side of a woodman, for a chip may
score your cheek like a slash with a knife. But the shortness of man's
days will not allow him to cut down many trees. In imagination I
sometimes seem to hear the sounds of the axes that have been ringing
in the forests of America for a hundred years, and envy the joy of the
lumbermen as the tall pines toppled to the fall. Of our English trees
there is none so pleasant to chop as the lime; the steel enters into
it so easily.

In the enclosed portion of the park at Okebourne the boughs of the
trees descended and swept the sward. Nothing but sheep being permitted
to graze there, the trees grew in their natural form, the lower limbs
drooping downwards to the ground. Hedgerow timber is usually
'stripped' up at intervals, and the bushes, too, interfere with the
expansion of the branches; while the boughs of trees standing in the
open fields are nibbled off by cattle. But in that part of the park no
cattle had fed in the memory of man; so that the lower limbs, drooping
by their own weight, came arching to the turf. Each tree thus made a
perfect bower.

The old woodmen who worked in the Chace told me it used to be said
that elm ought only to be thrown on two days of the year--_i.e._ the
31st of December and the 1st of January. The meaning was that it
should be cut in the very 'dead of the year,' when the sap had
retired, so that the timber might last longer. The old folk took the
greatest trouble to get their timber well seasoned, which is the
reason why the woodwork in old houses has endured so well. Passing
under some elms one June evening, I heard a humming overhead, and
found it was caused by a number of bees and humble-bees busy in the
upper branches at a great height from the ground. They were probably
after the honey-dew. Buttercups do not flourish under trees; in early
summer, where elms or oaks stand in the mowing-grass, there is often a
circle around almost bare of them and merely green, while the rest of
the meadow glistens with the burnished gold of that beautiful flower.

The oak is properly regarded as a slow-growing tree, but under certain
circumstances a sapling will shoot up q