Having obtained a long lease of the place, I grubbed up the hedges, turned three small fields into one, and made a cricket ground in the midst. My object was to imitate as far as possible the "Upper Club" of the Eton playing-fields.
I had barely accomplished the work, the cricket ground had just been levelled, when the landlord's agent--or more probably his "mortgagee"--arrived on the scene, accompanied by a hard-headed, blustering timber merchant from Cheltenham. To my horror and dismay I was informed that, money being very scarce, they contemplated making a clean sweep of these grand old elms. On my expostulating, they merely suggested that cutting down the trees would be a great improvement, as the place would be opened up thereby and made healthier.
In the hope of warding off the evil day we offered to pay the price of some of the finest trees, although they could only legally be bought for the present proprietor's lifetime.
The contractor, however, rather than leave his work of destruction incomplete, put a ridiculous price on them. He refused to accept a larger sum than he could ever have cleared by cutting them down. This is what Cowper would have stigmatised as
"disclaiming all regard
For mercy and the common rights of man,"
and "conducting trade at the sword's point."
We then resolved to buy the farm. But the stars in their courses fought against us; we were unsuccessful in our attempt to purchase the freehold.
And so the contractor's men came with axes and saws and horses and carts. For days and weeks I was haunted by that hideous nightmare, the crash of groaning trees as they fell all around, soon to be stripped of all their glorious beauty. The cruel, blasphemous shouts of the men, as they made their long-suffering horses drag the huge, dismembered trunks across the beautifully levelled greensward of the cricket ground, were positively heart-rending. Ninety great elms did they strike down. A few were left, but of these the two finest came down in the great gale of March 1896.
"Sic transit gloria mundi."
Trees are like old familiar friends, we cannot bear to lose them; every one that falls reminds us of "the days that are no more." Struck down in all the pride and beauty of their days, they remind us that