Chatting about trees, he points out one or two oaks, not at all rotten, but split half-way up the trunk—the split is perfectly visible—yet they have not been struck by lightning; and he cannot explain it. Looking back upon the wood as we leave it with intense pride in his trees, he gives me a rough version of the old story: how a knight of ancient days, who had done the king some great service was rewarded with a broad tract of land which he was to hold for three crops. He sowed acorns, and thus secured himself and descendants a tenure of almost 3000 years, at least, according to Dryden:—
The monarch oak, the patriarch of trees,
Shoots, rising up, and spreads by slow degrees;
Three centuries he grows, and three he stays
Supreme in state, and in three more decays.
The keeper wishes he had such an opportunity. The knight, in his idea, reached the acme of wisdom with his three crops of nearly a thousand years each.
His own kingdom may be said to begin with the park, and the land ‘in demesne,’ to quote the quaint language of the Domesday Book: a record not without its value as an outline picture of English scenery eight centuries ago; telling us that near this village was a wood, near that a stretch of meadow and a mill, here again arable land and corn waving in the breeze, and everywhere the park and domain of the feudal lords. The beauty of the park consists in its ‘breadth’ as an artist would say—the meadows with their green frames of hedges are cabinet pictures, lovely, but small; this is life size, a broad cartoon from the hand of Nature. The sward rises and rolls along in undulations like the slow heave of an ocean wave. Besides the elms there is a noble avenue of limes, and great oaks scattered here and there, under whose ample shade the cattle repose in the heat of the day.
In summer from out the leafy chambers of the limes there falls the pleasant sound of bees innumerable, the voice of whose trembling wings lulls the listening ear as the drowsy sunshine weighs the eyelid till I walk the avenue in a dream. It leads out into the park—no formal gravel drive, simply a footpath on the sward between the flowering trees: a path that becomes less and less marked as I advance, and finally fades away, where the limes cease, in the broad level of the opening ‘greeny field.’ These honey-bees seem to fly higher and to exhibit much more activity than the great humble-bee: here in the limes they must be thirty feet above the ground. Wasps also frequently wing their way at a considerable elevation, and thus it is that the hive-bee and the wasp so commonly enter the upper windows of houses. When its load of honey is completed, the bee, too, returns home in a nearly straight line, high enough in the air to pass over hedges and such obstacles without the labour of rising up and sinking again.
The heavy humble-bee is generally seen close to the earth, and often goes down into the depths of the dry ditches, and may there be heard buzzing slowly along under the arch of brier and bramble. He seems to lose his way now and then in the tangled undergrowth of the woods; and if a footstep disturbs and alarms him it is amusing to see his desperate efforts to free himself hastily from the interlacing grass-blades and ferns.