Descriptive letterpress printed opposite this photograph:

A BEECHEN SLOPE, KNOLE.

THERE are few trees more beautiful than the beech; whether standing alone in a park glade, towering up in leafy grandeur to a height of some seventy feet, and with branches feathering down towards the smooth turf below, or in groups, as at Knole: their lofty grey trunks rising like stately columns amid the deep shade cast by their own green foliage of luxuriant shining leaves, quivering and heaving in the soft summer breeze. They stretch their huge limbs upwards, crowned with light feathery tops; and, when the sunlight breaks through the dense covering, the light grey-coloured bark of the tall stems flashes brightly across the beechen slopes. Pleasant it is in summer-days, when the hot noon-day sun reigns imperiously over the plains below, to lie amid these sylvan scenes ⎯

“Where, the long drooping boughs between,

Shadows dark and sunlight sheen,

Alternate come and go.”

The squirrel gambols from tree to tree, the deer now and again break through the bracken and underwood of the distant groves, and through the apertures of the great boughs we see the silver-edged clouds sail by.

The soft smooth leaves of the beech, nearly oval in form, are beautiful in texture.

Like many forest trees, the blossoms are of two kinds, one being a cluster of stamens and the other the calyx, which forms the outer sheath of the future nut, with the small pointed stigmas protruding at the top. As the nut ripens the calyx bursts half-way down into four divisions, and in that state they lie in heaps under the trees in autumn.

The deer are partial to the beech-nut, and the squirrels also, while the dormouse is careful to grow very fat upon them as an indispensable preliminary to his long winter sleep. And who does not love trees: the mute companions of man from youth to age?

“The earth in its depths,” writes the author of “Modern Painters,” “must remain dead and cold, incapable except of slow crystalline change; but at its surface, which human beings look upon and deal with, it ministers to them through a veil of strange intermediate being, which breathes, but has no voice; moves, but cannot leave its appointed place; passes through life without consciousness, to death without bitterness; wears the beauty of youth without its passion, and declines to the weakness of age without its regret.

“Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful, and good for food, and for building, and for instruments of our hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and admiration from us, become, to their obtaining it, a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and way of life; so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves the trees enough, and every one is assuredly wrong in both who does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way.”