The general colour of the forest is a dingy green, save when a deeper shade here and there shows where the mighty bhur uprears its towering height, or where the crimson flowers of the seemul or cotton tree, and the bronze-coloured foliage of the sunpul (a tree very like the ornamental beech in shrubberies at home) imparts a more varied colour to the generally pervading dark green of the universal sal.

The result was, that when at last it slipped into the cool shade of a row of beeches at its base, its victim was as exhausted as itself.

Thus we have the oak tree or beech of Jupiter, the laurel of Apollo, the vine of Bacchus.

NOSTALGIA Fair were the dreamful days of old, When in the summer's sleepy shade, Beneath the beeches on the wold, The shepherds lay and gently played Music to maidens, who, afraid, Drew all together rapturously, Their white soft hands like white leaves laid, In the old dear days of Arcady.

The landmark of the low hills and the beeches up to which the property was saved (IX.8) seems to be the limits of Mantua's boundaries, not of Vergil's estates on the low river-plains.

He notes not the beauty of the beech above him, nor the sun, nor the sky; but on the other hand, when the sky is hidden, the sun gone, and the beautiful beech torn by the raving winds neither does he heed that.

Now splits a beech with such a crack That all the valleys echo it back.

I found, greatly to my surprise, that he had not only given diagrams of growth, but that he also had selected a Copper Beech as his example.

It is he who has told us what to expect, loving the beech like a father, "the most lovely of all forest trees whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage or graceful pendulous boughs."

Not even a leaf was rustling in the branches of the beeches under which they were standing.