All of a sudden a slight chilly gust chases away the whole illusion. Kapilavastu, Rajagriha, the deer forest, the Veluvana, with its crowd of yellow-robed monks carrying their begging bowls, fade away, and we are sobered into the commonplace realities of life on a spur of the Cotswold Hills. It is like the awakening after the intoxication of Hashish, or after the short death dealt by laughing gas. The dream may have been fascinating, but there are glorious compensations in the awakening, for though our peaceful gardens are not so wildly fantastic, not such an orgy of colour, as those of the gorgeous tropics, our woodlands in their grave dignity are matchless: they touch the heart; the others stir the senses. It was a lovely day in early summer, and the show of the Royal Horticultural Society was in full swing in the gardens of Chelsea Hospital. All the world was there—all the world, and everybody else’s wife. A few of us were standing looking at a grand display of orchids, when a charming lady turned round to me and said: “Oh! how delicate, how beautiful and how distinguished they are! Surely the very aristocracy of plant life!” “No,” I answered, “they are only the nouveaux riches. It is the old oaks of our parks and forests that are the aristocracy of plants.” Surely there is nothing more proud, nothing more wonderful in nature, than the noble old age of those patriarchs which centuries ago chequered with their quivering shade the glades in which Robin Hood and Little John drew the bow, and holy Friar Tuck made his quarter-staff spin round his head like the sails of a windmill. Indeed, all our indigenous trees are glorious. The beech, the ash, the wych-elm, and even the so-called British elm, which, sooth to say, is only a naturalized alien that came to us from Italy and has been so long among us, living in trusty alliance with our natives, that we have come to treat him as our own—all these, in company with the oak, truly make up what Wordsworth called “a brotherhood of venerable trees.”