In Britain, and probably all over Europe, there is no tree which commands so much veneration as the oak. We talk of hearts of oak, and of the wooden walls of old England, and we endow our hoary, gnarled giants with all the attributes of stateliness and royal honour. One squire of high degree I once knew who, shortly before his death, thanking God for a long life, boasted, not that his eighty years had been spent in the practice of piety and virtue, as doubtless was the case, but that he had never cut down an oak. With the oaks we connect the stories of old British kings and the mysterious liturgies of the golden-sickled Druids, those Brahmans of the Cassiterides—the Tin Islands—who, if we may believe Cæsar and Pliny, who are our only authorities—for the priesthood, even if they could do so, might write down nothing—exercised power greater than those of popes. Woe to him who denied their authority or questioned their law! For their excommunication was more terrible than that of Rome, making a man an outcast, a pariah, a social leper, with whom no man might deal or hold intercourse; for if he did, he, too, would fall under the awful ban. After a lapse of two thousand years we have heard of something of the same kind in our sister island. And our beloved Scotch fir! What of that true Briton? Happily there are still here and there in remote Highland glens a few of the old primeval forests of that great tree left. Probably the most picturesque of these is the King’s forest of Ballochbine, where you may see it in all the fullness of its nature—veterans borne down with age, stalwarts in full vigour, youngsters in their nonage, babies just born from the seed. Their red stems, glowing in the evening sun, spring out of a carpet of heather, blaeberries and ferns, among mossy rocks and lichen-starred stones. Close to them are their graceful consorts, the birches, which Lowell called “the most shy and ladylike of trees,” drooping their delicate plumes over the pools and musical rills of brown peat-stained burns. What a succession of pictures, hard to beat, does this old forest of Ballochbine give! And that is as it should be, for is it not the King’s own? The happy union between the pine and the birch has been sung by some Scottish poet in a simple but touching Epithalamium: “The Pine’s the King of Scottish glens: The Queen, ah! who is she? The fairest tree the forest kens. The bonnie birken tree!”