It is a wonderful tree, which White looked at every day for five-and-twenty years, yet never mentioned, and which Loe says nothing about in his _Yew Trees of Great Britain and Ireland_. The title of this work is misleading: _Famous Yew Trees_ it should have been, since it is nothing but a collection of facts as to size, supposed age, etc., of trees that have often been measured and described, and are accordingly well known. It is well, to my way of thinking, that he attempted nothing more. It is always a depressing thought, when one has discovered a wonderful or a beautiful thing, that a very full and very exact account of it is and must be contained in some musty monograph by some industrious, dreary person. At all events, I can say that the yew trees which have most attracted me, which come up when I think of the yew as a wonderful and a sacred tree, are not {201} in the book. Of my Hampshire favourites I will, for a special reason, speak of but one more--the yew in the churchyard of Hurstbourne Priors, a small village on the upper Test, near Andover. [Sidenote: Hurstbourne Priors yew] This tree, which is doubtless very aged, has not grown an enormous trunk, nor is it high for an old yew, but its appearance is nevertheless strangely impressive, owing to the length of its lower horizontal branches, which extend to a distance of thirty to thirty-five feet from the trunk, and would lie on the ground if not kept up by props. Another thing which make one wonder is the number of graves that are crowded together beneath these vast sheltering arms. One may count over thirty stones, some very old; many more have probably perished, and there are besides many green mounds. I have watched in a churchyard in the Midlands a grave being dug under a yew, at about three yards' distance from the trunk: a barrowful of roots was taken out during the process. It seemed to me that a very serious injury was being inflicted on the tree, and it is probable that many of our very old churchyard yews have been dwarfed in their growth by such cutting of the roots. But what shall we say of the Hurstbourne Priors yew, from which not one but thirty or forty barrow-loads of living roots must have been taken at various times to make room for so many coffins! And what is the secret of the custom in this, and probably other villages, of putting the dead so close to or under the shelter of the tree? Compare this Hurstbourne Priors yew, and many {202} other ancient churchyard yews in Hampshire, with that of Selborne, which albeit probably no older is double their size: is it not probable that the Selborne tree is the largest, best grown, and most vigorous of the old yews because it has not been mutilated at its roots as the others have been?