In England, the Glastonbury Thorn was long the object of pious reverence. This tree was supposed to have sprung from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, to whom the original conversion of this country is attributed in monkish legends. The story runs that when Joseph of Arimathea came to convert the heathen nations he selected Glastonbury as the site for the first Christian Church, and whilst preaching there on Christmas-day, he struck his staff into the ground, which immediately burst into bud and bloom; eventually it grew into a Thorn-bush, which regularly blossomed every Christmas-day, and became known throughout Christendom as the Glastonbury Thorn. “The winter Thorn, which Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord.” Like the Thorn of Glastonbury, an Oak, in the New Forest, called the Cadenham Oak, produced its buds always on Christmas Day; and was, consequently, regarded by the country people as a tree of peculiar sanctity. Another miraculous tree is referred to in Collinson’s ‘History of Somerset.’ The author, speaking of the Glastonbury Thorn, says that there grew also in the Abbey churchyard, on the north side of St. Joseph’s Chapel, a miraculous Walnut-tree, which never budded forth before the Feast of St. Barnabas (that is, the 11th of June), and on that very day shot forth leaves, and flourished like its usual species. It is strange to say how much this tree was sought after by the credulous; and though not an uncommon Walnut, Queen Anne, King James, and many of the nobility of the realm, even when the times of monkish superstition had ceased, gave large sums of money for small cuttings from the original. [Tailpiece] [Headpiece] CHAPTER VI. Plants of the Fairies and Naiades. Centuries before Milton wrote that “Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep,” our Saxon ancestors, whilst yet they inhabited the forests of Germany, believed in the existence of a diminutive race of beings--the “missing link” between men and spirits--to whom they attributed extraordinary actions, far exceeding the capabilities of human art. Moreover, we have it on the authority of the father of English poetry that long, long ago, in those wondrous times when giants and dwarfs still deigned to live in the same countries as ordinary human beings, “In the olde dayes of King Artour, Of which the Bretons speken gret honour, All was this land fulfilled of faerie; The Elf-quene and hire joly compaynie Danced full oft in many a grene mede. This was the old opinion as I rede.”