I like trees for the cool evening voices of their many leaves, for their cloudy forms linked to earth by stately stems--for the pale lifting of the sycamore leaves in breezes and also their drooping, hushed and massed repose, for the myriad division of the light ash leaves--for their straight pillars and for the twisted branch work, for their still shade and their rippling or calm shimmering or dimly glowing light, for the quicksilver drip of dawn, for their solemnity and their dancing, for all their sounds and motions--their slow-heaved sighs, their nocturnal murmurs, their fitful fingerings at thunder time, their swishing and tossing and hissing in violent rain, the roar of their congregations before the south-west wind when it seems that they must lift up the land and fly away with it, for their rustlings of welcome in harvest heat--for their kindliness and their serene remoteness and inhumanity, and especially the massiest of the trees that have also the glory of motion, the sycamores, which are the chief tree of Cornwall, as the beeches and yews are of the Downs, the oaks of the Weald, the elms of the Wiltshire vales. Before I part from trees I should like to mention those of mid-Somerset--and above all, the elms. I am thinking of them as they are at noon on the hottest days of haymaking at the end of June. The sky is hot, its pale blue without pity and changing to a yellow of mist near the horizon. The land is level and all of grass, and where the hay is not spread in swathes the grass is almost invisible for the daisies on its motionless surface. Here and there the mower whirrs and seems natural music, like the grasshopper’s, of the burning earth. Through the levels wind the heavy-topped grey willows of a hidden stream. In the hedges and in the wide fields and about the still, silent farmhouses of stone there are many elms. They are tall and slender despite their full mounded summits. They cast no shade. In the great heat their green is all but grey, and their leaves are lost in the mist which their mingling creates. Grey-hooded, grey-mantled, they seem to be stealing away over the fields to the sanctuary of the dark-wooded hills, low and round and lapped entirely in leaves, which stand in the mist at the edge of the plain--to be leaving that plain to the possession of the whirring mower and the sun of almighty summer. Sycamores solemnized the Cornish farm in the twilight, where I asked the farmer’s wife if she could let us have two beds for the night. She stood in the doorway, hands on hips, watching her grandchildren’s last excited minutes of play in the rickyard. “He’s the master,” she replied, pointing to the farmer who was talking to his carter, between the rickyard and the door, under the sycamores. “Two beds?” “That is what we should like,” said my friend and I.