Is it wrong to give an impression of Epping Forest in early spring, an impression resulting from a single passage through it? Surely not. Did not James Anthony Froude say, or did not somebody say in defence of James Anthony Froude--it really does not matter which--something to the effect that a man may write a tolerable description of a country from a single visit, or a thorough account of it after prolonged study, but that in the intervening period he cannot describe it at all? Whosoever said it, or even if it was never said until now, it is a true saying, for in the period between first impression and thorough knowledge the mind is so much hampered with details that it cannot survey the whole in proportion. It cannot see the wood for the trees. Of this Epping Forest I knew, as most men do, something from hearsay and from desultory reading. I had read of the ancient rights, apparently rather problematical as a matter of history, of the City in the Forest, of the Epping Hunt, of the saving of seven thousand wild acres, lying cheek by jowl with London, by the Epping Forest Act of 1871; had read also countless articles, wherein the sylvan beauties of Epping Forest, its ornithological and entomological treasures, were proclaimed with emphatic sincerity. Yet the place itself was a revelation. Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem Quam quæ sunt oculis submissa fidelibus. So wrote Horace long ago, and "seeing's believing," is a blunt but adequate translation of his verses. Epping Forest was and is a sheer delight. Apart from the roads that traverse it, it is as distinctly genuine and unkempt a piece of English woodland as is to be found on these islands. The reference here is not to fine timber or to monumental trees, but to the tangled thickets of ancient hawthorn, rising from beds of bracken--they were the brown relics of the last year's glory as we saw them--with here and there a natural alley through their midst, which stretched far on either side. Nothing of the tree kind gives such convincing testimony of antiquity as obviously old hawthorns, which have been left to the care of nature. Your huge and venerable oak may be, and very often is, historic; its story may be, and often is, traced back over several centuries. Men mourned over the Fairlop Oak, in Hainault Forest hard by, when it was blown down in 1820, because it had been forty-five feet in girth "and its boughs shadowed an area of 300 ft."--the passage is quoted because its meaning is not too clear--and it is said that the pulpit and lectern of St. Pancras Church were made of the timber. Your historic oaks are the aristocracy of trees; their annals are chronicled by the Debretts and Burkes of forestry. But as there are ancient families of English peasants, their simple pedigrees never kept because they seemed to be of no moment, which are probably far older in the land than any noble family, so there are, in all human