Another Swedish legend tells us how, when a man was on the point of cutting down a juniper tree in a wood, a voice was heard from the ground, saying, “friend, hew me not.”  But he gave another stroke, when to his horror blood gushed from the root[20].  Then there is the Danish tradition[21] relating to the lonely thorn, occasionally seen in a field, but which never grows larger.  Trees of this kind are always bewitched, and care should be taken not to approach them in the night time, “as there comes a fiery wheel forth from the bush, which, if a person cannot escape from, will destroy him.”

In modern Greece certain trees have their “stichios,” a being which has been described as a spectre, a wandering soul, a vague phantom, sometimes invisible, at others assuming the most widely varied forms.  It is further added that when a tree is “stichimonious” it is dangerous for a man, “to sleep beneath its shade, and the woodcutters employed to cut it down will lie upon the ground and hide themselves, motionless, and holding their breath, at the moment when it is about to fall, dreading lest the stichio at whose life the blow is aimed with each stroke of the axe, should avenge itself at the precise moment when it is dislodged."[22]

Turning to primitive ideas on this subject, Mr. Schoolcraft mentions an Indian tradition of a hollow tree, from the recesses of which there issued on a calm day a sound like the voice of a spirit.  Hence it was considered to be the residence of some powerful spirit, and was accordingly deemed sacred.  Among rude tribes trees of this kind are held sacred, it being forbidden to cut them.  Some of the Siamese in the same way offer cakes and rice to the trees before felling them, and the Talein of Burmah will pray to the spirit of the tree before they begin to cut the tree down[23].  Likewise in the Australian bush demons whistle in the branches, and in a variety of other eccentric ways make their presence manifest—­reminding us of Ariel’s imprisonment:[24]

  “Into a cloven pine; within which rift
  Imprison’d, thou didst painfully remain,
  A dozen years; ...
    ...  Where thou didst vent thy groans,
  As fast as mill-wheels strike.”

Similarly Miss Emerson, in her “Indian Myths” (1884, p. 134), quotes the story of “The Two Branches”: 

“One day there was a great noise in a tree under which Manabozho was taking a nap.  It grew louder, and, at length exasperated, he leaped into the tree, caught the two branches whose war was the occasion of the din, and pulled them asunder.  But with a spring on either hand, the two branches caught and pinioned Manabozho between them.  Three days the god remained imprisoned, during which his outcries and lamentations were the subject of derision from every quarter—­from the birds of the air, and from the animals of the woods and plains.  To complete his sad case, the wolves ate the breakfast he had left beneath the tree.  At length a good