“I never had dreamed of such delicate motion,
Fluent, and graceful, and ambient,
Soft as the breeze flitting over the flowers,
But swift as the summer lightning. 
I sat up again, but my strength was all spent,
And no time left to recover it,
And though she rose at our gate like a bird,
I tumbled off into the mixen.”

The last line is a delightful bathos, adding immensely to the completeness of the catastrophe.

In spring the beech is the most beautiful of forest trees, putting forth individual horizontal sprays of tender green from the lower branches about the end of April as heralds of the later full glory of the tree.  These increase day by day upwards in verdant clouds, until the whole unites into a complete bower of dense greenery.  The beech is known as the “groaning tree,” because the branches often cross each other, and where the tree is exposed to the wind sometimes groan as they rub together.  The rubbing often causes a wound where one of the branches will eventually break off, or occasionally automatic grafting takes place, and they unite.  In the Verderer’s Hall at Lyndhurst specimens are to be seen which have crossed and joined a second time, so that a complete hollow oval, or irregular circle of the wood could be cut out of the branch.

Estates where extensive beech woods existed have been bought by speculative timber dealers, who shortly installed a gang of wood cutters and a steam saw, on which the timber was sawn into suitable pieces, to be afterwards turned on a lathe into chair legs and other domestic furniture, and very often finally dyed to represent mahogany.  There are beeches in the New Forest which vie with the oak for premier place, measuring over 20 feet in circumference, and the mast together with the acorns affords abundant harvest, or “ovest,” as it is called, for the commoners’ pigs.

There was a curious saying in use by persons on the road to Pershore, when asked their destination.  In a good plum year the reply was, “Pershore, where d’ye think?” And in a year of scarcity, “Pershore, God help us!” The same expressions were formerly current regarding Burley in the New Forest referring to the abundance or scarcity of beech-mast and acorns, called collectively “akermast.”

When the nation had presented the Duke of Wellington, after the Battle of Waterloo, with Strathfieldsaye, an estate between Basingstoke and Reading, the Duke wishing to commemorate the event planted a number of beech trees as a lasting memorial, which were known as “the Waterloo beeches.”  Some years later, the eminent arboricultural author, John Loudon, writing on the subject of the relative ages and sizes of trees, wrote to the Duke for permission to view his Waterloo beeches.  The Duke had never heard of Loudon, and his writing being somewhat illegible he deciphered the signature “J.  Loudon” as “J.  London” (the Bishop of London), and the word “beeches” as “breeches.”