One of the favourite themes of boasting with the Squire, is the noble trees on his estate, which, in truth, has some of the finest that I have seen in England.  There is something august and solemn in the great avenues of stately oaks that gather their branches together high in air, and seem to reduce the pedestrians beneath them to mere pigmies.  “An avenue of oaks or elms,” the Squire observes, “is the true colonnade that should lead to a gentleman’s house.  As to stone and marble, any one can rear them at once—­they are the work of the day; but commend me to the colonnades that have grown old and great with the family, and tell by their grandeur how long the family has endured.”

The Squire has great reverence for certain venerable trees, gray with moss, which he considers as the ancient nobility of his domain.  There is the ruin of an enormous oak, which has been so much battered by time and tempest, that scarce any thing is left; though he says Christy recollects when, in his boyhood, it was healthy and nourishing, until it was struck by lightning.  It is now a mere trunk, with one twisted bough stretching up into the air, leaving a green branch at the end of it.  This sturdy wreck is much valued by the Squire; he calls it his standard-bearer, and compares it to a veteran warrior beaten down in battle, but bearing up his banner to the last.  He has actually had a fence built round it, to protect it as much as possible from further injury.

It is with great difficulty that the Squire can ever be brought to have any tree cut down on his estate.  To some he looks with reverence, as having been planted by his ancestors; to others with a kind of paternal affection, as having been planted by himself; and he feels a degree of awe in bringing down, with a few strokes of the axe, what it has cost centuries to build up.  I confess I cannot but sympathize, in some degree, with the good Squire on the subject.  Though brought up in a country overrun with forests, where trees are apt to be considered mere encumbrances, and to be laid low without hesitation or remorse, yet I could never see a fine tree hewn down without concern.  The poets, who are naturally lovers of trees, as they are of every thing that is beautiful, have artfully awakened great interest in their favour, by representing them as the habitations of sylvan deities; insomuch that every great tree had its tutelar genius, or a nymph, whose existence was limited to its duration.  Evelyn, in his Sylva, makes several pleasing and fanciful allusions to this superstition.  “As the fall,” says he, “of a very aged oak, giving a crack like thunder, has often been heard at many miles’ distance; constrained though I often am to fell them with reluctancy, I do not at any time remember to have heard the groans of those nymphs (grieving to be dispossessed of their ancient habitations) without some emotion and pity.”  And again, in alluding to a violent storm that had devastated the woodlands,