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Dinner over, I felt better, and roamed around the rest of the afternoon, sight-seeing, and didn't get back to camp till nearly sundown. By the way, that spring and that beech tree are there yet, or were in October, 1914, when I visited the Shiloh battlefield. I hunted them up on this occasion and laid down on the ground and took a long, big drink out of the spring for the sake of old times.

Though arranged alternately, like those of the beech, on the recent branches, they are clustered in stars containing from five to seven leaves on the fruitful branches that grow out from the perfected wood. Now stand off a little and see how the foliage seems to be all in tufts, each composed of several long, pointed leaves drooping from the centre.

"What, in the name of der Tophet, is the meaning of that ditter treatment, ye shameless lubbers?" sternly demanded the hunter, shaking his stout beech cane over the heads of the fore most of his opponents. "He deserves it! He is an impostor! He tried to get in his vote when he aint over eighteen years old!" shouted several tory voices in reply.

The park he was traversing was mostly open pasture studded with trees, except where at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Lord Buntingford of the day had planted a wood of oak and beech about the small lake which he had made by the diversion of two streamlets that had once found a sluggish course through the grassland.

When a real bird falls in flop, he spreads out his feathers and pecks them dry, but Peter could not remember what was the thing to do, and he decided, rather sulkily, to go to sleep on the weeping beech in the Baby Walk. At first he found some difficulty in balancing himself on a branch, but presently he remembered the way, and fell asleep.

Half-way down the slope they came to one of the unspeakably mournful little burying-grounds wherein the mountain people rest after their narrow lives. It was unhedged, uncared for, and a few crumbling boards for headstones told the living generation where the dead were at rest. For a moment they paused to look at a spot under a great beech where the earth had been lately disturbed.

Please, Comber, oh!" and Beech being in the same dormitory as himself he noticed, almost against his will, that shivering little mortal as he crept into bed and cowered beneath the sheets wondering whether before morning he would be tossed in sheets or would find his bed drenched in water or would be beaten with hair brushes.

Marsham talked of indifferent things, and she answered him with spirit, feeling it all, so far, a queer piece of acting. Then they emerged on the side of the hill beside a little basin in the chalk, where a gnarled thorn or two, an overhanging beech, and a bed of withered heather, made a kind of intimate, furnished place, which appealed to the passer-by.

The wind had ceased, and the glen lay at his feet, distinct in the cold, clear air, from the dark mass of pines that closed its upper end to the swelling woods of oak and beech that cut it off from the great Strath.

Life's bank account in the soil was constantly increasing; more and more of the inorganic was wrought up into the organic; the value of every clod underfoot was raised. The riot of gigantic forms ceased, and they became ashes. The giant and uncouth vegetation ceased, and left ashes or coal. The beech, the maple, the oak, the olive, the palm came in.