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Well, if the shrewd reader has the eye of Lieuenhöeck, and can discern, cradled in the small triangular beech-mast, a noble forest-tree, with silvery trunk, branching arms, and dark-green foliage, he deserves to be complimented indeed, for his own keen skill; but, at the same time, Nature will not hurry herself for him, but will quietly educe results which he foreknew or thought he did a century ago.
They chase each other round a tree-stem with wonderful agility, and express their animosity with angry grunts and a stamp of the foot like a rabbit. In autumn I have acorns and beech-mast collected, and store some bushels of each to be doled out through the winter and spring; strewn under the tulip-tree this food, mixed with corn, attracts an amusing variety of live creatures.
But to give their conversation in the original would convey but little information to the modern reader, for whose benefit we beg to offer the following translation: "The curse of St Withold upon these infernal porkers!" said the swine-herd, after blowing his horn obstreperously, to collect together the scattered herd of swine, which, answering his call with notes equally melodious, made, however, no haste to remove themselves from the luxurious banquet of beech-mast and acorns on which they had fattened, or to forsake the marshy banks of the rivulet, where several of them, half plunged in mud, lay stretched at their ease, altogether regardless of the voice of their keeper.
In the valleys waved rich harvests of wheat and barley, which were reaped, threshed, ground, and made into bread, by the master's thralls. Herds of oxen, and flocks of sheep and goats, roved on the broad upland pastures, and in the forest multitudes of swine were fattening on the beech-mast and acorns.
A certain proportion of the spores and seeds no doubt fulfilled their obvious function, and, carried by the wind to unoccupied regions, extended the limits of the forest; many might be washed away by rain into streams, and be lost; but a large portion must have remained, to accumulate like beech-mast, or acorns, beneath the trees of a modern forest.
This saying, I believe to be true; because neither the squirrels nor bears are plentiful, unless there is an abundant supply of beech-mast, butter- nuts, hickory-nuts, &c., which Providence has kindly provided in more superabundant quantity on the approach of a longer and severer winter than usual.
Throwing on a cloak she walked out into the moonlit garden, and went slowly down the whitened road toward the station. A magical, dewless night! The moonbeams had stolen in to the beech clump, frosting the boles and boughs, casting a fine ghostly grey over the shadow-patterned beech-mast. Gyp took the short cut through it.
A few green roots of dogs-bit or heather were a feast, and when men found beech-mast, nuts, or acorns, they danced for joy round the beech or oak, to the sound of some rude song, while they called the earth their mother and their nurse. This was their only festival, their only sport; all the rest of man's life was spent in sorrow, pain, and hunger.
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