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Updated: May 23, 2025
The fruit of wild cherry, elder, dogwood, haws, and mountain-ash are eaten by birds, and if a farm be planted with such trees and bushes in the barn-yard, along the lanes or in some of those unproductive spots that are to be found on every farm, birds will be attracted to the farm and will pay well for themselves, and the farmer's crop of cultivated fruit will be protected.
The huts were in a single row, and the whole of the little village quiet and dreamy, with willows, elders, and mountain-ash trees peeping out from the yards had an attractive look. Beyond the peasants homesteads there was a slope down to the river, so steep and precipitous that huge stones jutted out bare here and there through the clay.
But before he knew this, it had gathered him up and swung him across with it over to the other side of the arch. There he caught hold of a twisted ivy-tod and a bough of mountain-ash, whence he dropped on the bank, and crawled up it out of reach, commenting in forcible language upon the occurrence, by which he was still astoundedly bewildered.
When he had gone some way along the convent mound, and was come to the first bridge, where the mountain-ash stands, he saw two wolves coming towards him; and as he had no weapon with him, save a staff, he climbed up into a tree; whereupon the wolves trotted round it, blinked at him with their eyes, licked their lips, and at last jumped with their fore-paws up against the tree, snapping at him; he then saw that one was a he-wolf, a great fat brute with only one eye.
The house yard was like a circular room, with no outlook in any direction, as it had been in her father's time for he had not the heart to cut down as much as a bush. She lingered in the shadow under the big mountain-ash at the entrance to the farm, and stood looking about her. As she stood there a strange thing happened; a flock of doves came and lit beside her.
Autumn came, and the starlings assembled on the Thomaskirche, the storks in the village, and the swallows on the roof of the neighbour's house to prepare for their flight towards the south; heavy storms tore the leaves from the trees, one dull rainy day followed another, and when at last the mountain-ash berries and the barberries were shining in all their brightest scarlet, the rosy flush that had been coaxed into the young wife's cheeks during the long, dry, happy summer changed to a crimson spot, her eyes acquired a strained, longing, mournful expression, and after she had had an attack of coughing she would sink together as if the autumn winds had broken her as they had the stems of the mallow which were hanging from the trellis in the little garden outside.
Now, she moved with solemn steps, beneath the gloom of thickly interwoven branches, where the fresh dew still hung upon every flower, that peeped from among the grass; and now tripped sportively along the path, on which the sunbeams darted and the checquered foliage trembled where the tender greens of the beech, the acacia and the mountain-ash, mingling with the solemn tints of the cedar, the pine and cypress, exhibited as fine a contrast of colouring, as the majestic oak and oriental plane did of form, to the feathery lightness of the cork tree and the waving grace of the poplar.
He got away from his companions, and wandered out alone into the gardens in the evening sunlight, throwing himself on a bench beneath a mountain-ash. Here the little Lady Venetia, the eight-year-old sister of the colossal Seraph, found him, and Cecil roused himself, and smiled at her. "They say you have lost all your money," said the child, "and I want you to take mine. It is my very own.
She remembered that when she was a girl at school, years ago ten years ago Jo Portugais, then scarcely out of his teens, a cheerful, pleasant, quick-tempered lad, had brought her bunches of the mountain-ash berry; that once he had mended the broken runner of her sled; and yet another time had sent her a birch-bark valentine at the convent, where it was confiscated by the Mother Superior.
No tree, perhaps, holds such a prominent place in witchcraft-lore as the mountain-ash, its mystic power having rarely failed to render fruitless the evil influence of these enemies of mankind.
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