teful; and conscious that the tree drew me to it I
questioned myself as to the reason. It was, I told myself, nothing but
mental curiosity: my interest was a purely scientific one. For how comes
it, I asked, that a thorn can grow to a tree and live to a great age in
such a situation, on a vast, naked down, where for many centuries,
perhaps for thousands of years, the herbage has been so closely fed by
sheep as to have the appearance of a carpet, or newly mown lawn? The
seed is carried and scattered everywhere by the birds, but no sooner
does it germinate and send up a shoot than it is eaten down to the
roots; for there is no scent that attracts a sheep more, no flavour it
has greater taste for, than that of any forest seedling springing up
amidst the minute herbaceous plants which carpet the downs. The thorn,
like other organisms, has its own unconscious intelligence and cunning,
by means of which it endeavours to save itself and fulfil its life. It
opens its first tender leaves under the herbage, and at the same time
thrusts up a vertical spine to wound the nibbling mouth; and no sooner
has it got a leaf or two and a spine than it spreads its roots all
round, and from each of them springs a fresh shoot, leaves and
protecting spine, to increase the chances of preservation. In vain! the
cunning animal finds a way to defeat all this strategy, and after the
leaves have been bitten off again and again, the infant plant gives up
the struggle and dies in the ground. Yet we see that from time to time
one survives--one perhaps in a million; but how--whether by a quicker
growth or a harder or more poisonous thorn, an unpalatable leaf, or some
other secret agency--we cannot guess. First as a diminutive scrubby
shrub, with numerous iron-hard stems, with few and small leaves but many
thorns, it keeps its poor flowerless frustrate life for perhaps half a
century or longer, without growing more than a couple of feet high; and
then, as by a miracle, it will spring up until its top shoots are out of
reach of the browsing sheep, and in the end it becomes a tree with
spreading branches and fully developed leaves, and flowers and fruit in
their season.

One day I was visited by an artist from a distance who, when shown the
thorn, pronounced it a fine subject for his pencil, and while he made
his picture we talked about the hawthorn generally as compared with
other trees, and agreed that, except in its blossoming time when it is
merely pre