on or not; and hips and haws and holly-berries and harsh
acorn, and the rowan, which some think acrid; but the elderberry I can't
stomach.

How comes it, I have asked more than once, that this poor tree is so
often seen on the downs where it is so badly fitted to be and makes so
sorry an appearance with its weak branches broken and its soft leaves
torn by the winds? How badly it contrasts with the other trees and
bushes that flourish on the downs--furze, juniper, holly, blackthorn,
and hawthorn!

Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on an
extensive down in another part of Wiltshire with the tenant of the land,
who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but eventually finding that
he could make more with rabbits than with sheep turned most of his land
into a warren. The higher part of this down was overgrown with furze,
mixed with holly and other bushes, but the slopes were mostly very bare.
At one spot on a wide bare slope where the rabbits had formed a big
group of burrows there was a close little thicket of young elder trees,
looking exceedingly conspicuous in the bright green of early April.
Calling my companion's attention to this little thicket I said something
about the elder growing on the open downs where it always appeared to
be out of harmony with its surroundings. "I don't suppose you planted
elders here," I said.

"No, but I know who did," he returned, and he then gave me this curious
history of the trees. Five years before, the rabbits, finding it a
suitable spot to dig in, probably because of a softer chalk there,
made a number of deep burrows at that spot. When the wheatears, or
"horse-maggers" as he called them, returned in spring two or three pairs
attached themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them. There was
that season a solitary elder-bush higher up on the down among the furze
which bore a heavy crop of berries; and when the fruit was ripe he
watched the birds feeding on it, the wheatears among them. The following
spring seedlings came up out of the loose earth heaped about the rabbit
burrows, and as they were not cut down by the rabbits, for they dislike
the elder, they grew up, and now formed a clump of fifty or sixty little
trees of six feet to eight feet in height.

Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear, the bird
of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not even ask for a bush
to perch on?

It then occurred to me that in every ca