There they stand in thousands, the sturdy Scots, colonizing the
desert in spite of frost, and gales, and barrenness; and clustering
together, too, as Scotsmen always do abroad, little and big, every
one under his neighbour's lee, according to the good old proverb of
their native land, 'Caw me, and I'll caw thee.'
I respect them, those Scotch firs. I delight in their forms, from
James the First's gnarled giants up in Bramshill Park--the only place
in England where a painter can learn what Scotch firs are--down to
the little green pyramids which stand up out of the heather,
triumphant over tyranny, and the strange woes of an untoward youth.
Seven years on an average have most of them spent in ineffectual
efforts to become a foot high. Nibbled off by hares, trodden down by
cattle, cut down by turf-parers, seeing hundreds of their brethren
cut up and carried off in the turf-fuel, they are as gnarled and
stubbed near the ground as an old thorn-bush in a pasture. But they
have conquered at last, and are growing away, eighteen inches a year,
with fair green brushes silvertipt, reclothing the wilderness with a
vegetation which it has not seen for--how many thousand years?
No man can tell.
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