comes to nothing, reducing the people to a condition almost of famine. In order to preserve the nuts through the winter and spring and prevent the sprouting, they are subjected to desiccation in clèdes that may be seen as a part of the outbuildings of every farmhouse and of many cottages.
The Spanish chestnut is a beautiful tree. It was indigenous in England. A few years ago I was draining a field by the river, and cut down to glacial clay nearly nine feet below the surface, and lying on this was a huge tree, black as ebony. With great labour I had it removed to the sawmill, thinking it to have been black bog oak. It was Spanish chestnut, and since then others have been found in the same valley. It seems willing to grow anywhere. The peasants build up terraces no larger than a doormat, and it grows there. But where there is plenty of soil it will grow much more vigorously than on a ledge of rock.
"I wish," said R. L. Stevenson, "I could convey a notion of the growth of these noble trees; of how they strike out boughs like the oak, and trail sprays of drooping foliage like the willow; of how they stand as upright fluted columns like the pillars of a church; or like the olive, from the most shattered bole can put out smooth and youthful shoots, and begin a new life upon the ruins of the old. Thus they partake of the nature of many different trees; and even their prickly top-knots, seen near at hand against the sky, have a certain palm-like air that impresses the imagination. But this individuality, although compounded of so many elements, is but the richer and the more original. And to look down upon a level filled with these knolls of foliage, or to see a clan of old unconquerable chestnuts cluster like herded elephants upon the spurs of a mountain, is to rise to higher thoughts of the powers that are in Nature."
