There was also a cross-row of poplars
dividing the gardens and buildings from the plantation, and these were
the favourite nesting-trees of two of our best-loved birds--the
beautiful little goldfinch or Argentine siskin, and the bird called
firewood-gatherer by the natives on account of the enormous collection
of sticks which formed the nest.
Between the border poplar walk and the foss outside, there grew a
single row of trees of a very different kind--the black acacia, a rare
and singular tree, and of all our trees this one made the strongest
and sharpest impression on my mind as well as flesh, pricking its
image in me, so to speak. It had probably been planted originally by
the early first planter, and, I imagine, experimentally, as a possible
improvement on the wide-spreading disorderly aloe, a favourite with
the first settlers; but it is a wild lawless plant and had refused to
make a proper hedge. Some of these acacias had remained small and were
like old scraggy bushes, some were dwarfish trees, while others had
sprung up like the fabled bean-stalk and were as tall as the poplars
that grew side by side with them. These tall specimens had slender
boles and threw out their slender horizontal branches of great length
on all sides, from the roots to the crown, the branches and the bole
itself being armed with thorns two to four inches long, hard as iron,
black or chocolate-brown, polished and sharp as needles; and to make
itself more formidable every long thorn had two smaller thorns growing
out of it near the base, so that it was in shape like a round tapering
dagger with a crossguard to the handle.
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