His greatest pleasure was to
sit out of doors of an evening in sight of the grand old trees in his
park, and before going in he would walk round to visit them, one by
one, and resting his hand on the bark he would whisper a goodnight. He
was convinced, he confided to his young guest, who often accompanied
him in these evening walks, that they had intelligent souls and knew
and encouraged his devotion.
There is nothing surprising to me in this; it is told here only
because the one who cherished this feeling and belief was an orthodox
Christian, a profoundly religious person; also because my informant
herself, who was also deeply religious, loved the memory of this old
friend of her early life mainly because of his feeling for trees,
which she too cherished, believing, as she often told me, that trees
and all living and growing things have souls. What has surprised me is
that a form of tree-worship is still found existing among a few of the
inhabitants in some of the small rustic villages in out-of-the-world
districts in England. Not such survivals as the apple tree folk-songs
and ceremonies of the west, which have long become meaningless, but
something living, which has a meaning for the mind, a survival such as
our anthropologists go to the end of the earth to seek among barbarous
and savage tribes.
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