THE "AERIAL WOODMAN'S" WORK.
IN the grove of tall elms at the south-western corner of Kensington Gardens the London public has for some weeks watched the unusual sight of the lopping, sawing, and cutting into lengths of the trees overthrown in the great gale of last September. Many of these trees are three or four feet in diameter, for, growing as they did in the lowest and most sheltered corner of the precincts of the old palace, and below the level of the springs for which the place was formerly famous, some of these were the tallest trees in London, as well as among the oldest. They were probably of William LII.'s planting. When saplings they had seen the King's messengers coming and going with orders to the fleets in the Channel and the armies in Holland. They had seen the secret emissaries sent to summon the Old Pretender to the bedside of Queen Anne, and the arrival of the supporters of the Protestant succession, who marred for ever the chances of the exile by their advice to the dying Queen. They had seen Anne's funeral procession, and the march past of generations of " redcoats " from Hounslow to Westminster in all costumes and headgear, from the mitre-hats worn by the foot-guards at Culloden to the wideawakes of the Colonials who were our guests after the Boer War. Addison had walked beneath them, thinking perhaps of his next essay in the Spectator, and of the birds' eggs which he sent to young Lord Warwick, as the rooks and doves flew to and fro in their branches. And so they flourished and survived generations of men, until "the aerial woodman," to quote Mr. Watson's poem on the ancient yews of Merrow Down, felled them instantly and at once with the invisible axes of the storm.
Few sights excite such universal regret as ancient trees felled in numbers by the wind, or a gallant ship wrecked upon the rocks by the same invisible agency. The fabric and form of both are so stately and so complex ; the destruction so com- plete and beyond remedy. After a storm, whether on land
or sea, there comes a corresponding period of intense still- ness, tranquillity, and light. The darker and more furious the storm the longer as a rule is the pause, the more golden and prolonged the glow, that illuminates the full measure of the destroying force of the gale. "Yet when they had retreated to their camps a wondrous calm and stillness followed," says the Roman historian, after relating how a furious bail-storm on two successive days drove the Roman and Carthaginian armies from the field, just as each was about to fight the other "with Rome as the prize of the winner." As on the banks of the Anio, so it is on the shores or in the parks of Britain. There is no lack of light or calm in which to learn the losses inflicted by the divinity who "rides in the whirl- wind and directs the storm."
The sudden and destroying winds which occasionally fall upon our parks and woods are apparently guided by a capricious will. Their action is not uniform, as a rule. It would seem that the forces are irregular, and that just as over a plain of drifted snow wreaths and clouds may be seen in high commotion in one part, while in others the flakes lie still upon the ground, so the gale rages in frenzy in one spot, while in another at no great distance it is only a mighty rushing wind. Such a disaster fell recently upon the park of Barton Court, in the beautiful valley of the Kennet, opposite to Kintbin7 (Kennetbury), where some of the finest trout-fishing in England is to be found. Except the solid red Georgian house, built by Dundas, the first and last Lord Ambresbury, nearly every tall object in the park seems to have suffered by the storm. It is said that four thousand trees were destroyed on the property, and that forty men were employed for some months in cutting and removing the fallen, and in trimming and pruning the maimed. But whatever the exact figures, the fact remains that some of the timber and lopping,s still lie in the park, and that the greater part of the remaining trees show the extra- ordinary force - and power of the wind. Some of them, very large oaks, were uprooted. This, the commonest form of destruction by storms, does not suggest the force of the blast so vividly as do the various effects on still standing trees. The old proverb of the storm which spared the reed and overthrew the oak is not applicable to gales of this calibre. They destroy saplings and small trees equally with the veterans of one or two centuries. Some of the largest size had been snapped off half way up their stems. Some had their heads "screwed off" as if they had been twisted off by hand. In a great number one or more large branches had been violently torn and wrenched away, not merely snapped, but dragged from the living body of the tree, leaving nerves and fibres, in the shape of long twisted splinters, hanging. Young trees of some twenty or:thirty summers, standing in the fences by the roadside, had been snapped, torn, or broken equally with the others. The limit of the area affected seems to have been very narrow, perhaps one mile in length by half a mile in breadth. At a distance of a few miles stands the beautifully wooded park of Hamp- stead Marshall, an ancient demesne of the Earls of Craven, with every variety of park timber, from straight avenues of towering limes to spreading sycamores and most ancient thorns. In this gem of English park scenery scarcely a tree was injured by the storm.
An even more destructive and narrowly local cyclone, felling woods and timber, occurred on the interesting estate of Wretham, near Thetford, in Norfolk, a few years ago. The storm increased so suddenly that it was difficult for persons in the open to regain their houses ; but as it happened on a Sunday few people were in the fields, and no farm horses were at cart or plough. Though the force of the tempest was so severe, it did not do special damage except along a certain line, which happened to pass across a large and dense planta- tion of very tall and beautiful firs, mainly spruces. The cover was so thick that it would have been impossible before the storm to see more than a dozen yards in any direction. The smashing force of the wind hardly left a tree standing in the path of its main attack. The greater number were uprooted, and the whole wood lay a dense mass of fallen and super- incumbent trunks of spruce. When not uprooted, the trees were broken off short, like sticks of sealing-wax. The destruction was greater than if the wood had been fired; and this complete and irretrievable disaster was the work of twenty minutes. The storm which destroyed the Tay Bridge, and the train which was crossing it with its living freight, did enormous damage in the modern Scotch woodlands near the coast. Trees were blown down by tens of thousands, though no loss of life was recorded upon land. Nearly as much injury was done subsequently to the woodlands and forests in the neighbourhood of Crieff by a storm, which left a track like the course of a wide river, with well-defined margins where it had crossed the wider areas of fir forest.
The centre of Ireland was last autumn the scene of a cyclone which selected for its special playground some of the best wooded estates in the country. The area of the storm was so wide that it came as a universal calamity. As every estate had lost trees by the thousand, there was a simultaneous demand for labour, which rendered the cutting and removal of the logs expensive; while at the same time the "glut" of timber quite exceeded the local demand, and reduced the price obtainable from purchasers at a distance. This was one of the few storms in which the destruction of animal life—so marked in the great hurricanes of the West Indies, where not a winged insect escapes, and the birds are blown into the sea—was somewhat in evidence. Blackbirds and thrushes were found dead, and on one estate, where some large fir-woods were absolutely levelled, the squirrels were seen running about everywhere on the ground, absolutely bewildered, in what was now a treeless neighbourhood.
But no effort of these "sightless couriers of the air" has ever approached the havoc wrought over the whole of the South of England and on the adjacent seas by the great storm of November, 1703, the only example of its kind which has approached the force of the West Indian hurricanes. This storm, to which Addison referred in "The Campaign," and the terrors of which were described by Defoe, "had left a dreadful recollection in the minds of all men. No other tempest was ever in this country the occasion of a Parlia- mentary address and of a public fast," wrote Lord Macaulay. "Whole fleets had been cast away. One prelate had been buried beneath the ruins of his palace. London and Bristol had presented the appearance of cities just sacked. Hundreds of families were still in mourning. The prostrate trunks of large trees and the ruins of houses still attested in all the Southern counties the fury of the blast." This was the gale "such as of late o'er pale Britannia passed" which was summoned to every one's remembrance when Marlborough was likened to the angel who "rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." Only one person, or class of persons, is believed to have looked upon the visits of such angels, fortunately rare in this case, though regrettably so in others, with equanimity, if not satisfaction. It was, we believe, or rather is, part of the 'copyhold tenure in many manors that though the land to all intents and purposes belonged to the copyholder, the timber did not. He might not fell it. But if the "aerial woodman" intervened and blew it down for him, it was his to do as he liked with. Hence the word "windfall" for a come-by-chance piece of property, which has passed into the language of every day, though commemorating rather a nice point of old property law.
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