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. It was a terrible tree to
climb, yet, when a little older. I had to climb it a thousand times,
since there were certain birds which would make their nests in it,
often as high up as they could, and some of these were birds that laid
beautiful eggs, such as those of the Guira cuckoo, the size of
pullets' eggs, of the purest turquoise blue flecked with snowy white.

Among our old or ancient trees the peach was the favourite of the
whole house on account of the fruit it gave us in February and March,
also later, in April and May, when what we called our winter peach
ripened. Peach, quince, and cherry were the three favourite fruit-
trees in the colonial times, and all three were found in some of the
quintas or orchards of the old estancia houses. We had a score of
quince trees, with thick gnarled trunks and old twisted branches like
rams' horns, but the peach trees numbered about four to five hundred
and grew well apart from one another, and were certainly the largest I
have ever seen. Their size was equal to that of the oldest and largest
cherry trees one sees in certain favoured spots in Southern England,
where they grow not in close formation but wide apart with ample room
for the branches to spread on all sides.

The trees planted by a later generation, both shade and fruit, were