forth with the most
imperturbable seriousness, and with an air of complete assurance of the
truth. It appears, too, to have fully answered the purpose intended;
and the Scots, finding that the papal antiquity was but a poor defence
against such claims, and as if determined not to be outdone by the
Southron, replied in a document asserting their independence by virtue
of descent from Scota, one of the daughters of Pharaoh. The pope seems
to have been silenced in a conflict of ancestral authority, in which the
succession of St. Peter seemed quite a modern affair, when overshadowed,
by such Trojan and Egyptian antiquity.

* * * * *

=_Caroline M. Kirkland, 1808-1864._= (Manual, p. 484.)

From "Forest Life."

=_208._= THE FELLING OF A GREAT TREE.

One darling tree,--a giant oak which looked as if half a dozen Calibans
might have been pegged in its knotty entrails--this one tree, the
grandfather of the forest, we thought we had saved. It stood a little
apart,--it shadowed no man's land,--it shut the broiling sun from
nobody's windows, so we hoped it might be allowed to die a natural
death. But one unlucky day, a family fresh from "the 'hio" removed into
a house which stood at no great distance from this relic of primeval
grandeur. These people were but little indebted to fortune, and the size
of their potato-patch did not exactly correspond with the number of
rosy-cheeks within doors. So the loan of a piece of ground was a small
thing to ask or to grant. Upon this piece of lent land stood our
favorite oak. The potatoes were scarcely peeping green above the soil,
when we observed that the great boughs which we looked at admiringly a
dozen times a day, as they towered far above the puny race around them,
remained distinct in their outline, instead of exhibiting the heavy
masses of foliage which had usually clothed them before the summer
heat began. Upon nearer inspection it was found that our neighbor had
commenced his plantation by the operation of girdling the tree, for
which favor he expected our thanks, observing pithily that "nothing
wouldn't never grow under sich a great mountain as that!" It is well
that "Goth" and "Vandal" are not actionable.

Yet the felling of a great tree has something of the sublime in it. When
the axe first falls on the trunk of a stately oak, laden with the green
wealth of a century, or a pine whose aspiring peak might look down on a
moderate church steeple