ingered on
the deep green leaves of the prodigious oak. The baroness looked at it
awhile in silence.

Then she spoke slowly to it and said, "You were here before us: you will
be here when we are gone."

A spasm crossed Josephine's face, but she said nothing at the time. And
so they went in together.

Now as this tree was a feat of nature, and, above all, played a curious
part in our story, I will ask you to stay a few minutes and look at it,
while I say what was known about it; not the thousandth part of what it
could have told, if trees could speak as well as breathe.

The baroness did not exaggerate; the tree was far older than even this
ancient family. They possessed among other archives a manuscript written
by a monk, a son of the house, about four hundred years before our
story, and containing many of the oral traditions about this tree that
had come down to him from remote antiquity. According to this authority,
the first Baron of Beaurepaire had pitched his tent under a fair
oak-tree that stood prope rivum, near a brook. His grandson built a
square tower hard by, and dug a moat that enclosed both tree and tower,
and received the waters of the brook aforesaid.

At this time the tree seems only to have been remarked for its height.
But, a century and a half before the monk wrote, it had become famous in
all the district for its girth, and in the monk's own day had ceased
to grow; but not begun to decay. The mutilated arm I have mentioned
was once a long sturdy bough, worn smooth as velvet in one part from
a curious cause: it ran about as high above the ground as a full-sized
horse, and the knights and squires used to be forever vaulting upon
it, the former in armor; the monk, when a boy, had seen them do it a
thousand times. This bough broke in two, A.D. 1617: but the mutilated
limb was still called the knights' bough, nobody knew why. So do names
survive their ideas.

What had not this tree seen since first it came green and tender as
a cabbage above the soil, and stood at the mercy of the first hare or
rabbit that should choose to cut short its frail existence!

Since then eagles had perched on its crown, and wild boars fed without
fear of man upon its acorns. Troubadours had sung beneath it to lords
and ladies seated round, or walking on the grass and commenting the
minstrel's tales of love by exchange of amorous glances. Mediaeval
sculptors had taken its leaves, and wisely trusting to nature, had
adorn