ed churches with those leaves cut in stone.

It had seen a Norman duke conquer England, and English kings invade
France and be crowned at Paris. It had seen a girl put knights to the
rout, and seen the warrior virgin burned by envious priests with common
consent both of the curs she had defended and the curs she had defeated.

Why, in its old age it had seen the rise of printing, and the first dawn
of national civilization in Europe. It flourished and decayed in France;
but it sprung in Gaul. And more remarkable still, though by all accounts
it may see the world to an end, it was a tree in ancient history: its
old age awaits the millennium; its first youth belonged to that great
tract of time which includes the birth of Christ, the building of Rome,
and the siege of Troy.

The tree had, ere this, mingled in the fortunes of the family. It had
saved their lives and taken their lives. One lord of Beaurepaire, hotly
pursued by his feudal enemies, made for the tree, and hid himself partly
by a great bough, partly by the thick screen of leaves. The foe darted
in, made sure he had taken to the house, ransacked it, and got into the
cellar, where by good-luck was a store of Malvoisie: and so the oak and
the vine saved the quaking baron. Another lord of Beaurepaire, besieged
in his castle, was shot dead on the ramparts by a cross-bowman who had
secreted himself unobserved in this tree a little before the dawn.

A young heir of Beaurepaire, climbing for a raven's nest to the top
of this tree, lost his footing and fell, and died at its foot: and his
mother in her anguish bade them cut down the tree that had killed her
boy. But the baron her husband refused, and spake in this wise: "ytte ys
eneugh that I lose mine sonne, I will nat alsoe lose mine Tre." In
the male you see the sober sentiment of the proprietor outweighed the
temporary irritation of the parent. Then the mother bought fifteen ells
of black velvet, and stretched a pall from the knights' bough across the
west side to another branch, and cursed the hand that should remove it,
and she herself "wolde never passe the Tre neither going nor coming, but
went still about." And when she died and should have been carried past
the tree to the park, her dochter did cry from a window to the bearers,
"Goe about! goe about!" and they went about, and all the company. And in
time the velvet pall rotted, and was torn and driven away by the winds:
and when the hand of Nature, and no hum