young lady of good family, good manners, and good means. If her estate
went with this property it would complete as pretty a five thousand
acres of mixed soil as there is in the county. Those are beautiful old
meadows of hers, beautiful. Perhaps----" but here the old man checked
himself.

On leaving the house they had passed together down a walk called the
tunnel walk, on account of the arching boughs of the lime-trees that
interlaced themselves overhead. At the end of this avenue, and on the
borders of the lake, there stood an enormous but still growing oak,
known as Caresfoot's Staff. It was the old squire's favourite tree,
and the best topped piece of timber for many miles round.

"I wonder," said Philip, by way of making a little pleasant
conversation, "why that tree was called Caresfoot's Staff."

"Your ignorance astonishes me, Philip, but I suppose that there are
some people who can live for years in a place and yet imbibe nothing
of its traditions. Perhaps you know that the monks were driven out of
these ruins by Henry VIII. Well, on the spot where that tree now
stands there grew a still greater oak, a giant tree, its trunk
measured sixteen loads of timber; which had, as tradition said, been
planted by the first prior of the Abbey when England was still Saxon.
The night the monks left a great gale raged over England. It was in
October, when the trees were full of leaf, and its fiercest gust tore
the great oak from its roothold, and flung it into the lake. Look! do
you see that rise in the sand, there, by the edge of the deep pool, in
the eight foot water? That is there it is supposed to lie. Well, the
whole country-side said that it was a sign that the monks had gone for
ever from Bratham Abbey, and the country-side was right. But when your