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
adorned 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