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 human hand, had thus flouted and
dispersed the trappings of the mother's grief, two pieces were picked up
and preserved among the family relics: but the black velvet had turned a
rusty red.

So the baroness did nothing new in this family when she hung her chaplet
on the knights' bough; and, in fact, on the west side, about
eighteen feet from the ground, there still mouldered one corner of
an Atchievement an heir of Beaurepaire had nailed there two centuries
before, when his predecessor died: "For," said he, "the chateau is of
yesterday, but the tree has seen us all come and go." The inside of the
oak was hollow as a drum; and on its east side yawned a fissure as
high as a man and as broad as a street-door. Dard used to wheel his
wheelbarrow into the tree at a trot, and there leave it.

Yet in spite of excavation and mutilation not life only but vigor
dwelt in this wooden shell. The extreme ends of the longer boughs were