"At my house?" said Guido.

"Oh, no, dear, the house I was then thinking of is gone, like a leaf
withered and lost. But we have not forgotten any of the songs they sang
us, nor have the swallows that you see to-day--one of them spoke to you
just now--forgotten what we said to their ancestors. Then the blackbirds
came out in us and ate the creeping creatures, so that they should not
hurt us, and went up into the oaks and whistled such beautiful sweet low
whistles. Not in those oaks, dear, where the blackbirds whistle to-day;
even the very oaks have gone, though they were so strong that one of them
defied the lightning, and lived years and years after it struck him. One
of the very oldest of the old oaks in the copse, dear, is his grandchild.
If you go into the copse you will find an oak which has only one branch;
he is so old, he has only that branch left. He sprang up from an acorn
dropped from an oak that grew from an acorn dropped from the oak the
lightning struck. So that is three oak lives, Guido dear, back to the
time I was thinking of just now. And that oak under whose shadow you are
now lying is the fourth of them, and he is quite young, though he is so
big.

"A jay sowed the acorn from which he grew up; the jay was in the oak with
one branch, and some one frightened him, and as he flew he dropped the
acorn which he had in his bill just there, and now you are lying in the
shadow of the tree. So you see, it is a very long time ago, when the
blackbirds came and whistled up in those oaks I was thinking of, and that
was why I was not very happy."

"But you have heard the blackbirds whistling ever since?" said Guido;
"and there was such a big black one up in our cherry tree this morning,
and I shot my arrow at him and very nearly hit him. Besides, there is a