playfulness outwardly. We often walked through the village of
Bebbington, whose church had a high stone steeple, nearly to the
summit of which the ancient ivy had clambered. And as it came in view
he would always say, in a sort of recitative, perhaps reminiscent of
Scott's narrative poems, which he was at that time reading aloud to
us, "There is of Bebbington the holy peak!" To which I would as
constantly rejoin, "'Of Bebbington the holy spire,' father!"--being
offended by his use of a word so unmusical as peak. He would only
smile and trudge onward. He was somewhat solicitous, I suspect, to
check in his son any tendency towards mere poetical sentiment; his own
imaginative faculty was rooted in common-sense, and he knew the value
of the latter in curbing undue excursions into the fanciful and
transcendental.

In Eastham, on the village green, stood an old yew-tree which, six
centuries before, had been traditionally called The Old Yew of
Eastham, and was probably at least coeval with the village itself,
which was one of the oldest in England. It was of enormous girth, and
was still in leaf; but nothing but the bark was left of the great
trunk; all the wood had decayed away so long ago that the memory of
man held no record of it. There was a great conical gap in one side,
like an open door, and it was my custom--as it had doubtless been that
of innumerable children of ages gone--to enter this door and "play
house" in the spacious interior. Meanwhile my father would seat
himself on the twisted roots without, and let his thoughts drift back
to the time when this huge hulk had first cast a slender shadow over
the greensward of primitive, Saxon England. It was a massive tree
before the Domesday Book was begun; Chaucer would not be heard of for
four hundred years to come; and where was Shakespeare? What was
suspected of America? Yet here was this venerable vegetable, still