One darling tree,—­a giant oak which looked as if half a dozen Calibans might have been pegged in its knotty entrails—­this one tree, the grandfather of the forest, we thought we had saved.  It stood a little apart,—­it shadowed no man’s land,—­it shut the broiling sun from nobody’s windows, so we hoped it might be allowed to die a natural death.  But one unlucky day, a family fresh from “the ’hio” removed into a house which stood at no great distance from this relic of primeval grandeur.  These people were but little indebted to fortune, and the size of their potato-patch did not exactly correspond with the number of rosy-cheeks within doors.  So the loan of a piece of ground was a small thing to ask or to grant.  Upon this piece of lent land stood our favorite oak.  The potatoes were scarcely peeping green above the soil, when we observed that the great boughs which we looked at admiringly a dozen times a day, as they towered far above the puny race around them, remained distinct in their outline, instead of exhibiting the heavy masses of foliage which had usually clothed them before the summer heat began.  Upon nearer inspection it was found that our neighbor had commenced his plantation by the operation of girdling the tree, for which favor he expected our thanks, observing pithily that “nothing wouldn’t never grow under sich a great mountain as that!” It is well that “Goth” and “Vandal” are not actionable.

Yet the felling of a great tree has something of the sublime in it.  When the axe first falls on the trunk of a stately oak, laden with the green wealth of a century, or a pine whose aspiring peak might look down on a moderate church steeple, the contrast between the puny instrument and the gigantic result to be accomplished approaches the ridiculous.  But as “the eagle towering in his pride of place was, by a mousing owl, hawked at and killed,” so the leaf-crowned monarch of the wood has no small reason to quiver at the sight of a long-armed Yankee approaching his deep-rooted trunk with an awkward axe.  One blow seems to accomplish nothing:  not even a chip falls.  But with another stroke comes a broad slice of the bark, leaving an ominous, gaping wound.  Another pair of blows extends the gash, and when twenty such have fallen, behold a girdled tree.  This would suffice to kill, and a melancholy death it is; but to fell is quite another thing....  Two deep incisions are made, yet the towering crown sits firm as ever.  And now the destroyer pauses,—­fetches breath,—­wipes his beaded brow, takes a wary view of the bearings of the tree,—­and then with a slow and watchful care recommences his work.  The strokes fall doubtingly, and many a cautious glance is cast upward, for the whole immense mass now trembles, as if instinct with life, and conscious of approaching ruin.  Another blow! it waves,—­a groaning sound is heard—... yet another stroke is necessary.  It is given with desperate force, and the tall peak leaves its place with an easy sailing motion accelerated every instant, till it crashes prone on the earth, sending far and wide its scattered branches, and letting in the sunlight upon the cool, damp, mossy earth, for the first time perhaps in half a century.