The children were very much pleased with this story, and Malcolm said that he always liked to hear about people who found gold and things.

“I think that I do, myself,” replied Miss Harson, “although, as in this poor woman’s case and in many others, gold is not the best thing to find.  It often brings with it so much sorrow and sin as to be a curse to its owner.  The only safe treasure is that laid up in heaven, where ’neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,’

“From the very earliest times the oak has been used for shipbuilding.  The Saxons, we are told, kept a formidable fleet of vessels with curved bottoms and the prow and poop adorned with representations of the head and tail of some grotesque and fabulous creature.  King Alfred had many vessels that carried sixty oars and were entirely of oak.  A vessel supposed to be of his time has been discovered in the bed of a river in Kent, and after the lapse of so many centuries it is as sound as ever and as hard as iron.”

“Do oak trees ever have apples on ’em?” asked Clara.  “In a story that I read there was something about ‘oak-apples.’”

[Illustration:  THE OAK-GALL INSECT (Cynips).]

“They are not apples such as we eat, or fruit in any sense,” said her governess.  “They are the work of a species of fly called Cynips, which is very apt to attack the oak.  ’The female insect is armed with a sharp weapon called an ovipositor, which she plunges into a leaf and makes a wound.  Here she lays her eggs; and when she has done so, she flies away and we hear no more of her.  But the wound she has made disturbs the circulation of the sap.  It flows round and round the eggs as though it had met with some foreign body it would fain remove.  Very soon the eggs are in the midst of a ball-like and fleshy chamber—­the most suitable provision for them, and one which the parent-insect had provided by means of puncturing the leaf.  As the eggs are hatched the grubs will find themselves safely housed and in the midst of an abundance of food.’”

[Illustration:  OAK-APPLES.]

“Well,” exclaimed Malcolm, in great disgust, “apple is a queer name for a ball full of little flies!”

“It’s a very pretty ball, though,” said Miss Harson, “with a smooth skin and tinged with red or yellow, like a ripe apple.  If it is cut open, a number of granules are seen, each containing a grub embedded in a fruit-like substance.  The grub undergoes its transformation, and in due course emerges a perfect insect.  These pretty pink-and-white apples used to be gathered by English boys on the twenty-ninth of May, which was called ‘Oak-Apple Day.’”

“Did they eat ’em?” asked Edith.

“I do not see how they could, dear,” was the reply; “they were probably gathered just to look at.  Yet ‘May-apples,’ which grow, you will remember, on the wild azalea and the swamp honeysuckle, are often eaten, and they are formed in the same way; so we will not be too positive about the oak-apples.”