Banishing these wild imaginings, I rode on in the direction of this strange object; but it was only when I came within a very short distance that I was able to distinguish its nature.  It was a live oak of most stupendous dimensions, the very patriarch of the prairie, grown grey in the lapse of ages.  Its lower limbs had shot out in an horizontal, or rather a downward-slanting direction; and, reaching nearly to the ground, formed a vast dome several hundred feet in diameter, and full a hundred and thirty feet high.  It had no appearance of a tree, for neither trunk nor branches were visible.  It seemed a mountain of whitish-green scales, fringed with long silvery moss, that hung like innumerable beards from every bough and twig.  Nothing could better convey the idea of immense and incalculable age than the hoary beard and venerable appearance of this monarch of the woods.  Spanish moss of a silvery grey covered the whole mass of wood and foliage, from the topmost bough down to the very ground; short near the top of the tree, but gradually increasing in length as it descended, until it hung like a deep fringe from the lower branches.  I separated the vegetable curtain with my hands, and entered this august temple with feelings of involuntary awe.  The change from the bright sunlight to the comparative darkness beneath the leafy vault, was so great, that I at first could scarcely distinguish any thing.  When my eyes got accustomed to the gloom, however, nothing could be more beautiful than the effect of the sun’s rays, which, in forcing their way through the silvered leaves and mosses, took as many varieties of colour as if they had passed through a window of painted glass, and gave the rich, subdued, and solemn light of some old cathedral.

The trunk of the tree rose, free from all branches, full forty feet from the ground, rough and knotted, and of such enormous size that it might have been taken for a mass of rock, covered with moss and lichens, while many of its boughs were nearly as thick as the trunk of any tree I had ever previously seen.

I was so absorbed in the contemplation of the vegetable giant, that for a short space I almost forgot my troubles; but as I rode away from the tree they returned to me in full force, and my reflections were certainly of no very cheering or consolatory nature.  I rode on, however, most perseveringly.  The morning slipped away; it was noon, the sun stood high in the cloudless heavens.  My hunger had now increased to an insupportable degree, and I felt as if something were gnawing within me, something like a crab tugging and riving at my stomach with his sharp claws.  This feeling left me after a time, and was replaced by a sort of squeamishness, a faint sickly sensation.  But if hunger was bad, thirst was worse.  For some hours I suffered martyrdom.  At length, like the hunger, it died away, and was succeeded by a feeling of sickness.  The thirty hours’ fatigue and fasting I had endured were beginning to tell upon