The baroness kissed her and they came towards the house together, the baroness leaning gently on her daughter’s elbow.

Between the park and the angle of the chateau was a small plot of turf called at Beaurepaire the Pleasance, a name that had descended along with other traditions; and in the centre of this Pleasance, or Pleasaunce, stood a wonderful oak-tree.  Its circumference was thirty-four feet.  The baroness came to this ancient tree, and hung her chaplet on a mutilated limb called the “knights’ bough.”

The sun was setting tranquil and red; a broad ruby streak lingered on the deep green leaves of the prodigious oak.  The baroness looked at it awhile in silence.

Then she spoke slowly to it and said, “You were here before us:  you will be here when we are gone.”

A spasm crossed Josephine’s face, but she said nothing at the time.  And so they went in together.

Now as this tree was a feat of nature, and, above all, played a curious part in our story, I will ask you to stay a few minutes and look at it, while I say what was known about it; not the thousandth part of what it could have told, if trees could speak as well as breathe.

The baroness did not exaggerate; the tree was far older than even this ancient family.  They possessed among other archives a manuscript written by a monk, a son of the house, about four hundred years before our story, and containing many of the oral traditions about this tree that had come down to him from remote antiquity.  According to this authority, the first Baron of Beaurepaire had pitched his tent under a fair oak-tree that stood prope rivum, near a brook.  His grandson built a square tower hard by, and dug a moat that enclosed both tree and tower, and received the waters of the brook aforesaid.

At this time the tree seems only to have been remarked for its height.  But, a century and a half before the monk wrote, it had become famous in all the district for its girth, and in the monk’s own day had ceased to grow; but not begun to decay.  The mutilated arm I have mentioned was once a long sturdy bough, worn smooth as velvet in one part from a curious cause:  it ran about as high above the ground as a full-sized horse, and the knights and squires used to be forever vaulting upon it, the former in armor; the monk, when a boy, had seen them do it a thousand times.  This bough broke in two, A.D. 1617:  but the mutilated limb was still called the knights’ bough, nobody knew why.  So do names survive their ideas.

What had not this tree seen since first it came green and tender as a cabbage above the soil, and stood at the mercy of the first hare or rabbit that should choose to cut short its frail existence!

Since then eagles had perched on its crown, and wild boars fed without fear of man upon its acorns.  Troubadours had sung beneath it to lords and ladies seated round, or walking on the grass and commenting the minstrel’s tales of love by exchange of amorous glances.  Mediaeval sculptors had taken its leaves, and wisely trusting to nature, had adorned churches with those leaves cut in stone.