It had seen a Norman duke conquer England, and English kings invade France and be crowned at Paris.  It had seen a girl put knights to the rout, and seen the warrior virgin burned by envious priests with common consent both of the curs she had defended and the curs she had defeated.

Why, in its old age it had seen the rise of printing, and the first dawn of national civilization in Europe.  It flourished and decayed in France; but it sprung in Gaul.  And more remarkable still, though by all accounts it may see the world to an end, it was a tree in ancient history:  its old age awaits the millennium; its first youth belonged to that great tract of time which includes the birth of Christ, the building of Rome, and the siege of Troy.

The tree had, ere this, mingled in the fortunes of the family.  It had saved their lives and taken their lives.  One lord of Beaurepaire, hotly pursued by his feudal enemies, made for the tree, and hid himself partly by a great bough, partly by the thick screen of leaves.  The foe darted in, made sure he had taken to the house, ransacked it, and got into the cellar, where by good-luck was a store of Malvoisie:  and so the oak and the vine saved the quaking baron.  Another lord of Beaurepaire, besieged in his castle, was shot dead on the ramparts by a cross-bowman who had secreted himself unobserved in this tree a little before the dawn.

A young heir of Beaurepaire, climbing for a raven’s nest to the top of this tree, lost his footing and fell, and died at its foot:  and his mother in her anguish bade them cut down the tree that had killed her boy.  But the baron her husband refused, and spake in this wise:  “ytte ys eneugh that I lose mine sonne, I will nat alsoe lose mine Tre.”  In the male you see the sober sentiment of the proprietor outweighed the temporary irritation of the parent.  Then the mother bought fifteen ells of black velvet, and stretched a pall from the knights’ bough across the west side to another branch, and cursed the hand that should remove it, and she herself “wolde never passe the Tre neither going nor coming, but went still about.”  And when she died and should have been carried past the tree to the park, her dochter did cry from a window to the bearers, “Goe about! goe about!” and they went about, and all the company.  And in time the velvet pall rotted, and was torn and driven away by the winds:  and when the hand of Nature, and no human hand, had thus flouted and dispersed the trappings of the mother’s grief, two pieces were picked up and preserved among the family relics:  but the black velvet had turned a rusty red.

So the baroness did nothing new in this family when she hung her chaplet on the knights’ bough; and, in fact, on the west side, about eighteen feet from the ground, there still mouldered one corner of an Atchievement an heir of Beaurepaire had nailed there two centuries before, when his predecessor died:  “For,” said he, “the chateau is of yesterday, but the tree has seen us all come and go.”  The inside of the oak was hollow as a drum; and on its east side yawned a fissure as high as a man and as broad as a street-door.  Dard used to wheel his wheelbarrow into the tree at a trot, and there leave it.