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.
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