" 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.
Yet in spite of excavation and mutilation not life only but vigor
dwelt in this wooden shell. The extreme ends of the longer boughs were
firewood, touchwood, and the crown was gone this many a year: but narrow
the circle a very little to where the indomitable trunk could still
shoot sap from its cruse deep in earth, and there on every side burst
the green foliage in its season countless as the sand. The leaves carved
centuries ago from these very models, though cut in stone, were most of
them mouldered, blunted, notched, deformed: but the delicate types came
back with every summer, perfect and lovely as when the tree was but
their elder brother: and greener than ever: for, from what cause nature
only knows, the leaves were many shades richer than any other tree could
show for a hundred miles round; a deep green, fiery, yet soft; and then
their multitude--the staircases of foliage as you looked up the tree,
and could scarce catch a glimpse of the sky.
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