‘There!’ said my companion; ‘there’s a tree! there’s something like a tree! How a man must feel to call a tree like that his own! That’s Queen Elizabeth’s oak. It is indeed. England is dotted with would-be Queen Elizabeth’s oaks; but there is the very oak which she admired so much that she ordered luncheon to be served under it.... Ah! she knew the value of timber—did good Queen Bess. That’s now—now—let me see—the year after the Armada—nine from fifteen—ah well, somewhere about two hundred and thirty years ago.’
‘How lumpy and hard it looks!’ I remarked.
‘That’s the breed and the age of it,’ he returned. ‘The wonder to me is they don’t turn to stone and last for ever, those trees. Ah! there’s something to live for now!’
He had turned away to resume his walk, but as he finished the sentence, he turned again towards the tree, and shook his finger at it, as if reproaching it for belonging to somebody else than himself.
‘Where are you going now?’ he asked, wheeling round upon me sharply, with a keen look in his magpie-eyes, as the French would call them, which hardly corresponded with the bluntness of his address.
‘I’m going to the Hall,’ I answered, turning away.
‘You’ll never get there that way. How are you to cross the river?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never been this way before.’
‘You’ve been to the Hall before, then? Whom do you know there?’
‘Mrs Wilson,’ I answered.