I jumped from the surrey at the door, and drew her with me. "Let us look at them first of all," I said, "because there was our playhouse, there were our dreams."
She smiled as she pointed to the walks still lined with sunken ale bottles, their mouths projecting upward as borders for our flower beds.
Aunt Lucretia had gone into the house. Thomas had wheeled the surrey and team to the barn.
The land we stood on had once belonged to Andrew Jackson. Here he had lived before he had moved to the farm four miles away known as the Hermitage. Clover Bottom had been the pride of a great, strong heart. In the field beyond had stood the pioneer store where Jackson and Coffee had traded, with Indians. Beyond that was the far-famed circular field, in the great bend of Stone's River, and level as a floor, where Truxton and Plowboy and the unbeaten Maria had once raced. Still farther beyond Stone's River circled like a tube of quicksilver through the green of the wooded hills.
Never before was honesty put to such a test as when Andrew Jackson gave up this home to pay an unjust debt. Without complaint he moved further into the wilderness, and built his great double log-cabin home. That cabin is now a shrine!
Here stood the giant hickories in a group, the rugged, stately trees. Why did he plant them here? Or had the old hero, with that love of his for the unbending tree for which he was named, let them stand unscathed, as Nature had placed them? They stood in a great group, cathedral-like, one taller and more stately than his fellows, like a spire.
Of all the trees the hickory is the conqueror. Its purpose in life is to withstand. It is a fighting tree, rough of dress, careless of manner, rude in its unpolished bark. To be frightened by the hails of heaven is not for it. The hurricane cannot quell it. From its youth it has fought the storm, and when the storm has tired it has still stood, tattered but glorious.
Every fall in one great flaming pyre as of a burning bush wherein there is Divinity, they have blazed and burned before our wondering eyes. A warrior tree, and yet, withal, what no warrior ever was: a giver of gifts, not a wrecker of those already garnered; not bullets, not shells, not grape shot dropped on the land; but nuts. Some day, truly, the real conqueror of the world will conquer like this tree—overcoming in a hail of kindness flung from loving hands.
"It was these trees," I said, turning to Eloise, "that sent me to Germany to study forestry; these trees and Dr. Gottlieb. How is he? I can hardly wait till morning to run over to his cabin."
Eloise laughed. "Oh! you were always a poet, Jack. Dr. Gottlieb is the same, and he is famous now; such books he has written of flowers and trees!"