Dawn | Page 9

went with this property it would complete as pretty a five
thousand acres of mixed soil as there is in the county. Those are
beautiful old meadows of hers, beautiful. Perhaps----" but here the old
man checked himself.
On leaving the house they had passed together down a walk called the
tunnel walk, on account of the arching boughs of the lime-trees that
interlaced themselves overhead. At the end of this avenue, and on the
borders of the lake, there stood an enormous but still growing oak,
known as Caresfoot's Staff. It was the old squire's favourite tree, and
the best topped piece of timber for many miles round.
"I wonder," said Philip, by way of making a little pleasant conversation,
"why that tree was called Caresfoot's Staff."
"Your ignorance astonishes me, Philip, but I suppose that there are
some people who can live for years in a place and yet imbibe nothing
of its traditions. Perhaps you know that the monks were driven out of
these ruins by Henry VIII. Well, on the spot where that tree now stands
there grew a still greater oak, a giant tree, its trunk measured sixteen
loads of timber; which had, as tradition said, been planted by the first
prior of the Abbey when England was still Saxon. The night the monks
left a great gale raged over England. It was in October, when the trees
were full of leaf, and its fiercest gust tore the great oak from its
roothold, and flung it into the lake. Look! do you see that rise in the
sand, there, by the edge of the deep pool, in the eight foot water? That
is there it is supposed to lie. Well, the whole country-side said that it
was a sign that the monks had gone for ever from Bratham Abbey, and
the country-side was right. But when your ancestor, old yeoman
Caresfoot, bought this place and came to live here, in a year when there
was a great black frost that set the waters of the lake like one of the
new-fangled roads, he asked his neighbours, ay, and his labouring folk,
to come and dine with him and drink to the success of his purchase. It
was a proud day for him, and when dinner was done and they were all

mellow with strong ale, he bade them step down to the borders of the
lake, as he would have them be witness to a ceremony. When they
reached the spot they saw a curious sight, for there on a strong dray,
and dragged by Farmer Caresfoot's six best horses, was an oak of fifty
years' growth coming across the ice, earth, roots and all.
"On that spot where it now stands there had been a great hole, ten feet
deep by fourteen feet square, dug to receive it, and into that hole
Caresfoot Staff was tilted and levered off the dray. And when it had
been planted, and the frozen earth well trodden in, your grandfather in
the ninth degree brought his guests back to the old banqueting-hall, and
made a speech which, as it was the first and last he ever made, was long
remembered in the country-side. It was, put into modern English,
something like this:
"'Neighbours,--Prior's Oak has gone into the water, and folks said that it
was for a sign that the monks would never come back to Bratham, and
that it was the Lord's wind that put it there. And, neighbours, as ye
know, the broad Bratham lands and the fat marshes down by the brook
passed by king's grant to a man that knew not clay from loam, or layer
from pasturage, and from him they passed by the Lord's will to me, as I
have asked you here to-day to celebrate. And now, neighbours, I have a
mind, and though it seem to you but a childish thing, yet I have a mind,
and have set myself to fulfil it. When I was yet a little lad, and drove
the swine out to feed on the hill yonder, when the acorns had fallen,
afore Farmer Gyrton's father had gracious leave from the feoffees to
put up the fence that doth now so sorely vex us, I found one day a great
acorn, as big as a dow's egg, and of a rich and wondrous brown, and
this acorn I bore home and planted in kind earth in the corner of my
dad's garden, thinking that it would grow, and that one day I would hew
its growth and use it for a staff. Now that was fifty long years ago, lads,
and there where grew Prior's Oak, there, neighbours, I have set my
Staff to-day. The monks have told us how in Israel every man planted
his fig