I knew the open air was what she needed,
and I thought the walk would do her good, whether she made any new
astronomical acquisitions or not.
It was now late in the autumn, and the trees were pretty nearly stripped
of their leaves.--There was no place so favorable as the Common for the
study of the heavens. The skies were brilliant with stars, and the air
was just keen enough to remind our young friends that the cold season was
at hand. They wandered round for a while, and at last found themselves
under the Great Elm, drawn thither, no doubt, by the magnetism it is so
well known to exert over the natives of its own soil and those who have
often been under the shadow of its outstretched arms. The venerable
survivor of its contemporaries that flourished in the days when
Blackstone rode beneath it on his bull was now a good deal broken by age,
yet not without marks of lusty vitality. It had been wrenched and
twisted and battered by so many scores of winters that some of its limbs
were crippled and many of its joints were shaky, and but for the support
of the iron braces that lent their strong sinews to its more infirm
members it would have gone to pieces in the first strenuous northeaster
or the first sudden and violent gale from the southwest. But there it
stood, and there it stands as yet,--though its obituary was long ago
written after one of the terrible storms that tore its branches,--leafing
out hopefully in April as if it were trying in its dumb language to lisp
"Our Father," and dropping its slender burden of foliage in October as
softly as if it were whispering Amen!
Not far from the ancient and monumental tree lay a small sheet of water,
once agile with life and vocal with evening melodies, but now stirred
only by the swallow as he dips his wing, or by the morning bath of the
English sparrows, those high-headed, thick-bodied, full-feeding,
hot-tempered little John Bulls that keep up such a swashing and swabbing
and spattering round all the water basins, one might think from the fuss
they make about it that a bird never took a bath here before, and that
they were the missionaries of ablution to the unwashed Western world.
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