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made out of it. Lord Dudley has an oak table, made from a tree that grew in his park, which is three feet broad, and seventy-five feet long.

What a tree it must have been, Papa!

Its bark is not only used in tanning, but also in dying black; especially is this the case with the oak apples which you have often gathered.

And I think you said, that these were used in making ink.

They are a principal ingredient. When I was visiting in the neighbourhood of Olney, in Buckinghamshire, where the poet Cowper lived, I went into Yardley Forest, and climbed the tree which he has so beautifully celebrated.

You climb an oak tree, Papa! Why I never saw you get up a tree; and you could not get into this oak. Perhaps not; but I did really climb to the uppermost branches of the Yardley Oak; it is full of great knots, and I had no more difficulty in climbing it, than I have in going up stairs.

And how long did you stay in it?

For some time, I assure you, for the delight of contemplating the surrounding scenery, lulled my thoughts into a most delightful reverie. As I beheld the vast throne on which I was seated, and examined its infinitely varied twistings, furrows, and irregularities, I was led to compare the life of man with the duration and growth of this majestic monarch of the woods. This oak, I reflected, requires even the aid of pleasing, but uncertain tradition, to hand down to us the record of its first origin: it has stood while the infant has become an old man-it has been contemporary with generation after generation-while man, the vaunted "lord of the creation," is but an ephemeral being a mere existence, that is here to-day and gone to-morrow-presenting a most forcible admonition of the great importance of constant preparation for that future and better state, in which we shall change places; and the duration of the oak compared with our own existence, will be but the atom of a dayeternity against time-in which the revolution of

days, weeks, months, years, and even periods, will

leave no evidence of their progression.

[graphic]

SUMMER.

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