I went down the hill, crossed the creek on the stepping-stones, and followed the cowpath into the woods pasture.

It ran beside the creek bank through the spice thicket and blackberry patches, under pawpaw groves, and beneath giant oaks and elms.

Just where the creek turned at the open pasture, below the church and cemetery, right at the deep bend, stood the biggest white oak father owned.

It was about a tree exactly like this that an Englishman wrote a beautiful poem in McGuffey's Sixth, that begins: "A song to the oak, the brave old oak, Who hath ruled in the greenwood long; Here's health and renown to his broad green crown, And his fifty arms so strong." I knew it was the same, because I counted the arms time and again, and there were exactly fifty.

There was a pawpaw and spice hedge around three sides of this one, and water on the other.