This fear it apparently was, rather than any organic disease which was eating away the health of John South.
As the tree waved, South waved his head, making it his flugel-man with abject obedience.

"Ah, when it was quite a small tree," he said, "and I was a little boy, I thought one day of chopping it off with my hook to make a clothes-line prop with.

But I put off doing it, and then I again thought that I would; but I forgot it, and didn't.

And at last it got too big, and now 'tis my enemy, and will be the death o' me.
Little did I think, when I let that sapling stay, that a time would come when it would torment me, and dash me into my grave." "No, no," said Winterborne and Marty, soothingly.

But they thought it possible that it might hasten him into his grave, though in another way than by falling.
"I tell you what," added Winterborne, "I'll climb up this afternoon and shroud off the lower boughs, and then it won't be so heavy, and the wind won't affect it so." "She won't allow it--a strange woman come from nobody knows where--she won't have it done." "You mean Mrs.Charmond?
Oh, she doesn't know there's such a tree on her estate.