Its circumference was thirty-four feet.

The baroness came to this ancient tree, and hung her chaplet on a mutilated limb called the "knights' bough." The sun was setting tranquil and red; a broad ruby streak lingered on the deep green leaves of the prodigious oak.

The baroness looked at it awhile in silence.
Then she spoke slowly to it and said, "You were here before us: you will be here when we are gone." A spasm crossed Josephine's face, but she said nothing at the time.

And so they went in together.
Now as this tree was a feat of nature, and, above all, played a curious part in our story, I will ask you to stay a few minutes and look at it, while I say what was known about it; not the thousandth part of what it could have told, if trees could speak as well as breathe.
The baroness did not exaggerate; the tree was far older than even this ancient family.

They possessed among other archives a manuscript written by a monk, a son of the house, about four hundred years before our story, and containing many of the oral traditions about this tree that had come down to him from remote antiquity.