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I found him mumbling fast to himself and making slight, restless efforts to move. At last he grew quiet, and presently his half-open gnarled right hand came groping out over the covers. I took it in mine, and at once I felt it close on mine with a quick, convulsive strength. His hand was moist, his eyes saw nothing. I sat there thus for a long time. Then suddenly, "Good boy," he muttered thickly.

The oak, that giant tree which we were comparing to Shakespeare just now, and which has more than one point of resemblance to him, the oak has an unusual shape, gnarled branches, dark leaves, and hard, rough bark; but it is the oak. And it is because of these qualities that it is the oak.

Strong, sturdy, and lusty as he was, he could not help feeling the effects of all this. He leaned his rifle against a huge, gnarled root, within arm's length of where he half reclined, with his feet extended along the trunk. He had but to reach out his hand, without moving his body, to grasp the weapon whatever moment it might be needed.

"Evidently somebody doesn't want visitors," was the comment of the doctor's son. "I say," he called out, "what do you mean by heaving that wo " Crash! From the interior of the cabin came another chunk of wood, a gnarled root, just grazing Shep's shoulder. Then a stone followed, striking Whopper a glancing blow on the hip. Both lads retreated in confusion.

"All my youth, when I was strong and good-looking as you are now, and women loved me, I worked hard like a slave, and starved and saved. When others played I toiled, when they spent I hoarded up. What was I saving for? That I might buy myself that." He waved his hand in the direction of Suzee, sitting in a little crumpled heap against a gnarled tree opposite us.

But Sylvia was half-way across the back-yard worse, if possible, than the front as to the condition in which it was kept and had passed through the little gate into the orchard. It was full of old gnarled apple-trees, their trunks covered with gray lichen, in which the cunning chaffinch built her nest in spring-time.

Do we work for Him as He and all that are with Him do? Is His will done by us on earth, as it is heaven? Alas! alas! have we not all been like those three apostles whose eyes were heavy with sleep even while the Lord was wrestling with the tempter under the gnarled olives in the pale moonlight of Gethsemane? Let us arouse ourselves from our sloth.

Shall we be content any longer with a knowledge that is power, shall we boast ourselves any longer of a scientific art that leaves human nature, that makes over human nature to the tampering of an unwatched, unchecked empiricism, that leaves our own souls it may be, and the souls in which ours are garnered up, all wild and hidden, and gnarled within with nature's crudities and spontaneities, or choked and bitter with artificial, but unscientific, unartistic repression?

The broad outer moat was dry and grass-grown, and the laden trees of the orchard hung over it with gnarled, straggling branches that drew fantastical shadows upon the green slope.

Their horses were tethered some distance in the rear and they, too, rested in quiet. The tree sent up a great gnarled root and Ned sat on the ground, leaning against it. It just fitted into the curve of his back and he was very comfortable. But he did not allow his comfort to lull him into lethargy. Always he watched the river and the farther shore. He had now become no mean scout and sentinel.