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Never had she experienced so strong a sense of devotedness to him as when she saw the carriage winding past the middle oak-wood of the park, under a wet sky brightened from the West, and on out of sight. Rain went with Lord Romfrey in a pursuing cloud all the way to Bevisham, and across the common to the long garden and plain little green-shuttered, neat white cottage of Dr. Shrapnel.
They are afterwards washed in fresh water, and strung up by splits passed through their gills, one tier below another, to about seven feet from the ground. Oak-wood fires are then kindled under them for fourteen days, if intended for the foreign market; but if for home use, only twenty-four hours. The first are called red-herrings, and the latter are known as bloaters.
I had another shaft ready notched, so I loosed and set the shaft in his throat, and he fell. 'Straightway was a yelling and howling about us like the cries of scalded curs, and the oak-wood swarmed thick with these felons rushing on us; for it seems that the man whom I had slain was a chief amongst them, or we judged so by his goodly raiment. 'Methought then our last day was come.
So they went down to the water and washed the night from off them; and thence the most part of them went back to their lair among the thorn-bushes: but four of them went up the dale into the oak-wood to shoot a buck, and five more they sent out to watch their skirts around them; and Face-of-god with old Stone-face went over a ford of the stream, and came on to the lower slope of the burg, and so went up it to the top.
You could see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it. A huge load of oak-wood was passing through the gateway, towards the outbuildings in the rear; the fat cook or probably it might be the housekeeper stood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and poultry which a countryman had brought for sale.
The curse of the poor, monseigneur, is a seed that grows, grows taller than your tall oaks, and oak-wood builds the scaffold. Nobody here tells you the truth; and here it is, yes, the truth! I expect to die before long, and I risk very little in telling it to you, the truth! I, who play for the peasants to dance at the great fetes at Soulanges, I heed what the people say.
Suddenly the trees before him thinned, the ground sloped away, and there to the left on the westernmost edge of the hill lay the square stone rectory, its windows open to the evening coolness, a white flutter of pigeons round the dovecote on the side lawn, the gold of the August wheat in the great cornfield showing against the heavy girdle of oak-wood.
Let us get down into the wood where we can do off our skids and sit down, and then will I tell thee the tidings. Come on! And she caught his hand in hers, and they went speedily down the slopes toward the great oak-wood, the wind whistling past their ears. 'Whither are we going? said he. Said she: 'I am to show thee the way back home, which thou wilt not know surely amidst this snow.
But when they see that familiar pride of our country, a British oak, with its great underground buttresses spreading abroad through the soil in every direction, they infer at once that the buttresses are there, not as is really the case to support it and uphold it, but to drink in nutriment from the earth beneath, which is just about as capable of producing oak-wood as the copper plate on the ship's hull is capable of producing the flesh of a barnacle.
W. Warde Fowler. It appears to be simpler and more probable than the explanation which I formerly adopted, namely, that the oak was worshipped primarily for the many benefits which our rude forefathers derived from the tree, particularly for the fire which they drew by friction from its wood; and that the connexion of the oak with the sky was an after-thought based on the belief that the flash of lightning was nothing but the spark which the sky-god up aloft elicited by rubbing two pieces of oak-wood against each other, just as his savage worshipper kindled fire in the forest on earth.
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