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The path was strewn with a carpet of leaves; here and there a tall poplar stood majestically above its stunted comrades of pines and scrub oaks, but looked gaunt and bare, while the humbler brothers bore a beauty of blood-red leaves, or the constant green. Janet smiled, recalling an old belief of her childhood. She had asked Pa Tapkins once why the oaks were so very little.
She had made up her mind to return to the park in order to sit upon the benches there, but she had mistaken the direction, and following up Sacramento Street, had come out at length, not upon the park, but upon a great vacant lot at the very top of the Clay Street hill. The ground was unfenced and rose above her to form the cap of the hill, all overgrown with bushes and a few stunted live oaks.
If a dry limb was cut or broken off, a foot from the trunk, these thin oaken lips would slowly creep out and envelop it a sort of Western omnivorous trait appearing in the trees. Whitman refers to "the slumbering and liquid trees." These Yosemite oaks recall his expression more surely than any of our Eastern trees.
During this period, I was several times requested, then commanded, to go among the oaks and bring out my countrymen, and offer them their lives on giving up their rifles and persons. I at last offered to go and call them out, on condition that they should return to San Juan or go to Monterey, with their arms; this being refused, I told the commandante to go in and bring them out himself.
Master Gammon bade him go to a certain churchyard in Sussex, and inspect a particular tombstone, upon which the ages of his ancestry were written. They were more like the ages of oaks than of men. "It's the heart kills," said Robert. "It's damned misfortune," murmured the farmer. "It is the wickedness in the world," thought Rhoda. "It's a poor stomach, I reckon," Master Gammon ruminated.
The oaks were not yet yellow, their leaves were half green, half brown; Time had begun to invade them, but had not yet indented his full mark. Of the year there are two most pleasurable seasons: the spring, when the oak-leaves come russet-brown on the great oaks; the autumn, when the oak-leaves begin to turn. At the one, I enjoy the summer that is coming; at the other, the summer that is going.
Ours is a world wherein God hath ordained that acorns should go on toward oaks, huts become houses, tents temples, babes men, and the generations journey on to that sublime event "toward which the whole creation moves." In this long upward march science declares the human body has had its place.
I like the trees here very much; they are meant for hawthorns and oaks. There are a very few leaves on each tree, but at the top they are all twisted about, and are thicker, as if the wind were blowing them. Four bunches of leaves spring from long stiff stalks, and support the square abacus, one under each corner.
With a splendid one-handed catch Thurston had brought the well-fought contest to a close, and secured a victory for Ronleigh College. This brilliant feat, coupled with the gallant manner in which he had continued his innings when hurt, and so enabled Oaks to run up the score, caused the black sheep of the Sixth Form to be regarded as the hero of the day.
Land speculators swarmed everywhere; land offices confronted one at every turn; lawyers, doctors, men of all professions and trades had descended upon this waste of sand and scrub oaks about the lake.
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