Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/308

Rh it! and see the linden tree, and the great oak, and the white-faced cow, the house, the wall and the sweetbriers on it, and underneath all are the cloudy! so the last is made first, and the first last. Mr Church, who painted that Andes picture at the Athenaeum, could not come up to this; not he; no, not if he had Titian to help him! Look at the reflection of that great oak tree! Worth two hundred dollars for use is it? Captain McKay shan't have it; no, not for a thousand dollars ! No, no, dear old tree! Grandfather who was shot at Lexington used to tell grandmother, and she told everybody of it, that it was a large, full-grown tree, when his great-great-grandfather built the first log-house in town. Underneath that he first took his pack off his shoulders, and his hat from his head, and stood up straight, and offered his prayer of thanksgiving to God. ' Ebenezer/ said he, 'hitherto hath the Lord helped us,’ and he called his first son by that name—Ebenezer Welltodo. Here the old pilgrim buried Rachel, his first daughter, a tall girl, they say, but delicate. She died when she was only fifteen,—died the first year of their settlement, came over from England. But the garden rose could not stand the rough winters of those times, faded and died. The old pilgrim—he was only thirty-six or eight then, though—buried that rosebud under the great oak. When he was digging the grave, a woodpecker came and walked round on the trunk of the tree, and tapped it with his bill, and then stood close to his head and looked at him with great red eyes. He never had seen such a woodpecker before, nor any wild creature so tame, and called it a bird of paradise sent to tell him that his daughter was safe in the Promised Land. So he finished her grave, and lined it with green twigs which the oak-pruner had cut off from the tree, and covered her young body with the same—they had no other coffin—and filled it up with earth, and planted a wild-rose bush there for headstone. So this Rachel, like the other, was buried under a tree, and this Jacob also had his Oak of Weeping. I don't know how it is, but there has been a wopdpecker in some of the great dead limbs ever since. Dear old oak! if there be ’tongues in trees,’ what stories you could tell! You are as fair to the memory as to the eye. You shall never go to the mill;—a