THE WONDERS OF VEGETATION. 159 



the evidence of the owner's power of jurisdiction, who 

 used to hang culprits there. 



Among the ancient and marvellous trees which ex- 

 cite the interest of travellers in the highest degree, 

 the immense oak at Allouville, near Yvetot, must be 

 numbered among those to which memory most fre- 

 quently returns. Much has been said and written 

 about this tree ; and though the simple villagers that 

 dwell around know nothing of all the scientific dis- 

 cussions of which it has been the subject, they regard 

 it with pride and with tender affections. Their an- 

 cestors have sat beneath in its shade ; and their own 

 children are now playing around it, as so many gen- 

 erations have done before them. 



It stands in the centre of a graveyard, and often 

 peasants from all the country around come to kneel 

 under its heavy branches and there to pour out to 

 God their sorrows and their grief. Just above the 

 ground it measures thirty feet in circumference, and 

 twenty -four feet at a man's height. In the interior of 

 the hollow trunk a little chapel has been fitted up, 

 and above, as it were in the second story, a rustic her 

 mit lives, while still higher in the tree a small belfry, 

 surmounted by a cross, has been built and crowns the 

 marvellous edifice. 



This oak cannot be less than 900 years old. The 

 interior was fitted up as early as the seventeenth centu- 

 ry and the chapel dedicated to the virgin. During 

 the Revolution ignorant fanatics, who delighted in de- 

 struction, attempted on several occasions to burn down 

 this venerable historic monument ; but the inhabitants 



