the stem and the branches 
i9 
Stealthily the sheriff’s soldiers closed in about the 
glades of the forest where they knew Robin Hood and 
his men made their home. 
“Aha,” they said, “we have caught our bird this time 
unaware!” 
Suddenly they heard the whizz of arrows; arrows 
seemed to rain from the sky. They cried surrender and 
looked up. There were Robin Hood’s men, swarming 
in the trees above. Along the broad branches of the 
great oaks they leaped and ran, bows in hand, their coats 
and caps of Lincoln green splashed with the sunlight 
which filtered down between the leaves. 
Small wonder that the soldiers cried, “Enough!” 
Look at an oak in winter if you would see its true 
grandeur, in winter when it is stripped of leaves. Yonder 
towers its great trunk, one hundred feet high; its mas¬ 
sive gnarled limbs show strength to their very twig tips. 
It seems hardly fitting, does it, to speak of this great 
trunk as a stem? Daisies have stems, and violets have 
stems, but daisies and violets are only little modest 
flowering plants. And that is what the oak tree is—a 
flowering plant. There is nothing little and modest about 
it, to be sure, but it is a plant just the same, and is 
made up, like all the higher plants, of a root, a stem with 
branches, and leaves. The stem does two things; it 
holds the branches aloft, spreading the leaves to the sun- 
