tree eeeungs 
3 
the farmer’s pig root up and eat my acorns, and then who 
eats the pig ? Why, you do, and very sweet he tastes, too, 
when roasted in the oven all brown and sugary. 
Men have always been friendly to me. When I was 
an acorn my mother, who was five hundred years old, 
used to tell me things she had heard her father say—I 
guess he heard them from his father in turn—about how 
long centuries ago men used to worship me as a god. 
They thought anything so big and strong, anything that 
lived so many hundred years, must have some kind of a 
god inside it. Your own forefathers in England, the 
Druids, fierce men and heathen, hunters and fighters, had 
groves of sacred oaks. Whatever grew upon an oak they 
looked upon as a gift from heaven, especially mistletoe. 
When they found mistletoe growing around my great 
grandfather’s trunk, they would fetch a priest in a white 
robe and he would take his golden knife and cut off the 
mistletoe. My grandfather would have been flattered 
and pleased by this attention if he had not been so dis¬ 
gusted by the cruel custom of sacrificing two white bulls 
right under his branches every time the mistletoe was cut. 
And even earlier than this, down on the shores of the 
warm Mediterranean Sea the ancient Greeks had a temple 
at Dodona. The temple was dedicated to Zeus, and near 
the temple was an old, old oak tree which the Greeks said 
