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the: STORY 01? THE OAK TREE 
When the wind fills them, and their great heads bend. 
But when you think of all the roots they drop, 
As much at bottom as there is on top, 
A double tree, widespread in earth and air, 
Like a reflection in the water there. 
Caroline Perkins Sutson. 
If you stood alone under an oak tree on a summer's 
day, and that oak tree could talk, it might have a great 
deal to say to you. Perhaps it would say: 
“Look here, you boy or girl, maybe you think because 
I can't run around the way you do, that I'm not just 
as much alive and as much use in the world as you are. 
Well—maybe not quite as much alive nor quite as useful, 
because nothing in all Nature is as much alive or as 
important as man, but I want you to know I'm more than 
a stick of wood to be cut up for chairs and tables! I'm 
a plant, a living plant, like my half-brother the pine and 
my sweet cousin the rose, and even my homely great- 
niece the cabbage. You’re an animal, and I'm a plant, 
and in the order of the living world plants come next 
beneath animals. And not so very far beneath, either. 
Animals live on plants; if every plant in the ground 
should shrivel up and die, all you men and animals would 
die of starvation very soon after. I’m not much of a 
food plant myself, like a bean or a potato, but doesn’t 
