inmost secrets of their hearts with such perfect
simultaneousness, that not one of them could
have heard a syllable of the secrets
communicated by her confiding and voluble friend.
To them there was no need of external
phenomena; they cared not for setting suns, they
cared not for moonlit waves, they looked not to
the right nor to the left, but all talked at once
from the depths of their own inner
consciousness.

Expectation, awakened by the feeling that
our voyage would soon be over, revived
cordiality among the passengers, and suggested
topics for discourse connected with the future,
now that we had used up the past. But the
sight of land, while it afforded matter for
inquiry and explanation as different objects came
in sight, relaxed that tie which had bound us all
close together. On shore we should no longer
have any common interest, and our social status
would no longer be the same. Orestes cared
less for Pylades, Theseus became cool towards
Perithous, while despised "Steerage," having
put on his holiday clothes (previously secreted),
rose to a level with the rest.

Thus was dissolved the oligarchic republic of
the good ship Odin.

GOSPEL OAKS.

DR. DRYASDUST (as represented by an army
of writers in Notes and Queries) complains that
gospel oaks, gospel elms, and sermon trees are
one by one disappearing. Sometimes, the trees
die from sheer old age; sometimes, they are
rooted up by farm improvers, factory builders,
villa speculators, or railway contractors.
Dryasdust complains that there is in every case
one link broken between the present and the
past: one little centre destroyed around which
an old story had crystallised.

These gospel oaks and sermon trees point to
a state of society and of feeling which has
undergone much change. They were pulpits; they
were religious memorials; they were county
boundaries and parish limits; they were meeting-
points for villagers at certain annual celebrations;
they were all of these things by turns,
or in different instances. Some of those who
read this page may be aware of the recent
existence of the Gospel Oak Fields at Kentish
Town, London, now almost covered by
railways and houses. Far away from the
metropolis, there are the Gospel Oak Works,
and the Wednesbury Oak Works, in the busy
iron and coal district of South Staffordshire.
There is a gospel oak at Cressage in Shropshire.
There is another, generally known as
the Shire Oak, between Wallsall and Crickfield.
Gospel oaks also exist, or lately
existed, not far from Winchester; and near
Leamington; and in the park of Polstead Hall
near Stowmarket; and near Ross in Herefordshire.
Here and there, instead of a gospel oak,
we meet with a gospel elm, a gospel tree, or a
gospel bush.

Country people attach a religious meaning to
these trees. Thus, the Cressage Oak in Shropshire,
supposed by some to have derived its
name from Christ's Oak, is said to mark the
spot where the first Christian missionaries to
that county preached, in the old Druidical
days. In Worcestershire, there has been a
controversy on the question whether the
Apostle's Oak at Stanford Bridge, or the Mitre
Oak at Hartlebury, was the scene of the
controversy between St. Augustine and the British
bishops, twelve hundred and sixty years ago.
Of the gospel oak near Kentish Town, the
tradition used to be that either St. Augustine or
one of the Fathers once preached under the
shadow of its overhanging boughs. Up in the
far north, there is a venerable fir-tree on the
western coast of Argyle, which, before the building
of a regular church, was occasionally used
as a pulpit; the minister and his flock
clustered under its umbrageous canopy in fine
weather, trusting to a neighbouring house as a
place of assemblage in wet and cold weather.
What was thus done in comparatively modern
times may well have been the custom to a
much greater extent in those olden days when
churches were few, trees and green fields
plentiful, and people widely scattered.

It is remarked by the Rev. A. G. H.
Hollingsworth, in his History of Stowmarket:
"When Christianity was first introduced into
England, it was customary for the missionaries
to select some one known gigantic tree as
their place of assemblage. These leafy
tabernacles were generally oaks of vast size and
stature. Nor is it at all unlikely that some of
them were thus chosen because from their
gigantic bosom the sacred mistletoe of the
Druids had been cut; and they were
consecrated by superstitious veneration in the minds
of the people as sacred places. Nor were they
inappropriate pulpits for the apostolic bishops
and priests, who thus in making their shades
vocal with the gospel words, proclaimed by their
voice the victory of Christ over darkness and
idolatry." Mr. Hollingsworth was speaking
specially of the gospel oak in the parish of
Stowmarket. This measures forty-three feet in
circumference at a height of four feet from the
ground; it has a hollow trunk capacious enough
to contain eight or ten persons. An examination
of its rings leads to an opinion that it cannot
be much less than a thousand years old.

The majority of traditions relating to such
old trees are connected rather with the
boundaries between parish and parish, or county and
county, than with purely religious ceremonials.
They speak of processions, perambulations, and
beating the bounds, generally with more or less
admixture of pious observances, but principally
having in view the marking or indentifying of
corners in the boundary lines of local divisions.
Near Ross, it used to be the custom, during
the annual ceremony of beating the bounds, to
read portions of the gospel under the shadow
both of the gospel oak and the gospel bush.
The Plestor Oak mentioned by White in his