Item - The Oak of Montravail

(source: NIU Libraries)

Online Full Text:	Northern Illinois University
Series:	New York Weekly — v. 27 no. 51 — page 8
Subject / Tag:	Poem
Part of:	New York Weekly, v. XXVII, no. 51, October 28, 1872 (Issue)
Author:	Barber, Joseph
Date:	October 28, 1872
Edition Description:	At Montravail, in France, in the court-yard of an old feudal residence stands the famous "Montravail Oak," a tree more than two thousand years old. In order to ascertain its age, M. d'Orbigny, a distinguished French naturalist, cut a piece out of its entire thickness and boiled it in oil, an infallible means of bringing to light the separate layers produced each year. The result showed that the tree was two thousand and some hundreds of years old. This oak is hollow, and its interior in furnished with stone benches, on which a dozen persons can sit confortably [sic] round a table in the center. The light of Heaven shines into this sylvan apartment through a doorway and two windows, roughed out originally by the canker of decay and subsequently shaped and finished by the hand of art.-Galigani's Messenger.
First Sentence:	The oak that for two thousand years has battled tireless Time,
Last Sentence:	God liken me in my old age to the Oak of Montravail!