The story I have compiled begins at a period now distant; yet the series of events appears compact and coherent. What fact is there more tough and undeniable than an oak in an English park? Yet, firmly rooted though it be among the things of to-day, its beginnings date back a thousand years; it is a creature of the Dark Ages, a contemporary of legendary heroes and heroines, giants and fairies. It is a tangible proof of the mysterious past; but, in bringing vanished ages into the light of the passing moment, it takes from them the very reality whereof they testify. CHAPTER II. SIR BRIAN'S TROUBLES. The Oak of Kildhurm does not date back a thousand years. Its exact age is not known, but it grew to be a sturdy vegetable, great of girth and royal in its spread of limb. It was first recognisable as a tree in the hither outskirts of Queen Elizabeth's time, or in King James's earlier years: about the epoch, say, of the Gunpowder Treason, when the struggles between King and Parliament which culminated in the rebellion of two-score years later were just beginning: when people wore ruffs and tight waists, and cultivated a stiffness of aspect as if they were continually sitting for their portraits; when the names of Bacon, Raleigh, Shakespeare, and Drake had as yet acquired no legendary halo; when gentlemen were haughty and punctilious, wore long swords with basket hilts, and were bloodthirstily polite in using the same; when women were almost as beautiful and virtuous as they are at the present day, but less squeamish upon certain points; when Spain was as much of a scapegoat for English vituperation as Russia is now; when popery was not merely a picturesque opinion, but a matter of blazing faggots and iron virgins; when El Dorado still gleamed along the horizons of the Spanish main. At about this time it was that two men, riding in opposite directions along a lonely road, met beneath a huge oak tree, whose gnarled limbs, thickly clothed with sombre foliage, extended nearly across the way. The name of only one of these men has been preserved to us by tradition. Sir Brian Kildhurm, a valiant knight of Queen Elizabeth's manufacture, had fought with distinction in the Spanish wars, and afterwards (though himself of Irish descent) had unsheathed his sword for the repression of the Irish difficulties of that day. He owned a fair estate on the coast of Cumberland, a castle with a broad-bottomed tower on its seaward corner, a little black-haired son, and a very beautiful wife. With regard to this same wife, however, there was a difficulty, it would be hard to say exactly what: but, at all events, the personage who chanced to encounter Sir Brian beneath the overhanging branches of the oak tree on the lonely road was, in Sir Brian's opinion, in some way responsible for it.