Not now, as then, embracing in its green bosom sparse tracts of cultivated lands, with a few borough-towns, and a few feudal keeps, or hierarchal abbayes, but itself severed into divers and far-distant parcels, embosomed in broad stretches of the deepest meadows, the most teeming pastures, or girded on its swelling, insulated knolls by the most fertile corn-lands, survives the ancient Sherwood. Watered by the noblest and most beautiful of northern rivers, the calm and meadowy Trent, the sweet sylvan Idle, the angler's favorite, fairy-haunted Dee, the silver Eyre, mountainous Wharfe, and pastoral Ure and Swale; if I were called upon to name the very garden-gem of England, I know none that compares with this seat of the old-time Saxon forest. You can not now travel a mile through that midland region of plenty and prosperity without hearing the merry chime of village bells from many a country spire, without passing the happy doors of hundreds of low cottage homes, hundreds of pleasant hamlets courting the mellow sunshine from some laughing knoll, or nestling in the shrubberies of some orchard-mantled hollow. Nor are large, prosperous, and thriving towns, rich marts of agricultural produce, or manufactures of wealth richer than gold of El Dorado, so far apart but that a good pedestrian may travel through the streets of a half a dozen in a day's journey, and yet stand twenty times agaze between their busy precincts in admiration--to borrow the words of the great northern Romancer, with the scene and period of whose most splendid effort my humble tale unfortunately coincides--in admiration of the "hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed, perhaps, the stately march of the Roman soldiers." And here, let none imagine these to be mere exaggerations, sprung from the overflowing brain of the Romancer, for, not fifty miles distant from the scene described above, there is yet to be seen a venerable patriarch of Sherwood, which boasted still, within a few short years, some garlands of surviving green--the oak of Cowthorpe--probably the largest in the island; which is to this day the boundary corner of two marching properties, and has been such since it was constituted so in Doomsday Book, wherein it was styled _quercum ingentem_, the gigantic oak. Since the writing of those words eight centuries have passed, and there are many reasons for believing that those centuries have added not an inch to its circumference, but rather detracted from its vigor and its growth; and, to me, it seems far more probable that it was a full-grown tree, with all its leafy honors rife upon it, when the first Cæsar plunged, waist-deep, into the surges of the British Channel from the first Roman prow, than that it should have sprung up, like the gourd of a Jonah, in a single night, to endure a thousand years' decay without entirely perishing.