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“How the oak-tree loves her!” said the ash. “The lazy vine has naught to do but to twine herself about the arrogant oak-tree and hear him tell his wondrous stories!”

The ivy heard these envious words, and they made her very sad; but she said nothing of them to the oak-tree, and that night the oak-tree rocked her to sleep as he repeated the lullaby a zephyr was singing to him.

“There is a storm coming over the hills,” said the oak-tree one day. “The east wind tells me so; the swallows fly low in the air, and the sky is dark. Clasp me round about with thy dear arms, my beloved, and nestle close unto my bosom, and no harm shall befall thee.”

“I have no fear,” murmured the ivy; and she clasped her arms most closely about him and nestled unto his bosom.

The storm came over the hills and swept down upon the greenwood with deafening thunder and vivid lightning. The storm-king himself rode upon the blast; his horses breathed flames, and his chariot trailed through the air like a serpent of fire. The ash fell before the violence of the storm-king’s fury, and the cedars groaning fell, and the hemlocks and the pines; but the oak-tree alone quailed not.

“Oho!” cried the storm-king, angrily, “the oak-tree does not bow to me, he does not tremble in my presence. Well, we shall see.”

With that the storm-king hurled a mighty thunderbolt at the oak-tree, and the brave, strong monarch of the greenwood was riven. Then, with a shout of triumph, the storm-king rode away.

“Dear oak-tree, you are riven by the storm-king’s thunderbolt!” cried the ivy, in anguish.

“Ay,” said the oak-tree, feebly, “my end has come; see, I am shattered and helpless.”

“But I am unhurt,” remonstrated the ivy, “and I will bind up your wounds and nurse you back to health and vigor.”

And so it was that, although the oak-tree was ever afterward a riven and broken thing, the ivy concealed the scars upon his shattered form and covered his wounds all over with her soft foliage.

“I had hoped, dear one,” she said, “to grow up to thy height, to live with thee among the clouds, and to hear the solemn voices thou didst hear. Thou wouldst have loved me better then?”

But the old oak-tree said: “Nay, nay, my beloved; I love thee better as thou art, for with thy beauty and thy love thou comfortest mine age.”

Then would the ivy tell quaint stories to the old and broken oak-tree,–stories she had learned from the crickets, the bees, the butterflies, and the mice when she was an humble little vine and played at the foot of the majestic oak-tree towering in the green-wood with no thought of the tiny shoot that crept toward him with her love. And these simple tales pleased the old and riven oak-tree; they were not as heroic as the tales the winds, the clouds, and the stars told, but they were far sweeter, for they were tales of contentment, of humility, of love.

So the old age of the oak-tree was grander than his youth.

And all who went through the greenwood paused to behold and admire the beauty of the oak-tree then; for about his seared and broken trunk the gentle vine had so entwined her graceful tendrils and spread her fair foliage, that one saw not the havoc of the years nor the ruin of the tempest, but only the glory of the oak-tree’s age, which was the ivy’s love and ministering.

1886