So it was on this occasion; he looked straight at me with no sign of
understanding, no change in his clear grey eyes, and answered nothing.
But I would not be put off, and when, raising my voice, I repeated the
question, he replied, after another interval of silence, that the thorn
"was never any different." 'Twas just the same, ivy and all, when he
were a small boy. It looked just so old; why, he remembered his old
father saying the same thing--'twas the same when he were a boy, and
'twas the same in his father's time. Then anxious to escape from the
subject he began talking of something else.
It struck me that after all the most interesting thing about the thorn
was its appearance of great age, and this aspect I had now been told had
continued for at least a century, probably for a much longer time. It
produced a reverent feeling in me such as we experience at the sight of
some ancient stone monument. But the tree was alive, and because of its
life the feeling was perhaps stronger than in the case of a granite
cross or cromlech or other memorial of antiquity.
Sitting by the thorn one day it occurred to me that, growing at this
spot close to the road and near the summit of that vast down, numberless
persons travelling to and from Salisbury must have turned aside to rest
on the turf in the shade after that laborious ascent or before beginning
the long descent to the valley below.
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