Excerpt from An Old Shropshire Oak, Vol. 1 What are the headings of all these chapters for, and all these collected extracts?' I replied, The dream about the Old Oak of which I wrote, I am going to commit to paper. I have many cares and troubles in my vocation, and it will tend to ease them. There is nothing like a book, and a pen, and a garden to divert the mind. Bed a rose, prune a tree, dig a trench, or clean a flower border, and it is astonishing what relief it will give to a troubled spirit. It brings a man to himself, and Nature is beautiful always, even if the world is cross-grained, crooked, and awry. Horace had a good notion of this when he thus commenced his epistle to his steward, and you, as a scholar, will anticipate the words. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.