he brightest silver.
As I came in view of it, the sun was just covered by a passing cloud, from
the lower edge of which the bright rays shot down obliquely upon this
extraordinary phenomenon, lighting it up in the most brilliant manner. At
one moment it looked like a huge silver cone; then took the appearance of
an illuminated castle with pinnacles and towers, or the dome of some great
cathedral; then of a gigantic elephant, covered with trappings, but always
of solid silver, and indescribably magnificent. Had all the treasures of
the earth been offered me to say what it was, I should have been unable to
answer. Bewildered by my interminable wanderings in the prairie, and
weakened by fatigue and hunger, a superstitious feeling for a moment came
over me, and I half asked myself whether I had not reached some enchanted
region, into which the evil spirit of the prairie was luring me to
destruction by appearances of supernatural strangeness and beauty.

Banishing these wild imaginings, I rode on in the direction of this
strange object; but it was only when I came within a very short distance
that I was able to distinguish its nature. It was a live oak of most
stupendous dimensions, the very patriarch of the prairie, grown grey in
the lapse of ages. Its lower limbs had shot out in an horizontal, or
rather a downward-slanting direction; and, reaching nearly to the ground,
formed a vast dome several hundred feet in diameter, and full a hundred
and thirty feet high. It had no appearance of a tree, for neither trunk
nor branches were visible. It seemed a mountain of whitish-green scales,
fringed with long silvery moss, that hung like innumerable beards from
every bough and twig. Nothing could better convey the idea of immense and
incalculable age than the hoary beard and venerable appearance of this
monarch of the woods. Spanish moss of a silvery grey covered the whole
mass of wood and foliage, from the topmost bough down to the very ground;
short near the top of the tree, but gradually increasing in length as it
descended, until it hung like a deep fringe from the lower branches. I
separated the vegetable curtain with my hands, and entered this august
temple with feelings of involuntary awe. The change from the bright
sunlight to the comparative darkness beneath the leafy vault, was so great,
that I at first could scarcely distinguish any thing. When my eyes got
accustomed to the gloom, however, nothing could be more beautiful th