Dark was the trunk in the middle

So she might have walked until she had lost all knowledge of her way,had it not been for the interruption of a tree, which, although itdid not grow across her path, stopped her as effectively as ifthe branches had struck her in the face. It was an ordinary tree,but to her it appeared so strange that it might have been the only treein the world. Dark was the trunk in the middle, and the branchessprang here and there, leaving jagged intervals of light between themas distinctly as if it had but that second risen from the ground. 　　Having seen a sight that would last her for a lifetime, and fora lifetime would preserve that second, the tree once more sankinto the ordinary ranks of trees, and she was able to seat herselfin its shade and to pick the red flowers with the thin greenleaves which were growing beneath it. She laid them side by side,flower to flower and stalk to stalk, caressing them for walking alone. 　　Flowers and even pebbles in the earth had their own life and disposition,and brought back the feelings of a child to whom they were companions. 　　Looking up, her eye was caught by the line of the mountains flyingout energetically across the sky like the lash of a curling whip. 　　She looked at the pale distant sky, and the high bare places onthe mountain-tops lying exposed to the sun. When she sat down shehad dropped her books on to the earth at her feet, and now shelooked down on them lying there, so square in the grass, a tallstem bending over and tickling the smooth brown cover of Gibbon,while the mottled blue Balzac lay naked in the sun. With a feelingthat to open and read would certainly be a surprising experience,she turned the historian's page and read that--His generals, in the early part of his reign, attempted the reductionof Aethiopia and Arabia Felix. They marched near a thousandmiles to the south of the tropic; but the heat of the climatesoon repelled the invaders and protected the unwarlike nativesof those sequestered regions. . . . The northern countriesof Europe scarcely deserved the expense and labour of conquest. 　　The forests and morasses of Germany were filled with a hardy raceof barbarians, who despised life when it was separated from freedom.