ABSTRACT
Often when after a thunder-storm, one passes a field in which buckwheat is growing, it appears quite blackened and singed. It is just as if a flame of fire had passed across it; and then the countryman says, it got
that from the lightning. But whence has it received that? I will tell you what the sparrow told me about it, and the sparrow heard it from an old willow tree, which stood by a buck-wheat field, and still stands there. It is quite a great venerable willow tree, but crippled and old; it is burst in the middle, and grass and brambles grow out of the cleft; the tree bends forward, and the branches hang quite down to the ground, as if they were long green hair.
