In Arcadia a youth went to an ash tree at the head of a grove every day. He played in its branches and slept under its shade in the soft grass above its roots.
When the youth grew somewhat, he stopped going to the ash tree and went to the gymnasium where he wrestled and bloodied with his friends. The ash tree grew and became full and beautiful.
Soon the youth tired of rowdy pursuits. He was strong and lithe and his little mind yearned for more than the dust and blood of tussling. He went back to his grove, to his little ash tree sapling, and saw that it had grown, too.
He sat before it and he prayed for the nymph to show herself. He prayed how he had always loved the tree, that he was lonely, that all he wanted was to know the tree that had brought him joy.
And at that as if from a knot stepped out the nymph, resplendent in blue robes. Her hair was the color of its bark, wrapped in tresses of wildflowers. Her face was severe but beautiful. She held out soft, white, bare arms to the youth and pulled him to her bosom.
“How I’d waited for you,” she said. “Many years you played on my branches, you shimmied on my trunk, you flicked my very leaves to and fro. Oh! I couldn’t stand but for you to ask me to love you.”
She led the youth behind the tree into the grove to a small bower and a bed of soft clover. And there for two days and two nights the youth was lost to the world — his lessons, his flagging sport, the humbly laid-out table of his parents. At last he asked for water to quench his thirst, which the nymph produced from the leaves of her own tree, dripping cool dew into his parched mouth.
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