The story opens not with the legend itself but with a naturalist’s footnote: Sir Charles Lyell’s Second Visit to the United States records a date-palm in New Orleans, planted by a priest named Père Antoine, who provided in his will that the lot be forfeited if the tree were cut down. Aldrich then reports that Lyell’s inquiries among the “ancient créole inhabitants” yielded only that the old priest “gradually dried up, and finally blew away.” This deadpan, almost comic summary sets the tone for a tale that will treat its supernatural elements with a straight face.

A Frame Within a Frame

Aldrich introduces a second narrator: Miss Blondeau, a Louisiana lady he met in Alexandria, Virginia, in the summer of 1861, while New Orleans was held by Confederate forces. He insists that the story will seem tame because he lacks her “black ribbed-silk dress” and “Southern music” to tell it with. This self-deprecating gesture draws attention to the oral quality of the legend and to the distance between the written text and the living voice. The frame is layered: Lyell’s dry report, then Aldrich’s encounter, then Miss Blondeau’s performance, which she begins “with the air of Fiammetta telling her prettiest story to the Florentines in the garden of Boccaccio.” The allusion to Boccaccio’s Decameron signals that this is a tale of love, loss, and transformation, told by a woman who knows its power.

The Vow and the Stranger

The core narrative concerns two young men, Antoine and Emile Jardin, who are preparing to enter the Church. Their friendship is so close that they “studied, walked, ate, and slept together.” Into their lives comes a foreign lady from “some nameless island in the Pacific,” who dies and leaves a daughter, Anglice, aged sixteen or seventeen, “entirely friendless and unprovided for.” The young men swear “to love and watch over her as if she were their sister.” The language here is deliberately formal—swore between themselves—and the vow is presented as a sacred pact. But Anglice possesses “a wild, strange beauty that made other women seem tame beside her,” a phrase that hints at the disruption to come. The excerpt breaks off before the consequences unfold, but the setup is classic: a vow of chastity and protection, a beautiful ward, and the unspoken tension between duty and desire.

Diction and Distance

Aldrich’s prose in the frame is precise and slightly arch. He calls the meager results of Lyell’s inquiries “meagre and unsatisfactory,” and describes the priest as having “gradually dried up, and finally blew away”—a phrase that is both literal and absurd. The narrator’s voice is that of a gentleman collector of curiosities, presenting the legend with a mixture of skepticism and relish. In contrast, Miss Blondeau’s reported speech is more lyrical: she begins “with the air of Fiammetta,” and her tale is introduced as a “pretty story.” The shift in register—from Lyell’s scientific report to Aldrich’s wry commentary to Miss Blondeau’s romantic narration—creates a layered effect. The reader is never allowed to forget that this is a story being told, and that the telling itself is part of the subject.

The Palm as Witness

The date-palm itself is the only tangible link between the frame and the legend. It stands “near the Levée,” “thirty feet in height,” spreading its leaves “in the alien air as hardily as if its sinuous roots were sucking strength from their native earth.” The tree is an exotic, a transplant, like the characters. Père Antoine’s will—forfeiting the lot if the palm is cut down—makes the tree a legal as well as a symbolic object. In the legend, the palm may become a marker of the vow or of its violation. The story’s title points to the tree as the enduring witness to whatever transpired. Aldrich does not reveal the outcome in the excerpts, but the palm’s survival, and the priest’s strange physical wasting, suggest a tale in which nature and the supernatural intertwine.

Because the excerpts break off before the legend’s resolution, readers should attend to how Aldrich balances the competing claims of documentary fact and oral tradition. The palm tree, the will, the priest’s mummy-like decline—these are the fixed points around which the narrative circles. The story’s power may lie less in its plot than in the tension between the skeptical frame and the romantic tale within it.