"The Tree of Life", by Arthur Machen

This is just all the chapters put together into one upload. If you've been following along the whole time, there is nothing new to hear here.

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0:00:00 Chapter 1
0:12:21 Chapter 2
0:27:25 Chapter 3
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A lot of Welsh names in this one, and disappointingly little help online with pronunciations. I did my best based on what I could find, but please be gentle in the comments with the inevitable errors I made... Even google translate, which offers Welsh as an option, does not have voice output for Welsh words, so not even any help there.

Also interesting that Machen uses 'eggplant' instead of 'aubergine'. Hmmm...

From the annotations:

Chapter 1: Llantrisant: town in South Wales, the name means "Parish of the Three Saints"

St. Teilo: important 6th century Welsh saint

the dissolution of the religious houses: Henry VIII disbanded the Roman Catholic monasteries in Britain between 1536 and 1541

rose for the King in 1648: for Charles I during the English Civil War

Mr. Gladstone: Liberal prime minister William Ewart Gladstone

Inigo Jones: celebrated 17th century architect

marasmus: vague designation for any wasting disease

the arrows of the Gwent bowmen darkening the air at Crécy: like the later Battle of Agincourt, the Battle of Crécy (1346) represented an English victory during the Hundred Years War

Chapter 2: Arbor Vitae - Latin for "tree of life"

I know my pronunciation here of "vitae" is not a proper Latin one, but it is the pronunciation that arborists in the USA use when referring specifically to this exact plant. Why American arborists pronounce it wrong, I don't know, but that's the accepted tree-professional pronunciation here where I live, so it is what I used for this story.

Chapter 3: Bartle Frere: Sir Henry Bartle Frere (1815-84), colonial administrator; the anecdote can be found in "The Life and Correspondence of Sir Bartle Frere"

night-houses - Kate Hamilton and all that lot: a "night house" was an all-night public house, such as the disreputable "Kate Hamilton's"

Truefitt's: the self-described "Oldest Barbershop in the World", founded in 1805 and still in existence today

Judge and Jury: parlour game

poses plastiques: Victorian practice of posing as "living statues", a mode of performance with risque associations

Whips to scourge us: Lord Byron is quoted as having said to Walter Scott "Our pleasant vices are but whips to scourge us", echoing King Lear 5.3.161-2: "The gods are just, and of our pleasnt vices | Make instruments to plague us"

a memory like Macaulay's: Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59); as Francis Galton wrote in "Hereditary Genius", "He was able to recall many pages of hundreds of volumes by various authors, which he had acquired by simply reading them over"

Revelations: from Revelation 22

the Committee: i.e. of the club

The pictures used are:

Chapter 1: "View across the fields towards Llantrisant Old Church", by Eric Jones, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)

Chapter 2: "Arborvitae" by Oregon State University, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)

Chapter 3: "smoking room" by pshab, i.e. the Smoking room of National Liberal Club, Whitehall, London. Used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)

To follow along: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0607681h.html#2