Obviously finished, since he’s been dead lo! these hundred and more years. Cue a Yoda-comment here about how when one hundred years dead you are, not so good will you look. . . .
So in addition to Chesty’s grain and bark, another piece of evidence surfaced tending to show that this is a hundred-year-old American Chestnut: this plank has, in the sapwood near the bark, a worm hole of the sort that salvaged Chestnut is famed for. It’s but a pinhole you couldn’t fit a BB into. So I’m very comfortable, on four lines of evidence (remember the Olde Good Things guy who identified this piece and sold it to me), declaring that this is a genuine first-order relic of Sancta Castanea Dentata.
I do note to myself that if there is ever a Chesty the Second I will use a very light stain.
