Winter Meeting. 245 



Do you love trees? then try them and sec and yon will o-et a 

 thousand times the pleasure out of them, you can talk with them more 

 hitelligently and receive a hundred times more reward for the love 

 expended upon them in return, than you or any living man or woman 

 can get from a pet poodle dog, fox hound, or pug dog in a thousand 

 years, and those who live after you will call you blessed. 



"Set some trees on the commons. 



Ashes, linden, iJoplars, birch. 

 Set them out around the school house. 



Plant them thick about the church. 

 Have the children's play ground shaded. 



And the public walks as well, 

 And the joys from these arising 



Coming ages glad will tell. 



This tree planting means much more to all of us than the pleas- 

 ure we get out of them or those who come after us will get. These 

 trees are a plan of nature to modify the heat of summer and the cold 

 oi winter. Our delight on a hot summer day is under the shade of the 

 trees and the modifying of the winter blasts by the forests is just as 

 perceptible to you if you seek their shelter. The trees help to regulate 

 our rainfalls and our moisture and every city and town and village 

 should be a city forest just so far as it is possible. 



We should have leaf growth of any and every and all kinds for 

 our pleasure and profit and health, and for Its influence on the climate 

 and rainfall. Without these forests we should have the desert wastes 

 described by the poet. 



"The forest trees that in the olden times. 

 The peoples glory and the poets pride 

 Tempered the air and guarded well the earth. 

 And under spreading boughs for ages kept 

 Great reservoirs to hold the snow and rain, 

 From which the moisture through the teeming years 

 Flowed equally but freely — all were gone, 

 Their priceless leaves exchanged for petty cash; 

 The cash has melted and had left no sign. 

 The logger and the lumberman are dead, 

 The ax has rusted out for lack of use. 

 But all the endless evil they had done 

 Was manifest upon the desert waste. 



The home of the birds. I was at Marshall, Mo., the other day in the 

 campus of the college grounds among the beautiful trees and the 

 president said to me that the trees were becoming a birds paradise and 

 his whole trouble during the summer was to keep the boys and men 

 from killing the birds and destroying the nests. Not the least, there- 

 fore, of the many benefits of the tree planting is the place we give the 

 birds for their homes, plenty of beautiful forest trees in which to 

 make their nests, after having destroyed their native habitat, the natural 

 forests. 



