MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 485 



conditions, magnified to my mind the importance of intelligence in tree 

 planting. 



Did you ever think about the fields of wheat or corn that have occupied 

 your attention for a year, and how soon all relics of them are gone? The 

 fields are planted to something else, the money for the grain that was sold 

 is spent. Possibly you may have a coat or cloak that will last you for a 

 time in remembrance of the work you put into the crop; and possibly a 

 piece of fiirniture may remain with you some years yet; but this amounts 

 to little as a remembrance of your best exertion put into those growing 

 crops. How different it is in the planting of trees! The orchard that you 

 planted with your boys to help you, will be a fact in the lives of their boys 

 for which they will hold you in grateful remembrance. 



The trees you selected with care, to embellish your home grounds, the 

 selection and planting of which were matters of interest to the whole house- 

 hold, will remain for generations, growing in beauty and magnifying your 

 work and thonghtfulness. 



I go back to my birthplace, and my first thought is of the house. It has 

 changed beyond recognition. I think of the church where I learned my 

 first lesson in religious exercise. Its place is occupied by a more modern 

 structure that I cannot recognize as connected with my own boyhood days. 

 But the Honey Locust that stands in the yard, that I helped to plant, the 

 coming of whose leaves was to me a revelation of beauty, the growth of 

 whose thorns was a menace to my tendency to climb, is there still. I can 

 sit under its branches and feel that in a sense it is my very own, although 

 the land upon which it stands has passed into alien hands. Bountiful 

 treasures of memory are open to me exhibiting so many attractive things 

 connected with boy life upon the farm, that I feel a relationship to that 

 tree. It remains of all the things, that my hands touched, upon the old 

 farm. 



I go back to the old school yard of early days; the outlook everywhere is 

 changed. New farm houses on every side; the schoolhouse itself so 

 modernized as to scarcely exhibit a single thing to recall a memory of boy- 

 hood days. The old desks, upon which are recorded symbols of my jack- 

 knife days, have been removed, and newer ones, unscratched and smooth, 

 have taken their places. The chalk marks made clandestinely upon the 

 walls are gone. I look in vain for something to recall the pleasures of 

 those boyish days. No, not quite in vain, for there stands a Maple tree in 

 the corner of the yard, a tree that I planted with my own hands under the 

 guidance of a good mother, who took us boys to the woods and taught us 

 how to carefully take up a tree and remove it to the school premises. She 

 told us while she taught the lesson in detail, of how it would sta,nd there 

 through all the years of our lives in remembrance of our painstaking 

 efforts. The maple has grown beyond my thought, but it recalls to me the 

 fact that, after it was planted and I had removed from there, my compan- 

 ions of the school ground watered and cared for it, and preserved it until it 

 was so established as to be a monument in my memory. 



In teaching the boys and girls the little details which secure success in 

 the planting of a tree, we often forget the seeds we sow in their hearts 

 that shall grow and develop and sweeten their manhood and womanhood. 

 What object in nature is more suggestive of good thoughts than a tree? 

 It is a model of symmetry, of structure and beauty ; a monument erected 

 to a beautiful, benevolent thought. 



But there are certain economical considerations in tree planting not 



