HARDWOOD RECORD 



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January first. Nineteen Hundred and Twelve 



Good morrow, friend! Today from wooded slope and limbered plain 

 comes the salutation. 



^ Since Time began, my forebears have been knit in closest bonds with 

 jl yours, and long before your forefathers had learned the arts and crafts, 

 which now add to the joy of living, they stripped mine naked to make a 

 shelter for their clamorous broods. Even the fire that warmed their shiver- 

 ing bodies came from my procrealors' burning hearts. 



^1 My ancestors deemed it their privilege to cradle yours when they were 

 jl helpless babes; and their duty to form the beds upon which were 

 stretched all that was mortal of you in last repose. 



^ Even in the greatest tragedy and the greatest good the world [has ever 

 jl known, man was not separated from the tree. It is Christ on the cross 

 of wood thai is the symbol of humanity's redemption. 



tfJT We carried the intrepid mariner over unchartered seas to this glad new 

 ji land, where we again willingly sacrificed ourselves to your^^desires 

 and needs. 



tflT Gladly we laid our triumphant heads, which before had only known the 

 Jl winds of heaven, upon the ground that our bodies might form the walls 

 of homes that called the love of wives and the tenderness of mothers across 

 their thresholds. 



fn And those of us that stood after great fields had been denuded of our 

 7l) kind, sang songs of gladness that the land we had kept fertile through 

 countless years was feeding mouths of little children. 



JIT Oh, my friend, is it because you found so many of us willing to bow 

 al our heads at your slightest wish, that you, through thoughtless prodi- 

 gality and wanton waste, have stretched almost to breaking point bonds of a 

 friendship as old as man? 



God grant the cords again be conserved and strengthened, that those who 

 come after you may still be served by those which spring from my seed! 



Surely to widen the path for the march of progress it is not meet that 

 all of me and mme shall die. 



#]T Take heed ! Take heed, my friend ! Hold out to us a helping hand, 

 3I or the day is near when the ear of man shall listen in vaiji for the faint- 

 est sighing of the wind among the branches of the giant poplar, the stately 

 pine, the lordly oak, the moss-fringed cypress, the monarch fir, the rustling 

 maple and others of my kind. For when you have silenced us, not one shall 

 send forth again the old joyous greeting — Good morrow, friend ! 



— Idah McGlone Gibson. 



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