IN PRAISE OF THE WEYMOUTH PINE. 235 
a few scattered butternuts. I can see them 
now, —misshapen giants, patriarchal mon- 
strosities, their huge trunks leaning awk- 
wardly this way and that, and each bearing 
at the top a ludicrously small, one-sided 
bunch of leafy boughs. All about me was 
the ancient wood. Fora week I had been 
wandering through it with delight. Such 
beeches and maples, birches and butternuts! 
T had not thought of any imperfection. I 
had been in sympathy with the artist, and 
had enjoyed his work in the same spirit in 
which it had been wrought. Now, however, 
with these unhappy butternuts in my eye, I 
began to look, not at the forest, but at the 
trees, and I found that the spared butter- 
nuts were in no sense exceptional. All the 
trees were deformed. They had grown as 
they could, not as their innate proclivities 
would have led them. A tree is no better 
than a man; it cannot be itself if it stands 
too much in a crowd. 
I set it down, unwillingly, to the discredit 
of the Weymouth pine, — a symptom of some 
ancestral taint, perhaps, —that it suffers 
less than most trees from being thus en- 
croached upon. Yet it does not entirely es- 
