Earliest Signs of Spring 
is occasionally great irregularity as regards 
their return to particular localities. 
a 
One that walks much abroad in woods and 
by-ways finds a mute but endless sociability in 
trees. They seem really more companionable, 
because more self-revelatory, in winter and 
early spring than in summer, when their dis- 
tinctiveness of character, as shown in their va- 
rious types of growth, is so largely concealed 
by their foliage. But their leafless forms stand 
out against the winter sky in a rugged honesty 
of openness, defiant of criticism, and remind- 
ing one of that stern old monarch among men, 
a sort of destroying angel in English history— 
Oliver Cromwell—who exclaimed to an artist 
painting his picture, ‘‘ Paint meas Iam; if you 
leave out the scars and wrinkles I will not pay 
you a shilling!’’ In their summer dress, trees 
show themselves, as it were, under the polish of 
society manners, which easily becomes the var- 
nish of deceit. Even the oak, which bravely 
manages to carry his brusqueness so victoriously 
through the summer, is, notwithstanding, 
greatly mellowed by the luxurious ways of the 
softer season; and it is only in winter that he 
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