A POINT OF HONOR. 1 85 



in landscape planting and for hedges and borders. The 

 red cedar is common, though not so abundant in the vicin- 

 ity of Manchester as farther east and south. There is an- 

 other juniper which sometimes grows to the size of a tree, 

 concerning which I hope to have an article in the near fu- 

 ture. 



The cedars form a well marked tribe of the pine family. 

 They are distinguished from the pine (or fir) tribe by the 

 small size of the leaves and cones. The leaves in all of 

 them are mostly appressed, i. e., closely adherent to the 

 branchlets, and the cones are very small, being usuall}^ 

 less than half an inch in length. The three cedar trees 

 named are perfecth' distinguished by their cones. The 

 cones of the arbor vitse are bud-shaped and have from six 

 to twelve loose scales, which at maturity open to the base. 

 Those of the swamp white cedar are globular in form, of 

 few shield-shaped woody scales, each scale w'ith a spur-like 

 projection on the back, and at maturity the scales open 

 toward the centre, never to the base. Finally, those of 

 the red cedar are berry-like, from the coalescence of the 

 fleshy scales, about the size of a small pea and in color 

 dark blue with a whitish bloom. 



Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not 

 know the flowers ? If these did not exist, if they had all 

 been hidden from our gaze, as are probablj^ a thousand no 

 less fairy sights which are all around us but invisible to 

 our e3'es, w^ould our character, our faculties, our sense of 

 the beautiful, our aptitude for happiness be quite the 

 same ? All of a delightful sense would sleep forever at the 

 bottom of our harder and more desert hearts and our imag- 

 ination be stripped of worshipful images. The infinite world 

 of colors and shades would have been incompletely re- 

 vealed to us by a few" rents in the sky. The miraculous 

 harmonies of light at pla}^ ceaselessly inventing new gay- 

 eties, reveling in itself, would be unknown to us, for the 

 flowers first broke up the prism and made the most subtle 

 portion of our sight. — Maeterlinck , in the February Maga- 

 zine Number of the Outlook. 



