IN PRAISE OF THE WEYMOUTII 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. For a week I had been 

 wandering through it with delight. Such 

 beeches and maples, birches and butternuts ! 

 I 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- 



