BUILDING SITES. 33 



Occasionally, in rocky situations, or on the border of a running 

 brook, such sites may be charmingly harmonized with the practical 

 requirements of the dwelling and outbuildings ; but they are excep- 

 tional. The great mass of house sites are smooth swells or levels. 

 Trees already grown are invaluable. To have them, or not to 

 have them, is, to speak in business phrase, to begin with capital or 

 without it. As capital draws to itself capital, so trees are magnets 

 of home beauty, towards which domestic architecture, the gardener's 

 arts, and varied family enjoyments are most naturally attracted. But 

 there are trees whose age and habits of growth are not such as to 

 give them high value. Forest trees, which have attained a lofty 

 height, are not only dangerous in proximity to a dwelling, but are 

 also likely to maintain a sort of living death when their contempo- 

 rary trees are cut from around them — putting forth their leaves 

 annually, it is true, but dying limb by limb at their summits, and 

 scattering on the ground their dead twigs and branches. No 

 grandeur of lofty trunk can mitigate the danger from spring 

 winds or summer tempests that may bring its crushing weight 

 upon the house and its inmates. But trees which have grown 

 broadly in open ground, and lashed their arms and toughened their 

 fibres in the gales of half a century, may be relied on to brood pro- 

 tectingly over a home ; and tew among these are more loveable in 

 blossom, shade, and fruit, than fine old apple-trees. There is 

 another class of trees which have little beauty as environments of 

 a dwelling. We refer to " second-growth " trees, which have grown 

 thickly together, and which, though valuable for their shade, form 

 rather a nursery of rough poles, with a valuable mass of foliage 

 over them, than an ornamental grove. Rough woods are quite too 

 common in this country-, and too rude in all their looks and ways, 

 to be welcomed to our cultivated homes as we welcome the civil- 

 ized and polished members of the tree family. But such dense 

 groves of second-growth trees usually have many specimens among 

 them well worth preserving, and which, if twenty feet high or up- 

 wards, will better repay good nursing and care than any young 

 trees that can be planted to fill their places. The proprietor of 

 such a building site is much more likely to err, however, in leaving 

 too many than too few ; and the thorough cutting out of the grove, 

 3 



