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nature, benighted with the thick darkness of superstition, the 

 heavenly rays of inspired truth. Eliot was followed by a wor- 

 thy successor, Oliver Peabody. The Indians appreciated 

 the blessings of the religion of peace and love which he taught 

 them ; and in gratitude for his services, these sons of the forest, 

 to whom the trees seemed as their own kindred, came in a dep- 

 utation bringing two elms, and asked leave to plant in front of 

 the humble dwelling of the missionary these ^'^ trees of friend- 

 ship.^^ This was in 1722, and these trees stood for ninety 

 years, when one was rived by lightning, and the other seemed 

 to perish through sympathy. When the successor of Mr. Pea- 

 body, Mr. Badger was settled in 1753, the Indians offered the 

 same token of respect and the same pledge of good will to him. 

 These trees are still in full vigor, and remain as beautiful mon- 

 uments of affections, which have gone out on earth, but are 

 destined to be re-kindled and burn with a purer flame. 



Nature is every where prodigal of beauty, as if she would 

 stimulate the passion for it to the utmost extent. Among the 

 varied combinations of charming objects, which mingle in a 

 rural landscape, the trees are preeminent. Sometimes rising in 

 single cones so exact and symmetrical in their form, that they 

 seem the perfection of art ; sometimes spreading their umbra- 

 geous limbs in curves and lines of the most graceful expansion; 

 sometimes bending their boughs to the earth loaded with golden 

 and crimsoned fruit, and when the sun pours its bright rays upon 

 them, presenting not an inapt image of that sacred bush where 

 the divine presence wrapt itself in robes of fire ; sometimes 

 seen in long single lines skirting the traveller's path ; sometimes 

 in beautiful clumps and clusters, affording a grateful shade to 

 the panting herds ; at other times in the wide spread forest, 

 shading a valley with their deep and black green ; here again 

 burnishing the mountain's side with their thick and mat- 

 ted foliage ; now in autumn robed in the gorgeous vestments 

 of more than oriental magnificence ; and oftenin winter bend- 

 ing under their ])iled-up fleeces of snow, or glistening with 

 matchless splendor when cased in ice and changed into a crys- 



