TACOMA AND THE INDIAN LEGEND OF HAMITCHOU 



pack them in pink boxes, and send them forth to dis- 

 tress a world of patients : but Nature, who if she 

 even feels one's pulse does it by a gentle pressure of 

 atmosphere, Nature, knowing that her children in 

 their travels always need lively tonics, tells wind, sun, 

 and dew, servitors of hers, clean and fine of touch, to 

 manipulate gay strawberries, and dispose them at- 

 tractively on fair green terraces, shaded at parching 

 noon. Of these lovely fabrics of pithy pulpiness, no 

 limit to the dose, if the invalid does as Nature intended, 

 and plucks for himself, with fingers rosy and fragrant. 

 I plucked of them, as far as I could reach on either side 

 of me, and then lay drowsily reposing on my couch at 

 the summit of the Cascade Pass, under the shade of a 

 fir, which, outstanding from the forest, had changed 

 its columnar structure into a pyramidal, and had 

 branches all along its stalwart trunk, instead of a mere 

 tuft at the top. 



In this shade I should have known the tree which 

 gave it, without looking up, not because the sharp 

 little spicular leaves of the fir, miniatures of that sword 

 Rome used to open the world, its oyster, would drop 

 and plunge themselves into my eyes, or would insert 

 their blades down my back and scarify, but because 

 there is an influence and sentiment in umbrages, and 

 under every tree its own atmosphere. Elms refine 

 and have a graceful elegiac effect upon those they 

 shelter. Oaks drop robustness. Mimosas will pres- 

 sently make a sensitive-plant of him who hangs his 

 hammock beneath their shade. Cocoa-palms will infect 

 him with such tropical indolence, that he will not stir 

 until frowzy monkeys climb the tree and pelt him away 

 to the next one. The shade of pine-trees, as any one can 

 prove by a journey in Maine, makes those who undergo 

 it wiry, keen, trenchant, inexhaustible, and tough. 



When I had felt the influence of my fir shelter, on 

 the edge of the wayside prairie, long enough, I became 

 of course keen as a blade. I sprang up and called to 



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