seen, you were never more mistaken. Each has its charm like man 

 and woman. There is no duplicating. God makes his creations to be 

 like the marked copies of de luxe editions. Shell-barks are among 

 the treasures of my woods, and among the richest riches of winter 

 forests. 



Not lightly to estimate these winter riches, I would profess that of 

 all winter trees the sycamore is most beautiful. In Indiana, on the 

 Wabash, they are at their kingliest I have not seen their equals. 

 There they grow stately with few limbs, and the sycamores stand pillars 

 of carven marble. The sycamore is to me a fascinating tree for two 

 special reasons. First, where he lives, and second, how he does. 

 Oaks and elms and walnuts are like God's common people plenty of 

 them and everywhere. They grow down in broad valleys, on the edge 

 of the stream; they are on the hillsides climbing the bluffs; they are on 

 bluff edges; they are in ravines far back from any stream where they 

 can find an unpre-empted field for woodland; there they dig into the 

 earth, loam or clay, rock or woodland. Not so a sycamore, which will 

 not of its own accord grow on hills or run up a bank from a stream. 

 The sycamore hugs the water courses. Not, be it observed, as the 

 willow which grows in ravines, where waters sometimes run down in 

 marshy ground, and always knee-deep in ravines or streams, being very 

 ducks for loving water; for sycamores rarely or never stand in either 

 streams or swamp places. They are coy, and stand a few feet up and 

 back from the river's bank. They grow where water stays. You will 

 not find them in ravines whose custom is to go dry in summer. Where 

 waters stay, there sycamores stay. These waterways of the sycamore 

 are of singular interest, as I think any one who studies them will agree. 

 A wide valley on river-levels you will find thick sown to sycamores 

 across its entire breadth, for here they reach water. A stream-edge will 

 be sentineled with sycamores rooting above the stream, but very often 

 leaning over the water so as to see their own faces. Infrequently I have 

 seen them on so-called second bottoms, but as a very general rule 

 where a bluff begins to climb, a sycamore refuses to follow. Only the 

 other day, happening to be on the railroad that ran along the beautiful 

 Gasconade, I watched this fine power of selection of sycamores know- 

 ing what they want and getting it. And I saw their white pillars flash 

 snowy against the gray skyline, or the rocky cliffs, or the dim black 

 woodlands as they trooped along the river, never letting on they had a 

 purpose, but always having one, huddling together; for in this they are 



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