OUR BROTHERS, THE TREES 



Land of Heart's Desire, the writer has seen 

 very exact counterparts of Meg Merrilies 

 and Caliban. For there are freaks in the 

 woodland world as there are among beasts, 

 birds, and fishes, in accordance with Nature's 

 habit of illustrating the grotesque in every 

 department of her creation. 



In a word, nearly every adjective applica- 

 ble to the human body would fit some tree. 

 Even the mental and moral qualities of man- 

 kind find their parallels among our brothers 

 of the forest. Mr. Winthrop Packard tells 

 us that the larch is a mugwump, its cones 

 voting with the evergreens and its leaves 

 with the deciduous trees. Something like a 

 gregarious instinct too is shown by trees like 

 the beech, while others hate the vulgar crowd 

 and hold themselves aloof, a habit which is 

 a necessity to an elm, if it is to show all the 

 compelling lines of its beauty. 



Trees, then, like men, were not created 

 equal, but, like the stars, differ from each 

 other in glory. They have their distinctly 

 aristocratic, middle, and lower classes. In 

 the first belong the aristocracy of birth the 



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