ARBOR DAY MAXUAL. 



213 



promises to flower early, or Benjamin Franklin is drying up, whether Robert 

 Fulton is budding, or General Grant beginning to sprout, the pupil will find 

 that a tree may be as interesting as the squirrel that skims along its trunk, or 

 the bird that calls from its top like a muezzin from a minaret. 



The future orators of Arbor Day will draw the morals that lie in the resem- 

 blances of all life. It is by care and diligent cultivation that the wild crab is 

 subdued to bear sweet fruit, and by skillful grafting and budding that the same 

 stock produces different varieties. And so you, Master Leonard or Miss Alice, 

 if you are cross and spiteful and selfish and bullying, you also must be budded 

 and trained. Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined, young gentlemen, and 

 you must start straight if you would not grow up crooked. Just as the boy 

 begins, the man turns out. 



So, trained by Arbor Day. as the children cease to be children they will feel 

 the spfritual and refining influence, the symbolical beauty, of the trees. Like 

 men, they begin tenderly and grow larger and larger, in greater strength, more 

 deeply rooted, more widely spreading, stretching leafy boughs for birds to build 

 in. shading the cattle that chew the cud and graze in peace, deck ing themselves 

 in blossoms and ever-changing foliage, and murmuring with rustling music by 

 day and night. The. thoughtful youth will see a noble image of the strong man 

 struggling with obstacles that he overcomes in a great tree wrestling mightily 

 with the wintry gales, and extorting a glorious music from the storms which it 

 triumphantly defies. 



Arbor Day will make the country visibly more beautiful every year. Every 

 little community, every school district, will contribute to the good work. The 

 school-house will gradually become an ornament, as it is already the great 

 benefit of the village, and the children will be put in the way of Jiving upon 

 more friendly and intelligent terms with the bountiful nature which is so 

 friendly to us. 



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 



Editor s Easy Chair, Harper s Magazine, July, 1889. 



The objects of the restoration of the forests are as multifarious as the motives 

 which have led to their destruction, and as the evils which that destruction has 

 occasioned. The planting of the mountains will diminish the frequency and 

 violence of river inundations: prevent the formation of torrents; mitigate the 

 extremes of atmospheric temperature, humidity, and precipitation; restore 

 dried-up springs, rivulets, and sources of irrigation ; shelter the fields from 

 chilling and from parching winds; prevent the spread of miasmatic effluvia; 

 and, finally, furnish an inexhaustible and self-re newing supply of material indis- 

 pensable to so many purposes of domestic comfort, to the successful exercise 

 of even* art of peace, every destructive energy of war. 



GEORGE P. MARSH. 



A brotherhood of venerable trees. ' WORDSWORTH Sonnet. 



