ARBOR DAY MANUAL. 267 



cumstances to be preferred to vegetable existence, had the great poplar cut 

 down. It is so easy to say, "It is only a poplar," and so much harder to re- 

 place its living cone than to build a granite obelisk ! 



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I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. 

 Provincialism has no scale of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows 

 a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second 

 and third-rate ones for Nature's best I have often fancied the tree was afraid 

 of me, and that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when 

 she first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted. Before 

 the measuring tape the proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks into itself. 

 All those stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not 

 touching'each other's fingers, of one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it 

 so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful 

 ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions. 



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The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the ground is in 

 the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of the main road (if my points 

 of compass are right) in Springfield. But this has much the appearance of hav- 

 ing been formed by the union of two trunks growing side by side. 



The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows belong also 

 to the first class of trees. 



There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to spread its 

 claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or more before they covered 

 the foot of its bole up with earth. This is the American elm most like an oak 



of any I have ever seen. 



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What makes a first-class elm? Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly. 

 Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground and with a 

 spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim that title, according to my 

 scale. All of them, with the questionable exception of the Springfield tree 

 above referred to, stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or 

 twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of spread. 



Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to eighteen feet, 

 are comparatively common. The queen of them all is that glorious tree near 

 one of the churches in Springfield. Beautiful and stately she. is beyond all 

 praise. The ''great tree " on Boston common comes in the second rank, as 

 does the one at Cohasset, which used to have, and probably has still, a head as 

 round as an apple-tree, and that at Newburyport, with scores of others which 

 might be mentioned. These last two have perhaps been over-celebrated. Both, 

 however, are pleasing vegetables. The poor old Pittsfield elm lives on its past 

 reputation. A wig of false leaves is indispensable to make it presentable. 

 **** ****** 



Go out with me into that walk which we call the Mall, and look at the Eng- 

 lish and American elms. The American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, 

 and drooping as if from languor. The English elm is compact, robust, holds its 

 branches up,and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our own native tree. 



