ARBOR DAY MAX UAL. 



3-7 



soil ! It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face, and when I 

 whispered to myself, "This is mine," there was a shrinking as if there were 

 sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this 

 cathedral-topped tree ! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So 

 did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that com- 

 pleted glory, at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless 

 fingers ! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper ? My heart said " I may 

 not call thee property, and that property mine ! Thou belongest to the air. 

 Thou art the child of summer. Thou a'rt the mighty temple where birds praise 

 God. Thou belongest to no man's hand, but to all men's eyes that do love 

 beauty, and that have learned through beaut}' to behold God ! Stand, then, in 

 thine own beaut}- and grandeur ! I shall be a lover .and a protector, to keep 

 drought from thy roots, and the axe from thy trunk." 



For, remorseless men there are crawling yet upon the face of the earth, 

 smitten blind and inwardly dead, whose only thought of a tree of ages is, that 

 it is food for the axe and the saw! These are the wretches cf whom the 

 Scripture speaks : " A man -was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon 

 the thick trees" 



Thus famous, or rather infamous was the last owner but one, before me, of 

 this farm. Upon the crown of the hill, just where an artist would have planted 

 them, had he wished to have them exactly in the right place, grew some two 

 hundred stalwart and ancient maples, beeches, ashes, and oaks, a narrow belt- 

 like forest, forming a screen from the northern and western winds in winter, 

 and a harp of endless music for the summer. The wretched owner of this 

 farm tempted of the Devil, cut down the whole blessed band and brotherhood 

 of trees, that he might fill his pocket with two pitiful dollars a cord for the 

 wood ! Well, his pocket was the best part of him. The iron furnaces have 

 devoured my grove, and their huge stumps that stood like gravestones, have 

 been cleared away, that a grove may be planted in the same spot, for the next 

 hundred years to nourish into the stature and glory of that which is gone. 



In other places I find the memorials of many noble trees slain; here, a hem- 

 lock that carried up its eternal green a hundred feet into the winter air; there, 

 a huge double-trunked chestnut, dear old grandfather of hundreds of children 

 that have for generations clubbed its boughs, or shook its nut-laden top, and 

 laughed and shouted as bushels of chestnuts rattled down. Now, the tree 

 exists onJy in the form of looped-holed posts and weather-browned rails. I do 

 hope the fellow got a sliver in his fingers even- time he touched the hemlock 

 plank, or let down the bars made of those chestnut rails ! 



To most people a grove is a grove, and all groves are alike. But no two 

 groves are alike. There is as marked a difference between different forests as 

 between different communities. A grove of pines without underbrush, car- 

 peted with the fine-fingered russet leaves of the pine, and odorous of resinous 

 gums, has scarcely a trace of likeness to a maple woods, either in the insects, 

 the birds, the shrubs, the light and shade, or the sound of its leaves. If we 

 lived in olden times among young mythologies, we should say that pines held 

 the imprisoned spirit of naiads and water-nymphs, and that their sounds were 

 of the water for whose lucid depths they always sighed. At any rate, the first 



