124 ARBOR DAY 



spots and streaks; you can see at a glance where 

 man and nature have dealt the most kindly with it. 

 The warm, moist places, the places that have had 

 the wash of some building or of the road, or been 

 subjected to some special mellowing influence, how 

 quickly the turf awakens there and shows the tender 

 green! See what the landscape would be, how much 

 earlier spring would come to it, if every square yard 

 of it was alike moist and fertile. As the later snows 

 lay in patches here and there, so now the earliest 

 verdure is irregularly spread over the landscape 

 and is especially marked on certain slopes, as if it 

 had blown over from the other side and lodged there. 



A little earlier the homesteads looked cold and 

 naked; the old farmhouse was bleak and unattrac- 

 tive; now Nature seems especially to smile upon it; 

 her genial influences crowd up around it; the turf 

 awakens all about as if in the spirit of friendliness. 

 See the old barn on the meadow slope; the green 

 seems to have oozed out from it and to have flowed 

 slowly down the hill; at a little distance it is lost in 

 the sere stubble. One can see where every spring 

 lies buried about the fields; its influence is felt at 

 the surface and the turf is early quickened there. 

 Where the cattle have loved to lie and ruminate in 

 the warm summer twilight, there the April sunshine 

 loves to linger too, till the sod thrills to new life. 



The home, the domestic feeling in nature is 

 brought out and enhanced at this time; what man 



