144 ARBOR DAY 



is under all circumstances to be preferred to vege- 

 table existence had the great poplar cut down. 

 It is so easy to say, " It is only a poplar," and so much 

 harder to replace its living cone than to build a 

 granite obelisk! 



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 stretch- 

 ing 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. 



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 having been formed 

 by the union of two trunks growing side by side. 



