CULTURE OF TREES. 127 



ness, you make it more truly what is implied by the endearing 

 name of home. You thus promote the health and happiness of 

 your children, by supplying them with those wholesome fruits 

 which their growing constitutions so earnestly crave. You 

 associate their years of childhood with objects of pleasure and 

 gratification, with exhibitions of nature's beauty and loveliness. 

 You give them impressions of domestic life, of social enjoyments, 

 of filial and moral obligations, which no future condition of life 

 can efface. The man doomed to single life, who lives in the 

 present, not in the future ; whose earthly being is bounded by 

 the narrow horizon of a single term, we would counsel to grow 

 trees. Having by some dispensation of Providence, or more 

 probably by your own perverseness, failed to subserve an impor- 

 tant purpose of your being ; what service can you render, what 

 labor can you perform so efficacious as this for saving your 

 memory from oblivion ; your name and your form from descend- 

 ing to the same silent abode ? So that if your children shall not 

 hereafter rise up and bless you, some wayfaring stranger, some 

 future sojourner, while refreshed by its shade, or regaled with 

 its fruits, may inquire the name of their benefactor. Upon all 

 possessed of the requisite ability we would press the value and 

 importance of this work. In this, as in many of the higher 

 duties of life, we perform a double service. While we contrib- 

 ute most directly to the wealth, comfort, and prosperity of the 

 next generation, we derive the present reward which such service 

 ever imparts — a reward not unlike that bestowed upon the train- 

 ing of children, the rearing of domestic animals. But it is only 

 by the performance of this triple service, the enumeration of these 

 three paramount obligations in the catalogue of secular duties, 

 that we can claim to have discharged the full measure of life's 

 labor, and therefore the enjoyment of its rewards. 



William Brewster, Chairman. 



