SHADE-TREES IN CITIES. 313 



and specious look. You feel almost, as you look at its round trunk 

 shooting up as straight, and almost as fast as a rocket, crowned by 

 such a luxuriant tuft of verdure, that you have got a young palm- 

 tree before your door, that can whisper tales to you in the evening 

 of that " Flowery Country " from whence you have borrowed it, and 

 you swear to stand by it against all slanderous aspersions. But 

 alas ! you are greener in your experience than the Tartar in his 

 leaves. A few years pass by ; the sapling becomes a tree its blos- 

 soms fill the air with something that looks like curry-powder, and 

 smells like the plague. You shut down the windows to keep out 

 the unbalmy June air, if you live in town, and invariably give a 

 wide berth to the heavenly avenue, if you belong to the country. 



But we confess openly, that our crowning objection to this petted 

 Chinaman or Tartar, who has played us so falsely, is a patriotic ob- 

 jection. It is that he has drawn away our attention from our own 

 more noble native American trees, to waste it on this miserable pig- 

 tail of an Indiaman. What should we think of the Italians, if they 

 should forswear their own orange-trees and figs, pomegranates and 

 citrons, and plant their streets and gardens with the poison sumac- 

 tree of our swamps ? And what must a European arboriculturist 

 think, who travels in America, delighted and astonished at the 

 'beauty of our varied and exhaustless forests the richest in the 

 temperate zone, to see that we neither value nor plant them, but fill 

 our lawns and avenues with the cast-off nuisances of the gardens 

 of Asia and Europe ? 



And while in the vein, we would include in the same category 

 another less fashionable, but still much petted foreigner, that has 

 settled among us with a good letter of credit, but who deserves not 

 his success. We mean the abele or silver poplar. There is a 

 pleasant flutter in his silver-lined leaves but when the timber is a 

 foot thick, you shall find the air unpleasantly filled, every spring, 

 with the fine white down which flies from the blossom, while the 

 suckers which are thrown up from the roots of old abeles are a pest 

 to all grounds and gardens, even worse than those of the ailanthus. 

 Down with the abeles ! 



Oh ! that our tree-planters, and they are an army of hundreds 

 of thousands in this country ever increasing with the growth of 



