TREES 249 



dwelling because deep within him, deep perhaps as the 

 primal instincts of the race, is a great and trustful 

 affection humorously akin to the dog's trust in the table 

 beneath which he lies whether to escape the heat of 

 Summer or the 4th of July fire crackers. For all the 

 centuries of upward development, for all our tall-built 

 cities and snug dwellings, we are close to the ancient 

 Mother still. Go out some day into the wild places, 

 let night come on, or a storm, and see how you turn like 

 a homing bird to the shelter of the hemlock thicket! 

 Even on my own little place of a few acres, there is a 

 grove of pines near the house, murmurous like the sea, 

 and beside it three gnarled old apple trees which put a 

 green roof over that bit of the lawn, and to them I return 

 a dozen times a day out of the sunshine or the moonlight 

 on the garden, as a man returns to the welcome of his 

 roof and hearth. It has never occurred to me before to 

 explain or analyze this feeling, it has been so much an 

 unconscious part of my life; but I realize its implications 

 now. 



Trees, of course, are the most beautiful as well as the 

 most useful of growing things, not because they are the 

 largest but because they attain often to the finest 

 symmetry and because they have the most decided and 

 appealing personalities. Any one who has not felt the 

 personality of trees is oddly insensitive. I cannot, 

 indeed, imagine a person wholly incapable of such 

 feeling, though the man who plants a Colorado blue 



