258 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



may be ringed with the sapsucker's bores, the tree may 

 be lopsided and perishing with scale but all over it 

 sprout the suckers, its symbol of continued struggle. 

 The poor old apple tree beside some abandoned farm- 

 house or cellar-hole, where, perchance, no house has 

 stood for generations, still fighting for life, still striving 

 to "function," is to me a brave and beautiful thing. 



The trees of the hills and rocky pastures have a dif- 

 ferent character from their fatly nourished brothers of 

 the plain, and, as among men, they are often less beau- 

 tiful and more interesting. The sugar maple which 

 starts life as a tiny seedling in the sediment of a rain 

 pool on top of a boulder, and survives by sending its 

 roots down around the very rock till it seems, in the 

 course of a century, to clasp the rock "with crooked 

 hands" as an eagle might hold a ball in its claws, usu- 

 ally develops a rough sturdiness of trunk and very 

 often a twisted formation of growth, which suggest 

 almost human qualities of aggressiveness and tenacity. 

 Such a tree seems actually to have wrestled with its 

 environment, and put its enemies underfoot. It is to 

 the upland hardwoods, too, that all boys know they 

 must go for nuts. Did not the finest chestnuts always 

 grow on a hill? And what man is so poor in memories 

 that he cannot recall those golden October mornings 

 when there was frost in the air, and the pungent smell 

 of dried sweet fern, and up among the boulders the 

 gray hickories, still flaunting a few yellow leaves, had 



