VISITING THE GARDENS 187 



humanitarians, but a smiling jest to the poets 

 from Shakespeare to Swinburne 



With all its blithe, lithe bounty of buds and sprays, 

 For hapless boys to wince at and grow red, 

 And feel a tingling memory prick their skins. 



Now that "the rod becomes more mocked than 

 used," birch sprays are most familiar to us in the 

 humble usefulness of a broom. Yet on the 

 other side of the world there were nations that 

 would have been hard put to it to do without 

 this tree, used for many offices, but not for that 

 above-mentioned, since your cruel Mohawk and 

 thick-skinned Huron had a strangely sentimental 

 abhorrence of chastising their impish youngsters, 

 which, notes a Jesuit missionary, "will hinder 

 our design to instruct their youth." But mani- 

 fold were other services of birch in the wigwam 

 life of the backwoods for walls, roof, furniture, 

 clothes, torches, powders, poultices, and what 

 not ; bark was the Red Man's cradle and his 

 coffin, and the material for his masterpiece of 

 skill, the canoe ; it even at a pinch filled empty 

 stomachs, that could hold out for days on the 

 inner scrapings of bark, when moss, roots, and 

 berries failed his improvident hardihood. 



In other parts of the world, the coco-nut 



