IN PRAISE OF TREES 273 



Every tree helped, but the three pines most of all, 

 towering as they did far above the dwelling on 

 their splendid brown sterns. It cost the man who 

 planted them very slight effort to put them in, 

 though doubtless in his lifetime he saw but little of 

 their ultimate charm. Yet for the next generation 

 they were a constant solace and delight. 



Then the house was sold out of that family. We, 

 after seven years of affectionate living with those 

 trees, bade them a regretful farewell, though we 

 were moving to a place of our own, toward, at least, 

 the realization of a long-cherished dream. Return- 

 ing after several weeks on some errand, and also, I 

 fear, to steal a last look at the garden I was leaving 

 behind, I saw something was wrong even as I walked 

 up the street. Yet I couldn't believe my own senses. 

 Hurrying around the corner of the house, however, 

 the worst was confirmed. The three great pines, 

 which for fifty years had been growing their bravest 

 and quickest to convert an ugly house into a spot 

 of beauty, to give it tone and character, to bring 

 close to its occupants, even as they sat on their 

 porch, the inspiration of noble, columned uprights, 

 the fragrance of blown needles, the whisper cf the 

 forest, lay shivered and sprawling on the turf, one 

 of them, in its fall, having half demolished one of 

 the big apple-trees that had made an outdoor sum- 

 mer room beside the porch ! The house stood ugly, 

 naked, pitilessly exposed. It might have been any 

 house on a raw suburban street. The new owner, 

 with a bland smile of self-satisfaction, came out to 

 explain. He said the pines kept the house damp! 

 (In seven years we had never detected this, by the 



