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unsatisfying. Christmas trees growing on the hillside make 

 no appeal in their fresh clean greenness, but must be described 

 as naturally becandled; an impossibility, as the balsam fir — the 

 only one of the Eastern evergreens with erect cones that look 

 at all like candles — never retains whole cones through the win- 

 ter, the cones dropping off, scale by scale, long before Christmas. 

 Our other Eastern cone-bearing trees have hanging cones; the 

 most imaginative of our writers could not call them candles. 



If ornamental plants have their associated errors, economic 

 ones have their "ten thousands." Hay on its way to the barn 

 is never "foaming golden yellow." No farmer would even cut 

 hay so full of foreign plants that it appeared yellow; still less 

 would he dry, rake, and haul it. One of our best collections of 

 short stories by Mary Wilkins, a New England woman farming 

 under difficulties, who, when a weak-minded relative ambles 

 in with a posy of potato blossoms, breaks down in tears, because 

 he has lessened their potato crop. 



What such writers say, to quote Matthew Arnold, "is eloquent, 

 is well — but 'tis not true." It may be partly the fault of the 

 readers. We are not critical enough. We laud to the skies an 

 occasional author who "knows Nature like a book," and cite 

 approvingly such passages as "black-budded ash" and "shim- 

 mering beech," although they are details simple enough to be 

 included in the nature study outlines of the lower grades. In 

 these days of illustrated "how to know" books there is little ex- 

 cuse for such botanical and agricultural errors. 



Such mistakes are rarely mentioned or corrected in print. 

 In the case of the sugar beet, however, there were evidently 

 many protests, for the magazine later published several ob- 

 jections to the role assigned the red beet. Two or three of the 

 criticisms parodied the "free verse" of the original, indicating, 

 probably, that the form of the beet sugar poem irritated many 

 of the readers into writing. We have so long thought of poetry 

 as a beautiful form for something worth saying that it is hard to 

 accept much of the new poetry. We could stand lack of rhyme, 

 or even the lack of rhythm, but we can't stand it when they 

 have nothing to say. And if the thing itself isn't worth saying, 



