61 
TREES AND CHILDREN 
Among the beautiful beeches in the Forest of Fontainebleau, 
in France, stands one sacred to King Louis IX, called the Tree 
of Saint Louis. Because of the virtue and piety of this king, the 
tree of Saint Louis was afterwards chosen as a place for worship, 
somewhat after the custom of the druids, who worshiped under 
the oak, and the fire-worshippers, who prayed beneath the plane- 
tree In the plains of Persia. <After the French revolution, such 
homage to royalty was forbidden, but the peasants of the neigh- 
borhood continued to come by night and hang their wreaths and 
woven beads on the sacred tree. 
I believe that children might be taught to reverence to some 
extent every tree for its beauty and usefulness, as nobles and 
peasants reverenced the Tree of Saint Louis. 
The children of the Orient have the bamboo, the ginkgo, the 
teak, the banyan, and the oriental plane; those of Svria the 
ancient olive trees and cedars of Lebanon. The children of 
Norway have the Norway maple, and the Norway spruce; those 
. of Sweden, who live in the very home of Christmas, have also 
beautiful firs and birches. The Germans love their lindens and 
horsechestnuts and fill their fairy stories with references to fir 
trees; the Swiss children spend their summers on the Alpine 
Pastures surrounded by tall and stately firs and spruces; the 
Austrian children find the larch on the mountains and a beautiful 
species of pine in some of the valleys, from the wood of which 
they carve their Christmas toys; the Italian children, even in the 
crowded streets of Venice and Naples, cannot fail to know some- 
thing of the chestnut and olive orchards on the mountain slopes 
and the pollarded willows of the lowlands. The children of 
rural France love the long rows of poplars that shade the high- 
Ways, and those of the cities love their beautiful parks and shaded 
boulevards; the London lad occasionally turns his eyes from his 
cricket bat to gaze upon a majestic field elm or a grove of oaks 
or beeches, while the farmer’s boy loves to linger in the shade of 
the elms and oaks that everywhere dot the English landscape. 
In Cuba, children play beneath wide-spreading laurel trees and 
