16 East and West 
families we know best, but we come to know 
and feel an attachment for families essentially 
Western, like the Cacti, the Phlox, and the 
Waterleaf. 
Trees even more than flowers help to form 
that environment with which our thought- 
life and associations are so involved, and here 
the change is very radical in going from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific Slope. While hem- 
lock, spruce, and white pine play some part 
with us, our associations are in far greater 
degree with hardwoods, with red, scarlet, and 
white oaks, with shellbark, pignut, and chest- 
nut, with black, white, and yellow birch, with 
red, white, and sugar maples, and with beech 
andelm. It is these trees, so exquisitely ver- 
nal in May, so radiant in October, so sombre 
and austere in winter, which are chiefly re- 
sponsible for our tree-thoughts, our sylvan 
impressions. They, with here and there a 
pine or hemlock, constitute our Eastern 
tree-world. The splendid sugar maples of 
the Catskills, the great yellow birches of the 
Adirondacks, the beautiful domes which the 
elms make in the fields of Western New York, 
and the feminine white birch of Eastern 
woods, are the decided features of this corner 
of our estate. 
