Good Families 245 
one tree under which you can sit at noonday 
as under a spreading oak and find it compan- 
ionable and that is the cottonwood, which in 
the dry creek beds of Arizona becomes an 
ample and dignified, a really beautiful tree. 
Surely our Northern trees ave companionable, 
not only because of a certain personal quality, 
masculine in some, feminine in others, but 
of that staunchness and sincerity which are 
the traits a tree would seem to typify, and 
moreover, because of the apparent communi- 
cativeness which whispering leaves imply. 
They have their winter songs and their spring 
-songs; they sigh and whisper in the summer 
breeze; they moan and shriek in the winter 
gale. How characteristic the voice of the 
pines—a murmurous, mysterious woodsy 
speech! What a marked family mannerism 
in the leafy whisper of the aspens! These 
voices have their message for the sensitive 
ear: tranquil communications from the woods 
and gossip of the sylvan world. 
That which we may name personality in 
plants is something that may appeal to all of 
the senses or to one only. Sweet-fern is a 
fragrance—nothing more; sassafras and win- 
tergreen, flavours; orange milkweed a classic 
form and a splash of flaming colour; bayberry, 
