IN PRAISE OF TREES 271 



derness against the dark backing of the hemlocks, 

 just wanned enough by the yellow in their bark to 

 remove all mournful suggestion, as graceful and 

 upright and tapering a screen for a winding drive 

 as you could well conceive, as beautiful in winter as 

 in spring or summer. Why any human being should 

 desire to plant bare, ruled rows of Lombardy pop- 

 lars beside a mathematically straight drive, when 

 our own native landscape supplies him with such 

 a model, passes my comprehension. Nor are these 

 particular woods old. Twenty-five to thirty years 

 ago, I find, the swamp was cut over, only a few big 

 hemlocks and pines being left as seed-bearers. 



For several years we lived in a small house, set 

 well back from the village street in a five-acre lot. 

 It was not a pretty house — in fact, it was an ugly 

 house. But few visitors noticed this, certainly after 

 the first glance. Some one, presumably our land- 

 lord's father, forty-five or fifty years before we 

 inhabited it, had set out trees, and set them out 

 wisely. In front, for a screen, were hemlocks, with 

 a canoe-birch to show its white slenderness against 

 the evergreen backing; several Norway spruces, 

 which had attained such size that their stiff sym- 

 metry was broken and their mournf ulness somewhat 

 eliminated, and which chanced here not to seem 

 unduly exotic because at the same period they had 

 been planted all over the village, and occupied a 

 definite place in the local landscape; and, finally, 

 a huge old locust, with lightning-stab branches — a 

 veteran, of course, which had stood there for a cen- 

 tury or more, like the row of elms beside the road. 

 Beside the house were two crooked old apple- 



