THE BEAUTY OF TREES. 39 
breeze. It has resisted the crumbling power of Time’s 
history remarkably well, and furnishes a nidus for the 
growth of the beautiful moss, whose Calyptra, with its 
cardinal’s hat off, wooes the gentle zephyrs passing over 
its soft bed. 
This is a cool arbor—‘“a boundless contiguity of 
shade,” where, undisturbed by the heathen shot-gun, 
the feathered songsters congregate to pour forth their 
matin lays in peace and fill their crops with the devas- 
tating insects that would denude the old forest-trees of 
their beauty and leave them to wither in lifeless decay. 
Hear the sprightly bluejay pipe his saucy notes, and 
mock in great glee the chattering squirrel on yonder 
huge knot contiguous to a safe retreat. Listen to the 
half-dozen birds in yonder thicket, personified by the 
merry, mischievous catbird. He is really the only bird 
in the thicket, and he laughs to think how he is fooling 
an unfeathered biped, with mouth agape, wondering at 
his mixed minstrelsy. 
Hark! The woodpecker taps with lightning rapidity 
the dry limb on the top of yon elm, and as the taps echo 
among the cool arbors of the forest he chants his home- 
ly notes and thanks Heaven that he lives. The fish- 
hawk screams along the streams, and his voice strikes 
terror into the small song-birds, who have ventured near 
in search of food. 
In the distance, in the dark aisles of the forest, the 
loud notes of the hooting owl come booming on the 
air, and a thousand hearts beat momentarily in great 
fear. There goes one of the tribe known as the mink, 
and he proudly trots along with a mouse in his mouth 
and his head erect. And there comes a hawk from the 
barn-yard with a hen in her talons, pursuing the course 
marked out for her on the map of hawk-life, however 
detrimental that course may be to the housewife’s an- 
ticipated chicken-pie. Insect life’s ten thousand notes 
ascend to heaven in pans of praise, and feeble, finite 
