makes men and trees. War is an ingredient of souls, if souls are to 
come to manhood. Every winter tree is like a man on guard at a 
dangerous post No wind goes by, however sedate and conciliatory, that 
the tree does not fling out naked arms of angry might before his face 
and cry surlily, ‘Halt, who goes there?” and then the battle is fierce as 
a Scotch clansman’s onset. Winter trees make me proud of their grave 
and reasonable pugnacity. 
In winter is the time when most people get acquainted, | think. 
The long evenings, and the shut-in firelight are conciliatory to friend- 
ship and made for confidences So it is natural in winter to grow 
confidential with the trees. They then reveal their secret. Surly as 
they look, you will not find them so if you will be companionable. Then 
go out of town (trees stay in town because they are galiey slaves 
chained there). Go into the empty forest where a river runs (if Provi- 
dence favor you so highly), and spend a day there, building a fire on 
the sheltered side of some bank where the smoke curls on you, and the 
delicious odors of the wood exhale, and the flame dances in the twist- 
ing winds Let the day be gray. Cloudy days are the appropriate days 
for making friendship with the trees. On open days the sky is too high, 
too illuminated, there is no background for the trees; and besides the 
sunlight makes shadow and gives wrong impression of twig, bark, and 
limb ‘The artists in their studios shut sunlight out. We who love the 
trees must be as wise as they. When the gray clouds are just above 
the tree tops, it is as if you looked at every tree against a background 
of gray granite. A tree has its chance to declare itself as in a confes- 
sional. There is no shadow; and no light flames with its torch to make 
wrong proportion, but it is as if twilight lit your lamp for you. On such 
a day, wander, lover-like, among the trees, and they will be confidential 
with you like women talking of their lovers. Give me a gray day with 
its all-day twilight, and the naked might of forest, and I will not envy 
kings their coronation. 
A beech-tree is a picture. In the winter its sagging branches with 
their gray-brown leaves hanging shiveringly, so wizen and little. like a 
withered old man, and making their pitiful appeal as winds shiver by; 
and its trunk like a pillar of dusk to hold the porch of the evening up. 
Friend, if you do not know the beech-trees, you have one acquaintance- 
ship to contract which will do your life good. In autumn there is a 
harvest sunlight on the beech leaves very fair to see, but after all the 
oeech trunk is the tree's treasure. | never pass a beech without a 
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