seen, you were never more mistaken. Each has its charm like man 
and woman. There is no duplicating. God makes his creations to be 
like the marked copies of de luxe editions. Shell-barks are among 
the treasures of my woods, and among the richest riches of winter 
forests. 
Not lightly to estimate these winter riches, | would profess that of 
all winter trees the sycamore is most beautiful. In Indiana, on the 
Wabash, they are at their kingliest [ have not seen their equals. 
There they grow stately with few limbs, and the sycamores stand pillars 
of carven marble. The sycamore is to me a fascinating tree for two 
special reasons. First, where he lives, and second, how he does. 
Oaks and elms and walnuts are like God’s common people—plenty of 
them and everywhere. They grow down in broad valleys, on the edge 
of the stream; they are on the hillsides climbing the bluffs; they are on 
bluff edges; they are in ravines far back from any stream where they 
can find an unpre-empted field for woodland; there they dig into the 
earth, loam or clay, rock or woodland. Not so a sycamore, which wili 
not of its own accord grow on hills or run up a bank from a stream. 
The sycamore hugs the water courses. Not, be it observed, as the 
willow which grows in ravines, where waters sometimes run down in 
marshy ground, and always knee-deep in ravines or streams, being very 
ducks for loving water; for sycamores rarely or never stand in either 
streams or swamp places. They are coy, and stand a few feet up and 
back from the river’s bank. They grow where water stays. You will 
not find them in ravines whose custom is to go dry in summer. Where 
waters stay, there sycamores stay. These waterways of the sycamore 
are of singular interest, as | think any one who studies them will agree. 
A wide valley on river-levels you will find thick sown to sycamores 
across its entire breadth, for here they reach water. A stream-edge will 
be sentineled with sycamores rooting above the stream, but very often 
leaning over the water so as to see their own faces. Infrequently I have 
seen them on so-called second bottoms, but as a very general rule 
where a bluff begins to climb, a sycamore refuses to follow. Only the 
other day, happening to be on the railroad that ran along the beautiful 
Gasconade, I watched this fine power of selection of sycamores—know- 
ing what they want and getting it. And I saw their white pillars flash 
snowy against the gray skyline, or the rocky cliffs, or the dim black 
woodlands as they trooped along the river, never letting on they had a 
purpose, but always having one, huddling together; for in this they are 
6l 
