44 IRature StuMee in Berksbire. 



is inconceivably remote ; so our behaviour to-day 

 cannot fail to impress the close observer of family 

 likenesses, with our resemblance to our cousins, the 

 trees. 



Look at these pines, for example, tall, straight 

 fellows, most of them, running up from forty to sixty 

 feet, rough-coated at the base, but with smooth, 

 sleek jackets toward their tops, which well become 

 their slim, aristocratic figures. Erect and graceful in 

 mien, soft-voiced in the gentle winds, well-clad and 

 well-fed in appearance, they are excellent types of 

 a well-descended and well-connected family, proud 

 of their birth, blood, and breeding. And in their 

 isolation here on the little knoll where they live, forty 

 or fifty of them, one is reminded of the exclusiveness 

 of some human societies, whose aristocratic ways 

 are not unlike those of the lordly pines. But it was 

 only to-day that 1 discovered how much deeper and 

 farther this analogy ran. 



Within a rod of me, as 1 write, is a pathetic bit of 

 tragedy whose meaning has but just penetrated my 

 mind. Right here, in this group of stately forest aris- 

 tocrats, has grown up a little, rough-barked, scrubby 

 "pitch-pine '^ tree. How it happens to be here, the 

 sole one of its kind in the grove, is more than 1 can 

 tell But it has rooted itself and grown to a height 

 of nearly forty feet. Yet it could not hold its own. 

 It is among competitors which altogether outclass it. 

 These elegant members of the pine-trees^ "best 

 society " have simply crowded out their poor rela- 



