46 IRature StuMee in Berl^sbiie* 



trees have been quite excluded. The pines stand 

 by one another. They crowd close together, and 

 make common cause against intruders and strangers 

 to their set. They mass their evergreen foliage in a 

 thatch which casts a perennial shadow on the ground 

 beneath, very discouraging to shrubs and trees which 

 love their share of sunlight. And then they cover 

 the ground with a carpet of rusty, cast-off needles, 

 which seems still more to disconcert the grass and 

 vines and creeping things. Give these pines any 

 sort of a hold and they will maintain it against all 

 comers. The adults of the family have no bowels of 

 mercy. 



But just look down the slope yonder at that little 

 copse of young trees under the ledge. Day before 

 yesterday I counted in that little thicket nine differ- 

 ent varieties of trees, — oak, pine, birch, sumac, wild 

 cherry, elm, willow, poplar, and ash. They are getting 

 on well enough together. It is a very democratic 

 group. These juvenile trees play very harmoniously 

 in company. The question of precedence, of rank, 

 of rights and preferments, does not seem to have 

 come up as yet. Indeed there is a pair of young 

 poplars, or '' popples" as the boys call them, which 

 seem to have quite taken the lead and to be the 

 chiefs in that little group. But these equalities in the 

 democracy of childhood and youth cannot last ; they 

 wane with growth and the maturing of character and 

 its assertion of traits which line men— and trees as 

 well — into groups. Happy childhood, in which caste 



