Art Out-of-Doors 



mit a crime. But a tree is a tree in the same 

 sense only that a book is a book. Even a 

 beautiful tree ought sometimes to be felled 

 in the interests of beauty, just as an essen- 

 tially moral book ought sometimes to be 

 taken out of the hands of good children. 



A fine tree which does not seriously inter- 

 fere with the worth of more important things 

 ought, of course, to be preserved even at a 

 considerable sacrifice of money or conveni- 

 ence. It is the slow product of many years 

 of Nature's bounty working under favorable 

 conditions. It is a precious inheritance from 

 the past, and should be transmitted to pos- 

 terity with as keen a sense of its artistic 

 value as though it were a famous picture or 

 statue. But when a fine tree does interfere 

 with the beauty of something else, then their 

 rival claims should be carefully weighed, 

 and, if the tree prove the lighter in the bal- 

 ance, it should be sacrificed as willingly as 

 one vrould scrape a second-rate painting off a 

 wall if I\Iichael Angelo's hand were waiting 

 to cover it afresh. Our attitude toward 

 trees to-day is not rationally artistic ; it is 

 purely sentimental. Not once in twenty 

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