General Lvstrlxtions. 



be left from 2 to 6 inches long; and you cannot very well 

 leave those of a twelve feet tree more than two feet long, 

 though, perhaps, they reached fourteen feet in the ground. 

 It is manifestly impossible, that, with such a remnant of 

 root, the trunk and branches can be sufficiently supplied, 



53. In consequence of this want of supply to the trunk 

 and branches, the tree remains in a sort of stagnant state. 

 The bark, for want of a sufficient flowing up of sap, be- 

 comes clung to the wood, which gardeners call being hide 

 hound. Buds may come out the first summer, in all the 

 branches; but these buds are weak; they do not become 

 shoots; the leaves are all smaller than they ought to be, 

 and do not properly perform their functions; they are not 

 of the right colour; all has a sickly appearance ; and a look 

 at the tree in summer, tells you what you have to expect 

 the next year. The spring discovers to you a part of the 

 smaller branches dead at their tops, some of them dead alto- 

 gether; you cut these out to get rid of the eye-sore; and 

 thus a part of your tree has disappeared; it already bears 

 no resemblance to that beautiful and gay and flourishing 

 thing that it was, when you fell in love with it in the nur- 

 seryman's ground; and you are much about in the state of 

 feeling of the love-sick girl, in Mr. Monk Lewis's pretty 

 song, when she saw her " gallant and jolly tar" come home 

 to her longing arms, with " the loss of a leg and an arm 

 and an eye." It is, it must be confessed, pretty tough con- 

 stancy, that can hold its own after the roses and lilies and 

 dimples have had a good digging, or ploughing, of the 

 small-pox, which has, by way of doing the work well, 

 closed up one eye, or turned it inside out. Yet (to the 

 honour of human nature I say it), I can even believe in the 

 possibility of sentiment as sublime as this, when I behold 

 the fond planter of large trees retaining ail his affection 



