Travels in a Tree-top 



27 



really brighter in one case than in the other, 

 but my mind was. The sunset was too 

 closely linked with the death of the day ; there 

 was the idea of a grand finale before the 

 curtain drops, and this tends to dull enthu- 

 siasm. It is not so with sunrise. It is all 

 freshness, — a matter of birth, of beginning, 

 of a new trial of life, — and with so happy an 

 entrance, the exit should be one of gladness 

 only ; but there is no trace of pity in Nature. 

 In awful certainty the night cometh. 



I was not surprised at every visit to this 

 tree to find some new form of life resting on 

 its branches. A beautiful garter-snake had 

 reached a low branch by climbing to it from 

 a sapling that reached a little above it. There 

 was no break in the highway that led to 

 its very summit. The grass leaned upon 

 ferns, these upon shrubs, these again upon 

 saplings, and so the tree was reached. Any 

 creeping thing could have climbed just eighty 

 feet above the earth with far less danger than 

 men encounter clambering over hills. 



And not only a zoological garden was this 

 and is every other old tree, but the oak had 

 its botanic garden as well. When we con- 

 sider that many of the branches were so wide 



