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 line 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 would scrape a second-rate painting off a 
wall if Michael 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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