ARBOR DA Y MANUAL. 
213 
promises to flower early, or Benjamin Franklin is drying up, whether Robert 
Fulton is budding, or General Grant beginning to sprout, the pupil will find 
- that a tree may be as interesting as the squirrel that skims along its trunk, or 
the bird that calls from its top like a muezzin from a minaret. 
The future orators of Arbor Day will draw the morals that lie in the resem¬ 
blances of all life. It is by care and diligent cultivation that the wild crab is 
subdued to bear sweet fruit, and by skillful grafting and budding that the same 
: stock produces different varieties. - And so you, Master Leonard or Miss Alice, 
if you are cross and spiteful and selfish and bullying, you also must be budded 
.and trained. Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined, young gentlemen, and 
you must start straight if you would not grow up crooked. Just as the boy 
begins, the man turns out. 
So, trained by Arbor Day, as the children cease to be children 'they will feel 
the spiritual and refining influence, the symbolical beauty, of the trees. Like 
men, they begin tenderly and grow larger and larger, in greater strength, more 
•^deeply rooted, more widely spreading, stretching leafy boughs for birds to build 
in, shading the cattle that chew the cud and graze in peace, decking themselves 
in blossoms and ever-changing foliage, and murmuring with rustling music by 
day and night. The thoughtful youth will see a noble image of the strong man 
struggling with obstacles that he overcomes in a great tree wrestling mightily 
with the wintry gales, and extorting a glorious music from the storms which it 
triumphantly defies. 
Arbor Day will make the country visibly more beautiful every year. Every 
little community, every school district, will contribute to the good work. The 
school-house will gradually become an ornament, as it is already the great 
benefit of the village, and the children will be put in the way of living upon 
more friendly and intelligent terms with the bountiful nature which is so 
friendly to us. 
George William Curtis. 
Editor’s Easy Chair , Harper's Magazine, July, 1889. 
The objects of the restoration of the forests are as multifarious as the motives 
which have led to their destruction, and as the evils which that destruction has 
occasioned.- The planting of the mountains will diminish the frequency and 
violence of river inundations; prevent the formation of torrents ; mitigate the 
extremes of atmospheric temperature, humidity, and precipitation; restore 
dried-up springs, rivulets, and sources of irrigation; shelter the fields from 
chilling and from parching winds; prevent the spread of miasmatic effluvia; 
and, finally, furnish an inexhaustible and self-renewing supply of material indis¬ 
pensable to so many purposes of domestic comfort, to the successful exercise 
of every art of peace, every destructive energy of war. 
George P. Marsh. 
A brotherhood of venerable trees. 
Wordsworth — Sonnet . 
