NATURK STUDY. 
I 7 8 
iar voice are supposed to signify sorrow for past wrong¬ 
doings. The very slender petioles by which the leaves 
are attached are compressed laterally in several species, as 
the American aspen and black poplar, causing the leaf to 
be in almost perpetual motion ; but the Highlanders of 
Scotland believe that the holy cross was made of wood from 
this tree, and that its leaves are never allowed to rest. Im¬ 
pressed by the horrors of the crucifixion, they are still un¬ 
able to suppress their agitation. 
The glittering lights produced in the foliage of the 
white or silver poplar by this twinkling of the leaves is like 
only unto the silver luster on the ripples of a lake by moon¬ 
light, to which it has often been compared. 
‘‘Phaeton, son of Helios, the sun,” was presumptuous 
and ambitious enough to request his father to allow him 
for one day to drive the chariot of the sun across the heav¬ 
ens. His father granted the request, but the youth was 
too weak to check the horses. They rushed out of their 
usual track, and came so near the earth as almost to set it 
on fire. Thereupon Zeus, the supreme god in Greek 
mythology, killed him with a flash of lightning, and hurled 
him down into the river Eridamus. His sisters, who had 
yoked the horses to the chariot, and had wept and mourned 
for their lost brother, were metamorphosed into poplars 
and their tears into amber. “Who fails, who knows the 
story, to think of the slender, girlish figures of the weep¬ 
ing sisters as he watches and listens to a row of the Eom- 
bardy variety ?” 
The Eombardy poplar is a strongly marked tree in con¬ 
tour, its lines being chiefly perpendicular, but is not un¬ 
graceful, and a rural scene is recalled to mind where these 
poplars reach heavenward, like the twin spires of a cathe- 
eral, before an old red house and other more flattened tree 
forms by which it is surrounded. 
Of course there is a legend to explain this upward- 
