. e es 
™, oh Ay 
ar ia: ae 
— 4 
o wander from it in onth are drawn toward it in Bia 
re paths of pleasantness. 
" oak to\goodness that Tom Trafit would clear up the high- 
way at his do ! 
Again, — and this matter does no way concern Tom Trafit, 
| whom I leave henceforth at his spading,—every good roadside 
+ | in the land should d heve its trees ; and what trees shall an be? 
a its top a Genk thicket, be which there is no free flow of 
the winds, and for this reason, unless judiciously and regularly 
trimmed, is hardly to be commended as a tree to shade one’s 
| doorstep. The crimson-flowering and the silver-leaf are more 
‘| open in their habit, but not so sturdy growers, and never or 
rarely coming to the same grand proportions. The Norway and 
the Scotch maples have their special excellences, but they are 
: not of a kind to commend them for introduction along our high- 
roads. It is quite a common practice in putting out the sugar- 
| fourteen feet from the ground. Necessity may command this, 
but it is open to two serious objections: first, the new shoots all 
1 Starting from one point make a dense thicket, and, crowding each 
other as they do, forbid a free and natural development of the 
| tree; or, again, if only one or two shoots start from the surface 
| at or near the point of excision, the maple grows up with two 
leading shoots nearly equal in strength, and, the dead wood of 
| the old stem preventing firm union, there is great liability. to 
slit, and leave only the half of a tree. Care to secure one prom- 
f “nent leading shoot is the best precaution. 
| The European linden and its American congener, the basé- 
| wood, are both noble trees, not tempting to insects (save /the 
| bee to its blossoms) ; but the former variety is disposed to that 
| density of shade already hinted at in the case of the sugar-ma- 
ple, and so making it a questionable tree for the immediate 
| neighborhood of the house. The “button-ball,” which twenty 
| years ago stretched its white arms athwart so ‘many village 
"streets, i is now unfortunately gone by; consumiption is in its 
"family. I have made various experiments upon scattered speci- 
| mens within my own enclosure, in the hope of renewing its vigor, 
but in vain. We rail at it now that we hayé lost it; but its open 
habit of growth (giving free passage to the air), its great glossy 
| leaves, its picturesque splotches of col r upon bole and limb, its 
| dangling balls of seed, round as a bull’s-eye, were not without 
| their charms; and I shall never for get a certain line of gaunt 
a _ fellows (sycamores, we called them), beside which, for many and 
ie | many a day, I strode to school/in years long gone, watching the 
| swaying tassels, wondering at the painted trunks. 
If we could only put the oaks and the hickories along our 
roadside! For the hickories, it should be the smooth-barked (pig- 
nut, in boy-talk) ; and for the oak, it should be the white, or the 
| gray, or the yellow bark, and (if we could have it) the magnifi- 
cent water-oak of the South. The taproot of these trees, which 
renders them so impatient of removal, will always retard the gen- 
| eral introduction of them as shade-trees; beside which their 
¥ slow growth (this is not true of the hickory in 
Yet by all 
y i in position, and Jet us coax them from time to time to fill 
cht nt spaces. 
Have I forgotten the elm? Merci! have I forgotten the 
‘thay Macbeth under all the rustle of the “ Birnam wood”? 
OE 
Sas 
; ee We 06k oe vee Oe 
| maple along new streets to cut it squarely off, at some twelve or 
“oct 18 1921-~ extaciga ae ra ke dt. yy IPACAS. 
THE ATLANTIC ALMANAC FOR 1869. 
Yet what if it should prove that the elm is touched with a dis- 
ease that shall make a wreck of it, as it has made of the button- 
wood? There are, within a few years past, some bad/indica- 
tions, —a paucity of leafage, an early yellowing in the autumn, — 
a lack of the old vigor. These indications are not i 
parent, if apparent at all, in the year of our writing (’68) ; 
but in 1866 and 1867 they were in many quarters’ most decided. 
The canker-worm, too, has given it a hard strain; to lose a great 
dome of leafage in the very fulness of the season, and straight- 
way to repair the lobs, is ‘a staggering m mater for the most stal- 
wart tree. It is like Carlyle’s loss ( by byfning) of all the manu- 
script of the “french Levalutiod ” ; ; he re-wrote it indeed; but 
the loss and the ensuing) fapk-work paged him as ten ordinary 
summers might not have done. 
between the pendulous, graceful 
the sturdy self-assertion of (y 
rm of the drooping elm, and 
sight of the stately Jupiter with his broad head braving the 
‘clouds, we wait for a term’in the which to coin our admiration. 
There are towns we 
of their elms; there are streets which, without their elms, would 
be no streets at ally No trees make so wondrous a lap of their 
branches overhead, as we go down their aisles; none keep alive 
so pointedly the old fable of the Gothic arch, — the fable I mean 
of its having sprung from studies of the forest. There is a cer- 
tain University town, which some of us know, which has a 
standing miracle of this sort on one of its central streets. It 
would be a beauty forever, —if only the elms would live forever. 
The misfortune is that the good people of the town are so 
boastful of their trees that they are blinded to the necessity of 
any further adornment of street or city. To the forecast and 
Aaste and enterprise of one citizen, —long since dead, — they 
owe their trees; and with the odor of his memory and his deeds, 
they regale themselves and are sated; while an adjoining city of 
half its population has, by a slight of enterprise and faith and 
daring, converted a mud waste into a gem of a city garden, and 
so quintupled the value, of all outlying lands, and made the little 
Hartford Park a beauty and a joy forever (for parks never die, 
as forests die), the city of Elms hugs its traditions and its trees, 
and rests stagnant ; — stagnant and shameless, while its railway 
station — where four great lines of traffic concentre —is a by- 
word and a stench throughout New England. 
And now, even as I write, it is understood that there is to be a 
spoiling of the elms ; huge dormitories are to rise upon the Col- | 
lege campus, — the elms making way for them, — and their brick 
backs to be thrust upon the street that bounds the most beautiful 
spot of the town. This extravagant leap of brick and mortar 
into the elms and lawn is understood to be primarily for the sake 
of sparing existing buildings, and secondarily to secure some ap- 
proach in the general arrangement to the quadrangle of the .Eng- 
lish colleges. \ 
But what on earth does an American college want of a quad- 
rangle, which originally supposed a great portal and a porter 
and closed gates? Shall we have a proctor? Will the ruin of 
this old quiet green, with its outlook upon the larger green 
around which the town lies sleeping, find compensation in any 
mansard roof or pavilions they may contrive? \ Will the disjecta 
membra of present edifices, each of its own style and with its own 
architect, gain anything by the quadrangulation ? \Can any new 
campus behind — with the broad eastern outlook upon elms and 
churches and ‘lines of houses and slopes of lawn forever shut 
out — be equal to the old ? 
Once more, at least, before the final despoilment, I hope to 
wander under those old trees, brush once more, though with 
foot less elastic than of old, that greensward where we lay on the 
19 | 
at we call) the English elm. | 
Juno is magnificent, and wo say it freely; but when we catch 
gould name that live upon the reputation | 
i 
shall not attempt to decide | 
Urxme J 
