to be worth resisting.  You will find, that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the branches of the weeping-willow to the extreme upward inclination of those of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle.  At 90 deg. the oak stops short; to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of organization.  The American elm betrays something of both; yet sometimes, as we shall see, puts on a certain resemblance to its sturdier neighbor.

It won’t do to be exclusive in our taste about trees.  There is hardly one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting place for it.  I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions and aspect, a vast pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of a lofty hill, and a beacon to all the country round.  A native of that region saw fit to build his house very near it, and, having a fancy that it might blow down some time or other, and exterminate himself and any incidental relatives who might be “stopping” or “tarrying” with him,—­also laboring under the delusion that human life is under all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable existence,—­had the great poplar cut down.  It is so easy to say, “It is only a poplar!” and so much harder to replace its living cone than to build a granite obelisk!

I must tell you about some of my tree-wives.  I was at one period of my life much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode Island, a small, but delightful State in the neighborhood of Pawtucket.  The number of inhabitants being not very large, I had leisure, during my visits to the Providence Plantations, to inspect the face of the country in the intervals of more fascinating studies of physiognomy.  I heard some talk of a great elm a short distance from the locality just mentioned.  “Let us see the great elm,”—­I said, and proceeded to find it,—­knowing that it was on a certain farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly.  I shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great Johnston elm.

I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time.  Provincialism has no scale of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature’s best.  I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when she first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted.  Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks into itself.  All those stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not touching each other’s fingers, of one’s pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.