“In the other world?”

No:  to-morrow evening, as I am taking my accustomed walk into the country, I shall be wellnigh run over by a swiftly driven team; I shall spring suddenly aside, when thou wilt pass, O bogus son of Jehu, with thy dog-cart and two-forty span of bays, dashing down the road, thy thoughts fixed on horse-flesh instead of eternity, and thy soul bounded, north by thy cigar, east and west by the wheels thy vehicle, and south by the dumb beasts that drag thee along.

But, not to introduce the reader to more solemn scenes of affliction and sorrow which are witnessed here during the first vigil of the day, we pass to a later hour.  The mourners who come hither in the early morning to decorate the graves of the recent dead, and to weep over them undisturbed by visitors, have now departed.  The sun is already high, the dew has disappeared from the trees and the shrubs, and the paths and walks and avenues begin to be thronged with loungers and sight-seers from the city.

I had stopped at the forks of a lane and was hesitating which branch to take and what to do with myself, when a tall and beautiful Willow, standing upon a knoll a few rods distant, with thick drooping boughs sweeping the ground on every side, beckoned to me.  On approaching him, he extended a branch, shook me cordially by the hand, and invited me to accept the shelter and hospitality of his roof.  The proposal so generously made was at once accepted with profuse thanks, and, parting the boughs, I entered the tent and threw myself upon the soft grass.

Do you ever talk with trees?  It is a custom of mine, and I usually find their conversation much more entertaining and profitable than that of most men I know.  “Good morning!” I say to an acquaintance.  “Fine day,” he replies; “how’s business?” And so on for an hour, over themes of every nature, the current of conversation rippled with trite truisms, and whirling in the surface-eddies of Tupper’s “Proverbial Philosophy.”  But the tree takes the whole of the Tupperian philosophy for granted at the start, and the truisms which most men utter, and takes you for granted likewise,—­supposing neither half of your eyeballs blind, and that you have a soul as well as a body,—­and enters at once into conversation upon the high table-land of science, reason, and poetry.  The entire talk of a fashionable tea-party, strained from its lees of scandal, filtered through a sober reflection of the following morning, is not equal in value to the quivering of a single leaf.  A tree will discourse with you upon botany, physiology, music, painting, philosophy, and a dozen arts and sciences besides, none of which it simply chats about, but all of which it is:  and if you do not understand its language and comprehend what it tells you about them, so much the worse for you; it is not the fault of the tree.

I say, I talk with trees for this reason,—­because their wisdom is so much greater than that of my ordinary acquaintances,—­and further, (to put the major after the minor premise,) because they are virtually living beings, endowed with instinct, feeling, reason, and display every essential attribute of sentient creatures,—­in fact, because they have souls as well as men, only they are clothed in vegetable flesh.