“Some of them do,” said his governess, “but many of the elms on your father’s grounds are seventy feet high before the branches begin.  Sometimes two or three trunks shoot up together and spread out at the top in light, feathery plumes like palm trees.  The elm has a great variety of shapes; sometimes it is a parasol, when a number of branches rise together to a great height and spread out suddenly in the shape of an umbrella.  This makes a very regular-looking and beautiful tree.  For about three-quarters of the way up, the ‘plume’ of which Clara speaks has one straight trunk, which then bends over droopingly.  Small twigs cluster around the trunk all the way from bottom to top and give the tree the appearance of having a vine twining about it.  I think that the plume-shape is the prettiest and most odd-looking of all the elms.  Another strange shape is the vase, which seems to rest on the roots that stand out above the ground.  ’The straight trunk is the neck of the vase, and the middle consists of the lower part of the branches as they swell outward with a graceful curve, then gradually diverge until they bend over at their extremities and form the lip of the vase by a circle of terminal sprays.’”

“Have we any trees that look like vases, Miss Harson?” asked Clara.

“Yes,” was the reply; “not far from Hemlock Lodge there is one which we will look at when the leaves are all out.  But you must not expect to find a perfect vase-shape, for it is only an approach to it.  The dome-shaped elm has a broad, round head, which is formed by the shooting forth of branches of nearly equal length from the same part of the trunk, which gradually spread outward with a graceful curve into the roof or dome that crowns the tree.”

“I know something else about our elms,” said Malcolm:  “some of the roots are on top of the ground.  Isn’t that very queer, Miss Harson?”

[Illustration:  WYCH-ELM LEAVES.]

“Not for old elm trees, as this is quite a habit with them.  Indeed, in many ways, the elm is so entirely different from other trees that it can be recognized at a great distance.  It is both graceful and majestic, and is the most drooping of the drooping trees, except the willow, which it greatly surpasses in grandeur and in the variety of its forms.  The green leaves are broad, ovate, heart-shaped, from two to four or five inches long.  You can see their exact shape in this illustration.  Their summer tint is very bright and vivid, but it turns in autumn to a sober brown, sometimes touched with a bright golden yellow, And now,” continued Miss Harson, “we will examine the flowers which we have here, and we see that each blossom is on a green, slender thread less than half an inch long, and that it consists of a brown cup parted into seven or eight divisions, rounded at the border and containing about eight brown stamens and a long compressed ovary surmounted by two short styles.  This ripens into a flattened seed-vessel before the leaves are fully out, and the seeds, being small and chaffy, are wafted in all directions and carried to great distances by the wind.”