it.  The little trees may have cost two shillings more, if taken from another estate.  The donkey’s day was worth sixpence.  O, wooden-shoed Ptolemies! what a day’s work was that for the world!  They thought nothing of it—­nothing more than they would of transplanting sixty cabbages.  They most likely did the same thing the next day, and for most of the days of that year, and of the next year, until all these undulating acres were planted with trees of every kind that could grow in these latitudes.  How cheap, but priceless, is the gift of such trees to mankind!  What a wealth, what a glory of them can even a poor, laboring man give to a coming generation!  They are the most generous crops ever sown by human hands.  All others the sower reaps and garners into his own personal enjoyment; but this yields its best harvest to those who come after him.  This is a seeding for posterity.  From this well of Baca shall they draw the cooling luxury of the gift when the hands that made it shall have gone to dust.

And this is a good place and time to think of home—­of what we begin to hear called by her younger children, Old New England.  Trees with us have passed through the two periods specified by Solomon—­“a time to plant and a time to pluck up.”  The last came first and lasted for a century.  Trees were the natural enemies to the first settlers, and ranked in their estimation with the wild Indians, wolves and bears.  It was their first, great business to cut them down, both great and small.  Forests fell before the woodman’s axe.  It made clean work, and seldom spared an oak or an elm.  But, at the end of a century, the people relented and felt their mistake.  Then commenced “the time to plant;” first in and around cities like Boston, Hartford, and New Haven, then about villages and private homesteads.  Tree-planting for use and ornament marks and measures the footsteps of our civilization.  The present generation is reaping a full reward of this gift to the next.  Every village now is coming to be embowered in this green legacy to the future; like a young mother decorating a Christmas-tree for her children.  Towns two hundred years old are taking the names of this diversified architecture, and they glory in the title.  New Haven, with a college second to none on the American Continent, loves to be called “The Elm City,” before any other name.  This generous and elevating taste is making its way from ocean to ocean, even marking the sites of towns and villages before they are built.  I believe there is an act of the Connecticut Legislature now in force, which allows every farmer a certain sum of money for every tree he plants along the public roadside of his fields.  The object of this is to line all the highways of the State with ornamental trees, so that each shall be a well-shaded avenue.  What a gift to another generation that simple act is intended to make!  What a world of wonder and delight will our little State be to European travellers and tourists of the next century, if this measure shall be carried out!  If a few miles of such avenues as Burghley Park and Chatsworth present, command such admiration, what sentiments would a continuous avenue of trees of equal size from Hartford to New Haven inspire!