are long, flexible, and tough, and when young are pale yellow and of bitterish taste, but slightly flavored with the stronger tulip individuality which characterizes the juice and sap of the buds and the bark of the twigs.  The leaves, as I have said, are dark and rich, but their shape and color are not the half of their beauty.  There is a charm in their motion, be the wind ever so light, that is indescribable.  The rustle they make is not “sad” or “uncertain,” but cheerful and forceful.  The garments of some young giantess, such as Baudelaire sings of, might make that rustling as she would run past one in a land of colossal persons and things.

I have been surprised to find so little about the tulip-tree in our literature.  Our writers of prose and verse have not spared the magnolia of the South, which is far inferior, both tree and flower, to our gaudy, flaunting giantess of the West.  Indeed, if I were an aesthete, and were looking about me for a flower typical of a robust and perfect sentiment of art, I should greedily seize upon the bloom of the tulip-tree.  What a “craze” for tulip borders and screens, tulip wallpapers and tulip panel-carvings, I would set going in America!  The colors, old gold, orange, vermilion, and green,—­the forms, gentle curves and classical truncations, and all new and American, with a woodsy freshness and fragrance in them.  The leaves and flowers of the tulip-tree are so simple and strong of outline that they need not be conventionalized for decorative purposes.  During the process of growth the leaves often take on accidental shapes well suited to the variations required by the designer.  A wise artist, going into the woods to educate himself up to the level of the tulip, could not fail to fill his sketch-books with studies of the birds that haunt the tree, and especially such brilliant ones as the red tanager, the five or six species of woodpecker, the orioles, and the yellow-throated warbler.  The Japanese artists give us wonderful instances of the harmony between birds, flowers, and foliage; not direct instances, it is true, but rather suggested ones, from which large lessons might be learned by him who would carry the thought into our woods with him in the light of a pure and safely-educated taste.  Take, for instance, the yellow-bellied woodpecker, with its red fore-top and throat, its black and white lines, and its bright eyes, together with its pale yellow shading of back and belly, and how well it would “work in” with the tulip-leaves and flowers!  Even its bill and feet harmonize perfectly with the bark of the older twigs.  So the golden-wing, the tanager, and the orioles would bear their colors harmoniously into any successful tulip design.

South of the Alleghany Mountains I have not found as fine specimens of this tree as I have in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana.  Everywhere the saw-mills are fast making sad havoc.  The walnut and the tulip are soon to be no more as “trees with the trees in the forest.”  Those growing in the almost inaccessible “pockets” of the Kentucky and Tennessee mountains may linger for a half-century yet, but eventually all will be gone from wherever a man and a saw can reach them.