And now let us return to our chief picture.  In the days of my earliest remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western side of the old mansion.  Whether, like the cypress, these trees suggest the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their tremulous leaves make wits afraid by sympathy with their nervous thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of their foliage and their closely swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs stiffened in their cerements, I will guess; but they always seemed to me to give an of sepulchral sadness to the house before which stood sentries.  Not so with the row of elms which you may see leading up towards the western entrance.  I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona, or the strong man whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous.

The College plain would be nothing without its elms.  As the long hair of a woman is a glory to her, are these green tresses that bank themselves against sky in thick clustered masses the ornament and the pride of the classic green.  You know the “Washington elm,” or if you do not, you had better rekindle our patriotism by reading the inscription, which tells you that under its shadow the great leader first drew his sword at the head of an American army.  In a line with that you may see two others:  the coral fan, as I always called it from its resemblance in form to that beautiful marine growth, and a third a little farther along.  I have heard it said that all three were planted at the same time, and that the difference of their growth is due to the slope of the ground,—­the Washington elm being lower than either of the others.  There is a row of elms just in front of the old house on the south.  When I was a child the one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of its limbs and a long ribbon of bark torn away.  The tree never fully recovered its symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a second thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those of the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis.  Heaven had twice blasted it, and the axe finished what the lightning had begun.

The soil of the University town is divided into patches of sandy and of clayey ground.  The Common and the College green, near which the old house stands, are on one of the sandy patches.  Four curses are the local inheritance:  droughts, dust, mud, and canker-worms.  I cannot but think that all the characters of a region help to modify the children born in it.  I am fond of making apologies for human nature, and I think I could find an excuse for myself if I, too, were dry and barren and muddy-witted and “cantankerous,”—­disposed to get my back up, like those other natives of the soil.