ine reflected from the bright yellow
stubble of the newly-cut wheat-fields beat against our faces with a
steady glare, and dipped into a cool, green, shady hollow where cows
cropped the rich grass or stood knee-deep in the water of a little
stream. Well they might stand in quiet contentment: a king might have
envied them their surroundings. Overhead rose a dozen or more of the
tallest and finest elms we had ever seen, stretching their thick
branches till they met and formed a canopy so dense that only a stray
sunbeam or two pierced through and fell upon the smooth green sward.
Peerless among them stood an elm of mighty girth and lofty height, its
widely-stretching branches as large around, where they left the trunk,
as a common tree, and clothed to the farthest twig with luxuriant
foliage. And all up and down the mossy trunk and around the branches
grew young twigs from a few inches to a foot or two in length, half
hiding the shaggy bark with their tender green leaves. It was a
combination of tree-majesty and grace that is rarely seen. In a tropical
forest I have beheld a lofty tree covered thickly all over its trunk and
branches with ferns and parasitic plants, but the sight, though
beautiful, was suggestive of morbid, unnatural growth. This royal elm
out of its own sap had clothed its trunk as with a thickly-twining vine.
When, after gazing our fill, we drove reluctantly out of the shady green
hollow into the sunshine, and began to climb a hill, we saw at the top a
small house surrounded by fruit trees and shaded in front by a
grape-arbor. On reaching it we stopped to ask our way of a man who sat
in his shirt-sleeves near the front door, fanning himself with his straw
hat. He seemed frank and inclined to talk, and asked us to stop and rest
a while in the shade. We did so, and his wife brought us some fresh
buttermilk to drink, the children gathering about to look at us as if
our advent was the incident of the month. In conversation we learned
that he was the owner of forty acres, which he devoted largely to the
cultivation of small fruits. The land was paid for, with the exception
of a mortgage of three hundred dollars, which he hoped to lift in a
season or two if the yield was good.

"We're doing well now," he said, "but when we started, eight years ago,
it was truly discouraging. There was no house on the place when we came
here. We put up the room we now use as a kitchen, and lived in it for
two years and a half. I