looking
countryman's cart stops opposite my door.--Do I want any
huckleberries?--If I do not, there are those that do. Thereupon my
soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the
wholesome countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad
hands around its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries,
and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel until they
tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the
resounding metal beneath.--I won't say that this rushing
huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me than the "Anvil
Chorus."

--I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.

--Where are your great trees, Sir?--said the divinity-student.

Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have
put my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham
Young has human ones.

--One set's as green as the other,--exclaimed a boarder, who has
never been identified.

They're all Bloomers,--said the young fellow called John.

[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our
landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by
putting my wedding-ring on a tree.]

Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,--said I,--I
have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New
England elms and other big trees.--Don't you want to hear me talk
trees a little now? That is one of my specialities.

[So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about
trees.]

I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most
intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had
several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular. Now,
if you expect me to hold forth in a "scientific" way about my
tree-loves,--to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and
describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that,--you are an
anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who will
discourse to you of such matters. What should you think of a lover
who should describe the idol of his heart in the language of
science, thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo;
Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental
Formula

2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3
i---c---p---m---
2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3'

and so on?

No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them,
adore them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green
sun-shades over our heads, talking