lm,"--I said, and proceeded to find
it,--knowing that it was on a certain farm in a place called Johnston,
if I remember rightly. I shall never forget my ride and my
introduction to the great Johnston elm.

I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the
first time. Provincialism has no _scale_ of excellence in man or
vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it
has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for
Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and
that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when she
first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted. Before
the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks
into itself. All those stories of four or five men stretching their
arms around it and not touching each other's fingers, of one's pacing
the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its
leafy lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so
many false pretensions.

As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object of
my journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time at the
road-side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the rest, I
asked myself,--"Is this it?" But as I drew nearer, they grew
smaller,--or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line had
looked like one, and so deceived me. At last, all at once, when I was
not thinking of it,--I declare to you it makes my flesh creep when I
think of it now,--all at once I saw a great, green cloud swelling in
the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty and
imperial supremacy among the lesser forest-growths, that my heart
stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a hunter springs at a
five-barred gate, and I felt all through me, without need of uttering
the words,--"This is it!"

You will find this tree described, with many others, in the excellent
Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The author has
given my friend the Professor credit for some of his measurements, but
measured this tree himself, carefully. It is a grand elm for size of
trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular development,--one of the first,
perhaps the first, of the first class of New England elms.

The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the
ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of the
main road (if my points of compass ar