ils.

I once passed a lazy, dreamy afternoon in a small clearing on a Canadian
mountain-side, where the lumbermen had left standing a few scattered
butternuts. I can see them now,--misshapen giants, patriarchal
monstrosities, their huge trunks leaning awkwardly this way and that,
and each bearing at the top a ludicrously small, one-sided bunch of
leafy boughs. All about me was the ancient wood. For a week I had been
wandering through it with delight. Such beeches and maples, birches and
butternuts! I had not thought of any imperfection. I had been in
sympathy with the artist, and had enjoyed his work in the same spirit in
which it had been wrought. Now, however, with these unhappy butternuts
in my eye, I began to look, not at the forest, but at the trees, and I
found that the spared butternuts were in no sense exceptional. _All_ the
trees were deformed. They had grown as they could, not as their innate
proclivities would have led them. A tree is no better than a man; it
cannot be itself if it stands too much in a crowd.

I set it down, unwillingly, to the discredit of the Weymouth pine,--a
symptom of some ancestral taint, perhaps,--that it suffers less than
most trees from being thus encroached upon. Yet it does not entirely
escape. True, it leans neither to left nor right, its trunk is seldom
contorted; if it grow at all it must grow straight toward the zenith;
but it is sadly maimed, nevertheless,--hardly more than a tall stick
with a broom at the top. If you would see a typical white pine you must
go elsewhere to look for it. I remember one such, standing by itself in
a broad Concord River meadow; not remarkable for its size, but of a
symmetry and beauty that make the traveler turn again and again, till he
is a mile away, to gaze upon it. No pine-tree ever grew like that in a
wood.

I go sometimes through a certain hamlet, which has sprung suddenly into
being on a hill-top where formerly stood a pine grove. The builders of
the houses have preserved (doubtless they use that word) a goodly number
of the trees. But though I have been wont to esteem the poorest tree as
better than none, I am almost ready to forswear my opinion at sight of
these slender trunks, so ungainly and unsupported. The first breeze, one
would say, must bring them down upon the roofs they were never meant to
shade. Poor naked things! I fancy they look abashed at being dragged
thus unexpectedly and inappropriately into broad daylight. If I were to