fferent class. One never
thinks of it as a lawn tree, or as bordering a fashionable roadway;
rather the expectation is to find it along a brook, in a meadow, or in
some rather wild and unkempt spot. As one of the scientific books begins
of it, "it is a tree of the first magnitude." I like that expression;
for the sycamore gives an impression of magnitude and breadth; it
spreads out serenely and comfortably.

My friend Professor Bailey says _Platanus occidentalis_, which is the
truly right name of this tree, has no title to the term sycamore; it is
properly, as his Cyclopedia gives it, Buttonwood, or Plane. Hunting
about a little among tree books, I find the reason for this, and that it
explains another name I have never understood. The sycamore of the
Bible, referred to frequently in the Old Testament, traditionally
mentioned as the tree under which Joseph rested with Mary and the young
child on the way to Egypt, and into which Zaccheus climbed to see what
was going on, was a sort of fig tree--"Pharaoh's Fig," in fact. When
the mystery-plays of the centuries gone by were produced in Europe, the
tree most like to what these good people thought was the real sycamore
furnished the branches used in the scene-setting--and it was either the
oriental plane, or the sycamore-leaved maple that was chosen, as
convenient. The name soon attached itself to the trees; and when
homesick immigrants looked about the new world of America for some
familiar tree, it was easy enough to see a great similarity in our
buttonwood, which thus soon became sycamore.

[Illustration: The sycamore, or button-ball]

So much for information, more or less legendary, I confess; but the
great tree we are discussing is very tangible. Indeed, it is always in
the public eye; for it carries on a sort of continuous disrobing
performance! The snake sheds his skin rather privately, and comes forth
in his new spring suit all at once; the oak and the maple, and all the
rest of them continually but invisibly add new bark between the
splitting or stretching ridges of the old; but our wholesome friend the
sycamore is quite shamelessly open about it, dropping off a plate or a
patch here and there as he grows and swells, to show us his underwear,
which thus at once becomes overcoat, as he goes on. At first greenish,
the under bark thus exposed becomes creamy white, mostly; and I have had
a conceit that the colder the winter, the whiter would be those portions
of Mr.