ways been convenient to it, leading to more rapid growth and a more
compact root system. I only interject this prosaic fact here in the hope
that some of my tree-loving readers will undertake to plant some oaks
instead of only the soft-wooded and less permanent maples, poplars, and
the like.

Another simulative leaf is that of the laurel-oak, and it is color and
gloss as well as shape that have been borrowed from its humbler
neighbor in the forest. The shining green of the laurel is seen in these
oak leaves; they are also half evergreen, thus being one of the family
particularly belonging to our Southern States, and hardly enduring the
chill of the winters north of Virginia. It is one of the galaxy of oaks
I remember as providing a special interest in the Georgia forests, where
the long-leaved pine also gave a new tree sensation to the visitor from
the North, who at first could hardly imagine what those lovely little
green fountains of foliage were that he saw along the roadside and in
the woods. The Georgia oaks seem to me to have a richness of foliage, a
color and substance and shine, that compare only with the excellence of
two other products of the same State--the peach and the watermelon. The
long summer and the plenitude of sunshine seem to weave into these
products luxuriance found nowhere else; and when one sees for the first
time a happy, rollicking bunch of round-eyed negro children, innocent
alike of much clothing or any trouble, mixing up with the juicy Georgia
melon under the shade of a luxuriant oak, he gets a new conception of
at least one part of the race problem!

One of the things I wanted much to see when I first traveled South was
the famed live-oak, the majesty and the mournfulness of which had been
long sung into me. Perhaps I expected too much, as I did of the
palmetto, another part of my quest, but surely there was disappointment
when I was led, on the banks of the Manatee River in Florida, to see a
famous live-oak. It was tall and grand, but its adornment of long,
trailing gray Spanish moss, which was to have attached the sadness to
it, seemed merely to make it unkempt and uncomfortable. I was instantly
reminded of a tree at home in the far North that I had never thought
particularly beautiful, but which now, by comparison, took on an
attractiveness it has never since lost. Imagine a great spreading
weeping willow turned dingy gray, and you have a fair picture of a
moss-covered live-oak; but yo