sighed lazily and half aloud.

"Would you?" asked a voice from somewhere close to him.

It was a low, caressing, insinuating voice, with a strange seductiveness
in its silvery intonation. And instead of feeling startled he felt a
sudden wave of happiness, as if a beautiful female had breathed upon his
cheek.

"Would you?" asked the voice, deliciously flattering him, "_would_ you
like to be one of us indeed?"

A tree has a life void of trouble, he ruminated. The birds sing to it,
and the wind caresses it, and it feels the sunshine, and greatens where
it grows. Yes, I should like to be a tree indeed!

"Shall I grant your wish?" asked the voice whisperingly--how exquisitely
sweet and soothing it was!--"shall I grant it here, and now?" it asked.

The student closed his eyes to leisurely consider; and then, half
dreamily, answered, "Yes!"

To be a tree is to be in touch with Nature nakedly; to be stripped of
the disguises that have gathered about the man, and to be thrown back
blankly into the narrowest groove of life. The student felt the wind and
the sun on his branches, and the birds sang joyously, nestling among
his leaves; his feet were rooted in the fresh and wholesome earth, and
the sap moved sluggishly in his rough-barked trunk.

It was a calm and deeply drowsy existence; but the restlessness of
humanity was not yet eliminated from him, and he investigated his novel
tenement wonderingly, and not without a touch of squeamish disgust.

But when the quiet night descended on him, and the cooling dews slid
into his pores, the exquisite soothe of the darkness enveloped him, and
to the rustling of his leaves he fell healthily asleep.

He was awakened presently by the gracious dawn, by the sweet and
wholesome breath of morning, and the flash of the sunrise and the
singing of birds. And had it not been for the dew-crumpled volume that
now lay blotched and smirched at his feet, he would have forgotten his
manhood and the unquiet life of cities and would have looked for his
brothers only among the trees.

But so long as the volume lay there forlornly, so long he remembered,
and had something to regret.

But the days passed--he could now keep no count of them--and human
speech and human passions dropped away from his memory as quietly and
painlessly as his own ripe leaves began presently to drop. And the
tree's life narrowed to its narrow round of needs.

It sheltered the birds, and it took the wind's kisses gladl