in Lynn and elsewhere; and I have
seen, in the entries of the wealthy, hat-trees with a fair show of
fruit. A family-tree I once cultivated myself, and found therefrom but a
scanty yield, and that quite tasteless and innutritious. Of trees
bearing men we are not without examples; as those in the park of Louis
the Eleventh of France. Who has forgotten, moreover, that olive-tree
growing in the Athenian's back-garden, with its strange uxorious crop,
for the general propagation of which, as of a new and precious variety,
the philosopher Diogenes, hitherto uninterested in arboriculture, was so
zealous? In the _sylva_ of our own Southern States, the females of my
family have called my attention to the china-tree. Not to multiply
examples, I will barely add to my list the birch-tree, in the smaller
branches of which has been implanted so miraculous a virtue for
communicating the Latin and Greek languages, and which may well
therefore be classed among the trees producing necessaries of
life,--_venerabile donum fatalis virgae_. That money-trees existed in the
golden age there want not prevalent reasons for our believing. For does
not the old proverb, when it asserts that money does not grow on _every_
bush, imply _a fortiori_, that there were certain bushes which did
produce it? Again, there is another ancient saw to the effect that money
is the _root_ of all evil. From which two adages it may be safe to infer
that the aforesaid species of tree first degenerated into a shrub, then
absconded underground, and finally, in our iron age, vanished
altogether. In favourable exposures it may be conjectured that a
specimen or two survived to a great age, as in the garden of the
Hesperides; and, indeed, what else could that tree in the Sixth AEneid
have been, with a branch whereof the Trojan hero procured admission to a
territory, for the entering of which money is a surer passport than to a
certain other more profitable (too) foreign kingdom? Whether these
speculations of mine have any force in them, or whether they will not
rather, by most readers, be deemed impertinent to the matter in hand, is
a question which I leave to the determination of an indulgent posterity.
That there were, in more primitive and happier times, shops where money
was sold,--and that, too, on credit and at a bargain,--I take to be
matter of demonstration. For what but a dealer in this article was that
AEolus who supplied Ulysses with motive power for his fleet in b