not the least oozing from its trunk, to show that its best days are past.
Vigorous in youthful blooming beauty, it stands the ornament of these
sequestered wilds, and tacitly rebukes those base ones of thine own
species who have been hardy enough to deny the existence of Him who
ordered it to flourish there.

Behold that one next to it!--Hark! how the hammerings of the red-headed
woodpecker resound through its distempered boughs! See what a quantity
of holes he has made in it, and how its bark is stained with the drops
which trickle down from them. The lightning, too, has blasted one side
of it. Nature looks pale and wan in its leaves, and her resources are
nearly dried up in its extremities; its sap is tainted; a mortal
sickness, slow as a consumption, and as sure in its consequences, has
long since entered its frame, vitiating and destroying the wholesome
juices there.

Step a few paces aside, and cast thine eye on that remnant of a mora
behind it. Best part of its branches, once so high and ornamental, now
lie on the ground in sad confusion one upon the other, all shattered and
fungus-grown, and a prey to millions of insects, which are busily
employed in destroying them. One branch of it still looks healthy! Will
it recover? No, it cannot; nature has already run her course, and that
healthy looking branch is only as a fallacious good symptom in him who is
just about to die of a mortification when he feels no more pain, and
fancies his distemper has left him; it is as the momentary gleam of a
wintry sun's ray close to the western horizon.--See! while we are
speaking, a gust of wind has brought the tree to the ground, and made
room for its successor.

Come farther on, and examine that apparently luxuriant tauronira on thy
right hand. It boasts a verdure not its own; they are false ornaments it
wears; the bush-rope and bird-vines have clothed it from the root to its
topmost branch. The succession of fruit which it hath borne, like good
cheer in the houses of the great, has invited the birds to resort to it,
and they have disseminated beautiful, though destructive, plants on its
branches, which, like the distempers vice brings into the human frame,
rob it of all its health and vigour; they have shortened its days, and
probably in another year they will finally kill it, long before nature
intended that it should die.

Ere thou leavest this interesting scene, look on the ground around thee,
and see what every