there is a mixture of
sand and vegetable mould superposed on clay and gravel. About its roots
you may find the lady-slipper and the dog-tooth violet, each in its
season. Its bark often bears the rarest lichens, and, near the ground,
short green moss as soft and thick as velvet. The poison-ivy and the
beautiful Virginia creeper like to clamber up the rough trunk, sometimes
clothing the huge tree from foot to top in a mantle of brown feelers and
glossy leaves. Seen at a distance, the tulip-tree and the
black-walnut-tree look very much alike; but upon approaching them the
superior symmetry and beauty of the former are at once discovered. The
leaves of the walnut are gracefully arranged, but they admit too much
light; while the tulip presents grand masses of dense foliage upheld by
knotty, big-veined branches, the perfect embodiment of vigor.

In the days of bee-hunting in the West, I may safely say that a majority
of bee-trees were tulips. I have found two of these wild Hyblas since I
began my studies for this paper; but the trees have become so valuable
that the bees are left unmolested with their humming and their honey. It
seems that no more appropriate place for a nest of these wild
nectar-brewers could be chosen than the hollow bough of a giant
tulip,--a den whose door is curtained with leaves and washed round with
odorous airs, where the superb flowers, with their wealth of golden
pollen and racy sweets, blaze out from the cool shadows above and
beneath. But the sly old 'coon, that miniature Bruin of our Western
woods, is a great lover of honey, and not at all a respecter of the
rights of wild bees. He is tireless in his efforts to reach every
deposit of waxy comb and amber distillation within the range of his keen
power of scent. The only honey that escapes him is that in a hollow too
small for him to enter and too deep for his fore-paws to reach the
bottom.

Poe, in his story of the Gold-Bug, falls into one of his characteristic
errors of conscience. The purposes of his plot required that a very
large and tall tree should be climbed, and, to be picturesque, a tulip
was chosen. But, in order to give a truthful air to the story, the
following minutely incorrect description is given: "In youth the
tulip-tree, or _Liriodendron Tulipiferum_, the most magnificent of
American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a
great height without lateral branches; but in its riper age the bark
becomes gnarle