ens, tulip wallpapers and tulip
panel-carvings, I would set going in America! The colors, old gold,
orange, vermilion, and green,--the forms, gentle curves and classical
truncations, and all new and American, with a woodsy freshness and
fragrance in them. The leaves and flowers of the tulip-tree are so
simple and strong of outline that they need not be conventionalized for
decorative purposes. During the process of growth the leaves often take
on accidental shapes well suited to the variations required by the
designer. A wise artist, going into the woods to educate himself up to
the level of the tulip, could not fail to fill his sketch-books with
studies of the birds that haunt the tree, and especially such brilliant
ones as the red tanager, the five or six species of woodpecker, the
orioles, and the yellow-throated warbler. The Japanese artists give us
wonderful instances of the harmony between birds, flowers, and foliage;
not direct instances, it is true, but rather suggested ones, from which
large lessons might be learned by him who would carry the thought into
our woods with him in the light of a pure and safely-educated taste.
Take, for instance, the yellow-bellied woodpecker, with its red fore-top
and throat, its black and white lines, and its bright eyes, together
with its pale yellow shading of back and belly, and how well it would
"work in" with the tulip-leaves and flowers! Even its bill and feet
harmonize perfectly with the bark of the older twigs. So the
golden-wing, the tanager, and the orioles would bear their colors
harmoniously into any successful tulip design.

South of the Alleghany Mountains I have not found as fine specimens of
this tree as I have in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. Everywhere the
saw-mills are fast making sad havoc. The walnut and the tulip are soon
to be no more as "trees with the trees in the forest." Those growing in
the almost inaccessible "pockets" of the Kentucky and Tennessee
mountains may linger for a half-century yet, but eventually all will be
gone from wherever a man and a saw can reach them.

The oak of England and the pine of Norway are not more typical than the
tulip-tree. The symmetry, vigor, and rich colors of our tree might
represent the force, freedom, and beauty of our government and our
social influences. If the American eagle is the bird of freedom, the
tulip is the tree of liberty,--strong, fragrant, giant-flowered,
flaunting, defiant, yet dignified and steadfast.