en
fields are much larger, brighter, and more graceful than those of old
gnarled forest-trees, but the finest blooms I ever saw were on a giant
tulip in a thin wood of Indiana. A storm blew the tree down in the midst
of its flowering, and I chanced to see it an hour later. The whole great
top was yellow with the gaudy cups, each gleaming "like a flake of
fire," as Dr. Holmes says of the oriole. Some of them were nearly four
inches across. Last year a small tree, growing in a garden near where I
write, bloomed for the first time. It was about twenty years old. Its
flowers were paler and shallower than those gathered at the same time in
the woods. It may be that transplanting, or any sort of forcing or
cultivation, may cause the blooms to deteriorate in both shape and
color, but I am sure that plenty of light and air is necessary to their
best development.

In one way the tulip-tree is closely connected with the most picturesque
and interesting period of American development. I mean the period of
"hewed-log" houses. Here and there among the hills of Indiana, Ohio,
Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, there remains one of those low,
heavy, lime-chinked structures, the best index of the first change from
frontier-life, with all its dangers and hardships, to the peace and
contentment of a broader liberty and an assured future. In fact, to my
mind, a house of hewed tulip-logs, with liberal stone chimneys and heavy
oaken doors, embowered in an old gnarled apple-and cherry-orchard,
always suggests a sort of simple honesty and hospitality long since
fallen into desuetude, but once the most marked characteristic of the
American people. It is hard to imagine any meanness or illiberality
being generated in such a house. Patriotism, domestic fidelity, and
spotless honesty used to sit before those broad fireplaces wherein the
hickory logs melted to snowy ashes. The men who hewed those logs "hewed
to the line" in more ways than one. Their words, like the bullets from
their flint-locked rifles, went straight to the point. The women, too,
they of the "big wheel" and the "little wheel," who carded and spun and
wove, though they may have been a trifle harsh and angular, were
diamond-pure and the mothers of vigorous offspring.

I often wonder if there may not be a perfectly explainable connection
between the decay or disappearance of the forests and the evaporation,
so to speak, of man's rugged sincerity and earnestness. Why should not