vate signals hardly the botanist can
read,--while we walk under the triumphal arches of the Elms. Leave it to
Nature to appoint the days, whether the same as in neighboring States or
not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if they can understand
them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her Woodbine flag! What
public-spirited merchant, think you, has contributed this part of the
show? There is no handsomer shingling and paint than this vine, at
present covering a whole side of some houses. I do not believe that the
Ivy _never sear_ is comparable to it. No wonder it has been extensively
introduced into London. Let us have a good many Maples and Hickories and
Scarlet Oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting
in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is
not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They
are important, like the town-clock. A village that has them not will not
be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is
wanting. Let us have Willows for spring, Elms for summer, Maples and
Walnuts and Tupeloes for autumn, Evergreens for winter, and Oaks for all
seasons. What is a gallery in a house to a gallery in the streets, which
every market-man rides through, whether he will or not? Of course, there
is not a picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to
us as is the western view at sunset under the Elms of our main street.
They are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them. An
avenue of Elms as large as our largest and three miles long would seem
to lead to some admirable place, though only C---- were at the end of
it.

A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering
prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two villages,
one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the
other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a single tree or
two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found
the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate
drinkers. Every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone will be exposed.
The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their barns and houses,
like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look to see spears in
their hands. They will be ready to accept the most barren and forlorn
doctrine,--as that the world is speedily coming to an end, or has
already got to it, or