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et is that I have never been in a position to do so. I can say, though, with Dr. Holmes, for whose opinion on such things I have a most profound admiration, that I have an intense, passionate fondness for all trees in general and for certain trees in particular. When I go out among the trees I have a kinship there. I am never lonely when I am in a forest and I cannot say that when I am alone in a big city. I like to look upon an old tree as a patriarch with not only an honored past but an interesting story locked up under its bark. As I go to such a place as Valley Forge, I like to lay my hand on the rough bark of an old tree and say, "Oh, but that you might tell your tale; you are the only thing left which looked upon the scene in which a few were crucified that many might live." Such are the thoughts that come to me when I stand by an old tree. I like to let my mind run back to the beginnings of trees, to the pre-historic times when this bed rock was laid down, when all this region was an inlet or bay from the Atlantic Ocean and the upland was treeless as our rock record shows. Then there were the beginnings of low fern-like growth and clotted mass which gradually increased in size until they assumed the enormous proportions which made the coal beds possible. And then I like to follow the growth of trees on to the broad leaf. We have the beginnings of the broad leaf, the sassafras, the poplars, the maples, and the oaks, and then, as the crowning feature of the evolutionary process, the nut tree. I like to let my mind run ahead a bit, particularly at such a time as this when we are setting out new trees. What sort of people will these trees live to see? Will there be a decadence of the taste and fondness for trees, which we hope is growing? Will these trees live to see a race of people who take no interest in such things except a commercial one, who have no thought for the beauty of the trees nor for the rights of posterity? Will these trees perchance live to see an upheaval of the happy affairs which now exist in this country? In one hundred and fifty years many things can happen. There is much in the existing turmoil of war conditions that suggests possible disaster within the next couple of centuries, and possibly that the fair constitution of Franklin and Washington may be submerged in a chaos of something that means nothing. The remote possibility of the invasion of a conquering race to destroy all these things--but
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