Look at the wonderful ribbing on the rind of this Spanish chestnut; what is it that wakes up in you when you study its lines and formation? You cannot say, yet you respond to it in an indefinable manner. These branches of apple-wood, only gnarled old things, twisted and crooked and all out of shape some people would say; yet you know that they would not have been nearly so lovely had they been straight as a dart. The larches with their strong bark showing grey and red and green, and furrowed like the sea sand—isn’t there something in this that calls to you from back recesses of your being, and reminds you of the time when you—no, not you, but your ancestors, centuries ago, lived not so much in cities and houses made with hands, as out of doors, finding mystery in the green-roofed aisles and the cathedral dimness of forests long since felled?
To those of us who spend much time among these hills, each tree within the wood-house comes as a friend, with a definite personality and distinct association, and we regret its individual “going out,” even though we know it to be inevitable.
This giant, that leans against the outside wall, with no possibility of ever getting inside the door until it has been sawn in half, is a big fir (where a squirrel nested) that heeled right over in a blizzard. Here is the tall cherry-tree that died of a hollow heart, so beloved of the birds that they left us never a one if we got up later than half-past four the morning the cherries were ripe. This is the bough from the big plum-tree that broke down last August under its weight of fruit. These branches of old apple-trees are some of the winter wreckage that was strewn about the orchards; see the lichen that covers them, could anything be more satisfying to look upon? And these are some of the birches that seemed so frail as they bent to the wind on the slopes, with purple twigs and green leaves always moving; until you have actually handled them you scarcely realize the strength and toughness of the delicate-looking bark, and you henceforth take a much more personal interest in Hiawatha and his canoe, even though his tree was another member of the family. And that convenient stump you are sitting upon is part of a hoary pear, that used annually to clothe itself in white—and then contribute more gallons of perry than it does to think of in these more sober days!