the road-side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the
rest, I asked myself,--"Is this it?" But as I drew nearer, they
grew smaller,--or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line
had looked like one, and so deceived me. At last, all at once,
when I was not thinking of it,--I declare to you it makes my flesh
creep when I think of it now,--all at once I saw a great, green
cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such
Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser
forest-growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs
as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me,
without need of uttering the words,--"This is it!"

You will find this tree described, with many others, in the
excellent Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The
author has given my friend the Professor credit for some of his
measurements, but measured this tree himself, carefully. It is a
grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular
development,--one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first
class of New England elms.

The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the
ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of
the main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield.
But this has much the appearance of having been formed by the union
of two trunks growing side by side.

The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows, belong
also to the first class of trees.

There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to
spread its claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or
more before they covered the foot of its bole up with earth. This
is the American elm most like an oak of any I have ever seen.

The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of
form. I have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County,
and few to compare with it anywhere. I am not sure that I remember
any other first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.

--What makes a first-class elm?--Why, size, in the first place, and
chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above
the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across,
may claim that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the
questionable exception of the Springfield tree above referred to,
stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or
twenty-three feet of gi