shoot across each
other's ascending curves, to intermingle their showery flakes of green.
When one looks through a long double row of these, as in that lovely
avenue which the poets of Yale remember so well,

"Oh, could the vista of my life but now as bright appear
As when I first through Temple Street looked down thine espalier!"

he beholds a temple not built with hands, fairer than any minster, with
all its clustered stems and flowering capitals, that ever grew in stone.

Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of
its elms. The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable
creature among us. It loves man as man loves it. It is modest and
patient. It has a small flake of a seed which blows in everywhere and
makes arrangements for coming up by and by. So, in spring, one finds a
crop of baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips, very weak and small
compared to those succulent vegetables. The baby-elms die, most of them,
slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe, as meekly as
Herod's innocents. One of them gets overlooked, perhaps, until it has
established a kind of right to stay. Three generations of carrot and
parsnip consumers have passed away, yourself among them, and now let
your great-grandson look for the baby-elm. Twenty-two feet of clean
girth, three hundred and sixty feet in the line that bounds its leafy
circle, it covers the boy with such a canopy as neither glossy-leafed
oak nor insect-haunted linden ever lifted into the summer skies.

Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not only on account of its
Gothic-arched vista. In this street were most of the great houses, or
"mansion-houses," as it was usual to call them. Along this street,
also, the more nicely kept and neatly painted dwellings were chiefly
congregated. It was the correct thing for a Rockland dignitary to have a
house in Elm Street. A New England "mansion-house" is naturally square,
with dormer windows projecting from the roof, which has a balustrade
with turned posts round it. It shows a good breadth of front-yard
before its door, as its owner shows a respectable expanse of a clean
shirt-front. It has a lateral margin beyond its stables and offices, as
its master wears his white wrist bands showing beyond his coat-cuffs.
It may not have what can properly be called grounds, but it must have
elbow-room, at any rate. Without it, it is like a man who is always
tight-buttoned for want of any