inst sky in thick clustered masses the ornament and the pride of the
classic green. You know the "Washington elm," or if you do not, you had
better rekindle our patriotism by reading the inscription, which tells
you that under its shadow the great leader first drew his sword at the
head of an American army. In a line with that you may see two others:
the coral fan, as I always called it from its resemblance in form to
that beautiful marine growth, and a third a little farther along. I have
heard it said that all three were planted at the same time, and that
the difference of their growth is due to the slope of the ground,--the
Washington elm being lower than either of the others. There is a row of
elms just in front of the old house on the south. When I was a child
the one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of
its limbs and a long ribbon of bark torn away. The tree never fully
recovered its symmetry and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a
second thunderbolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, like those
of the lost souls in the Hall of Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and
the axe finished what the lightning had begun.

The soil of the University town is divided into patches of sandy and
of clayey ground. The Common and the College green, near which the old
house stands, are on one of the sandy patches. Four curses are the local
inheritance: droughts, dust, mud, and canker-worms. I cannot but think
that all the characters of a region help to modify the children born in
it. I am fond of making apologies for human nature, and I think I
could find an excuse for myself if I, too, were dry and barren and
muddy-witted and "cantankerous,"--disposed to get my back up, like those
other natives of the soil.

I know this, that the way Mother Earth treats a boy shapes out a kind
of natural theology for him. I fell into Manichean ways of thinking from
the teaching of my garden experiences. Like other boys in the country,
I had my patch of ground, to which, in the spring-time, I entrusted the
seeds furnished me, with a confident trust in their resurrection and
glorification in the better world of summer. But I soon found that my
lines had fallen in a place where a vegetable growth had to run the
gauntlet of as many foes and dials as a Christian pilgrim. Flowers would
not Blow; daffodils perished like criminals in their cone demned caps,
without their petals ever seeing daylight; roses were disf