llow of a great butternut tree--the
one my mother was married under. When I was in college I used to go back
to it. I used to wonder a little that it was still there. When we had
all grown up we all came back and got together under it one happy day
and there it still stood, its great arms from out of the sky bent over
lovers and over children on its little island, its wide river singing
round it, still that glorious old hollow in it, full of dreams and
childhood and mystery, and that old sudden sunshine in it through the
knots like portholes ... then we stood there all of us together. And the
mother watched her daughter married under it.

I can remember many days standing beneath it as a small boy (my small
insides full of butternuts, a thousand more butternuts up on the tree),
and I used to look up in its branches and wonder about it, wonder how it
could keep on so with its butternuts and with its leaves, with its
winters and with its summers, its cool shadows and sunshines, still
being a butternut tree, with that huge hollow in it.

I have learned since that if a few ounces or whittlings of wood in a
tree are chipped out in a ring around it under the bark, cords of wood
in the limbs all up across the sky would die in a week--if one chips out
those few little ounces of wood.

Cords of wood can be taken out of the inside of the tree and it will not
mind.

It is that little half-inch rim of the tree where the juice runs up to
the sun that makes the tree alive or dead.

The part that must be saved first and provided for first is that
slippery little shiny streak under the bark.

One could dig out a huge brush-heap of roots and the tree would live.
One could pick off millions of leaves, could cut cords of branches out
of it, or one could make long hollows up to the sun, tubes to the sky
out of trees, and they would live, if one still managed to save those
little delicate pipe lines for Sap, running up and running down, day and
night, night and day, between the light in heaven and the darkness in
the ground.

Perhaps Men are valuable in proportion as it would be difficult to
produce promptly other men to perform their functions, or to take their
places.

If we cut away in society men of genius, leaves, and blossoms, in trees,
men who reach down Heaven to us, they grow out again.

If we cut away in society great masses of roots, common men who hew out
the earth in the ground and get earth ready to be heaved up to