etch down squirrels from that tree-top, they might
also serve to clip off and let fall some of the finest clusters or
sprays of tulip. The experiment was tried, with excellent result. I made
the little artist glad with some of the grandest specimens I have ever
seen.

The tulip-tree is of such colossal size and it branches so high above
ground that it is little wonder few persons, even of those most used to
the woods, ever see its bloom, which is commonly enveloped in a mass of
large, dark leaves. These leaves are peculiarly outlined, having short
lobes at the sides and a truncated end, while the stem is slender, long,
and wire-like. The flower has six petals and three transparent sepals.
In its centre rises a pale-green cone surrounded by from eighteen to
thirty stamens. Sap-green, yellow of various shades, orange-vermilion,
and vague traces of some inimitable scarlet, are the colors curiously
blended together within and without the grand cup-shaped corolla. It is
Edgar Fawcett who draws an exquisite poetic parallel between the oriole
and the tulip,--albeit he evidently did not mean the flower of our
Liriodendron, which is nearer the oriole colors. The association of the
bird with the flower goes further than color, too; for the tulip-tree is
a favorite haunt of the orioles. Audubon, in the plates of his great
ornithological work, recognizes this by sketching the bird and some
rather flat and weak tulip-sprays together on the same sheet. I have
fancied that nature in some way favors this massing of colors by placing
the food of certain birds where their plumage will show to best
advantage on the one hand, or serve to render them invisible, on the
other, while they are feeding. The golden-winged woodpecker, the downy
woodpecker, the red-bellied woodpecker, and that grand bird the pileated
woodpecker, all seem to prefer the tulip-tree for their nesting-place,
pecking their holes into the rotten boughs, sometimes even piercing an
outer rim of the fragrant green wood in order to reach a hollow place. I
remember, when I was a boy, lying in a dark old wood in Kentucky and
watching a pileated woodpecker at work on a dead tulip-bough that seemed
to afford a great number of dainty morsels of food. There were streaks
of hard wood through the rotten, and whenever his great horny beak
struck one of these it would sound as loud and clear as the blow of a
carpenter's hammer. This fine bird is almost extinct now, having totally
disap