h; yet the balance so inclined that the years
increased his store, and thrift, industry and honesty brought him honor
among his neighbors. He helped the widow and the orphan and loaned money
without a mortgage. His debts and credits were obligations of honor; as
he paid, so he was paid.

Uncle Lyman admired trees as the most wonderful things that God had made
grow out of the earth. He could hardly bring himself to chop them down.
The crash of a falling tree which gave me the most intense delight, made
him sorrowful. He stood awhile over it as over the corpse of an old
friend. He had known it for many a year, had noted its growth from a
sapling to a tree as old as himself. Like the old man of Verona,

"A neighboring wood, born with himself, he sees,
And loves his old contemporary trees".

The trees I loved and played with most in my boyhood, the white birches,
for which I still have more fondness than any other in our northern
forests, Uncle Lyman cared for not at all. Although he had a sense of
beauty, and long association with an object affected him with a tinge of
romance and secret sentiment, yet utility was the chief criterion in his
estimate of trees and men. Could you do a good day's work, it was
enough; it filled the measure of a man and the promise of a boy. A
useful tree was therefore the best tree. He had no use for white or gray
birches, for they were neither timber nor vendible firewood. He often
ridiculed them, and if there was a worthless fellow in town, he was, in
his comparison, a gray birch, good for nothing but to hoop the cider
barrels, of which the fellow was too fond; if a too gay girl, she was a
white birch, dressed in satin, frizzled and beribboned, dress over dress
of the same stuff to her innermost petticoat. He saw no good in the
birch except for the backs of naughty boys. I now know a hundred uses
for the birch, unsuspected by him. He had never heard of peg and spool
and bobbin mills, nor of the mountain poet who makes his own birch bark
books, on whose leaves he inscribes his simple songs--and, envied man,
is able to sell them.

But all these useful, playful and poetic uses are nothing to me in
comparison to the birchen bower wherein I spent entrancing summer days
with Launa Probana.

Having been my father's most intimate friend, when he died in the midst
of his years, he became my mother's adviser and helper, and to me a
second father. I loved him well, and I believe he reciproc