d
bushes joined hands with their leaves, like young men and maidens standing
ready for a dance around a married pair. In the midst of the company stood
the pair, distinguished from all the rest of the forest throng by
gracefulness of form and charm of colour; the white birch, the beloved,
with her husband the hornbeam. But farther off, like grave elders sitting
in silence and gazing on their children and grandchildren, stood on this
side hoary beeches, and on that matronly poplars; and an oak, bearded with
moss, and bearing on its humped back the weight of five centuries,
supported itself--as on the broken pillars of sepulchres--on the petrified
corpses of other oaks, its ancestors.

Thaddeus writhed, being not a little wearied by the long conversation in
which he could not take part. But when they began to glorify the forests
of foreign lands, and to enumerate in turn every variety of their
trees--oranges, cypresses, olive trees, almonds, cactuses, aloes, mahogany,
sandalwood, lemons, ivy, walnuts, even fig trees--praising extravagantly
their forms, flowers, and bark, then Thaddeus constantly sniffed and
grimaced, and finally could no longer restrain his wrath.

He was a simple lad, but he could feel the charm of nature, and, gazing on
his ancestral forest, he said full of inspiration:--

"In the botanical garden at Wilno I have seen those vaunted trees that
grow in the east and the south, in that fair Italian land--which of them
can be compared to our trees? The aloe with its long stalk like a
lightning rod? Or the dwarfish lemon tree with its golden balls and
lacquered leaves, short and dumpy, like a woman who is small and ugly, but
rich? Or the much-praised cypress, long, thin, and lean, which seems the
tree, not of grief, but of boredom? They say that it looks very sad upon a
grave; but it is like a German flunkey in court mourning, who does not
dare to lift his arms or turn his head, for fear that he may somehow
offend against etiquette.

"Is not our honest birch tree fairer, which is like a village woman
weeping for her son, or a widow for her husband, who wrings her hands and
lets fall over her shoulders to the ground the stream of her loose
tresses? Mute with grief, how eloquently she sobs with her form! Count, if
you are in love with painting, why do you not paint our own trees, among
which you are sitting? Really, the neighbours will laugh at you, since,
though you live in the fertile plain of Lithuania, y