ort of green watchtower, from
whence he might gain a view of the surrounding country. Age and time,
since then, have dealt hardly with the stanch old fellow. His limbs have
been here and there shattered; his back begins to look mossy and
dilapidated; but after all, there is a piquant, decided air about him,
that speaks the old age of a tree of distinction, a kingly oak. To-day I
see him standing, dimly revealed through the mist of falling snows;
to-morrow's sun will show the outline of his gnarled limbs--all rose
color with their soft snow burden; and again a few months, and spring
will breathe on him, and he will draw a long breath, and break out once
more, for the three hundredth time, perhaps, into a vernal crown of
leaves. I sometimes think that leaves are the thoughts of trees, and
that if we only knew it, we should find their life's experience recorded
in them. Our oak! what a crop of meditations and remembrances must he
have thrown forth, leafing out century after century. Awhile he spake
and thought only of red deer and Indians; of the trillium that opened
its white triangle in his shade; of the scented arbutus, fair as the
pink ocean shell, weaving her fragrant mats in the moss at his feet; of
feathery ferns, casting their silent shadows on the checkerberry leaves,
and all those sweet, wild, nameless, half-mossy things, that live in the
gloom of forests, and are only desecrated when brought to scientific
light, laid out and stretched on a botanic bier. Sweet old forest
days!--when blue jay, and yellow hammer, and bobalink made his leaves
merry, and summer was a long opera of such music as Mozart dimly
dreamed. But then came human kind bustling beneath; wondering, fussing,
exploring, measuring, treading down flowers, cutting down trees, scaring
bobalinks--and Andover, as men say, began to be settled.

Staunch men were they--these Puritan fathers of Andover. The old oak
must have felt them something akin to himself. Such strong, wrestling
limbs had they, so gnarled and knotted were they, yet so outbursting
with a green and vernal crown, yearly springing, of noble and generous
thoughts, rustling with leaves which shall be for the healing of
nations.

These men were content with the hard, dry crust for themselves, that
they might sow seeds of abundant food for us, their children; men out of
whose hardness in enduring we gain leisure to be soft and graceful,
through whose poverty we have become rich. Like Moses, th