bee. Does the school-boy ever forget "the days that he went" truanting after the auburn fruit embedded in velvet within, but without protected by porcupines of husks? With what delight did the young good-for-nothings pelt down those yellow husks to be crushed open by indefatigable heels! Ah! the aurora of life—how bright, how merry it is!
For ever linked in the minds of these truants with the chestnut is the walnut. How the green, smooth globes that insphere the fruit make the eyes of the young vagabonds dance, and how eagerly they mount to shake down those globes, each fracturing at the fall, and letting out the round ivories that in turn imprison the dark gold meats!
And now the oak, "the brave old oak," and so forth. Suppose yourself in a wood! Do you see that little brown vegetable cup with a braided cover—there by the dead maple leaf and tuft of crimson-headed moss? Yon robin just planted his foot upon and covered it. And then do you see that towering tree whose head seems nearly to touch the white cloud above it! Look! upon its very apex there is a bird, seemingly the size of this wild pigeon on the beech-tree, but in reality an eagle. A great many years have intervened between the two objects, it is true, but you think twice ere realizing that yon seamed, stern, sturdy oak once nestled in this acorn. So of all trees, you say, from the seed. True again, but none strikes you so forcibly in this contrast as the oak. And what a tree it is! First piercing the mould, a tiny needle that the ground-squirrel would destroy with a nibble, and then rearing grandly toward the sun a wreath of green to endure for ages. Does the wild wind dash upon it? Its shakes its proud head, but no more bends its whole shape than yon crag. Doth the arrowy sleet strike it? Its leaves only make clicking music; and as for the early snow, it bears it up easily as a deer would fragments of kalmia-blossoms on his antlers. How finely its dark green stands out from the lighter hues of the beeches, birches, and maples! And then how it keeps old Time at a distance! Why, decades are nothing to it. The child gathers the violet at its foot; as a boy, he pockets its dropped acorns; a man, he looks at its height, towering up, towering up, and
