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spots great beeches are wreathed pillars of living green, very picturesque indeed if seen at a distance through openings of vista between the trunks, like the ivied battlements of ancient ruins; elsewhere

the vine trails along the ground, snake-like, across the matted leaves, or cushions the remains of some old prostrate veteran; in still other moods it clambers industriously over a young maple or a broadleaved mulberry, seeking even the outermost twigs everywhither, and nodding airly above them, in a canopy that affords a lovely, shady solitude, like the bowers formed by the wild grape.

The beeches are the most interesting of the trees. What huge limbs they have, sometimes all twisted and bent and gnarled together, and yet spreading and drooping finally into long, low. trailing, fan-like sprays-the eye lashes of the forest. Was it Thoreau who said that no tree had "so fine a bole or so fair an instep as the beech?" Gilpin, in describing the beech, says of its bark: "It is naturally of a dingy olive; but it is

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TWIN SISTERS.

always overspread in patches with a variety of mosses and lichens, which are commonly of a lighter tint, in

the upper parts, and of a deep velvet green toward the root." Somehow I always feel as if I were actually in a forest if there are only a few beeches. I used to enjoy in boyhood days swinging upon their great arms, the tips of which often would sweep the very earth, and to scramble amongst their branches, like a squirrel, after the nuts; yet I think nowadays it would be one of the hardest trees in the world to climb.

What is it that possesses men to carve their initials upon every suitable tree? Is it merely to record the fact of their presence on that spot, or a desire that their names shall be writ there for eternity? Or does the smoothness of the bark attract them? Whatever the reason, certain it is that he is an extraordinary man who with a jack-knife in his pocket will pass a good beech without first trying the blade, and leaving at least a part of his name as a witness to posterity of his having passed that way.

'T was not an uncommon propensity, it seems, centuries ago. Even as far back as the old Roman days do we find mention of this singular trait in human nature as being a characteristic of the Latin race. Hamerton quotes Vergil on the custom. In the tenth eclogue Gallus says:

"Certum est in silvis, inter spelaea ferarum

Malle pati, tenerisque meos incidere amores

Arboribus crescent illæ; crescetis, amores."

("My mind is made up to prefer to suffer in the forests, among the dens of wild beasts, and to cut my loves upon the trees: these will grow ; ye young will grow, too,

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ye loves" [i. e., the letters will increase with the size of the tree, as his feelings].) It has long been a means of letter-writing with savages. In his "History of of Virginia, in Four Parts," published (second edition) in 1722, Thomas Beverley remarks, too, that it was learned by the next settlers " "by Letters on the Trees," scratched there by earlier arrivals, that the latter had removed to Croatan, an island. Orlando you remember, in "As You Like

"THE EYELASHES OF THE FOREST.

It," was so persistent in carving sweet Rosalind's name upon the trees and hanging verses from their boughs ("There is a man haunts the forest," said she to him) that Jaques was moved to remonstrate: "I pray you, mar no more trees with writing lovesongs in their barks." Sir Roger de Coverley, too, confessed that he "had been fool enough" to carve "the perverse widow's" name on several of his trees; "so unhappy is the condition of men in love, to attempt the removing of their passion by the methods which serve only to imprint it deeper." And here are some

lines from an old poem, "The Beech Tree's Lament," by Thomas Campbell, uttered by the beech:

"Thrice twenty summers I have seen
The sky grow bright, the forest green;
And many a wintry wind have stood
In bloomless, fruitless solitude,
Since childhood in my pleasant bower
First spent its sweet and sportive hour;
Since youthful lovers in my shade
Their vows of truth and rapture made;
And on my trunk's surviving frame

Carved many a long-forgotten name.”

Who shall, asks Bryant also, speaking of his future forest,

"Who grave, as was the wont

Of simple, pastoral ages, on the rind

Of my smooth beeches some beloved name?"

A beech is the best, and the tree most frequently chosen, on account of its smooth, easily-cut bark. It is the pleasantest and most yielding to the knife; and initials carved on a beech, if they have been dug deep into the sap wood beneath the bark, are retained much longer than on any other tree. "No bark," says Gilpin, "tempts the lover so much to make it the depository of his mistress's name." I have seen old beeches deeply scarred with the hieroglyphics of visitors, curiously crude, like Indian picture-writing, interwoven with the initials. In our boyhood enthusiasm, however, we did not restrict ourselves to beeches, nor even to trees, but our names were cut upon every available object around the farm-the well curb, trough, the timbers in the barn, the door, the beams, the feed-box, the

big catalpa-tree, and the gate posts-and even a mapletree bears in its branches aloft somewhere the initials of two youngsters who one memorable night perched for hours among them in order to get the last glimpse of an eclipse as the moon went down toward the western horizon. Sycamores

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and poplars may. sometimes be made to serve the purpose quite well, in lieu of a beech, if the passion is upon one; and I have seen whole names shaped diligently into the rough, uneven bark of oaks and elms.

I like to look at these initials carved on the trees. The old inscriptions are in their way filled with the very spirit of the past. Many of those who put them here have gone far beyond into still happier hunting grounds; but they once lived here below, and whether from affection or mere

INITIALS AND HIEROGLYPHICS.

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