by the Park Commissioners to add their tribute to the day. Songs are sung during the planting, and the teachers tell the pupils all about the tree they have planted, how it will grow, and how grateful its shade will be to future generations. A luncheon spread in the open concludes the ceremonies.

"A Spanish holiday (Fiesta del Arbol) devoted to tree-planting was evidently copied from our Arbor Day. It is celebrated annually on March 26th. The festival was instituted in 1896. The young King Alfonzo with the queen regent and the ladies of the court proceeded to some grounds lying near the village of Hortaleza, about two miles to the east of Madrid. There he planted a pine sapling. Two thousand children selected from the Madrid schools followed his example. Gold medals commemorative of the event were distributed among them. The inscription runs 'First Fête of the Tree, instituted in the reign of Alfonzo XIII., 1896.' The schoolboys who planted the saplings are taken periodically by their schoolmasters to note the progress of their respective trees, and are encouraged to foster tree-planting in their country."

When the idea of the new holiday was fully grasped there arose at once a chorus of enthusiastic praise of the day and its founder from significant voices.

"I willingly confess," wrote James Russell Lowell, "to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to

respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them." Boyle O'Reilly spoke of the day's celebration as "one of the loveliest practices of the country and century." "Francis Parkman," notes K. G. Wells,* "congratulated the West on its discovery." And Edward Everett Hale, with the precision characteristic of him, advised the "State to invest a considerable sum annually, from its sinking fund, in forests."

No wonder the land was stirred by the idea. For the observance of Arbor Day holds quite as rich possibilities of spiritual growth as of merely physical development.

It is a symbol of progress. It is the only one of our American holidays which turns its face toward the future rather than toward the past.

But it holds for the youth of our impetuous and youthfully spendthrift land, a lesson far more needed than that of progress - the lesson of economy and unselfish foresight.

Our young cities have too often been ruthlessly sacrificed to a brutal, hideous materialism; and a large number of our city children have never known the beauty of places devoted to "green things growing." To many of them Arbor Day means the awakening of the æsthetic sense and its celebration often arouses a dormant love for nature which may some day sweep them with a rush out of the crowded, * In "Pieces for Every Occasion."

unhealthy metropolis "back to the soil," where they are needed.

Then, in turn, Arbor Day, by arousing the “barefoot boy" to a sense of those beautiful miracles of the commonplace amid which he lives, and by keeping him in touch with the modern, scientific side of rural life, is a potent factor in keeping him away from the city and in making him a happier, more intelligent, and more effective farmer.

Many more of the blessed influences of the delightful holiday are fully brought out in the pages that follow.

While the important movement for the conservation of our national resources, inaugurated by President Roosevelt, has given Arbor Day a new national significance, it has emphasized the unfortunate character of its name. "If the name of Arbor Day," wrote George William Curtis, "may seem to be a little misleading, because the word 'arbor,' which meant a tree to the Romans, means a bower to Americans, yet it may well serve until a better name is suggested."

The name has served us, it is true, from the days when we first awoke to a dim realization of our criminal waste of trees and its perils. Almost four decades ago, when the infant holiday was christened, our whole idea of the conservation of natural resources was to plant a few trees once a year. But that idea was merely a first vague pre

lude to our present conviction that we must conserve all of our natural resources. And to-day the tree that we plant on Arbor Day is to our larger consciousness — a mere symbol of the larger conservation which must hand down to our children an unimpoverished America.

If, therefore, the young trees of our young holiday are only expressive and highly poetic symbols of the new wave of unselfish foresight in which America is being baptized, would it not be more fitting, more significant and more beautiful if we should rechristen our new festival with the name · CONSERVATION DAY?

February, 1909.

R. H. S.

NOTE

THE Editor and Publishers wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to Houghton, Mifflin & Company; Charles Scribner's Sons; Doubleday, Page & Company; Bobbs, Merrill & Company; Mr. David McKay; The Century Company; Educational Publishing Company; Duffield & Company; Mr. Lloyd Mifflin and others who have very kindly granted permission to reprint selections from works copyrighted by them.