Peter seemed quite a modern affair, when overshadowed, by such Trojan and Egyptian antiquity. * * * * * =_Caroline M. Kirkland, 1808-1864._= (Manual, p. 484.) From "Forest Life." =_208._= THE FELLING OF A GREAT TREE. One darling tree,--a giant oak which looked as if half a dozen Calibans might have been pegged in its knotty entrails--this one tree, the grandfather of the forest, we thought we had saved. It stood a little apart,--it shadowed no man's land,--it shut the broiling sun from nobody's windows, so we hoped it might be allowed to die a natural death. But one unlucky day, a family fresh from "the 'hio" removed into a house which stood at no great distance from this relic of primeval grandeur. These people were but little indebted to fortune, and the size of their potato-patch did not exactly correspond with the number of rosy-cheeks within doors. So the loan of a piece of ground was a small thing to ask or to grant. Upon this piece of lent land stood our favorite oak. The potatoes were scarcely peeping green above the soil, when we observed that the great boughs which we looked at admiringly a dozen times a day, as they towered far above the puny race around them, remained distinct in their outline, instead of exhibiting the heavy masses of foliage which had usually clothed them before the summer heat began. Upon nearer inspection it was found that our neighbor had commenced his plantation by the operation of girdling the tree, for which favor he expected our thanks, observing pithily that "nothing wouldn't never grow under sich a great mountain as that!" It is well that "Goth" and "Vandal" are not actionable.