--It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,--said the divinity-student;--saying it, however, in one of the dead languages, which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and therefore do not bear quotation as such. Well, now,--said I,--suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking countryman's cart stops opposite my door.--Do I want any huckleberries?--If I do not, there are those that do. Thereupon my soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the wholesome countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad hands around its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries, and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel until they tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the resounding metal beneath.--I won't say that this rushing huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me than the "Anvil Chorus." --I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer. --Where are your great trees, Sir?--said the divinity-student. Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have put my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has human ones. --One set's as green as the other,--exclaimed a boarder, who has never been identified. They're all Bloomers,--said the young fellow called John. [I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my wedding-ring on a tree.] Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,--said I,--I have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and other big trees.--Don't you want to hear me talk trees a little now? That is one of my specialities. [So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about trees.] I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular. Now, if you expect me to hold forth in a "scientific" way about my tree-loves,--to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that,--you are an anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who will discourse to you of such matters. What should you think of a lover who should describe the idol of his heart in the language of science, thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo; Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental Formula 2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3 i---c---p---m--- 2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3' and so on?