Never before was honesty put to such a test as when Andrew Jackson gave up this home to pay an unjust debt. Without complaint he moved further into the wilderness, and built his great double log-cabin home. That cabin is now a shrine! Here stood the giant hickories in a group, the rugged, stately trees. Why did he plant them here? Or had the old hero, with that love of his for the unbending tree for which he was named, let them stand unscathed, as Nature had placed them? They stood in a great group, cathedral-like, one taller and more stately than his fellows, like a spire. Of all the trees the hickory is the conqueror. Its purpose in life is to withstand. It is a fighting tree, rough of dress, careless of manner, rude in its unpolished bark. To be frightened by the hails of heaven is not for it. The hurricane cannot quell it. From its youth it has fought the storm, and when the storm has tired it has still stood, tattered but glorious. Every fall in one great flaming pyre as of a burning bush wherein there is Divinity, they have blazed and burned before our wondering eyes. A warrior tree, and yet, withal, what no warrior ever was: a giver of gifts, not a wrecker of those already garnered; not bullets, not shells, not grape shot dropped on the land; but nuts. Some day, truly, the real conqueror of the world will conquer like this tree—overcoming in a hail of kindness flung from loving hands. "It was these trees," I said, turning to Eloise, "that sent me to Germany to study forestry; these trees and Dr. Gottlieb. How is he? I can hardly wait till morning to run over to his cabin." Eloise laughed. "Oh! you were always a poet, Jack. Dr. Gottlieb is the same, and he is famous now; such books he has written of flowers and trees!" "Do you know they use his text-books in Germany?" I asked proudly; "and that last work of his, ’Tree Influence on Precipitation,’ was talked about in all the universities. Look," I said, pointing to a scarred and gullied hillside across the road, showing bare even in the twilight, "there is the great work to be done in our land, there is the coming field for the young brains of our country—that, and better farming, and the watering of our great barren spots in the West. We’ve cut down our trees wantonly—our pioneer sires did so before us,—for the land had to be cleared or they would have died. But now if I can only get them to change! You should see the German and French system. When I came through France, along their coasts, both on the Mediterranean and the Channel, were great forests planted to break the winds and storms. I was told that a century ago the winds began to make deserts of their coasts, encroaching mile after mile into the land. Now, with the trees planted, it is a garden again."