The nut yields an abundance of valuable oil, and the wood of the tree is very beautiful and useful for many purposes, one of which is to finish houses on the inside, and another to make gunstocks. There is another tree belonging to the same family that grows in America and looks very much like the black walnut tree. It is the butternut. Butternut wood is valuable, and butternuts have sweet, oily kernels that most people like. The flowers, of course, are like those of the walnut. [Illustration: Butternuts.] A brown dye is made from the inner bark of the butternut tree, and also a medicine is obtained from it. During the War of the Rebellion the Southern soldiers were often dressed in homespun clothes dyed by the bark of the butternut, and on this account they were called “butternuts.” THE CHESTNUT. [Illustration: Chestnut flowers.] The chestnut is a very large and beautiful tree that grows abundantly in some parts of New England and over the Alleghany Mountains. Children always know the chestnut trees, if they live near them. Like the hickory and walnut, the chestnut has its staminate flowers in catkins, but these are white instead of green, and give the chestnut a very handsome appearance when they cover it with airy plumes in the early summer. The nuts grow in prickly burrs, two or three in a burr. When the nuts are ripe in the fall, the burrs open to let them out. As everybody knows, they have a thin shell and a sweet kernel. They are sometimes boiled and sometimes eaten raw. Squirrels, chipmunks, and some birds are fond of them and are often the means of planting them. Chestnut wood is soft and has rather a coarse, loose grain. It is used largely for fence rails, cheap shingles, and railroad ties. Chestnuts grow in some parts of Europe and Asia, and there is one kind that bears a nut as large as a black walnut. This nut is not as sweet as our chestnuts, but it is extensively used as food in some parts of Europe. The people go in families to gather the nuts, and prize them as we prize wheat and corn. [Illustration] OTHER EDIBLE SEEDS. [Illustration: Hazelnuts.] There are other nuts, as the pecan, whose tree belongs to the Hickory family and grows wild in the southern part of the United States; the beechnut, which grows on a stately tree of our forests; and the hazelnut, that grows on bushes in thickets near streams sometimes, or on the borders of woods. But squirrels, chipmunks, birds, and such folk are not the only ones that plant seeds. Some ants do. Indeed ants are great hands to plant seeds. They do not take the hard nuts, but rather the seeds of certain grasses and other plants that bear rather small seeds. The ants carry the seeds into their holes, where they sometimes eat only one part of the seed, not enough to hurt it in the least, and so the seeds, buried in the ant-hills, are able to grow.