----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 specialties. [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? No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them, adore them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green sun-shades over our heads, talking to us with their hundred thousand whispering tongues, looking down on us with that sweet meekness which belongs to huge, but limited organisms,--which one sees in the brown eyes of oxen, but most in the patient posture, the outstretched arms, and the heavy-drooping robes of these vast beings endowed with life, but not with soul,--which outgrow us and outlive us, but stand helpless,--poor things!--while Nature dresses and undresses them, like so many full-sized, but underwitted children.