On approaching him,
he extended a branch, shook me cordially by the hand, and invited me
to accept the shelter and hospitality of his roof. The proposal so
generously made was at once accepted with profuse thanks, and, parting
the boughs, I entered the tent and threw myself upon the soft grass.
Do you ever talk with trees? It is a custom of mine, and I usually find
their conversation much more entertaining and profitable than that of
most men I know. "Good morning!" I say to an acquaintance. "Fine day,"
he replies; "how's business?" And so on for an hour, over themes of
every nature, the current of conversation rippled with trite truisms,
and whirling in the surface-eddies of Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy."
But the tree takes the whole of the Tupperian philosophy for granted at
the start, and the truisms which most men utter, and takes _you_ for
granted likewise,--supposing neither half of your eyeballs blind,
and that you have a soul as well as a body,--and enters at once into
conversation upon the high table-land of science, reason, and poetry.
The entire talk of a fashionable tea-party, strained from its lees of
scandal, filtered through a sober reflection of the following morning,
is not equal in value to the quivering of a single leaf. A tree will
discourse with you upon botany, physiology, music, painting, philosophy,
and a dozen arts and sciences besides, none of which it simply chats
about, but all of which it _is_: and if you do not understand its
language and comprehend what it tells you about them, so much the worse
for you; it is not the fault of the tree.
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