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Show i ! TREES r By THOMAS ARKLE CLARK ;q Dean of Men, University of M Illinois. 5r-;:--:fi:--x- We were rushing along through the flat semi-barren lands of Montana. (Warn yoii ureat stretches of prairie land, gray with sage brush, spread out before us, with here and there a green patch of fresh growing grain. The farmyards with the low two or three roomed dwelling houses stood bare and treeless under the burning sun. There was nh unobstructed view across the plain to the rocky buttes along the horizon. To a middle-westerner used to trees and gardens cay with flowers it was a cheerless, almost al-most depressing scene. A man from Alaska was sitting across the aisle from me looking out gloomily upon the waste of bad fands. "They can have the whole d d place for all of me," he remarked to me finally. "I don't want none of it. I've got to have trees." I had . supposed, ignorantly, of course, nev?r having been farther north than Prince Rupert,-that gold and Icebergs constituted the chief products of Alaska, but my neighbor assured me that there are all sorts of trees in Alaska. His statement made me want more than ever to go there, for, like him, I don't see quite how 1 could get on without trees. A house without trees about it stands out naked and unadorned, beaten by the winter winds and scorched by the burning sun of midsummer. When we moved from a wooded farm to the prairies when I was seven, the first thing father did after the house was built was to surround the place with trees brought from the timber tim-ber lands along the Vermilion maples and quick growing poplars, and elms and sycamores and little tapering red cedars, which he kept trimmed into curious geometrical shapes. The place ; did not seem like home until there i were trees about it. He liked them so well that he dropped seeds of the soft maple in the hedge rows about the j farm, so that It was not long unfrl I there was a row of maples shooting up ! all along the roadway. We seemed i safer; we were more contented, the place took on a greater air of comfort and homelikeness with the trees about. When Nancy and I came to build ! our house there was a huge maple tree j standing in the middle of the lot Just J where the house would naturally sit i We gazed at it towering up into the sky and the longer we looked the more I Impossible it seemed for us to sacrl-t sacrl-t lice it. The house stands today far-j far-j ther back from the street than any i other, and in front of it stands the i '. old maple like a guardian angel, its branches spreading out and furnishing furnish-ing cool shade during the hot summer. sum-mer. - I "Why did you build your house so ! far back?" every one asked us. It was ' for the sake of the tree. It would j have seemed sacrilsge to have cut It j down after It had been growing in strength and beauty for so many years. There is a question that we have to settle now. We have so many trees that it is difficult to have flowers, for flowers infiPt on sunshine. But I think the trees will stand and we shall be I j content with grass. The trees seem I like old tried friends whom we cannot ! do without. " 1 rt). 1329. Wrptorn Newsrifippr Unlcn.) ' |