Provincialism has no SCALE of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature's best.

I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when she first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted.
Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks into itself.

All those stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not touching each other's fingers, if one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.
As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object of my journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time at the road-side.

Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the rest, I asked myself,--"Is this it ?" But as I drew nearer, they grew smaller,--or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line had looked like one, and so deceived me.

At last, all at once, when I was not thinking of it,--I declare to you it makes my flesh creep when I think of it now,--all at once I saw a great, green cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser forest-growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me, without need of uttering the words,--"This is it!" You will find this tree described, with many others, in the excellent Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts.