Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its
elms. The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable
creature among us. It loves man as man loves it. It is modest and
patient. It has a small flake of a seed which blows in everywhere and
makes arrangements for coming up by and by. So, in spring, one finds a
crop of baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips, very weak and small
compared to those succulent vegetables. The baby-elms die, most of them,
slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe, as meekly as Herod's
innocents. One of them gets overlooked, perhaps, until it has
established a kind of right to stay. Three generations of carrot and
parsnip consumers have passed away, yourself among them, and now let your
great-grandson look for the baby-elm. Twenty-two feet of clean girth,
three hundred and sixty feet in the line that bounds its leafy circle, it
covers the boy with such a canopy as neither glossy-leafed oak nor
insect-haunted linden ever lifted into the summer skies.

Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not only on account of its
Gothic-arched vista. In this street were most of the great houses, or
"mansion-houses," as it was usual to call them. Along this street, also,
the more nicely kept and neatly painted dwellings were chiefly
congregated. It was the correct thing for a Rockland dignitary to have a
house in Elm Street. A New England "mansion-house" is naturally square,
with dormer windows projecting from the roof, which has a balustrade with
turned posts round it. It shows a good breadth of front-yard before its
door, as its owner shows a respectable expanse of a clean shirt-front.
It has a lateral margin beyond its stables and offices, as its master
wears his white wrist bands showing beyond his coat-cuffs. It may not
have what can properly be called grounds, but it must have elbow-room, at
any rate. Without it, it is like a man who is always tight-buttoned for