Old lamps for new

by E. V. Lucas

“You might,” said the sparrows, “but it isn’t very likely.”

Then the men came to haul the tree away. Poor tree, what a time it had! It was sawed into logs, and pushed, with thousands of others, into a pulping machine, and the sap oozed out of it, and it screamed with agony; and then by a dozen different processes, all extremely painful, it was made into paper.

Oh, how it wished it was still growing on the hillside with the sun and the rain, and the children at its foot, and the birds and squirrels in its branches. “I never thought the world would be like this,” it said. And the other trees in the paper all around it agreed that the world was an overrated place.

And the tree went to sleep and dreamed it was a mast, and woke up crying.

Then it was rolled into a long roll five miles long and put down into the hold of a ship, and there it lay all forlorn and sea-sick for a week. A dreadful storm raged overhead—the same wind that had once tried its strength on the hillside—and as they heard it all the trees in the paper groaned as they thought of the life of the forest and the brave days that were gone.

The worst of it was that the roll in which our tree lay was close by the foot of the mast, which came through the hold just here, and he found that they were old friends. The mast said he could think of no life so pleasant as that of a mast. “One has the sun all day,” he said, “and the stars all night; one carries men and merchandise about the world; one lies in strange harbours and sees strange and entertaining sights. One is influencing the world all the time.”

At these words the tree wept again. But he made an effort to be comforted. “You wouldn’t suggest,” he inquired timidly, “that a mast was as important, say, as a newspaper?”

The mast laughed till he shook. “Well, I like that,” he said. “Why, a newspaper—a newspaper only lasts a day, and everything in it is contradicted and corrected the day after! A mast goes on for years. And another thing,” he added, “which I forgot: sometimes the captain leans against it. The captain! Think of that.”

But the tree was too miserable.

In the harbour it was taken out of the ship and flung on the wharf, and then it was carried to the warehouse, below a newspaper office in London. What a difference from Newfoundland, where there was air and light. Here it was dark and stuffy, and the rolls talked to each other with tears in their voices.