Jack Ballington, Forester

by John Trotwood Moore

Oh, frail little woman, who never wrote a weak line! O, earth-bound and earth-found one, who never created save of heaven! O, little homely one, whose portrait I did not till then even love to recall, so different it seemed from the soul which could write as it wrote: now it hangs the most beautiful thing on my study wall.

I stood there, looking, steeped in the thrill of it. I thought a pink rainbow had fallen across the hills.

Then the nobility of this pink flower went into me, for there is nobleness even among flowers and trees. The blue grass is the aristocrat, who sits only at the richest tables, with cedars to wait on him, refreshed with the waters of a thousand hills. The bermuda runs hither and yon, sending its stolons after the fat things of earth; and the redtop grows only where it can reach the richest granaries. The stone-crop alone clings to this bare brown rock, shielding its poverty.

Seeing this, I gloried in the chance that faced me, the chance to be another type of pioneer, and to undo the wrongs and ravages of my forbears. For this I had sacrificed the love of my grandsire, the General, who had wanted me to be a soldier, and of my Aunt Lucretia, and even of Eloise, it seemed, that one sweet dream of my life. For in the four years I had been gone from her I had lost my chance to win her. What did her talk of the night before mean but that she meant to wed another?

CHAPTER IX

THE TRANSPLANTED PINE

Tradition, that greatest of all historians, had it, that the first settlers on the lands of The Home Stretch had been a young pioneer and his bride from Virginia; and that she, leaving her old home for a new one in the wilderness, yielded to the pretty sentiment of her girl's heart, and brought away with her a young pine from under her own roof tree. Nursed and watered through all the long journey, over mountains, wilderness and river, she planted it among the great oaks and poplars of her western home. Tradition told how, when the young husband had built his double log-cabin from the solid trunks of the black walnut and thatched it with the rich red hearts of the cedar shingles, the little bride cherished the pine. The story was full of pathos; she and her baby had died that first year, and both were buried in the same grave under the little pine. It was a great pine now, but lonely. It had been a great pine since I could remember. It had always appealed to me, standing alone amid the other trees. For miles I could see it, towering above all the others. And always a little tremor of loneliness came, as one who passes a deserted schoolhouse door where once children have played. The great trees around it, oaks, elms, poplars, maples, seemed at home. This was their soil, these were their friends and kindred. But the pine was not of them. It had been transplanted. Were trees men, the pine would be a Highlander of the clan McGregor. And away from its clan, in a valley where it belonged not, in soil that made for fatness and richness but not for religion and art, it was lonely. For trees are but men who are dumb.

Often, as a boy, staying with Dr. Gottlieb in his cabin, I would awake at night and hear the pine sighing. Once I remember there had been a fierce storm, and as it swept through the forest it maddened the other trees until they roared in their wrath. But the lonely pine tree had called above the roar of the others. One would not look in the Swiss mountains for the cherries of the valley, nor for the cedars of Lebanon in the rich loam of the rivers. This pine was the Scotch McGregor in an English court. It was Bonaparte on Elba. It was Thomas Carlyle in Gaiety street. It was a tree without a country....

Dr. Gottlieb lived among the trees in a double log-cabin, and had lived there since I could remember. My Aunt Lucretia's heart was as big as her farm, and for many years she and Dr. Gottlieb had been friends. He, being a scholar and a botanist, a very babe in a strange land in spite of all his learning, had been easily parted from what little he had brought to America, and had actually come to sickness and want. Then it was that my Aunt Lucretia took him in and gave him this cabin on her farm. Since then he had grown famous, and was known over two continents as one of the greatest living botanists. In fall and winter he was dean of that department in a noted college, but in spring and summer nothing could keep him from his walnut log-cabin by the great pine in the little valley, where his wild flowers grew in the hills behind him and the trees were his friends and comrades.

His story was like that of many who claim America as home. In the discontent of the Bavarians in their struggle for a more liberal government, many republican ideas were advanced. Gottlieb, then a student in Munich, with a number of other young men, attempted to celebrate Washington's birthday in the Bavarian capital with speeches so revolutionary that they brought on a riot. In the fighting his roommate and best friend killed a police officer. Gottlieb's family was influential and stood high in royal favor. But the boy who had done the killing was not so fortunate. To be found out meant certain death for him. So Gottlieb pleaded guilty for his friend's sake, and would have been executed, but for the influence of his family. Even they could not save him from banishment, and so he had lived with us, as great a patriot as I ever knew, loving his country so that the thought of it would bring tears to his eyes, loving his Fatherland, and yet himself a man without a country.