[MUCH TOO HIGH.]
BY MARGARET EYTINGE.
"Time for your catkins to fly," said the Wind to a Willow-tree that stood just outside of a great city.
You don't know what catkins are? Well, I will try to tell you. The seeds of certain kinds of trees, growing on long slender stems, in little scales overlapping each other, each one tipped with the tiniest of feathers, and the whole somewhat resembling a very small cat's tail. And when they are quite ripe, the Wind comes along and carries them away, dropping them here and there, as he journeys on, to take their chances, which are as one in a thousand, of finding homes and becoming trees.
"Take them," said the Willow, and flung them upon his wings, and away he went into the city, letting some fall in the middle of the streets, where they were soon trampled beneath the hoofs of the horses; and some on the sidewalks, where the twittering sparrows found and ate them; and some in the parks and gardens, where a few were fortunate enough to sink into the ground, and the rest perished when came the autumn cold; and one—the last it was—he carried to a bustling noisy square in the heart of the city, on one side of which a tall house, once a fashionable dwelling, but now divided into offices for business men, stood a story and a half higher than its humbler neighbors.
Before this house grew a fine oak, more than a century old, the only tree that had been spared when the square (which had once been a famous pleasure-ground filled with trees) became a business thoroughfare, and it owed its safety to the fact that it had heard the bells ring out our Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July, 1776.
In the wide gutter of the sloping roof of the tall house the dust had been accumulating for many years, and mingling with the decaying leaves dropped from the oak, had formed a rich soil, and into this soil the Wind planted the last seed of the catkin. And lo and behold! it took root there, and the next spring two tiny green leaves came up and looked wonderingly about them, to be followed by more green leaves, and still more, until at the end of the summer a slender young tree—not yet high enough to be seen from the street below, but already welcomed by the oak, whose topmost branches waved a little above it, and the birds who stopped ever and anon to rest a while on the gable roof on their way to the country—swayed gracefully to and fro as the breeze passed by it.
And when winter came, the kind old Oak threw over it a covering of leaves, and dropped a withered branch or two upon them to keep them from being scattered when the North Wind was in one of his tempers. And so, snug and warm, the little tree waited for returning spring, and then it burst through its leaf cloak, and went on growing and growing, until it could look down and see all that was passing in the square. And in a few years it became so stout and tall that people began to look up at it in wonder, and its fame spread abroad, and many came from afar to gaze upon the marvellous thing, growing, as it were, in the air. And as it got taller and taller, it began to be prouder and prouder.
"Was ever tree so high as I?" it called to the Oak one day. "I can peep into the chimney; I tower above you, and yet they call you the King of trees."