"
"Where are your trees, Sir?" said the divinity student.
"Oh, all around about New England. I call all trees mine that I
have put my wedding ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as
Brigham Young has human ones." "One set's as green as the
other," exclaimed a boarder, who has never been identified.
"They're all Bloomers,"--said the young fellow called John. (I
should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our
landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by
putting my wedding-ring on a tree.) "Why, measuring it with my
thirty-foot tape, my dear, said I.--I have worn a tape almost
out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and other
big trees. Don't you want to hear me talk trees a little now?
That is one of my specialties."
"What makes a first-class elm?"
"Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly anything over
twenty feet clear girth five feet above the ground and with a
spread of branches a hundred feet across may claim that title,
according to my scale. All of them, with the questionable
exception of the Springfield tree above referred to, stop, so
far as my experience goes, at about twenty-two or twenty-three
feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of spread.
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