Descriptive letterpress printed opposite this photograph:

AFTER THE STORM.

” Oh ye whose boughs

Make beautiful the rocks o’er which they play,

Who pile with foliage the great hills, and rear

A paradise upon the lonely plain,

Trees of the forest and the open plain,

Have ye no sense of being?

When in your winter sleep

The sun shines warm, have ye no dreams of spring?

Know ye no sadness when the hurricane

Has swept the wood and snapp’d its sturdy stems

Asunder, or has wrench’d, from out the soil,

The mightiest with their circles of strong roots,

And piled the ruin all along his path? “

WHEN the south-west gales sweep the broad forest, scattering destruction in their wild career, it is an exciting spectacle to watch the huge limbs of some of the greater trees striving and wrestling with their unseen foe.

There is something almost human in the fierce struggle. They writhe and sway in their huge agony, bending almost to the earth under the straining grasp of their mysterious assailant, and when the foe is beaten off, spring back with a rebound that is majestic! But sometimes the struggle has another termination, as when one fierce blast succeeds immediately upon another, like blow upon blow, ere the staggering tree has time to recover, until, after a splendid resistance, crash goes the giant limb of mammoth circumference, like the mast of a great ship, carrying with it in its fall, the rent boughs, green cordage, and splintered fragments of all else involved in its ruin.

And, when the storm is past, there lies the prostrate limb with a hushed stillness that is pathetic! The warm sun shines out, and the startled birds return and fit about the motionless branches that will never more make pleasant shade, or drop their harvest dole of beech-nuts, or put on their autumnal pomp of red and gold. The trunk lingers on, lifting up, as in mute appeal, its maimed and splintered stump to the vacant sky,

“An unremember’d Past

Broods like a presence ‘mid the long gray boughs,”

although as in the life of man- it may long out-live the catastrophe. Trees, like mankind, are liable to have their career cut short in the period of noblest vigour, and violence may anticipate the calm decay of age, their destruction being effected by the same forces that erewhile wantoned in zephyr-breezes amidst the summer tresses of the whispering leaves.