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The night before I had come up through a long valley, overhung with pines on one side and crimsoning maples on the other, and, travelling till nearly midnight, had lain down in the hollow of a bank, and listened to a little river leap over cascades, and, far below, go prattling on to the greater river in the south. My eyes closed, but for long I did not sleep.

These shiny seeds or keys are brightly scarlet, as well, and thus very attractive in color. There is a reason for this, in nature's economy; for while the loosely hung samaras of the other maples are distributed by the breezes, the red pods of this mountain maple hold stiffly upward to attract the birds upon whom it largely depends for that sowing which must precede its reproduction.

I emphasize this, for I hope some of my readers may be on the outlook for a new pleasure in early spring the blooming of this maple, with flowers so thoroughly distinct and so entirely beautiful. The samaras to follow on this Norway maple are smaller than those of the other two maples mentioned, and they hang together at a different angle, somewhat more graceful.

The towering spruces and sugar pines of our Pacific Coast. The great elms of New England. The justly famous, white pines of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The wonderful spice-woods of Java and Ceylon. The curious soap and rubber trees of Brazil. The tall sugar maples and smooth, symmetrical beeches of New York. The great hemlocks of Pennsylvania.

L'everything go to hell, but DON' let innerfere business!" Sheridan had seized the telephone upon Roscoe's desk, and was calling his own office, overhead. "Abercrombie? Come down to my son Roscoe's suite and get rid of some gentlemen that are waitin' there to see him in room two-fourteen. There's Maples and Schirmer and a couple o' fellows on the Kinsey business.

By the rude desk Gaston was sitting on the evening that Jude and Joyce were clinging to each other in the house under the maples. His hands were plunged deep in the pockets of his corduroy trousers, his long legs extended, and his head thrown back; he was smoking one of his memory-filled pipes, and his eyes were fixed upon the rafters of the room.

Green fields and hills stretched away on either side, and the one broad, quiet avenue was shaded with maples, grand old forest trees. It looked like Paradise to Faith. She soon found the cottage, a lovely nest of white and green glimmering through the trees, the smooth lawn gay with daffodils and crocuses.

At the end of the lane was the blue glimmer of the river; to the left, standing in front of a clump of oaks and maples, he saw a long tumble-down house with white paint peeling from its clapboards. On the road-side facing the gateway stood one of the open sheds in which the New Englander shelters his farming implements and visitors "hitch" their "teams."

Who does not know of the maples that are all around us? Yet who has seen the commonest of them bloom in very early spring, or watched the course of the peculiar winged seed-pods or "keys" that follow the flowers? The white or "silver" maple of streets or roadsides, the soft maple of the woods, is one of the most familiar of American trees.

Towering above us are great sycamores, cypress, maples, and elms, and all about a dense jungle of grasses, vines, and monster weeds the rank horse-weed being now some ten feet high, with a stem an inch in diameter; the dead stalks of last year's growth, in the broad rolling fields to our rear, indicate a possibility of sixteen feet, and an apparent desire to out-rival the corn.