Article June 13, 1903 Issue

Many in One

CYRENE EMORY

Concord (N. H.) Patriot

Editor of The Patriot.

From the "multitude of counsellors" that you have evoked among the women of Concord, many pregnant plans must have come as to the beautifying of our city, and one can hardly hope to add anything of value. But a few suggestions have been made to me that seem much to the point.

Obviously, one good way to make Concord beautiful is sedulously to care for the beauty she already possesses in such large measure—and a great feature of that beauty is her trees. It makes little difference what the season may be,—the naked branches thrown against the winter sky, the tender, filmy green of the spring-time, the ripe stateliness of summer, thick with shadows, or the harlequin dance of autumn,—at all times our trees are a blessing that perhaps we do not half appreciate just because we are so accustomed to it. When a man says, "Come, let us cut down a tree," he rarely thinks of the decades of sunshine and rain that have gone to make that tree, and that must go to make another like it. At the northeast corner of the new city building there stood, until a very little while ago, a shapely maple, thirty years old or so. The hearts of some of us burned within us one day when we saw how that tree had been mutilated,—"butchered," as I heard it well expressed,—in order to meet the supposed exigencies of the fire alarm system. Why? Because, forsooth, some baby cyclone, wandering down the valley of the Merrimack in a visionary future, might blow it over and break some wire! The tree will be cut down and the wires will be safe, but it reminds me, Mr. Editor, of the young woman who, sitting one day in front of the kitchen stove, burst out all at once into wild weeping. Everybody in the place rushed to her in dismay to know what the cause for such grief might be, and at last in gasps it came,—"I was thinking what if brother Frank should come on from Minneapolis next year with his wife and the baby, and one of the lids should fall off the stove and kill the baby!"

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