Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1875 — A Boy’s Composition on Trees. [ARTICLE]

A Boy’s Composition on Trees.

Most trees was once twigs, but some was acorns, which are not good to eat, but some boys eat them, though, and I think they are bad off. A kind of a tree which was once a chestnut is good enough, but it is awful tall and. mighty scarce, because the chestnuts are six dollars a bushel, and they don’t give hardly any for five cents, and so I’d rather buy a plug top. But there is a kind of a tree what they make into home-made sugar with, and I believe I like therif” kind the best, for, you can borrow a auger, you can spit on your bands and bore a big hole in them, and then drive in a big elder, and you can suck till you get sick if you suck too much. Then you can leave the elder in the hole, so that other boys will get sick, just for spite. I don’t think the honey-locust tree is much liked, only by birds, for they know that boys can’t climb and get their nests. The thorns are so sharp as tacks, and for my part it is the only thing what I will take a dare on. I won’t climb a honeylocust for anybody. Honey-locusts are tolerable good to eat, but they won’t fall till frost, and the boys havn’t got no time to wait for frost, so they throw clubs at them.

I despise the sycamore, for they nearly always grow by the creek, just where the good holes is, and they root out into the water so, when you go a fishing and get a bite and think you have got a chub, why, you haven’t got no such thing, but you get a line broke and get mad. Then there is the persimmon tree, which if you eat before they get ripe you can’t whistle “Shopfly” and “ Hail Columbia” both at once. A tree grows in our back yard; I don’t know its name, but a good 'many of the small limbs is trimmed off of it. My step-father cut them off one at a time, as they was needed. If the wind would blow that tree down altogether, or it would get blighted, I would be glad. A tree is the most naturalist thing, and they are like a schoolmaster, because no two are alike. These trees which I spoke about are found in the woods, and lightning strikes them, and any boy can find them what ain’t too lazy, but no boy can find the lightning. Some of the Great Eastern was once a tree, and a telegraph pole also once was, and so was a stump fence, and some of® the Erie Railroad, and then you well know that a tree is one of the usefulest things which is. TTiere is some men which they call wooden men, but I don’t know for certain if ever they were trees. But my finger is sore, and my pen it must get mended; and so respectful,

JOHN GLADES.

An old bachelor thus impeaches woman: “ I impeach her in the name of the great whale ot the ocean, whose bones are tom asunder to enable her to keep straight. I impeach her in the name of the peacock, whose strut, without his permission, she has stealthily and without honor assumed. I impeach her in the name of the horse, whose tail she has perverted from its use to the making of wavy tresses to decorate'the back of the head and neck. J impeach her in the name of the kangaroo, whose beautiful figure she, in taking Upon her the Grecian bend, has brought into ill-favor and disrepute.”