Page:The Country Boy.djvu/24

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

16
PREFACE

a tree with stories beyond the first white man it ever saw; and many a day when I have watched the leading citizens playing marbles in its extensive shadow, I have thought: How many are the interesting stories you could tell, of ages passed when you saw the beautiful deer and other wild game gather at your base, of the great pride you must have felt when the old cock grouse hooted from your moss covered limbs in the early breaking of spring and of the interesting councils of war which painted Indians in ancient days convened under your spreading old limbs. Who knows but what the great Snohomish, the chief and orator of the Santiams, made your shade a stopping place going up the Columbia to the great council? At last you saw the first white man and his ox team approach, and later make treaty and trade and war with the Indians; and at the very last, you find you have been chosen as the center around which men and women of the finest type build a beautiful little city that for a time nestled under your very branches for protection. You grew and spread and at last as a mother that had walked the floor nights with her babe,