They failed to find such a land as Ponce de Leon, looked for in Florida,
in the year 1512. He was so delighted with the variegated flowers, wild
roses, ever green and beautiful foliage, and the fragrance of the air,
that he thought that these woods must contain the fountain of life and
youth and that that must be the place upon the earth where men could live
and never grow old.
When I was quite young, a few years after our settlement, I think in
1838, Mr. Elijah Lord came and settled about a mile and a half
north-west of father's. He came down with his oxen by father's place to
get small, hard-maple trees, out of the woods, that he wanted to take
home and set out on his place. He was then about a middle-aged man. He
set out the trees on both sides of the road, running through his place,
for about eighty rods, in front of his house. I asked him if he expected
to see them grow up; he said he did not set them out for himself, but for
the benefit of other people, for the good of the generations that would
follow him.
Some years after that, I visited Mr. Lord in his last sickness. He looked
very much older than he did when he planted the trees.
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