The Walking Trees
1876 story for children.
:121–132, 181–190, 241–252
: Little Leo has a fancy about seven tall ash‐trees that grow on a ridge of upland in front of his father’s house. He believes they walk and go off on expeditions every night. He watches one night to see. Sure enough, they tear their roots out of the ground and start. One of the trees invites him to go with them, and, being a brave little man, he jumps up into its branches. The trees tramp away to a strange country so near the sky that when Leo climbs to the topmost branches and gives a spring he finds himself in a bed of fleecy cloud. Leo’s adventures in cloud‐land with the cloud‐man, the summer‐cloud children, the beautiful women poised in the great lake, the sky, and called Hours, with the rain‐children in Bad‐weather country, in the home of King Storm, and in Snow country, are a series of delightful fancies, of which the descriptions are alternately droll, gorgeous, dramatic, and delicately poetic. The description of what Leo sees at the Gates of Sunrise, and the account of the palace of King Storm, where among “vast halls lined with crystal pillars” the visions of what is being done on earth by all his minions, from the shipwrecking tempests to the zephyrs fanning the buds open, are to be seen—“dim pictures, wide and dim, with lights and colors struggling in them, as if out of a deep and wonderful distance”—are about the finest things we have read in this kind of literature. 