Papeete's Trees

A Howl—And a Transformation

Prom Our Own Correspondent

Papeete, Oct. 10.

TREE lovers at Papeete have been, for years, torn and lacerated in spirit over what seemed to be the wanton de struction of shade-trees bordering the highways of the city. They have held lodges of sorrow and conclaves of in dignation about the prone and dismem bered trunks of many a stately tree, and have raised their hands in pontifical anathema and uttered dark prophecies of an uninhabitable blazing furnace, re sembling Djibouti, on the Somali Coast.

The authorities to whom these protests have been addressed have been very patient. They explained that the arbori culturists of early times planted without discrimination—mango trees, that in the fruiting season bombarded passers-by with falling missiles and cluttered the road ways; trees whose woody heart became soft and pithy at maturity and easily succumbed to dry rot; trees that sent down no tap-root, and, with age, became top heavy and a menace to surrounding property.

They led the protestants to the public gardens where they exhibited long rows of vast tubs and hogs heads in which were growing saplings of exotic species that would be suitable and lasting sub stitutes for the lamented trees.

But the tree-lovers refused to be com forted. Accustomed to the deliberate course of Nature in the temperate zones, they could vision the maturity of these spindling saplings only in the time of their grand-children.

Time, however, which heals many things, has healed the scars which so grievously tormented the tree-lovers. The saplings, planted in the fecund, volcanic soil, have in an amazingly short period, grown to tall, symmetrical trees, and Papeete is again destined to become a garden city, to match the charming new Papeete which is growing rapidly to the eastward of the old town.