THE COMMON SILVER FIR 85 



is the Common Silver Fir, the mightiest and the 

 highest of them all. 



As the Common Silver Fir is always a forthcoming 

 feature on most wayside and woodland scenes, we 

 have very little to say further of it here, unless it be 

 to enter a caveat for the sake of the less initiated, 

 and warn them not to be betrayed into any surprise, 

 or deluded at any critical moment, by the different 

 aspects and variety show that the leaves of this tree 

 sometimes offer to observers, according to the different 

 layers of its branches on which they grow. While 

 on the lower stages they wear an orderly, combed 

 and neatly parted appearance, of almost pectinate 

 perfection, upon the upper often all these character- 

 istics seem to have been relegated to the regions of 

 a lost art. The leaves are apt to stand out all over 

 the place and awry. They exhibit a crowded and 

 comparatively shock-headed arrangement. Side by 

 side they look like the foliage of two different trees, 

 anyhow until more closely examined, and then — to 

 those at least who know — they look, as they should, 

 themselves. 



As it is quite an unusual occurrence for the majority 

 of us to come into contact with the top boughs of 

 trees that stand over a hundred feet high, this is a 

 little attention to detail that we can only recommend 

 readers for their own edification to make the most of, 

 when they happen across one of these giants pros- 

 trated by storm, and levelled to the earth by the 

 inevitable forces of the Fates and Furies. 



Witnesses of their doom may, perchance, with 

 luck light upon another curious sight (as did the 

 WTiter), of the leaves on the extremity branchlets 

 lying upturned, after the fall to earth of the tree, 

 and the new ones growing on the wrong side and the 

 opposite one to that on which they did before, when 

 their parent stem led a straight and upright life. The 



