A LABRADOR SPRING 



into the ground like a fox, or flatten oneself 

 out like paper. The trunk was four inches 

 in diameter and contained sixty-seven rings. 



A balsam fir fifteen feet high and two and 

 one-half inches in diameter had grown rather 

 rapidly for nineteen years, then very slowly 

 for fifty-four years, and rapidly again for the 

 last six. One might infer that its neighbours, 

 starting at about the same time, so surpassed 

 it when it was nineteen years old, that for 

 over fifty years the lessened sun-light made its 

 growth slow and painful, but that six years ago 

 a storm had laid so many of its companions low 

 that it plucked up heart in the renewed sun- 

 light and grew like a sapling again, only to 

 be slain in its lusty seventy-ninth year by man 

 the destroyer. And for what purpose? To 

 count its rings forsooth! 



The stump of a favoured balsam fir at Es- 

 quimaux Point that I examined showed twenty- 

 one rings in a diameter of four and one-half 

 inches. Its early life, however, had been rather 

 difficult, for at the end of fifteen years it had 

 reached a diameter of only an inch. Another 

 balsam fir at Mingan had a diameter of trunk 

 of eight inches, and had grown to be over thirty 



214 



