THE FOEESTS 207 



tree is spared, even the soil is scraped away, while 

 the thousands of uprooted pines and spruces are 

 piled upon one another heads downward, and tucked 

 snugly in along the sides of the clearing in two 

 windrows, like lateral moraines. The pines lie with 

 branches wilted and drooping like weeds. Not so 

 the burly junipers. After braving in silence the 

 storms of perhaps a dozen or twenty centuries, they 

 seem in this, their last calamity, to become some 

 what communicative, making sign of a very un 

 willing acceptance of their fate, holding themselves 

 well up from the ground on knees and elbows, 

 seemingly ill at ease, and anxious, like stubborn 

 wrestlers, to rise again. 



HEMLOCK SPEUCE 

 (Tsuga Pattoniand) 



THE Hemlock Spruce is the most singularly 

 beautiful of all the California conif erse. So slender 

 is its axis at the top, that it bends over and droops 

 like the stalk of a nodding lily. The branches 

 droop also, and divide into innumerable slender, 

 waving sprays, which are arranged in a varied, 

 eloquent harmony that is wholly indescribable. Its 

 cones are purple, and hang free, in the form of 

 little tassels two inches long from all the sprays 

 from top to bottom. Though exquisitely delicate 

 and feminine in expression, it grows best where 

 the snow lies deepest, far up in the region of 

 storms, at an elevation of from 9000 to 9500 feet, 

 on frosty northern slopes; but it is capable of 



