Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 135 



aloft till their separate heads were lost in the mass 

 of foliage above, and the rank underbrush choked 

 the spaces between the trunks. On the higher peaks 

 and ridge-crests of the mountains there were strag- 

 gling birches and pines, hemlocks and balsam firs ; 22 

 elsewhere, oaks, chestnuts, hickories, maples, 

 beeches, walnuts, and great tulip trees grew side by 

 side with many other kinds. The sunlight could 

 not penetrate the roofed archway of murmuring 

 leaves; through the gray aisles of the forest men 

 walked always in a kind of midday gloaming. Those 

 who had lived in the open plains felt when they came 

 to the backwoods as if their heads were hooded. 

 Save on the border of a lake, from a cliff top, or on 

 a bald knob that is, a bare hill-shoulder, they 

 could not anywhere look out for any distance. 



All the land was shrouded in one vast forest. It 

 covered the mountains from crest to river-bed, filled 

 the plains, and stretched in sombre and melancholy 

 wastes toward the Mississippi. All that it con- 

 tained, all that lay hid within it and beyond it, 

 none could tell'; men only knew that their boldest 

 hunters, however deeply they had penetrated, had 

 not yet gone through it, that it was the home of the 

 game they followed and the wild beasts that preyed 

 on their flocks, and that deep in its tangled depths 

 lurked their red foes, hawk-eyed and wolf-hearted. 



22 On the mountains the climate, flora, and fauna were all 

 those of the north, not of the adjacent southern lowlands. 

 The ruffed grouse, red squirrel, snow bird, various Canadian 

 warblers, and a peculiar species of boreal field-mouse, the 

 evotomys, are all found as far south as the Great Smokies. 



