140 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



have often noticed this peculiar tendency in the birches, 

 especially where a large root has had exceptional mois- 

 ture, but it will also occasionally be met with in the 

 case of apple-trees in orchards. Rings crowded closely 

 together may indicate also unusually hard winters, or 

 the lack of sufficient rainfall for several continued sea- 

 sons (and this has often been tested from the rings by 

 the memories of the oldest inhabitants, and the story 

 of the trees has been found a true one), or the denud- 

 ing of the foliage by fire or insects, in which cases it 

 would of course take the tree some years to restore its 

 normal annual increase through the leaves. A scar in 

 the interior of a tree, say on a ring eighty years from 

 the bark, may be an old blaze from the trails of the 

 frontier, or, if it is continued throughout the successive 

 log sections at the same ring (as I have seen it), is per- 

 haps the tale of a lightning streak, or another tree, in 

 falling, may have broken a branch from this one and 

 stripped a long streamer of the bark off with it, this 

 wound of former days having long since been shut in 

 and healed over by the newer growth. If the tree be 

 a maple, we may perhaps find a small cavity inclosed 

 far in the wood, an evidence of some old-time tapping 

 of years ago, which had been grown over and left there, 

 yet even now to witness of its origin by the spiral ribs 

 of the auger. It brings along with it all the long train 

 of memories of the sugar camp, and of the humor and 

 "sparking" of the best times in the world, the hours 

 spent about the fire when the sap is boiling. And so 

 these disks of the logs, can we but interpret them, are 

 a record of the tree's life, invisible and buried while 



