A SPRAY OF PINE. 49 



out the best land to the early settlers ! Remnants of 

 its stumps are still occasionally seen in land that has 

 been given to the plough these seventy or eighty years. 

 In Pennsylvania the stumps are wrenched from the 

 ground by machinery and used largely for fencing. 

 Laid upon their side with their wide branching roots 

 in the air, they form a barrier before which even the 

 hound-pursued deer may well pause. 



This aboriginal tree is fast disappearing from the 

 country. Its second growth seems to be a degenerate 

 species, what the carpenters contemptuously call 

 pumpkin pine, on account of its softness. All the 

 large tracts and provinces of the original tree have 

 been invaded and ravished by the lumbermen, so 

 that only isolated bands, and straggling specimens, 

 like the remnants of a defeated and disorganized 

 army, are now found scattered up and down the 

 country. The spring floods on our northern rivers 

 have for decades of years been moving seething walls 

 of pine logs, sweeping down out of the wilderness. 

 I remember pausing beside a mammoth pine in the 

 Adirondac woods, standing a little to one side of the 

 destroyer's track, that must have carried its green 

 crown near one hundred and fifty feet above the 

 earth. How such a tree impresses one ! How it 

 swells at the base and grows rigid as if with muscular 

 effort in its determined gripe of the earth ! How it 

 lays hold of the rocks, or rends them asunder to 

 secure its hold I Nearly all trunk, it seems to have 

 shed its limbs like youthful follies as it went sky- 

 4 



