250 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



spruce on a trimmed lawn east of the Alleghanies, where 

 it is obliged to comport itself with elms and trolley cars, 

 is admittedly pretty callous. Trees are peculiarly the 

 product of their environment, and their personalities, in 

 a natural state, have invariably a beautiful fitness. 



Take the white pine for example, noblest of all our 

 common North American trees. The pine by nature 

 is gregarious in the extreme. One old patriarch, if left 

 alone, will in a few years breed a family of seedlings half 

 an acre in extent about its feet, and this little stand of 

 seedlings, in time, if they are left alone, will in a single 

 generation begin to breed more seedlings out to wind- 

 ward, and thus in a hundred years the patriarch, the 

 grandfather of the forest, will be hidden perhaps in the 

 depths of an extensive wood. The young trees as they 

 begin to grow are crowded thickly together, and very 

 soon their lateral branches begin to touch and shade 

 completely the ground beneath. As soon as this hap- 

 pens, of course, all the lateral branches below the upper 

 layer are shaded, too, and begin to die. Only the tops 

 of the trees get the sun, so they give up the natural 

 effort to spread, and devote most of their attention to 

 racing upward after more and more sunshine. The 

 weaker trees, crowded in between the strong, sooner or 

 later give up the struggle and die, but the strong ones 

 keep going up and up, till all signs of their lower lateral 

 branches have completely disappeared and the lofty 

 trunks tower straight as ruled lines for fifty, seventy- 



