TREES 251 



five, in primeval forests even for one hundred feet in air, 

 before the trees grow a single limb. It takes many gen- 

 erations to make such a forest, though, alas ! but a few 

 months to destroy it. What man who has ever entered 

 the hushed cathedral aisles of a mighty pine grove fra- 

 grant with that indescribable incense, murmurous over- 

 head with the whisper of surf upon a lonely shore, 

 mysterious with the tiny patter of pitch, illumined 

 through vistas between the solemn uprights that look 

 like blue daggers of light can ever forget it? It is like 

 nothing else on earth. One fancies, sometimes, that the 

 Egyptian temples must have been, on their man-made 

 scale, something akin, though with far less grace and 

 airiness. A pine tree is always graceful, which is hardly 

 the word for an Egyptian column. 



Yet the isolated pine, which has not fought upward in 

 the crowded phalanx of its fellows but has expanded 

 laterally as well, is a totally different tree, with a totally 

 different personality a very noble and sturdy person- 

 ality, too. How characteristic of our northern moun- 

 tains is the ragged upland pasture, where the cattle 

 wander through hassocks of grass and sweet fern, and by 

 some bit of gray stone wall a single pine stands up 

 alone, its branches extended in angular parallels like a 

 cedar of Lebanon, broken and stunted short on the side 

 toward the prevailing winter storms, streaming away 

 more gracefully to leeward, and the massive trunk 

 comparatively short and gnarled instead of tall and 



