A SPRAY OF PINE 45 



of its stumps are still occasionally seen in land that 

 has been given to the plow 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 degen- 

 erate race, 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 wil- 

 derness. I remember pausing beside a mammoth 

 pine in the Adirondack 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! Nearly all trunk, 

 it seems to have shed its limbs like youthful follies 

 as it went skyward, or as the builders pull down 



