110 ESSAYS. 



intention of going thither, he cheerfully set about accompany- 

 ing me. At mid-day I reached my long-wished-for Pines, and 

 lost no time in examining them, and endeavoring to collect 

 specimens and seeds. New and strange things seldom fail to 

 make strong impressions, and are therefore frequently over- 

 rated ; so that, lest I should never again see my friends in 

 England to inform them verbally of this most beautiful and 

 immensely grand tree, I shall here state the dimensions of 

 the largest I could find among several that had been blown 

 down by the wind. At three feet from the ground, its cir- 

 cumference is fifty-seven feet nine inches ; at one hundred 

 and thirty-four feet, seventeen feet five inches ; the extreme 

 length two hundred and forty-five feet. 1 The trunks are 

 commonly straight, and the bark remarkably smooth for such 

 large timber, of a whitish or light-brown color, and yielding 

 a great quantity of bright amber gum. The tallest stems are 

 generally unbranched for two thirds of the height of the tree ; 

 the branches rather pendulous, with cones hanging from their 

 points, like sugar-loves in a grocer's shop. These cones are, 

 however, only seen on the loftiest trees, and the putting my- 

 self in possession of three of these (all I could obtain) nearly 

 brought my life to a close. As it was impossible either to 

 climb the tree or hew it down, I endeavored to knock off the 

 cones by firing at them with ball, when the report of my gun 

 brought eight Indians, all of them painted with red earth, 

 armed with bows, arrows, bone-tipped spears, and flint knives. 

 They appeared anything but friendly. I endeavored to ex- 

 plain to them what I wanted, and they seemed satisfied, and 

 sat down to smoke ; but presently I perceived one of them 



1 We take this to be the correct account. But, by an error in copying, 

 as we suppose, the length of this same tree is given at only two hundred 

 and fifteen feet, in the memoir inserted in the 16th volume of the " Trans- 

 actions of the Linnrean Society " j whence it has been copied into Lambert's 

 great work on Pines, Loudon's Arboretum, the " American Almanac " 

 for 1838, and Hooker's "Flora Boreali- Americana." There is another 

 apparent discrepancy between the two accounts. In the Linnaean Trans- 

 actions, the timber is said to be " white, soft, and light." In his journal, 

 Douglas says, the wood of the large tree he examined was " remarkably 

 fine-grained and heavy." 



