THE SPRUCE FIR. 395 



In the country bordering on the Baltic a Spruce forest 

 is a very different thing. " This is the land of Pines — 

 lofty, erect battalions : their bark is smooth as the mast 

 of a ship; their branches regular as a ladder, varying 

 scarce an inch in girth in fifty feet of growth : for miles 

 interrupted only by a leaning, never by a crooked, tree ; 

 with an army of sturdy Lilliputians clustering round their 

 bases — fifty heads starting up where one yard of light is 

 admitted. What becomes of all the pruning, trimming, 

 and training — the days of precious labour spent on our 

 own woods 1 Nature here does all this, and immeasurably 

 better for her volunteers, who stand closer, grow faster, and 

 soar higher than the carefully planted and transplanted 

 children of our soil. Here and there a bare jagged trunk, 

 and a carpet of fresh-hewn boughs beneath, show where 

 some peasant urchin has indulged in sport which with us 

 would be amenable to the laws, — namely, mounted one 

 of these grenadiers of the forest, hewing off" every suc- 

 cessive bough beneath him, till, perched at a giddy height 

 aloft, he clings to a tapering point which his hand may 

 grasp. The higher he goes, the greater the feat, and the 

 greater the risk to his vagabond neck in descending the 

 noble and mutilated trunk." Sometimes the woods are 

 composed of " mingled trees ; the fresh hues of the Oak 

 contrasting with the black Pines : and close to us stood a 

 noble Spruce, split from top to base by the lightning of 

 last week's storm, one half resting against a neighbouring 

 stem, the other pale, bleeding, and still erect ; below lay 

 forty feet of the luxuriant head, with enormous splinters, 

 rent in longitudinal lines, while the ground was furrowed in 

 deep angular troughs by the last strength of the fluid : here 

 and there the sun shooting across a Silver Birch trunk 

 like the light across a liquid human eye, or illuminating 

 the red bark of a veteran Scotch Fir with a fiercer glow, 

 or stealing, few and far between, in slender bars of gold 

 along the tender grass." ^ 



^ "Letters from the Baltic." 



