How Animals Talk 



Oriental rug. Along the edges of this rug, as a 

 ragged fringe, stood groups of larches in irregular 

 order, little fairylike larches that bore their 

 crown of leaves not as other trees bear them, 

 heavily, but as a floating mist or nebula of sage 

 green. Like New England ladies of a past age 

 they seemed, each wearing a precious lace shawl 

 which gave an air of daintiness to their sterling 

 worth. When the time came for the leaves to fall, 

 instead of rustling down to earth with a sound of 

 winter, mournfully, they would scamper away on 

 a merry wind, mingling their fragrance with that 

 of the ripened grass ; and then the twigs appeared 

 plainly for the first time, with a little knot or twist 

 in every twig, like toil-worn fingers that the lace 

 had concealed. 



Here or there amid this delicate new growth 

 towered the ruin of a mighty tamarack, or ship- 

 knee larch, such as men sought in the old clipper- 

 ship days when they needed timbers lighter than 

 oak, and even tougher to resist the pressure of 

 the gale or the waves' buffeting. Once, before the 

 shipmen penetrated thus far into the wilderness, 

 the tamaracks stood here in noble array, their 

 heads under clouds, beckoning hungry caribou 

 to feed from the lichens that streamed from their 

 broad arms above the drifted snow; now most of 

 them are under the moss, which covered them 



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