112 THE CANADIAN FOREST. 



every direction. Side by side, for example, with oak, 

 ash, and elm, stand gigantic hickories, sugar-maples, and 

 butter-nut trees ; * while fire-flies and rattlesnakes in- 

 habit the same woods with the common squirrel and 

 the hedgehog of one's boyish hunts. Fields of common 

 oats alternate with those of towering maize and rows 

 of huge orange pumpkins, hoed and tended by negroes 

 and negresses; and the roadside is bordered by peach 

 orchards, their ripe fruit weighing down the trees, and 

 covering the ground. 



The grand forests, free of all brushwood, present a 

 more striking appearance than anything else to the 

 eye of one just arrived from the Old World. No one 

 can enter their shadows or tread their long-drawn vistas 

 of tall grey stems, spanned by over-arching roof of dark 

 leaves, without the idea of a vast cathedral involuntarily 

 rising in the mind. Like ruined columns, huge 

 prostrate trunks lie strewn around, some but newly 

 fallen, others moss-grown and verdant, with creeping 

 plants ; while many show only a dark line of decayed 

 vegetable mould, the last and rapidly disappearing 

 vestige of their former stateliness. Here the ground is 

 blue with hyacinths, there covered with beds of dry 

 leaves, the resort of snakes, blind-worms, and huge centi- 



* Juglans cinerea. 



