IN PRAISE OF TREES 275 



They got their moss. Now it is six inches deep, 

 and the creepers have crept up the pillars, climbed 

 over the edge, and mingled their green with the 

 velvet. After a dozen years several people in the 

 village privately confess (behind locked doors) that 

 they like it. Everybody likes the Poindexter sisters 

 — "the Girls," we call them. Still, they are queer 

 — imagine throwing dirt. . . . 



But to return to the subject of pines. The white 

 pine, of course, needs no encomium, as Daniel Web- 

 ster said of Massachusetts. Few of our generation, 

 to be sure, to say nothing of the generations coming 

 up behind us, have ever seen white pines at their 

 best. The virgin stands that once dotted our hills 

 and valleys are no more, and it will have to be an- 

 other two or three hundred years before our descend- 

 ants can, in some state reservation, perhaps, see 

 again those vast cathedral aisles, those massive- 

 based, aspiring uprights shooting skyward seventy- 

 five feet without a limb, and bearing their plumed 

 tops a hundred and twenty-five to a hundred and 

 fifty feet above the earth, feel again the awe and 

 hush of such a forest where the foot fell silent on 

 brown needles and the wind soughed so high aloft 

 it was but a far-off whisper. I know of but one such 

 grove hereabouts — in Cornwall, Connecticut, which 

 some miracle has preserved from the ax of man. 

 Sons of mine, if I had them, should make pilgrim- 

 ages to it every year! But we all know the beauty 

 of columnar pine aisles on a lesser scale, as well as 

 the beauty of the single old tree which grew in the 

 open, free to throw out its level, lateral branches like 

 a cedar of Lebanon, and, if it stands on some ex- 



