A LABRADOR SPRING 
into the ground like a fox, or flatten oneself 
out like paper. The trunk was four inches 
in diameter and contained sixty-seven rings. 
A balsam fir fifteen feet high and two and 
one-half inches in diameter had grown rather 
rapidly for nineteen years, then very slowly 
for fifty-four years, and rapidly again for the 
last six. One might infer that its neighbours, 
starting at about the same time, so surpassed 
it when it was nineteen years old, that for 
over fifty years the lessened sun-light made its 
growth slow and painful, but that six years ago 
a storm had laid so many of ics companions low 
that it plucked up heart in the renewed sun- 
light and grew like a sapling again, only to 
be slain in its lusty seventy-ninth year by man 
the destroyer. And for what purpose? To 
count its rings forsooth! 
The stump of a favoured balsam fir at Es- 
quimaux Point that I examined showed twenty- 
one rings in a diameter of four and one-half 
inches. Its early life, however, had been rather 
difficult, for at the end of fifteen years it had 
reached a diameter of only an inch. Another 
balsam fir at Mingan had a diameter of trunk 
of eight inches, and had grown to be over thirty 
214 
