64: J)AYS OUT OF DOORS. 



toned roaring and moaning among the oaks near by. 

 Except the larger trees, there was little else to be seen, 

 the fields and meadows alike being enveloped in a misty 

 cloud-mass of whirling snow that I fancied the smoke of 

 an icy fire. 



The wild weather gave me no little concern with re- 

 gard to the old trees near my house. I was curious, too, 

 to know which species was sufEering most from loss of 

 branches and general mutilation. The snapping and 

 crashing heard above the wind's roaring suggested univer- 

 sal destruction. Judging from past wind-storms, I looked 

 for the leveling of the fourteen pines near the house, or 

 at least that the trunks alone would remain standing ; but 

 these unaccountably escaped all serious injury, and are 

 still the same sorry-looking irregularities they have been 

 for the last twenty years. 



It is not a little strange that the long rows of white 

 pines planted by Joseph Bonaparte in his park near Bor- 

 dentown. New Jersey, more than sixty years ago, have 

 escaped serious breakage from wind, incrusting snow, and 

 ice-incased twigs — the three causes that have, separately 

 and combinedly, effected the uncrowning and disfiguring 

 of the pines at home, which are no more exposed and 

 scarcely three miles away. Do not these trees generally 

 require planting in clusters, so as to be self-protecting, or 

 to be intimately associated with other trees ? A lone pine 

 is very pretty and poetical, but hereabout it is as uncer- 

 tain as the average white man. 



But to return to the forest in the storm. Of a hundred 

 or more large trees — oaks, chestnuts, birches, gums, liq- 

 uidambars, persimmons, eatalpas, beeches, and sassafras — 

 occupying some three acres of southward sloping hillside, 

 but one, a large chestnut, was uprooted, and this was lifted 

 bodily from the ground and carried several feet from 

 where it had stood. The others were twisted ; branches 



