THE CHILI PINE. 



431 



risinff to the almost incredible height of two 

 hundred and twenty feet, with a trunk thirty feet 

 in circumference. Mrs. Meredith, in her enter- 

 taining "Notes and Sketches of New South 

 Wales," thus describes some young trees which 

 grew near her house in that country:— ihe 

 Norfolk Island Pine is certainly the most noble 

 and stately tree of all the Pine family that I have 

 ever seen, beautiful as they all are. Ihe tall, 

 erect and tapering stem, the regularity oi the 

 circling branches, lessening by small degrees Irom 

 the widely-spread expanse below, to the tmy cross 

 that crowns the summit of the exquisite natural 

 spire, and the really verdant, dense, massive lohage, 

 clothing the whole with an unfading array of scale 

 armour, form altogether the finest model oi a Pme 

 that can be imagined. The cones too are worthy 

 to grow on such a tree; solid ponderous things, 

 as large as a child's head— not a baby s head 

 neither— with a fine embossed coat of mail, firmly 

 seated on the beam-like branches, as if defying the 

 winds to shake them. Mr. Meredith climbed very 

 nearly to the summit of our tallest Pme, and said 

 he had never seen anything more beautiful than 

 the downward view into and over the mass ol 

 diverging branches spread forth beneath him. Me 

 brought me down one cone with its spray, if I may 

 so call the armful of thick green shoots that sur- 

 rounded it, and I was gazing on it for half the day 

 after; it was so diff^erent from anything I had ever 

 seen before, so new, and so grandly beautiiul. 

 The rigidity of the foUage had a sculpture-hke 

 character that made me think how exquisitely 

 Gibbons would have wrought its image m some ot 

 his graceful and stately designs, had he ever seen 



