(i5) 
out all brilliant light. Their tops are usually 225 to 300 feet from 
the ground, considerably higher, I presume, than any of the New¬ 
port steeples. Hemlocks and cedars fill the lower spaces with 
feathery foliage, while the ground is hidden by the broad, glossy 
leaves of the salal hush, the graceful fronds of the ferns and a car¬ 
pet of golden brown moss. The fallen trees stretch their gigantic 
lengths in all directions ; many of them supporting a whole nur¬ 
sery of delicate young hemlocks, others wasted away after centu¬ 
ries to long, low waves in the general surface. The ground pine 
of our eastern woods and the little Linnaea are interlaced on the 
mossy knolls and hang in festoons from the decaying stumps. 
Sometimes the sunlit top of a dead tree, broken off fifty feet from 
the ground, supports a little colony of tender vines and bushes 
waving gaily on their lofty perch. 
Amid all this exuberant plant growth there is comparativelv 
little animal life. Deer, so numerous in the open forests of the 
eastern slope, avoid a region so difficult to pass through. 
The panthers and wolves follow the deer. Black bears are 
more common, and their well trodden paths may often be 
found about the wild berry patches; but the dreaded grizzly 
does not come so far north. The only creatures often seen arc 
the saucy squirrels and the jay birds that gather round every camp 
from Maine to the Pacific. Sometimes one may start a covey of 
grouse, but he who depends upon his shot-gun will be apt to go 
hungry. It is a silent forest, so still one may almost hear plants 
grow ; the wind passes far overhead stirring the tops of the giants, 
but unfelt in the “dim aisles below there are no rustling leaves, 
no chirping insects, no pattering raindrops ; only growth—silent, 
progressive, life springing everywhere from decay. The natural 
question, how old is this forest, is not easy to answer. Individual 
trees, if we may trust the record of their yearly rings, are four hun¬ 
dred to six hundred years old, and they often stand upon the 
decayed trunks of others that may have taken twice that time to 
grow and moulder away ; perhaps we may count fifteen hundred 
years in the still recognizable wood fibre. Back of that, we must 
depend on uncertain estimates based on the approximate thick¬ 
ness of vegetable mould and its rate of accumulation, estimates for 
which the data are very insufficient. 
