LXXII 
THE KNOT HOLE’S STORY 
I SN’T IT ODD that a knot hole in a board tells the 
story of a limb of a tree and a buried wound in its 
body! 
This knot hole may appear in a board five or six inches 
from the part of it that was the outside of the tree. 
There may be clean-grained lumber for many inches and 
then there may appear, deep in the tree, a burly knot, 
strangely out of place. 
The wise lumberman knows well how it got there. It 
may have been fifty years ago that a straight, middle- 
sized tree was growing sturdily in its forest. A storm 
blew down a near-by monarch which, in falling, broke a 
limb off the middle-sized tree. The bare butt of a limb 
two feet long was left, and this soon died. 
The tree had to get rid of this dead limb butt. Egch 
spring, as is its way, it put on a covering of new growth 
much as it might put on a cloak. This new growth cov¬ 
ered every part of the tree from the tips of the twigs at 
its top to the tips of its roots in the ground. But here 
where the dead limb stuck through the bark was a place 
it could not cover. 
Year after year the new bark closed in about this dead 
limb. The rain from without and the sap from within 
kept its base wet, aiding decay. The strong new bark 
pinched like forceps. In the end they bit this limb butt 
off even with the outside of the tree. 
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