ver can be mistaken for another.

Next in rank and scarcely less in majesty is the massive white fir,
rising at times even to two hundred feet, his sometimes six-foot trunk
conspicuously rough, dark brown in color, deeply furrowed with ashen
gray. His pale yellow-green crown is mysteriously tinged with white. His
limit of age is three hundred and fifty years.

Last of the ranking trio is the western yellow pine, a warrior clad in
plates of russet armor. A hundred and sixty feet in natural height, here
he sometimes towers even with his fellow knights. He guards the outer
precincts of the court, his cap of yellow-green, his branching arms
resting upon his sides.

These are the great nobles, but with them are millions of lesser
courtiers, the incense cedar from whose buttressed, tapering trunks
spring countless branches tipped with fan-like plumes; many lesser
conifers; the splendid Pacific birches in picturesque pose; the oaks of
many kinds far different from their eastern cousins. And among the feet
of these courtiers of higher degree crowd millions upon millions of
flowering shrubs, massing often in solid phalanxes, disputing passage
with the deer.

All mingle together, great and small. The conifers, in the king's honor,
flaunt from stem and greater branch long fluttering ribbons of pale
green moss. Thousands of squirrels chatter in the branches. Millions of
birds make music. It is a gala day.

Enter the King.

The King of Trees is of royal lineage. The patient searchers in the
rocks of old have traced his ancestry unknown millions of years, back to
the forests of the Cretaceous Period. His was Viking stock from arctic
zones where trees can live no more.

To-day he links all human history. The identical tree around which
gather thousands of human courtiers every year emerged, a seedling,
while Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem. No man knows how old his
predecessors were when finally they sank into death--mighty fall! But
John Muir counted four thousand rings in the trunk of one fallen giant,
who must have lived while Pharaoh still held captive the Children of
Israel.

The General Sherman Tree of the Giant Forest, the oldest living thing
to-day, so far as I have been able to ascertain, probably has seen
thirty-six hundred years. It is evident to the unlearned observer that,
while mature, he is long short of the turn of life. A thousand years
from now he still may be the earth's biggest and oldest living thing;