good?"

"Yes, sir," put in Anton, "Dan'l used to talk about that. He always used
to say that the oak tree was a black witch tree and that the beech tree
and the alder tree were white witches."

"Like nearly all folk-lore," replied the Forecaster, "there's a mighty
good reason for that superstition. Folk-lore, after all, is merely keen
observation reduced to a saying or a story. It is true that the oak-tree
is a black witch so far as lightning is concerned and that the beech and
alder are white witches. The proportion of trees struck by lightning has
often been counted and for every fifty-four oaks struck, only one beech,
or birch, or maple or alder is struck. Elms are fairly dangerous, being
forty to the beech's one, and pines are less so, their ratio being
fifteen. Not only this, boys, but a good deal depends on the way in
which a tree is struck. An oak-tree may be riven into splinters, showing
the terrible resistance that it gives to the stroke. A beech-tree,
usually, is killed outright, yet shows but little outward injury. The
oak has resisted the current, it is a bad conductor; the beech has
allowed the current to flow directly to the ground.

"So, boys, if you are in a mixed forest and stand beneath a tree, the
figures show that you are fifty-four times as likely to be struck with
lightning when standing beneath an oak, instead of a beech. Not only
that, but if the oak be struck, the lightning may jump from the tree to
you more surely than it would from a beech-tree.

"It's surprising," he went on, "but even trees of closely related
character show very different effects of lightning. 'Nothing but
lightning,' writes John Muir, 'hurts the Sequoia or Big Tree. It lives
on through indefinite thousands of years, until burned, blown down or
undermined, or shattered by some tremendous lightning stroke. No
ordinary bolt ever hurts the Sequoia. I have seen silver firs split
into long peeled rails radiating like spokes of a wheel from a hole in
the ground where the tree stood. But the Sequoia, instead of being split
and shivered, usually has forty to fifty feet of its brash knotty top
smashed off in short chunks, about the size of cord-wood, the rosy-red
ruins covering the ground in a circle one hundred feet wide or more.

"'I never saw any that had been cut down to the ground, or even to below
the branches, except one about twelve feet in diameter, the greater part
of which was smashed to fragments. All the very old Seq