th for succeeding
generations. Hence these occasional trees. I may be wrong, but I
have an idea that my patriarch was growing right where he stands,
a young and vigorous sapling, when quaint old Josselyn wrote about
those two voyages to New England in the early years of the
seventeenth century.

Josselyn gives us to understand that the wood of the white pine is
that mentioned in the Scriptures as gopher wood out of which Noah
built the ark. Certainly if the white pine of Josselyn's day was
abundant in the neighborhood of Ararat in Noah's time he could
have done no better. The wood is light, soft, close and straight
grained. You may search the world for one more easily worked or
more generally satisfactory. Indeed the last half-century has seen
the good white pine of the world pretty nearly used up, certainly
all the best of it, for woodworking purposes. Fifty years ago it
was the cheapest New England wood, today it is the highest-priced,
and the old-time clear pine, free from knots and sapwood is almost
impossible to obtain at any price. For all the forestry we can
bring into play it will take more than three centuries to grow for
us such trees as were common in Maine and New Hampshire a century
ago. In 1832 white pines were not rare in Maine six feet in
diameter and 240 feet high. In 1736 near the Merrimac River above
Dunstable in New Hampshire a pine was cut, straight and sound and
having a diameter at the butt of 7 feet 8 inches. Half a thousand
years were none too many in which to grow such a pine as that.
Could a man have a few of these on his farm anywhere in New
England today they would be worth more than any other crop the
centuries could have raised for him.

The youngest pine seedlings hide so securely in the pasture grass
and under the low bushes that rarely does one notice them during
the first summer's growth. By the end of that time they are
singularly, to my mind, like fairy palm trees, planted in the
gardens where the little folk stroll on midsummer nights. Their
single stem and the spreading whorl of leaves at the summit of it
are in about the same proportion as those of a palmetto whose
great leaves have been tossed and shredded by the trade winds.
That so tiny a twig could become, in the passage of centuries
even, a 200-foot tree seems difficult to believe. It looks no more
likely than that the "ground-pine" which is taller than the
seedling and fully as sturdy should some day be 200 feet tall. Ye