t
the ground-pine may grow from its creeping rootstock for a
thousand years in the shade of one grove and never be over a foot
tall. Thus easily may we be deceived by small beginnings. No palm
ever rivalled a full-grown pine in height and girth, yet a palm
comes out of the ground as great in diameter of trunk and with as
abundant a leafage as it will ever have.

Watching seedling pines grow year by year it is difficult to see
how the great, clean trunked, old-time pines that towered over two
hundred feet tall and were from four to six feet in diameter came
about. The free growing pasture pine makes a round headed shrub,
for the first ten years or so of its life, with abundant long
limbs, and is clad in profuse foliage from top to bottom. Even as
decades pass its limbs still remain numerous and though there is
abundant wood in the half century old pasture pine it is of little
use for lumber, for the limbs, young and old, have filled its
trunk with knots. Where our present day trees have seeded in
thickly and uniformly over considerable space it is different.
Then as the trees grow old they grow taller, each struggling to
outdo its neighbors and get more light and air. Lower limbs decay
in time and in the progress of forty or fifty years we get a
"second growth" pine which is fairly limbless for a height of
forty or fifty feet. Give the trees another half century if you
will. I know many groves that have had that and still their
trunks, though fairly bare, show the knots where the limbs have
been and produce anything but clear lumber. It may be that by
giving these century-old groves another century or two we should
have something like the old perfect boles that our great
grandfathers got out of the Maine woods, but I am not sure about
it. I see no promise of it in the conditions under which pines
grow today. Even my patriarch, though he has, I am very sure,
sufficient years to his credit would cut up into only a medium
quality of box boards; there is no clear lumber in him.

To produce the wonder trees of the early half of the nineteenth
century the tiny seeds must have rooted plentifully in rich soil,
the trees must have grown so close together as to steadily and
persistently crowd out the weaker and shorter, and in the passing
of two, three or four centuries we had remaining the magnificent
specimens, towering two hundred or more feet in the air, their
trunks without limb or knot for more than half that distance. S