fy plumes right
to our dooryards. Let the ploughed field lie fallow for a decade
and see them come, loyal little folk preparing the way for them,
as the trolls of ancient tales worked for those they loved. Into
the brown furrows troop the goldenrod and asters, the wild
grasses and brambles making a first shelter for the seeds of
gray birch and wild cherry that magically come and plant
themselves. A thousand other forms of life, beast and bird and
insect, make the place their home; all preparing it for the
nursing of the young pines to came. However rough has been the
work of the wood cutters, however persistent the forest fires,
somewhere is a seed pine standing, ready to spear the turf a mile
away with brawn javelins out of whose wounds shall spring trees,
just as out of the Cadmus-sown dragon's teeth of old sprang armed
men. The tree may be a century-old gnarled trunk, too crooked and
knotty to be worthy the woodman's axe, or a verdant sprout of a
score of years' standing, green and lusty--the result will be
the same. When the seeding year comes the brown cones will open
and the winds will bear the germs of the new growth forth,
spinning down the gale, whichever way they list to blow. The tiny
pines that result may live for three or four years amongst the
brambles unnoticed, then suddenly they take heart and grow and we
find a lusty forest coming along. At three years they will not be
over ten inches high, but they will make ten inches in height the
next year, and after the fifth they stride forward like lusty
youths, glorifying in their increase. It is not uncommon for them
to stretch up three feet a year, more than doubling their height
in that sixth year in which they strike their stride. They do not
cease this upward striving as long as they live.

After the age of sixty or so the pine may be said to have passed
the heyday of its youth, no longer increasing so rapidly in height
and girth, yet the increase goes on, if more sedately. The tree
rarely reaches a height of more than 160 feet and a diameter of
more than forty inches. The largest ever measured by the Forestry
Department of the United States was forty-eight inches in diameter
at breast high and 170 feet in height, containing 738 cubic feet
of wood in its mighty trunk. It will be some time before seedlings
in the bramble patch here in Massachusetts reach that size,
however, for this tree was 460 years old. It grew among trees of
similar age in a pine for