must have been much higher, for it measures a hundred feet
round its trunk at the root end. A man can ride on horseback for two
hundred feet through its hollow trunk as it lies on the ground. Many
of the standing trees hollowed out by fires are large enough, used as
cabins, to live in.

The Mariposa grove of Big Trees, being not far from Yosemite Valley,
is the best known, as thousands of tourists visit both places. There
is a big tree at Mariposa for every day in the year, and two very
wonderful ones, the Grizzly Giant and Wawona. Stage-coaches drive into
the grove through the tree Wawona, which was bored and burned out
so as to make an opening ten by twelve feet. A wall of wood ten feet
thick on each side of this opening supports the living tree. The great
Grizzly Giant towers a hundred feet without a branch, and twice that
height above the first immense branches that are six feet through.
This was, no doubt, an old tree when Columbus discovered America, yet
it is alive and green and still growing.

The largest tree in the world is the General Sherman, in Sequoia
National Park, and it is thirty-five feet in diameter. This means that
the stump of the tree, if smoothed off, would make a floor on which
thirty people might dance, or your whole class be seated. You can
scarcely imagine what a mighty column such a tree is, with its rich
red-brown bark, fluted like a column, too, and with its crown of
feathery green branches and foliage. The bark is a foot or two thick.
The trees are evergreens, and conifers, or cone-bearers. Sequoia cones
are two or three inches long and full of small seeds. The Douglas
squirrel gets most of these seeds, but there are still seedlings and
saplings or young trees enough to keep the race alive in most of the
groves.

These groves of wonderful and rare trees are protected as National
Parks in the Sequoia and Grant groves, and Mariposa belongs to the
state. It is against the law to cut the trees in those groves. Their
worst enemy is fire, and a troop of cavalry is sent every year to
guard them, and to keep out the sheep-herders, whose flocks would
destroy the underbrush and young trees. But, unfortunately, lumbermen
have put up mills near the Fresno and Kings River groups, and, wasting
more than they use, are destroying magnificent trees thousands of
years old in order to make shingles. When nature has taken such good
care of this rare and wonderful tree, the Sierra Giant, men should try
to