horses for that matter--care for trifling discomforts of the
body? In these intangible comforts of the eye was a great refreshment
of the spirit.

The following day we rode through the pine forests growing on the
ridges and hills and in the elevated bowl-like hollows. These were not
the so-called "big trees,"--with those we had to do later, as you shall
see. They were merely sugar and yellow pines, but never anywhere have
I seen finer specimens. They were planted with a grand sumptuousness of
space, and their trunks were from five to twelve feet in diameter and
upwards of two hundred feet high to the topmost spear. Underbrush,
ground growth, even saplings of the same species lacked entirely, so
that we proceeded in the clear open aisles of a tremendous and spacious
magnificence.

This very lack of the smaller and usual growths, the generous plan of
spacing, and the size of the trees themselves necessarily deprived us
of a standard of comparison. At first the forest seemed immense. But
after a little our eyes became accustomed to its proportions. We
referred it back to the measures of long experience. The trees, the
wood-aisles, the extent of vision shrunk to the normal proportions of
an Eastern pinery. And then we would lower our gaze. The pack-train
would come into view. It had become lilliputian, the horses small as
white mice, the men like tin soldiers, as though we had undergone an
enchantment. But in a moment, with the rush of a mighty
transformation, the great trees would tower huge again.

In the pine woods of the mountains grows also a certain close-clipped
parasitic moss. In color it is a brilliant yellow-green, more yellow
than green. In shape it is crinkly and curly and tangled up with
itself like very fine shavings. In consistency it is dry and brittle.
This moss girdles the trunks of trees with innumerable parallel
inch-wide bands a foot or so apart, in the manner of old-fashioned
striped stockings. It covers entirely sundry twigless branches. Always
in appearance is it fantastic, decorative, almost Japanese, as though
consciously laid in with its vivid yellow-green as an intentional note
of a tone scheme. The somberest shadows, the most neutral twilights,
the most austere recesses are lighted by it as though so many freakish
sunbeams had severed relations with the parent luminary to rest quietly
in the coolnesses of the ancient forest.

Underfoot the pine-needles were springy beneath the