pering
upwards, and each circle of branches decreasing in diameter until a
hundred and fifty feet are gained. The stems of some of these giants of
the forest are eighteen feet in circumference at the height of a man
from the ground, and their lower branches would of themselves form trees
such as many a trim and well-kept park could never boast of. At other
times the original tree will have met with an accidental fracture when
young, and after going up twenty or thirty feet from the ground, as an
immense wooden column, will throw out three or four other trees from its
summit, which will all shoot up parallel to each other into the air and
form a little forest of themselves. Very frequently, however, it happens
that the tree has been contorted in its early growth, and then broken
afterwards: in such cases it seems to have forgotten its nature
completely, and to have gone mad in its spirit of increase; for it turns
and forces itself into the strangest convolutions and intricacies of
form. It becomes like a short stunted oak, or a thickly knotted thorn:
or it might sometimes be mistaken for a willow, at others for a
cedar--for any thing but one of the same species as the stately spire of
wood that soars up into the heaven close by its side.

When the tree becomes quite dead, blasted by lightning, or injured by
the attacks of animals at its base, it does not therefore lose all its
beauty; for it becomes immediately covered with a peculiar gray lichen
of great length and luxuriance; occupying every branch and twig of the
dead tree, and clothing it, as it were, with a second but a new kind of
foliage. This lichen will sometimes hang down from the branches in
strings of weeping vegetation to the length of five feet and more. You
may sometimes ride under the living tree where this parasitical foliage
is mixed with the real covering of the boughs, forming the most
anomalous, and yet the most picturesque of contrasts.

In forests of this kind, the undergrowth of brushwood of every variety
is exceedingly abundant and beautiful: every woodland shrub is to be
found there--the hazel especially--and the thickets thereby formed are
quite impenetrable. As the older and larger trees decay, they lose
their footing in the soil, and fall in every variety of strange
position--presenting a picture of desolation, the effect of which is at
first strange to the mind, and at last becomes even painful. But
wherever a tree falls, there a luxuriant