g at
the top, horizontal about half-way down, and drooping in handsome curves
at the base. By the time the sapling is five or six hundred years old
this spiry, feathery, juvenile habit merges into the firm, rounded dome
form of middle age, which in turn takes on the eccentric picturesqueness
of old age. No other tree in the Sierra forest has foliage so densely
massed or presents outlines so firmly drawn and so steadily subordinate
to a special type. A knotty ungovernable-looking branch five to eight
feet thick may be seen pushing out abruptly from the smooth trunk, as if
sure to throw the regular curve into confusion, but as soon as the
general outline is reached it stops short and dissolves in spreading
bosses of law-abiding sprays, just as if every tree were growing beneath
some huge, invisible bell-glass, against whose sides every branch was
being pressed and molded, yet somehow indulging in so many small
departures from the regular form that there is still an appearance of
freedom.

The foliage of the saplings is dark bluish-green in color, while the
older trees ripen to a warm brownish-yellow tint like Libocedrus. The
bark is rich cinnamon-brown, purplish in young trees and in shady
portions of the old, while the ground is covered with brown leaves and
burs forming color-masses of extraordinary richness, not to mention the
flowers and underbrush that rejoice about them in their seasons. Walk
the Sequoia woods at any time of year and you will say they are the most
beautiful and majestic on earth. Beautiful and impressive contrasts meet
you everywhere: the colors of tree and flower, rock and sky, light and
shade, strength and frailty, endurance and evanescence, tangles of
supple hazel-bushes, tree-pillars about as rigid as granite domes, roses
and violets, the smallest of their kind, blooming around the feet of the
giants, and rugs of the lowly chamaebatia where the sunbeams fall. Then
in winter the trees themselves break forth in bloom, myriads of small
four-sided staminate cones crowd the ends of the slender sprays,
coloring the whole tree, and when ripe dusting the air and the ground
with golden pollen. The fertile cones are bright grass-green, measuring
about two inches in length by one and a half in thickness, and are made
up of about forty firm rhomboidal scales densely packed, with from five
to eight seeds at the base of each. A single cone, therefore, contains
from two to three hundred seeds, which are about