lutely prostrate, at its lowest usually attaining a height of three
or four feet, with a main trunk, and branches outspread and intertangled
above it, as if in ascending they had been checked by a ceiling, against
which they had grown and been compelled to spread horizontally. The
winter snow is indeed such a ceiling, lasting half the year; while the
pressed, shorn surface is made yet smoother by violent winds, armed with
cutting sand-grains, that beat down any shoot that offers to rise much
above the general level, and carve the dead trunks and branches in
beautiful patterns.

During stormy nights I have often camped snugly beneath the interlacing
arches of this little pine. The needles, which have accumulated for
centuries, make fine beds, a fact well known to other mountaineers, such
as deer and wild sheep, who paw out oval hollows and lie beneath the
larger trees in safe and comfortable concealment.

[Illustration: A DWARF PINE.]

The longevity of this lowly dwarf is far greater than would be guessed.
Here, for example, is a specimen, growing at an elevation of 10,700
feet, which seems as though it might be plucked up by the roots, for it
is only three and a half inches in diameter, and its topmost tassel is
hardly three feet above the ground. Cutting it half through and counting
the annual rings with the aid of a lens, we find its age to be no less
than 255 years. Here is another telling specimen about the same height,
426 years old, whose trunk is only six inches in diameter; and one of
its supple branchlets, hardly an eighth of an inch in diameter inside
the bark, is seventy-five years old, and so filled with oily balsam, and
so well seasoned by storms, that we may tie it in knots like a
whip-cord.

WHITE PINE
(_Pinus flexilis_)

This species is widely distributed throughout the Rocky Mountains, and
over all the higher of the many ranges of the Great Basin, between the
Wahsatch Mountains and the Sierra, where it is known as White Pine. In
the Sierra it is sparsely scattered along the eastern flank, from Bloody
Canon southward nearly to the extremity of the range, opposite the
village of Lone Pine, nowhere forming any appreciable portion of the
general forest. From its peculiar position, in loose, straggling
parties, it seems to have been derived from the Basin ranges to the
eastward, where it is abundant.

It is a larger tree than the Dwarf Pine. At an elevation of about 9000
feet above the sea, it ofte