the slant
of it. Lone Pine had a mighty girth at the bottom, and its bare body
tapered into the sky as straight as an arrow. Uncle Eb used to say that
its one long, naked branch that swung and creaked near the top of it,
like a sign of hospitality on the highway of the birds, was two hundred
feet above ground. There were a few stubs here and there upon its
shaft--the roost of crows and owls and hen-hawks. It must have passed
for a low resort in the feathered kingdom because it was only the
robbers of the sky that halted on Lone Pine.

This towering shaft of dead timber commemorated the ancient forest
through which the northern Yankees cut their trails in the beginning of
the century. They were a tall, big fisted, brawny lot of men who came
across the Adirondacks from Vermont, and began to break the green canopy
that for ages had covered the valley of the St Lawrence. Generally they
drove a cow with them, and such game as they could kill on the journey
supplemented their diet of 'pudding and milk'. Some settled where the
wagon broke or where they had buried a member of the family, and there
they cleared the forests that once covered the smooth acres of today.
Gradually the rough surface of the trail grew smoother until it became
Paradise Road--the well-worn thoroughfare of the stagecoach with its
'inns and outs', as the drivers used to say--the inns where the 'men
folks' sat in the firelight of the blazing logs after supper and
told tales of adventure until bedtime, while the women sat with their
knitting in the parlour, and the young men wrestled in the stableyard.
The men of middle age had stooped and massive shoulders, and
deep-furrowed brows: Tell one of them he was growing old and he might
answer you by holding his whip in front of him and leaping over it
between his hands.

There was a little clearing around that big pine tree when David Brower
settled in the valley. Its shadows shifting in the light of sun and
moon, like the arm of a compass, swept the spreading acres of his farm,
and he built his house some forty rods from the foot of it on higher
ground. David was the oldest of thirteen children. His father had died
the year before he came to St Lawrence county, leaving him nothing but
heavy responsibilities. Fortunately, his great strength and his kindly
nature were equal to the burden. Mother and children were landed safely
in their new home on Bowman's Hill the day that David was eighteen. I
have heard the