ay
up, and at the top reaching ardently heavenward. Near it stood a parent
tree of perhaps middle age, born around the time of Christ, whose crown
was still firmly rounded with the densely massed foliage, now
yellow-brown, and the bark red-brown.

The millions of two inch cones, surprisingly tiny for such a tree, hang
heavy with seeds,--they counted 300 in a single green cone.

"With such millions of seeds," puzzled Pedro, "I should think the trees
would grow so thick that there would be no walking between them."

"No," said Norris. "In the first place, remember that not one seed in a
million escapes these busy Douglas squirrels and the big woodcocks that
you hear drumming everywhere. Then even the millionth seed has to risk
forest fires and snow-slides, lumbermen and lightning. But I'll tell you
something funny about them. You'd naturally think, from the number of
streams in these forests, that they required a lot of moisture. Well,
they don't. Further South they grow and flourish on perfectly dry ground.
But their roots retain so much rain and snow water that their tendency is
to _make_ streams. The dense crown helps too, by preventing evaporation.
You'll find Sequoias flourishing in a mere rift in a granite precipice.
But wherever you find a dense growth, as you do here, there you will find
their roots giving out the seepage that feeds a million streamlets, and
these in turn feed the great rivers.

"You see these trees _must_ be able to survive drouth or they could not
have survived the changes of so many thousand years. Why, these Sequoias
might have formed one continuous forest from the American River on South,
if it had not been for the glaciers that swept down the great basins of
the San Joaquin and Kings' River, the Tuolumne and the Stanislaus."

"But why didn't the glaciers clean them off the basins of the Kaweah and
the Tule Rivers, too?"

"Ah! There the giant rock spurs of the canyons of the King and the Kern
protected the Tule and the Kaweah, by shunting the ice off to right and
left."

"There's one thing more I'd like to know," said Pedro. "Where will we
find the nut pines that have the pine nuts? Aren't they delicious?"

"There are several kinds," said Norris. "There is a queer little one with
cones growing like burrs on the trunk as well as on the limbs, but that
is only found on burnt ground. Another, that forms a dietary staple with
the Indians of Nevada, is to be found only on the East slope of