t feet
in diameter four feet from the ground, though some grand old patriarch
may be met here and there that has enjoyed six or eight centuries of
storms and attained a thickness of ten or even twelve feet, still sweet
and fresh in every fiber. The trunk is a remarkably smooth, round,
delicately-tapered shaft, straight and regular as if turned in a lathe,
mostly without limbs, purplish brown in color and usually enlivened with
tufts of a yellow lichen. Toward the head of this magnificent column
long branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming
a palm-like crown, but far more impressive than any palm crown I ever
beheld. The needles are about three inches long in fascicles of five,
and arranged in rather close tassels at the ends of slender branchlets
that clothe the long outsweeping limbs. How well they sing in the wind,
and how strikingly harmonious an effect is made by the long cylindrical
cones, depending loosely from the ends of the long branches! The cones
are about fifteen to eighteen inches long, and three in diameter;
green, shaded with dark purple on their sunward sides. They are ripe in
September and October of the second year from the flower. Then the flat,
thin scales open and the seeds take wing, but the empty cones become
still more beautiful and effective as decorations, for their diameter is
nearly doubled by the spreading of the scales, and their color changes
to yellowish brown while they remain, swinging on the tree all the
following winter and summer, and continue effectively beautiful even on
the ground many years after they fall. The wood is deliciously fragrant,
fine in grain and texture and creamy yellow, as if formed of condensed
sunbeams. The sugar from which the common name is derived is, I think,
the best of sweets. It exudes from the heart-wood where wounds have been
made by forest fires or the ax, and forms irregular, crisp, candy-like
kernels of considerable size, something like clusters of resin beads.
When fresh it is white, but because most of the wounds on which it is
found have been made by fire the sap is stained and the hardened sugar
becomes brown. Indians are fond of it, but on account of its laxative
properties only small quantities may be eaten. No tree lover will ever
forget his first meeting with the sugar pine. In most pine trees there
is the sameness of expression which to most people is apt to become
monotonous, for the typical spiral form of conifers, ho