inged with pink, standing erect on
the upper side of the topmost branches, while the tufts of young leaves,
about as brightly colored as those of the Douglas spruce, make another
grand show. The cones mature in a single season from the flowers. When
mature they are about six to eight inches long, three or four in
diameter, covered with a fine gray down and streaked and beaded with
transparent balsam, very rich and precious-looking, and stand erect like
casks on the topmost branches. The inside of the cone is, if possible,
still more beautiful. The scales and bracts are tinged with red and the
seed-wings are purple with bright iridescence. Both of the silver firs
live between two and three centuries when the conditions about them
are at all favorable. Some venerable patriarch may be seen heavily
storm-marked, towering in severe majesty above the rising generation,
with a protecting grove of hopeful saplings pressing close around his
feet, each dressed with such loving care that not a leaf seems wanting.
Other groups are made up of trees near the prime of life, nicely
arranged as if Nature had culled them with discrimination from all
the rest of the woods. It is from this tree, called Red Fir by the
lumbermen, that mountaineers cut boughs to sleep on when they are so
fortunate as to be within its limit. Two or three rows of the sumptuous
plushy-fronded branches, overlapping along the middle, and a crescent of
smaller plumes mixed to one's taste with ferns and flowers for a pillow,
form the very best bed imaginable. The essence of the pressed leaves
seems to fill every pore of one's body. Falling water makes a soothing
hush, while the spaces between the grand spires afford noble openings
through which to gaze dreamily into the starry sky. The fir woods are
fine sauntering-grounds at almost any time of the year, but finest in
autumn when the noble trees are hushed in the hazy light and drip with
balsam; and the flying, whirling seeds, escaping from the ripe cones,
mottle the air like flocks of butterflies. Even in the richest part of
these unrivaled forests where so many noble trees challenge admiration
we linger fondly among the colossal firs and extol their beauty again
and again, as if no other tree in the world could henceforth claim our
love. It is in these woods the great granite domes arise that are so
striking and characteristic a feature of the Sierra. Here, too, we find
the best of the garden-meadows full of lilies.