to convince
me that most of the trees eight or ten feet thick, standing on
pavements, are more than twenty centuries old rather than less. Barring
accidents, for all I can see they would live forever; even then
overthrown by avalanches, they refuse to lie at rest, lean stubbornly
on their big branches as if anxious to rise, and while a single root
holds to the rock, put forth fresh leaves with a grim, never-say-die
expression.

The Mountain Hemlock

As the juniper is the most stubborn and unshakeable of trees in the
Yosemite region, the Mountain Hemlock (Tsuga Mertensiana) is the most
graceful and pliant and sensitive. Until it reaches a height of fifty or
sixty feet it is sumptuously clothed down to the ground with drooping
branches, which are divided again and again into delicate waving
sprays, grouped and arranged in ways that are indescribably beautiful,
and profusely adorned with small brown cones. The flowers also are
peculiarly beautiful and effective; the female dark rich purple, the
male blue, of so fine and pure a tone. What the best azure of the
mountain sky seems to be condensed in them. Though apparently the most
delicate and feminine of all the mountain trees, it grows best where
the snow lies deepest, at a height of from 9000 to 9500 feet, in
hollows on the northern slopes of mountains and ridges. But under all
circumstances, sheltered from heavy winds or in bleak exposure to them,
well fed or starved, even at its highest limit, 10,500 feet above the
sea, on exposed ridge-tops where it has to crouch and huddle close in
low thickets, it still contrives to put forth its sprays and branches in
forms of invincible beauty, while on moist, well-drained moraines it
displays a perfectly tropical luxuriance of foliage, flowers and fruit.
The snow of the first winter storm is frequently soft, and lodges in due
dense leafy branches, weighing them down against the trunk, and the
slender, drooping axis, bending lower and lower as the load increases,
at length reaches the ground, forming an ornamental arch. Then, as storm
succeeds storm and snow is heaped on snow, the whole tree is at last
buried, not again to see the light of day or move leaf or limb until set
free by the spring thaws in June or July. Not only the young saplings
are thus carefully covered and put to sleep in the whitest of white beds
for five or six months of the year, but trees thirty feet high or more.
From April to May, when the snow by repe