fineness of the taper of the trunk as a whole. No
description can give anything like an adequate idea of their singular
majesty, much less of their beauty. Except the sugar pine, most of their
neighbors with pointed tops seem ever trying to go higher, while the big
tree, soaring above them all, seems satisfied. Its grand domed head
seems to be poised about as lightly as a cloud, giving no impression
of seeking to rise higher. Only when it is young does it show like
other conifers a heavenward yearning, sharply aspiring with a long
quick-growing top. Indeed, the whole tree for the first century or
two, or until it is a hundred or one hundred and fifty feet high, is
arrowhead in form, and, compared with the solemn rigidity of age, seems
as sensitive to the wind as a squirrel's tail. As it grows older, the
lower branches are gradually dropped and the upper ones thinned out
until comparatively few are left. These, however, are developed to a
great size, divide again and again and terminate in bossy, rounded
masses of leafy branch-lets, while the head becomes dome-shaped, and is
the first to feel the touch of the rosy beams of the morning, the last
to bid the sun good night. Perfect specimens, unhurt by running fires or
lightning, are singularly regular and symmetrical in general form though
not in the least conventionalized, for they show extraordinary variety
in the unity and harmony of their general outline. The immensely strong,
stately shafts are free of limbs for one hundred and fifty feet or so.
The large limbs reach out with equal boldness a every direction, showing
no weather side, and no other tree has foliage so densely massed, so
finely molded in outline and so perfectly subordinate to an ideal type.
A particularly knotty, angular, ungovernable-looking branch, from five
to seven or eight feet in diameter and perhaps a thousand years old,
may occasionally be seen pushing out from the trunk as if determined to
break across the bounds of the regular curve, but like all the others
it dissolves in bosses of branchlets and sprays as soon as the general
outline is approached. Except in picturesque old age, after being struck
by lightning or broken by thousands of snow-storms, the regularity of
forms is one of their most distinguishing characteristics. Another is
the simple beauty of the trunk and its great thickness as compared with
its height and the width of the branches, which makes them look more
like finely modeled a