how much beyond that none may venture to predict.

Picture, now, the Giant Forest, largest of the several sequoia groves in
the Sequoia National Park. You have entered, say, in the dusk of the
night before, and after breakfast wander planless among the trees. On
every side rise the huge pines and firs, their dark columns springing
from the tangled brush to support the cathedral roof above. Here an
enormous purplish-red column draws and holds your astonished eye. It is
a gigantic thing in comparison with its monster neighbors; it glows
among their dull columns; it is clean and spotless amid their mosshung
trunks; branchless, it disappears among their upper foliage, hinting at
steeple heights above. Yet your guide tells you that this tree is small;
that its diameter is less than twenty feet; that in age it is a
youngster of only two thousand years! Wait, he tells you, till you see
the General Sherman Tree's thirty-six and a half feet of diameter; wait
till you see the hundreds, yes thousands, which surpass this infant!

But you heed him not, for you see another back among those sugar pines!
Yes, and there's another. And there on the left are two or three in a
clump! Back in the dim cathedral aisles are reddish glows which must
mean still others. Your heart is beating with a strange emotion. You
look up at the enormous limbs bent at right angles, at the canopy of
feathery foliage hanging in ten thousand huge plumes. You cry aloud for
the sheer joy of this great thing, and plunge into the forest's heart.

The Giant Forest contains several thousand sequoia trees of large size,
and many young trees. You see these small ones on every hand, erect,
sharply pointed, giving in every line a vivid impression of quivering,
bounding life. Later on, as they emerge above the roof of the forest,
for some of them are more than three hundred feet high, they lose their
sharp ambitious tops; they become gracefully rounded. Springing from
seed less than a quarter of an inch in diameter, they tend, like their
cousins the redwoods, to grow in groups, and these groups tend to grow
in groves. But there are scattering individuals in every grove, and many
small isolated groves in the Sierra. The Giant Forest is the largest
grove of greatest trees. The General Grant Grove, in a small national
park of its own, near by, is the second grove in size and importance;
its central figure is the General Grant Tree, second in size and age to
the General She