eir
gowns, lighting up like sombre faces that unexpectedly smile and
are flooded with sunlight. The pines, too, bloom in spring, but
conspicuously on their branch tips. The candles they light then
serve only to accentuate the sober, dark green of their gowns. But
in September, the pines shed their last year's leaves that have
grown a little dull and rusty with long service, and now stand
forth clean and more vividly green than at any other time of year.
The deciduous trees follow the fashions and change their suits for the
prevailing mode three or four times a year, yet it is true of them
that nature unadorned is adorned the most. There is a beauty in
the bare wood standing revealed in November that they never had in
the flush of June or the glory of early October. There is nothing
in flower or leaf that can match the exquisite harmony of the bark
tints, nor can the foliage in mass so please the eye as the
delicate tracery of twigs and the matchless contour of tapering
limbs. In the November birch or maple the dryad herself stands
revealed.

*****

It is not so with the pines. They change gowns so decorously and
the new one is so like the old in its simple lines and perfect
good taste that we are unaware of the transition. There is a
perfection of dignity and serenity about a free-grown pasture pine
that I find equalled in no other tree. These are druids of eld, if
you will, harpers hoar, plucking wild symphonies from the tense
wires of the storm wind's three-stringed harp. Yet the dryad
dwells within them as well, and on gentler days they show her in
many phases of queenly womanhood. They mother the romping shrubs,
the slender, maidenly birches, the maples, vainglorious in their
dainty spring colors, their voluminous summer robes, their
gorgeous autumn gowns, and they do it all with a kindly dignity
that endears, while they stand high above all these in their
perfection of simplicity. They can be tender without unbending,
and in their soothing shadow is balm for all wounds. Tonight the
sky is black with rain that tramps with its thousand feet on the
camp roof and marches endlessly on. The wind is from the east and
the pines sing its song of wild and lonely spaces. Yet one great
tree that was old with the wisdom of the world before I was born
stretches a limb to the camp window, and in the flicker of the
firelight I see it stroke it caressingly with soft leaf fingers
and twigs that bend back at the stroke. It is li