ergreen
coniferous woodland of the north. Its pines, firs, spruces, hemlocks,
and cedars which are really junipers, cover most of Canada together with
northern New England and the region south of Lakes Huron and Superior.
At its northern limit the forest looks thoroughly forlorn. The gnarled
and stunted trees are thickly studded with half-dead branches bent down
by the weight of snow, so that the lower ones sweep the ground, while
the upper look tired and discouraged from their struggle with an
inclement climate. Farther south, however, the forest loses this
aspect of terrific struggle. In Maine, for example, it gives a pleasant
impression of comfortable prosperity. Wherever the trees have room to
grow, they are full and stocky, and even where they are crowded together
their slender upspringing trunks look alert and energetic. The signs
of death and decay, indeed, appear everywhere in fallen trunks, dead
branches, and decayed masses of wood, but moss and lichens, twinflowers
and bunchberries so quickly mantle the prostrate trees that they do not
seem like tokens of weakness. Then, too, in every open space thousands
of young trees bank their soft green masses so gracefully that one has
an ever-present sense of pleased surprise as he comes upon this younger
foliage out of the dim aisles among the bigger trees.

Except on their southern borders the great northern forests are not good
as a permanent home for man. The snow lies so late in the spring and the
summers are so short and cool that agriculture does not prosper. As a
home for the fox, marten, weasel, beaver, and many other fur-bearing
animals, however, the coniferous forests are almost ideal. That is why
the Hudson's Bay Company is one of the few great organizations which
have persisted and prospered from colonial times to the present. As long
ago as 1670 Charles II granted to Prince Rupert and seventeen noblemen
and gentlemen a charter so sweeping that, aside from their own powers
of assimilation, there was almost no limit to what the "Governor and
Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay" might
acquire. By 1749, nearly eighty years after the granting of the charter,
however, the Company had only four or five forts on the coast of Hudson
Bay, with about 120 regular employees. Nevertheless the poor Indians
were so ignorant of the value of their furs and the consequent profits
were so large that, after Canada had been ceded to Great Britain in
1763