stry."

"He must be a convict at hard labor," guessed Roger.

"Or the Mayor of the Prairie Dog Town setting an example to his
constituents," laughed James.

The polar bear was suffering from the heat and nothing but the tip of
his nose and his eyes were to be seen above the water of his tank where
he floated luxuriously in company with two cakes of ice.

The wolves and the foxes had dens among rocks and the wild goats stood
daintily on pinnacles to see what was going on at a distance. No one
cared much for the reptiles, but the high flying cage for birds kept
them beside it for a long time.

Across the road they entered the grounds of the Arboretum and passed
along a narrow path beside a noisy brook under heavy trees, until they
came to a grove of tall hemlocks. With upturned heads they admired these
giants of the forest and then passed on to view other trees from many
climes and countries.

"Here's the Lumholtz pine that father wrote me about from Mexico," cried
Ethel Blue, whose father, Captain Morton, had been with General Funston
at Vera Cruz. "See, the needles hang down like a spray, just as he said.
You know the wood has a peculiar resonance and the Mexicans make musical
instruments of it."

"It's a graceful pine," approved Ethel Brown. "What a lot of pines there
are."

"We are so accustomed about here to white pines that the other kinds
seem strange, but in the South there are several kinds," contributed
Dorothy. "The needles of the long leaf pine are a foot long and much
coarser than these white pine needles. Don't you remember, I made some
baskets out of them?"

The Ethels did remember.

"Their green is yellower. The tree is full of resin and it makes the
finest kind of kindling."

"Is that what the negroes call 'light wood'?" asked Della.

"Yes, that's light wood. In the fields that haven't been cultivated for
a long time there spring up what they call in the South 'old field
pines' or 'loblolly pines.' They have coarse yellow green needles, too,
but they aren't as long as the others. There are three needles in the
bunch."

"Don't all the pines have three needles in the bunch?" asked Margaret.

"Look at this white pine," she said, pulling down a bunch off a tree
they were passing. "It has five; and the 'Table Mountain pine' has only
two."

"Observant little Dorothy!" exclaimed Roger.

"O, I know more than that," laughed Dorothy. "Look hard at this white
pine needle; do you see, it has thr