led, by
its aid a fire can be kindled even in a heavy rain.

[Illustration: Sweet birch in early spring]

The great North Woods show us wonderful birches. Paddling through one of
the Spectacle ponds, along the Racquette river, one early spring day, I
came upon a combination of white pine, red pine, and paper-birch that
was simply dazzling in effect. This birch has bark, as every one knows,
of a shining creamy white. Not only its color, but its tenacity,
resistance to decay, and wonderful divisibility, make this bark one of
the most remarkable of nature's fabrics. To the Indian and the trapper
it has long been as indispensable as is the palm to the native of the
tropics.

[Illustration: Yellow birches]

There are other good native birches, and one foreigner--the true white
birch--whose cut-leaved form, a familiar lawn tree of drooping habit, is
worth watching and liking. The name some of the nurserymen have given
it, of "nine-bark," is significantly accurate, for at least nine layers
may be peeled from the glossy whiteness of the bark of a mature tree.

I intend to know more of the birches, and to see how the two kinds of
flowers act to produce the little fruits, which are nuts, though they
hardly look so. And I would urge my tree-loving friends to plant about
their homes these cheery and most elegantly garbed trees.

The spice-bush, of which I spoke above, is really a large shrub, and is
especially notable for two things--the way it begins the spring, and
the way it ends the fall. About my home, it is the first of wild woods
trees to bloom, except perhaps the silver maple, which has a way of
getting through with its flowers unnoticed before spring is thought of.
One finds the delicate little bright yellow flowers of the spice-bush
clustered thickly along the twigs long before the leaves are ready to
brave the chill air. After the leaves have fallen in the autumn, these
flowers stand out in a reincarnation of scarlet and spicy berries, which
masquerade continually as holly berries when cunningly introduced amid
the foliage of the latter. Between spring and fall the spice-bush is
apparently invisible.

[Illustration: Flowers of the spice-bush]

[Illustration: Leaves and berries of the American holly]

How many of us, perfectly familiar with "the holly berry's glow" about
Christmas time, have ever seen a whole tree of holly, set with berries?
Yet the trees, sometimes fifty feet high, of American holly--and this i