the Caucasus. Look at them, glistening in the
winter sun, or drooping with the clinging snow; walk in a spruce wood,
inhaling the bracing balsamic fragrance which seems so kindly to the
lungs; hark to the music of the wind in their tops, telling of health
and purity, of God's love and provision for man's mind and heart, and
you will begin to know the song of the firs. To really hear this grand
symphony, for such it then becomes, you must listen to the wind playing
on the tops of a great primeval coniferous forest, of scores and
hundreds of acres or miles in extent. And even then, many visits are
needed, for there are movements to this symphony--the allegro of the
gale, the scherzo of the easy morning breeze, the deep adagio of a
rain-storm, and the andante of warm days and summer breezes, when you
may repose prone upon a soft carpet of pine needles, every sense made
alert, yet soothed, by the master-theme you are hearing.

There is a little wood of thick young pines, interspersed with hard
maple and an occasional birch, close by the lake of the Eagles, where my
summers are made happy. The closeness of the pines has caused their
lower branches to die, as always in the deep forest, and the falling
needles, year by year, have deepened the soft brown carpet that covers
the forest floor. Some one, years ago, struck by the aisles that the
straight trunks mark out so clearly, called this the "Cathedral Woods."
The name seems appropriate at all times, but especially when, on a warm
Sunday afternoon, I lie at ease on the aromatic carpet, hearing the soft
organ tones in the pine tops, and drinking in God's forest message.

[Illustration: An avenue of white pines]

I have visited these pine woods at midnight, when a full moon, making
brilliant the near-by lake, gave but a ghostly gloom in the deep, deep
silence of the Cathedral; but, more impressive, I have often trodden
through in a white fog, when the distance was misty and dim, and the
aisles seemed longer and higher, and to lead one further away from the
trifles of temper and trial. Indeed, I do not believe that any one who
has but once fully received from the deep forest that which it gives out
so freely and constantly can ever think of things trivial, or of minor
annoyances, while again within its soothing portals.

But of the trees of the forest of pine and spruce it must be noted that
sometimes the deepest, glossiest green of the leaves as presented to
the eye only hid