is capable of
enduring more moisture about its roots than any of its companions,
excepting only the Sequoia.

The largest specimens are about 150 feet high, and seven feet in
diameter. The bark is brown, of a singularly rich tone very attractive
to artists, and the foliage is tinted with a warmer yellow than that of
any other evergreen in the woods. Casting your eye over the general
forest from some ridge-top, the color alone of its spiry summits is
sufficient to identify it in any company.

In youth, say up to the age of seventy or eighty years, no other tree
forms so strictly tapered a cone from top to bottom. The branches swoop
outward and downward in bold curves, excepting the younger ones near the
top, which aspire, while the lowest droop to the ground, and all spread
out in flat, ferny plumes, beautifully fronded, and imbricated upon one
another. As it becomes older, it grows strikingly irregular and
picturesque. Large special branches put out at right angles from the
trunk, form big, stubborn elbows, and then shoot up parallel with the
axis. Very old trees are usually dead at the top, the main axis
protruding above ample masses of green plumes, gray and lichen-covered,
and drilled full of acorn holes by the woodpeckers. The plumes are
exceedingly beautiful; no waving fern-frond in shady dell is more
unreservedly beautiful in form and texture, or half so inspiring in
color and spicy fragrance. In its prime, the whole tree is thatched with
them, so that they shed off rain and snow like a roof, making fine
mansions for storm-bound birds and mountaineers. But if you would see
the _Libocedrus_ in all its glory, you must go to the woods in
winter. Then it is laden with myriads of four-sided staminate cones
about the size of wheat grains,--winter wheat,--producing a golden
tinge, and forming a noble illustration of Nature's immortal vigor and
virility. The fertile cones are about three fourths of an inch long,
borne on the outside of the plumy branchlets, where they serve to enrich
still more the surpassing beauty of this grand winter-blooming
goldenrod.

[Illustration: INCENSE CEDAR IN ITS PRIME.]

WHITE SILVER FIR
(_Abies concolor_)

[Illustration: FOREST OF GRAND SILVER FIRS. TWO SEQUOIAS IN THE
FOREGROUND ON THE LEFT.]

We come now to the most regularly planted of all the main forest belts,
composed almost exclusively of two noble firs--_A. concolor_ and
_A. magnifica_. It extends with no marked interrup