ted, flaking off in thin,
lustrous ribbons that are sometimes used by Indians for tent-matting.
Its fine color and odd picturesqueness always catch an artist's eye, but
to me the Juniper seems a singularly dull and taciturn tree, never
speaking to one's heart. I have spent many a day and night in its
company, in all kinds of weather, and have ever found it silent, cold,
and rigid, like a column of ice. Its broad stumpiness, of course,
precludes all possibility of waving, or even shaking; but it is not this
rocky steadfastness that constitutes its silence. In calm, sun-days the
Sugar Pine preaches the grandeur of the mountains like an apostle
without moving a leaf.

[Illustration: JUNIPER, OR RED CEDAR.]

On level rocks it dies standing, and wastes insensibly out of existence
like granite, the wind exerting about as little control over it alive or
dead as it does over a glacier boulder. Some are undoubtedly over 2000
years old. All the trees of the alpine woods suffer, more or less, from
avalanches, the Two-leaved Pine most of all. Gaps two or three hundred
yards wide, extending from the upper limit of the tree-line to the
bottoms of valleys and lake basins, are of common occurrence in all the
upper forests, resembling the clearings of settlers in the old
backwoods. Scarcely a tree is spared, even the soil is scraped away,
while the thousands of uprooted pines and spruces are piled upon one
another heads downward, and tucked snugly in along the sides of the
clearing in two windrows, like lateral moraines. The pines lie with
branches wilted and drooping like weeds. Not so the burly junipers.
After braving in silence the storms of perhaps a dozen or twenty
centuries, they seem in this, their last calamity, to become somewhat
communicative, making sign of a very unwilling acceptance of their fate,
holding themselves well up from the ground on knees and elbows,
seemingly ill at ease, and anxious, like stubborn wrestlers, to rise
again.

HEMLOCK SPRUCE
(_Tsuga Pattoniana_)

The Hemlock Spruce is the most singularly beautiful of all the
California coniferae. So slender is its axis at the top, that it bends
over and droops like the stalk of a nodding lily. The branches droop
also, and divide into innumerable slender, waving sprays, which are
arranged in a varied, eloquent harmony that is wholly indescribable. Its
cones are purple, and hang free, in the form of little tassels two
inches long from all the sprays from top