tly responds, reaching several slender side
branches over the heads of his brethren. They as quickly show the effects
of the lessened light and forthwith the race is at an end. The victor
shoots up tall and straight, stamping and choking out the lives at his
side, as surely as if his weapons were teeth and claws instead of delicate
root-fibres and soughing foliage.

The contest with its fellows is only the first of many. The same elements
which help to give it being and life are ever ready to catch it unawares,
to rend it limb from limb, or by patient, long-continued attack bring it
crashing to the very dust from which sprang the seed.

We see a mighty spruce whose black leafage has waved above its fellows for
a century or more, paying for its supremacy by the distortion of every
branch. Such are to be seen clinging to the rocky shores of Fundy, every
branch and twig curved toward the land; showing the years of battling with
constant gales and blizzards. Like giant weather-vanes they stand, and,
though there is no elasticity in their limbs and they are gnarled and
scarred, yet our hearts warm in admiration of their decades of patient
watching beside the troubled waters. For years to come they will defy
every blast the storm god can send against them, until, one wild day, when
the soil has grown scanty around the roots of one of the weakest, it will
shiver and tremble at some terrific onslaught of wind and sleet; it will
fold its branches closer about it and, like the Indian chieftains, who
perhaps in years past occasionally watched the waters by the side of the
young sapling, the conquered tree will bow its head for the last time to
the storm.

Farther inland, sheltered in a narrow valley, stands a sister tree, seeded
from the same cone as the storm-distorted spruce. The wind shrieks and
howls above the little valley and cannot enter; but the law of
compensation brings to bear another element, silent, gentle, but as deadly
as the howling blast of the gale. All through the long winter the snow
sifts softly down, finding easy lodgment on the dense-foliaged branches.
From the surrounding heights the white crystals pour down until the tree
groans with the massive weight. Her sister above is battling with the
storm, but hardly a feather's weight of snow clings to her waving limbs.

The compressed, down-bent branches of the valley spruce soon become
permanently bent and the strain on the trunk fibres is great. At last,
wit