ing permission to do as
I pleased with his remains, I at once began to cut and split both the
trunk and the limbs and to transcribe their strange records. Day after
day I worked. I dug up the roots and thoroughly dissected them, and
with the aid of a magnifier I studied the trunk, the roots, and the
limbs.

I carefully examined the base of his stump, and in it I found 1047
rings of growth! He had lived through a thousand and forty-seven
memorable years. As he was cut down in 1903, his birth probably
occurred in 856.

In looking over the rings of growth, I found that a few of them were
much thicker than the others; and these thick rings, or coats of wood,
tell of favorable seasons. There were also a few extremely thin rings
of growth. In places two and even three of these were together. These
were the result of unfavorable seasons,--of drought or cold. The
rings of trees also show healed wounds, and tell of burns, bites,
and bruises, of torn bark and broken arms. Old Pine not only received
injuries in his early years, but from time to time throughout his
life. The somewhat kinked condition of several of the rings of growth,
beginning with the twentieth, shows that at the age of twenty he
sustained an injury which resulted in a severe curvature of the spine,
and that for some years he was somewhat stooped. I was unable to make
out from his diary whether this injury was the result of a tree or
some object falling upon him and pinning him down, or whether his back
had been overweighted and bent by wet, clinging snow. As I could not
find any scars or bruises, I think that snow must have been the cause
of the injury. However, after a few years he straightened up with
youthful vitality and seemed to outgrow and forget the experience.

A century of tranquil life followed, and during these years the rapid
growth tells of good seasons as well as good soil. This rapid growth
also shows that there could not have been any crowding neighbors to
share the sun and the soil. The tree had grown evenly in all quarters,
and the pith of the tree was in the centre. But had one tree grown
close, on that quarter the old pine would have grown slower than the
others and would have been thinner, and the pith would thus have been
away from the tree's centre.

When the old pine was just completing his one hundred and thirty-fifth
ring of growth, he met with an accident which I can account for only
by assuming that a large tree that grew severa