n of what these figures amount
to, suppose the tree fallen at the gable of an ordinary two-story house.
You propose to cross by a plank laid from your roof to the upper side of
the tree. That plank would perceptibly slope _up_ from your roof-peak.
Through another tree, lying prostrate also, and hollow from end to end,
our whole cavalcade charged at the full trot for a distance of one
hundred and fifty feet. The entire length of this tree before truncation
had been about three hundred and fifty feet. In the hollow bases of
trees still standing we easily sheltered ourselves and horses. We tried
throwing to the top of some of them with ludicrous unsuccess, and
finally came to the monarch of them all, a glorious monster not included
in the above table of dimensions, as most of those measured are still
living, and all have the bark upon them still, while _the_ tree is to
some extent barked and charred. When it stood erect in its live
wrappings, it measured forty feet in diameter,--over one hundred and
twenty in circumference! Estimates, grounded on the well-known principle
of yearly cortical increase, indisputably throw back the birth of these
largest giants as far as 1200 B. C. Thus their tender saplings
were running up just as the gates of Troy were tumbling down, and some
of them had fulfilled the lifetime of the late Hartford Charter-Oak when
Solomon called his master-masons to refreshment from the building of the
Temple. We cannot realize time-images as we can those of space by a
reference to dimensions within experience, so that the age of these
marvellous trees still remains to me an incomprehensible fact, though
with my mind's eye I continue to see how mountain-massy they look, and
how dwarfed is the man who leans against them. We lingered among them
half a day, the artists making color-studies of the most picturesque,
the rest of us _izing_ away at something scientific,--Botany,
Entomology, or Statistics. In Geology and Mineralogy there is nothing to
do here or in the Valley,--the formation all being typical Sierra-Nevada
granite, with no specimens to keep or problems to solve. Of course our
artists neither made nor expected to make anything like a realizing
picture of the groves. The marvellous of size does not go into gilt
frames. You paint a Big Tree, and it only looks like a common tree in a
cramped coffin. To be sure, you can put a live figure against the butt
for comparison; but, unless you take a canvas of the