... I now write lying
on the grass with my gun cocked beside me, and penning these lines
by the light of my Columbian candle, namely, an ignited piece of
rosin-wood.
This grand pine discovered under such, exciting circumstances Douglas
named in honor of his friend Dr. Lambert of London.
The trunk is a smooth, round, delicately tapered shaft, mostly without
limbs, and colored rich purplish-brown, usually enlivened with tufts of
yellow lichen. At the top of this magnificent bole, long, curving
branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming a
palm-like crown, but far more nobly impressive than any palm crown I
ever beheld. The needles are about three inches long, finely tempered
and arranged in rather close tassels at the ends of slender branchlets
that clothe the long, outsweeping limbs. How well they sing in the wind,
and how strikingly harmonious an effect is made by the immense
cylindrical cones that depend loosely from the ends of the main
branches! No one knows what Nature can do in the way of pine-burs until
he has seen those of the Sugar Pine. They are commonly from fifteen to
eighteen inches long, and three in diameter; green, shaded with dark
purple on their sunward sides.
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