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.
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