Scarcely a tree is spared, even the soil is scraped away,
while the thousands of uprooted pines and spruces are piled upon one
another heads downward, and tucked snugly in along the sides of the
clearing in two windrows, like lateral moraines. The pines lie with
branches wilted and drooping like weeds. Not so the burly junipers.
After braving in silence the storms of perhaps a dozen or twenty
centuries, they seem in this, their last calamity, to become somewhat
communicative, making sign of a very unwilling acceptance of their fate,
holding themselves well up from the ground on knees and elbows,
seemingly ill at ease, and anxious, like stubborn wrestlers, to rise
again.
HEMLOCK SPRUCE
(_Tsuga Pattoniana_)
The Hemlock Spruce is the most singularly beautiful of all the
California coniferae. So slender is its axis at the top, that it bends
over and droops like the stalk of a nodding lily. The branches droop
also, and divide into innumerable slender, waving sprays, which are
arranged in a varied, eloquent harmony that is wholly indescribable. Its
cones are purple, and hang free, in the form of little tassels two
inches long from all the sprays from top to bottom.
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