“In the South Park and Calaveras groves there are some remarkable trees. One tree in the South Park grove will hold forty persons in the hollow of its trunk; another has sheltered sixteen horses. The four highest trees in the Calaveras grove, are the Keystone State, 325 feet high, Gen. Jackson, 319 feet, Mother of the Forest, 315 feet, and the Daniel Webster of 307 feet high. The Husband and Wife are a pair of trees gracefully leaning against each other, 250 feet high, and each sixty feet in circumference. The Hermit is a solitary specimen of great proportions; the Old Maid, a disconsolate looking spinster, fifty-nine feet around, and the Old Bachelor, a rough, unkempt old fellow nearly 300 feet in height. The Father of the Forest is prostrate, hollow, limbless and without bark; yet across the roots the distance is twenty-eight feet.... Into the tree a tourist can ride ninety feet on horseback. One of the largest trees of the Calaveras grove was bored down with pump augurs, and the stump smoothed off and converted into a floor of a dancing hall. Thirty-two persons, or four quadrille sets, have ample room to dance at one time, and yet leave room for musicians and spectators.” [Illustration: THE TUNNELLED TREE.] I can give my readers no better idea of the solemn immensity of the trees, than by again quoting Mr. Whitehall. He says in conclusion: “Although it was then June, yet the eternal snows of the mountains were everywhere around us, and, as the huge banks and drifts stretched away off in the distance, the melting power of heat and the elements was on every side defied. Not a weed or blade of grass relieved the monotony of the view; not the chirping of an insect or the twittering of a bird was heard. The solemn stillness of the night added a weird grandeur to the scene. Now and then a breath of wind stirred the topmost branches of the pines and cedars, and as they swayed to and fro in the air the music was like that of Ossian, ‘pleasant but mournful to the soul.’ There were sequoias on every side almost twice as high as the falls of Niagara; there were pines rivaling the dome of the capitol at Washington in grandeur; there were cedars to whose tops the monument of Bunker Hill would not have reached. There were trees which were in the full vigor of manhood before America itself was discovered; there were others which were yet old before Charlemagne was born; there were others still growing when the Savior himself was on the earth. There were trees which had witnessed the winds and storms of twenty centuries; there were others which would endure long after countless generations of the future would be numbered with the past. There were trees crooked and short and massive; there were others straight and tall and slender. There were pines whose limbs were as evenly proportioned as those of the Apollo Belvedere; there were cedars whose beauty was not surpassed in their counterparts in Lebanon;