Turn now to Parkman, who knows and loves his forests as Miss Murfree her mountains, and who has once and for all time painted the picture of the great American forest: "Deep recesses, where, veiled in foliage, some wild, shy rivulet steals with timid music through breathless caves of verdure; gulfs where feathered crags rise like castle walls, where the noonday sun pierces with keen rays athwart the torrent, and the mossed arms of fallen pines cast wandering shadows on the illumined foam; pools of liquid crystal turned emerald in the reflected green of impending woods; rocks on whose rugged front the gleam of sunlit waters dances in quivering light; ancient trees hurled headlong by the storm to dam the raging stream with their forlorn and savage ruin; or the stern depths of immemorial forests, dim and silent as a cavern, columned with innumerable trunks, each like an Atlas upholding its world of leaves, and sweating perpetual moisture down its dark and channelled rind—some strong in youth, some gouty with decrepit age, nightmares of strange distortion, gnarled and knotted with wens and goitres, roots intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife: green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks, turning pulpy stumps to mounds of verdure, and swathing fallen trunks, as, bent in the impotence of rottenness, they lie outstretched over knoll and hollow like mouldering reptiles of the primeval world, while around, and on, and through them springs the young growth that fattens on their decay—the forest devouring its own dead. Or, to turn from its funereal shade to the light and life, to the open woodland, the sheen of sparkling lakes, and mountains basking in the glory of the summer noon, flecked by the shadows of passing clouds that sail on snowy wings across the transparent azure." No pestilent fever or insidious deadly miasma lurks in our forests. On the contrary, their pure, piny breath brings back health to many an ailing mortal, and beneath their feathery hemlocks and aromatic spruces one may lie down at night in sweet security from snakes, or centipedes, or other crawling horrors that make each night in a tropical forest a period of peril.