To us in New England to whom a cedar tree thirty feet high is no common sight the stories of these hundred-foot high trees seem strange indeed, and I know of but one red cedar whose diameter is as much as twelve inches. This tree is much less than thirty feet in height, however. It grows by itself on rocky ground in a pasture where it has no close neighbors of any variety. Its trunk divides at eight feet from the ground into many branches which make a round head whose ancient, twigs are hoary with lichens and seem to be in the last stages of senile debility. Yet every year the old tree puts forth a crop of new leaves and defies the decay of centuries. How many years old this tree is I cannot say, but I think it very many. We readily tell the age of many trees by counting the rings of growth after they are cut. Cedars have been known to show an annual increase of half to three-quarters of an inch thus measured. Others have grown so slowly that only with a microscope can the annual rings be counted. I fancy my patriarch as belonging to their lodge, nor would I be surprised to learn that when its first plume appeared above the ledges Indian tepees were the only human habitations of the region. The red cedar seems to have a power to fix itself on a rough ledge and grow there year after year and indeed century after century, that is far greater than that of any other tree. You will find them on the rocks looking seaward along much of our New England coast, some of them the same trees known in the same spots since the days of the earliest settlers, gnarled, stunted and storm-beaten, but evergreen, and glowing with a little of the gold of spring each year just the same, typical, it always seems to me, of all that is hardy and defiant in the New England character. I know such cedars on the ledges which jut southerly from the edge of the tiny plateau which is the top of Blue Hill and you may find them on many other ledges of the range. I believe these same trees were there when Captain John Smith first sighted the "Cheviot Hills" from the ship which brought him into Massachusetts Bay.