While the whole Appalachian Mountain region is dotted with localities where the red cedar grows plentifully, it is only in the southern portion that the best pencil wood is obtained. The demand long ago outstripped the supply and the great old trees that were peculiarly prized for the work have in the main passed. These trees seem to ripen and mellow after passing maturity and the wood from their red texture which makes it highly desirable for pencil wood. Only the higher priced pencils now cut in that smooth, cheesy, delightful fashion when being sharpened. The cheaper ones have the knots and inequalities in the wood which show them to have been taken from younger and immature trees. Half a million cubic feet of the best quality of red cedar was once used annually from these Southern forests in this country, and nearly a hundred thousand feet of it was exported. A generation ago one of the world's great pencil manufacturers, L. von Faber, established a red cedar forest in Germany to see what could be done to artificially supply the demand for the vanishing wood. In 1875 he set young trees a foot and a half in height over an extensive area. At the end of the century these trees had attained a height of twelve feet and were growing thriftily. But as the trees have to be nearly fifty years old before they will furnish pencil wood, the value of the experiment is still unproven. But all this is by the way and is not to be compared with the joy the red cedars give to the pasture world just by being there and sending forth the beneficence of their personality upon all who come. They make the finest nesting places for the birds in summer. They feed them in autumn and in the winter's fiercest cold they wrap the warm blanket of their bronze foliage about them. Nor do I blame the Indians for investing them with strange powers. In the sunshine of midday they may seem merely friendly little trees of the pasture. If you will walk among them as dusk deepens you may feel their commonplace characteristics slip from them and the deep mystery of being begin to express itself. Then they seem like tribes of the elder world, a connecting link perhaps between the forest and the red men who but a few centuries ago inhabited it, far more real at such a time than the shadowy memories of these vanished inhabitants. CHAPTER XXII AUNT SUE'S SNOWBANK