For some miles further, the forest consisted of Norway and white pine, almost unmixed with any other timber. There is something majestic in these vast and thickly-set labyrinths of brown columnar stems averaging a hundred and fifty feet in height, perhaps, and from one to five in thickness, making a traveller feel somewhat like a Lilliputian Gulliver in a field of Brobdignagian wheat. It is singular to observe the effect of an occasional gust of wind in such situations. It may not even fan your cheek; but you hear a low surging sound, like the moaning of breakers in a calm sea, which gradually increases to a loud boisterous roar, still seemingly at a great distance; the branches remain in perfect repose, you can discover no evidence of a stirring breeze, till, looking perpendicularly upwards, you are astonished to see some patriarchal giant close at hand--six yards round and sixty high--which alone has caught the breeze, waving its huge fantastic arms wildly at a dizzy height above your head. There are times when the hardiest woodman dares not enter the pine woods; when some unusually severe gale sweeping over them bends their strong but slender stems like willow wands, or catches the wide-spreading branches of the loftier trees with a force that fairly wrenches them out by the roots, which creeping along on the surface of the soil, present no very powerful resistance. Nothing but the close contiguity of the trees saves them from general prostration. Interlocked branches are every moment broken off and flung to a distance, and even the trunks clash, and as it were, whet themselves against each other, with a shock and uproar that startles the firmest nerves. It were tedious to detail all the events of our morning's march: How armed with English fowling pieces and laden with ammunition, we momentarily expected to encounter some grisly she-bear, with a numerous family of cubs; or at the least a herd of deer or a flock of wild turkeys: how we saw nothing more dangerous than woodpeckers with crimson heads, hammering away at decayed trees like transmigrated carpenters; how we at last shot two partridges sitting on branches, very unlike English ones, of which we were fain to make a meal, which was utterly detestable for want of salt; how the government guide led us, helter-skelter, into the untracked woods, walking as for a wager, through thickets of ground hemlock,[2] which entangled our feet and often tripped us up; how we were obliged to follow him over and under wind-falls, to pass which it was necessary to climb sometimes twenty feet along some half-recumbent tree; how when we enquired whether clay or sand were considered the best soil, he said some preferred one, and some the other; how he showed us the front of a lot that was bad, and guessed that the rear ought to be better; how we turned back at last, thoroughly jaded, but no wiser than when we set out--all this and much more, must be left to the reader's imagination.