In the summer months our evergreens are greatly less noticeable. They are overshadowed and eclipsed by the rich and exuberant foliage of our common but noble forest trees; but their beauty is not, even then, lost. They give variety of hues to the forests which they fringe or help to form; variety of shapes, and always exquisite, spicy, and healthful odors. But when the autumn comes, with its infinitely varied tintings of orange and vermilion; when the frost works its wonders, and the wooded hills are clothed with splendor--then the rich groups of our native evergreens rise in their immortality of freshness. How exquisitely their bright unfading green sets off and contrasts with the rich golds, glowing scarlets, russet browns, purples, and crimsons, in all their delicate shades and evanescent hues! The forest leaves grow sere and fall from their stems, sailing down singly or in groups, like bevies of frightened birds, until the hickory, oak, maple, and elm stand uncrowned, disrobed, lifting their bare arms to the winter skies; then higher and ever higher rises, as the gloom of winter deepens, the glory of evergreen shrub and tree. The fields are dull russet, the forests are black, each tree seems a skeleton; all nature, save the evergreen, looks dead. But our mountains of firs, our hills of pine, our groves of cedar, our thickets of holly, our cliffs crowned with laurel, full of life, and covered with unchangeable verdure, keep eternally fresh and beautiful. Then come the great white silent snowflakes, sailing round and falling gently down, alighting on trunk, branch, and leaf, and covering and draping the hills, until they are pure and fair as the hills of Beulah. There is a dreamlike beauty in an evergreen forest mantled with snow. What words could tell the purity of coloring, the gracefulness of form of the pine boughs bending under their white burden of feathery crystals? Especially is this true of the young and pliant trees in hedgerows and thickets, and such as are everywhere springing up over the waste and wornout lands of Virginia.