The old monarch pine stands out like a sculptured column of ebony against the blue sky. Its umbel top, crowned with white, makes a fitting capital for a shaft so noble. It is a picture, in and of itself. The shrubs and young trees, so rich in leaves and verdure, so pliant to the lines and curves of grace, when happily and picturesquely grouped, are almost bewilderingly beautiful. Yet perhaps that which contains in itself the greatest number of the elements of beauty, is the medium-sized pyramidal tree, be it of spruce, Norway pine, or balsam fir. It unites at once, in its pyramidal shape, the strength and majesty of the old, and in its gracefully curved limbs and abundant leaves, the beauty and freshness of the young tree. When loaded down with a spotless burden of snow until its limbs are almost ready to break, no pyramid of art, no monument chiselled by human hands, can hope to approach its pure and model beauty. The evergreen itself, however, seems to know no season but spring. In none other does it appear to change, and even then it casts not off the old--it only puts on the new in tenderer and fresher beauty! The new growth of the spruce and fir, the pale yellowish-green tips set in the dark old background, are exquisitely lovely; nor are the light green shoots of the white, yellow, and pitch pine much, less beautiful. Later comes the glory of the laurel bloom, the most beautiful woodflower in our climate. As the other trees put on their leaves successively, the tinting of light, dark, and yellowish green are infinitely varied and pleasing. Nor must I pass over, in my picture of evergreen, the mosses and ferns of the mountains of Virginia. More fragile than the trees and shrubs, they cannot be considered less beautiful. Indeed, the mosses of Cheat Mountain are the most luxuriant, exquisite, delicate, and richly beautiful things in nature. No dream of fairyland could, to my imagination, be lovelier than are the evergreen heights of these mountains, covered, matted, fringed, heaped, piled as they are with the greatest variety of mosses of the most delicate texture, feathery forms, and wondrously beautiful combinations. No one who has not seen them can have any just conception of mountain mosses, nor of the marvellous luxuriance of beauty with which they clothe rock, and tree, and earth, and everything upon these lone wild slopes and summits. Over the rocks, amid the mosses, hang the long pendent ferns, in richer, darker green. And with the grand old pine and fir trees lifting their heads to the heavens, and the thick tanglewood of shrub and underbrush, there is grandeur, grace, and beauty in bewildering, changeful, and ravishing confusion.