Most perfectly formed of the Sequoias of the Grove is the Alabama Tree. The pioneers called it the “Pillar of the Temple.” It has developed under full sunlight and is magnificently balanced in all its proportions. Truly, it is one of the finest examples of “Nature’s forest masterpieces,” as John Muir was wont to designate the Sequoia. Fit to support any temple, it stands marvelously perfect, unmarred by fire, untouched by disease, undisturbed by the violence of the elements. Centuries have passed over it, centuries that have noted many disasters in the march of civilization, and yet it has remained free from accident. Its heroic stem is as roundly perfect and as regularly tapered as though turned in a lathe. Unbroken by a limb upwards of nearly two hundred feet, with an instep that adjusts itself to the mass it supports with elegant finish, it discloses a trunk with deeply and widely furrowed ridges not unlike a pillar that Phidias might have fashioned. But no pillar ever conceived by man bore a tint more ravishing or a luster more superb than this. When spotted with shifting patches of golden sunlight, its cinnamon-reddish trunk would put to shame the richest colorings of Numidian marble. Nor has any pillar of stone ever supported a more exquisite structure than the crown of this Sequoia. Possessed of almost an artificial finish, it is a gracefully trimmed, singularly perfect dome. The supports of this crown leave the trunk in a woody wilderness of huge arms, wild in ungovernable expression, knotted and confused as those of giants who toss their arms in anguish. These great limbs, regal-hued in rose and purple, dissolve themselves abruptly into masses of stumpy branchlets which in turn spray out into a soft film of deep blue-green foliage. Indeed, it is impossible to distinguish against the skyline exactly where this arch described by the foliage ends and where sky begins. So subtile are the edges of this crown that they appear to melt away into the heavens. Yet more wonderful is the flame-like semi-halo visible along the crest of this tree just after a rain. Ruskin noticed this light on pine trees. “The whole outer crown,” he states, “becomes a thing of light, dazzling as the sun itself, for every minutest needle is bedewed and carries a diamond, as if living among the clouds it had caught a part of their glory.” Never has Nature presented a more striking contrast, a more extraordinary comparison than in the trunk and foliage of the Sequoia. They are at the opposite ends of the scale. One presents the utmost massiveness of outline; the other the most delicate curvature and grace. The trunk has qualities of permanence, classic mightiness, enduring power, and the colossal dimensions that go with two thousand years of age; the foliage possesses qualities of fleetness, ephemeral frailty, fragile beauty, and the airy nothingness of a dream.