When Alaric knocked at the Gates of Rome, the Grizzly Giant had arrived at full maturity. Its base had become greatly enlarged, the better to bear up its great weight; while its crown had grown more open, displaying enormously large, gnarled, and knotty branches, each bearing a dense mass of blue-green foliage that melted impalpably away into the sky like vagrant shreds of clouds. And from the Fall of Rome to the present day, the Grizzly Giant has passed through maturity and on into life’s late afternoon shadows. It first saw the light of day when European civilization was in its dawn and has continued apace with its progress, the epitome of the advancement of the Indo-European peoples. Empires have risen, reached the zenith of their power, and passed on to decay and oblivion within its life time. Nations have succeeded Empires, and these, too, have been followed in their turn by other world powers, like meteors in the sky of history, and this aged monarch has reigned on. Like some ancient thing of the dead ages, it seems to have been forgotten by death so that it might live on until the sun is a burnt-out cinder in the sky. Impassive, resolute, and self-possessed, it stands unmoved and unaffected by the world about it, unconcerned with its pompous shams, its trite pride, its hollow vanity. Grizzled and picturesque with age, it still clings to life with sublime tenacity. The lightnings of countless clouds have failed to take its life; the snows of a thousand winters have shattered and broken its royal crown; the storms of over ten centuries have stripped it nearly bare of its bark and have mercilessly washed the soil from its roots, while the insect foes and fungi pests of three thousand years have left it as unharmed as fitful winds leave the heavens. The oldest living thing, triumphant over tempest and flame, verdant and fruitful, giving shelter to all seekers thereof, and sending forth flocks of singing feathered creatures annually from its great crown like its own flocks of winged seeds from its cone, the Grizzly Giant stands—content. +Chapter VII+ A BLOSSOM OF DECADENCE Is the great Sequoia a tree that dreads tomorrow? This mournful question was raised over a half century ago by prominent naturalists of the period. Imbued with the idea that all living things have their day in this world of evolving forms of life, they were unable to see a future for a tree whose race has played so large a role in the past.