Other creatures, too, are laying up provisions for the winter. Birds are amazingly industrious. Some are gathering with much fuss into flocks preparatory for southward flight, while others, with thoughts of chill days to come, are busily searching out every cranny for a morsel of food, mere atoms against the huge, lofty trunks. Blue-jays are indulging in their usual pilfering, making more noise than all the rest of the forest folk combined. Insects also seem unusually active. Happy, gauzy-winged bits of concentrated gayety, they while away their little hours in the mellowed sunshine. Giving no thought to the frosts and short days to come, transitory and carefree, they offer the most tragic contrasts, dancing and humming about the immortal Sequoia. When winter comes and all is in keeping with the great sleep of the forest, it is blossom time for the Sequoia. For everything else the beauty of life’s expansion is ended. The pines have become funereal in their aspect; the firs have lost their gayety. The underbrush, bowed with the weight of snow, is stripped of its bright leaves. Sear and brown, they lie heaped in hollows where the wailing Autumn winds left them. The flowers, too, are in their graves. The robins are gone. Even streams are silent and buried. But the Sequoia, living an almost enchanted existence, is quite beyond reach of every influence suggestive of winter’s repose. Though all life about it may cease, it must blossom forth. Producing myriads of minute flowers at the ends of branches formed the previous year, it fairly bursts into bloom, dusting the snowy ground, like a gigantic goldenrod, with golden pollen. Contrasting the prolific abundance of Sequoia seeds with the scarcity of seedlings, it seems logical to conclude that the Sequoia is not reproducing. It is true that seedlings are rare in the northern groves, although seed production there is as great as elsewhere. This has been construed as evidence that the seeds are infertile and bears out the sad prophecy of Asa Gray that the Sequoia is a wan and weary survivor of the Age of Reptiles and has that inferiority about it of all things that go back into the past. Tainted with antiquity, it is supposedly losing its power of reproduction. [Illustration: ALABAMA TREE, A PERFECT SEQUOIA MARIPOSA GROVE Photo by A. C. Pillsbury] The southern groves, however, throw quite a different light upon the question. There reproduction is manifest on every hand. Companies of seedlings are springing up everywhere determined to carry on the noble line. They are found growing not alone in moist glens where the soil is rich and deep, but also on rocky ledges and steep hillsides seemingly bare of all nutriment, some even battling for life with their roots wedged in crevices of granite beds. Exuberant and heavy with an output of green foliage, these monarchs of the future promise anything but an inability to maintain the forest in its most perfect vigor.