Hemlock spruce and pine forests--Story of a pine seedling--Its struggles and dangers--The gardener's boot--Turpentine of pines--The giant sawfly--Bark beetles--Their effect on music--Storm and strength of trees--Tall trees and long seaweeds--Eucalyptus, big trees--Age of trees--Venerable sequoias, oaks, chestnuts, and olives--Baobab and Dragontree--Rabbits as woodcutters--Fire as protection--Sacred fires--Dug-out and birch-bark canoes--Lake dwellings--Grazing animals and forest destruction--First kind of cultivation--Old forests in England and Scotland--Game preserving. "The murmuring pines and the hemlocks Stand like harpers hoar with beards that rest on their bosom."--_Longfellow._ Of course the Hemlock here alluded to is not the "hemlock rank growing on the weedy bank," which the cow is adjured not to eat in Wordsworth's well-known lines. (If the animal had, however, obeyed the poet's wishes and eaten "mellow cowslips," it would probably have been seriously ill.) The "Hemlock" is the Hemlock spruce, a fine handsome tree which is common in the forests of Eastern North America. These primeval forests of Pine and Fir and Spruce have always taken the fancy of poets. They are found covering craggy and almost inaccessible mountain valleys; even a tourist travelling by train cannot but be impressed by their sombre, gloomy monotony, by their obstinacy in growing on rocky precipices on the worst possible soil, in spite of storm and snow. [Illustration: _Canadian Pacific Railway_ A GIANT DOUGLAS FIR This species of fir tree grows to an enormous height in British Columbia. It is now being planted in many Scotch forests.] But to realize the romance of a Pine forest, it is necessary to tramp, as in Germany one sometimes has to do, for thirty miles through one unending black forest of Coniferous trees; there are no towns, scarcely a village or a forester's hut. The ground is covered with brown, dead needles, on which scarcely even green moss can manage to live. Then one realizes the irritating monotony of the branches of Pines and Spruces, and their sombre, dark green foliage produces a morose depression of spirit. The Conifers are, amongst trees, like those hard-set, gloomy, and determined Northern races whose life is one long, continuous strain of incessant endeavour to keep alive under the most difficult conditions.