The storm wind ramps through its thrashing branches; and what do you suppose it is doing? Precisely what the storm winds of adversity do to you and me: blowing down the dead leaves, snapping off the dead branches, making us take tighter hold on the verities of the eternal rocks, teaching us to anchor on facts, not fictions, destroying our weakness, strengthening our flabbiness, making us prove our right to be fit to survive. Woe betide the tree with rotten heart wood or mushy anchorage! You see its fate with upturned roots still sticky with the useless muck. Not so different from us humans with mushy creeds that can't stand fast against the shocks of life! You say all this is so much symbolism; but when the First Great Cause made the tree as well as the man, is it surprising that the same laws of life should govern both? It is the forester, not the symbolist, who divides the life of the tree into seven ages; just as it is the poet, not the philosopher, who divides the life of man in seven ages; and it needs no Maeterlinck, or Haeckel, to trace the similarity between the seven ages. Seedling, sapling, large sapling, pole, large pole, standard and set--marking the ages of the trees--all have their prototypes in the human. The seedling can grow only under the protecting nursery of earth, air, moisture and in some cases the shade of other trees. The young conifers, for instance, grow best under the protecting nursery of poplars and cottonwoods, as one sees where the fire has run, and the quick growers are already shading the shy evergreens. And there is the same infant mortality among the young trees as in human life. Too much shade, fire, drought, passing hoof, disease, blight, weeds out the weaklings up to adolescence. Then, the real business of living begins--it is a struggle, a race, a constant contention for the top, for the sunlight and air and peace at the top; and many a grand old tree reaches the top only when ripe for death. Others live on their three score years and ten, their centuries, and in the case of the sugar pines and sequoias, their decades of centuries. First comes the self-pruning, the branches shaded by their neighbors dying and dropping off. And what a threshing of arms, of strength against strength, there is in the storm wind, every wrench tightening grip, to the rocks, some trees even sending down extra roots like guy ropes for anchorhold. The tree uncrowded by its fellows shoots up straight as a mast pole, whorl on whorl of its branches spelling its years in a century census. It is the crowded trees that show their almost human craft, their instinct of will to live--cork-screwing sidewise for light, forking into two branches where one branch is broken or shaded, twisting and bending, ever seeking the light, and spreading out only when they reach room for shoulder swing at the top, with such a mechanism of pumping machinery to hoist barrels of water up from secret springs in the earth as man has not