Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of OntarioScadding, Henry
History
Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario
Scadding, Henry
Toronto (Ont.) -- Description and travel; Toronto (Ont.) -- History
Pines of a great height and thickness crowded the tops of these hills.
The paths of hurricanes could be traced over extensive tracts by the
fallen trunks of trees of this species, their huge bulks lying one over
the other in a titanic confusion worthy of a sketch by Doré in
illustration of Dante; their heads all in one direction, their upturned
roots, vast mats of woody ramifications and earth, presented sometimes a
perpendicular wall of a great height. Occasionally one of these upright
masses, originating in the habit of the pine to send out a wide-spread
but shallow rootage, would unexpectedly fall back into its original
place, when, in the clearing of the land, the bole of the tree to which
it appertained came to be gashed through. In this case it would
sometimes happen that a considerable portion of the trunk would appear
again in a perpendicular position. As its top would of course show that
human hands had been at work there, the question would be propounded to
the new comer as to how the axe could have reached to such a height. The
suppositions usually encouraged in him were, either that the snow must
have been wonderfully deep when that particular tree was felled, or else
that some one of the very early settlers must have been a man of
exceptional stature.
Among the lofty pines, here and there, one more exposed than the rest
would be seen, with a piece of the thickness of a strong fence-rail
stripped out of its side, from its extreme apex to its very root,
spirally, like the groove of a rifle-bore. It in this manner showed that
at some moment it had been the swift conductor down into the earth of
the contents of a passing electric cloud. One tree of the pine species,
we remember, that had been severed in the midst by lightning, so
suddenly, that the upper half had descended with perfect
perpendicularity and such force that it planted itself upright in the
earth by the side of the trunk from which it had been smitten.
Nor may we omit from our remembered phenomena of the pine forests
hereabout, the bee-trees. Now and then a huge pine would fall, or be
intentionally cut down, which would exhibit in cavernous recesses at a
great distance from what had been its root end, the accumulated combs
of, it might be, a half century; those of them that were of recent
construction, filled with honey.
A solitary survivor of the forest of towering pines which, at the period
to which we are adverting, covered the hills on both sides of the Don
was long to be seen towards the northern limit of the Moss Park
property. In the columns of a local paper this particular tree was thus
gracefully commemorated:--
Oh! tell to me, thou old pine tree,
Oh! tell to me thy tale,
For long hast thou the thunder braved,
And long withstood the gale;
The last of all thy hardy race,
Thy tale now tell to me,
For sure I am, it must be strange,
Thou lonely forest tree.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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