Little obstructs your passage, now that the firm ice is underfoot, unless it is the too close set tree trunks. Goldthread and partridge berry creep in the moss that mounds about the very stumps of the cedars, but no other vine or shrub seems to have the vitality to grow here, or if it had it has wisely used it to flee to more sunny uplands. Not even in tropical jungles have I seen the struggle for existence so fierce as it is among these too closely set swamp cedars. One in ten eventually survives and makes a marketable growth. Other things bring them to disaster than the choking crowding of their neighbors, however. Here and there you can see big trees that lurch in strange fashion, some this way and some that. This is most often true of a pine that by some chance has grown among them. The cause is the uncertain footing of the slimpsy bog. As they get heavier and taller they cannot find sufficient anchorage in the yielding wallop beneath their roots, and sooner or later a wind comes that tips them over. But I found in places among the sheltering larger trees, groups of young ones, cedars, that could have suffered from no wind, they were so well protected and walled round by their elders. These were laid down in brief windrows all in the same direction, and I wonder still what force accomplished it. If it had been a tropical jungle I should have said that here a hippopotamus wandered up out of the depths and back again, or here an elephant fled from some retired statesman, but these are not beasts of our frozen forests. In one place was another tropical suggestion that was a bit startling. This was the cast skin of a snake that must have been four inches in diameter. It was only the white bark of a dead birch that had fallen and rotted, as to its heart-wood, all away, but the tougher bark remained, dangling in white folds just as a snake’s skin does when cast.