Over on the ridge, some miles to the westward of the Macwahoc-Kingman road, stands a sole survivor of the old-time pumpkin pines. Forty and fifty feet from the earth toward its limbs the birches and beeches lift whispering leaves. Timber and cat-spruce and resinous fir spire higher yet and fling incense toward him. Sixty and seventy feet they reach, growing tenuous to the tip of nothingness, yet the stately column of his trunk soars half a hundred feet beyond their tops, lonely and unapproachable. It was to forests of such trees as these that our great-grandfathers brought their axes,--a forest that we unlucky moderns may see here in our dreams only. We are fortunate in having the stumps left, for they still stand along the Moluncus in much the same form that they stood when the lumberman’s axe was yet pitchy with their chips. The roots are still sound wood, and it may be another half-century before they decay and add to the richness of the dense forest mold about them. The stumps, five or six feet in diameter, and often as high as your head, showing in what depth of snow our ancestors worked at their logging, hold their shape in many instances. Around the base is a circular ring of dark rich mold which was once the bark on the stump. This has in every case fallen off and crumbled to humus, leaving the heart-wood exposed. Mosses gray and green cling to this and cover it, and because it retains its shape you might almost think it sound, but a kick or a stab with your walking-stick will prove the opposite. It is but punk, standing in the breathless, windless silence of the wood, mute monument to a glory that is departed, waiting itself to pass on at a touch. What the glory and solemnity of the Maine forest must have been when these giants were the columns to the temple of the woods we can but dream. In the dense shade of their dark, interlocking boughs no deciduous growth could thrive, and their own lower branches died for lack of sunlight and passed in time, leaving behind no scars to mar the splendid columns that rose fifty or sixty feet clear without knob or limb. Out of these lofty, silent spaces must have stepped the tall gods of the red men, nor can one imagine the Indians themselves traversing them in other than silent reverence. Nor yet can we of a stronger race stand among their moss-grown stumps to-day without feeling the worshipful awe of the forest strong upon us. The gods are gone indeed, but the demigods remain. The spruces and firs, foster children of the great pines, stand close-set upon the ground that they once occupied and rear again the temple toward heaven in pinnacles and spires where once were darkly-vaulted domes.