The most telling timber-line that I have seen is on the slope of Long's Peak in the Rocky Mountain National Park. This is a wild place during a winter gale. It is a stirring place at all times and seasons. One day I went up to timber-line on Long's Peak with a number of children. They were interested, and even excited, by the dwarfed and strangely shaped trees. We found a dead pine that had lived two hundred and fifty-eight years, yet it was so small that a boy easily carried it about on his shoulder. Several little girls stood by a living spruce. Every child was taller than the little tree, yet the spruce had been growing when each of their great-grandmothers was born. All timber-line trees are undersized. Most of their ranks are less than eight feet high. One autumn a grizzly that I was following dug up a number of dwarfed trees at timber-line. I carried these home for careful examination. One of them was a black birch with a trunk nine tenths of an inch in diameter, a height of fifteen inches, and a limb-spread of twenty-two inches. It had thirty-four annual rings. Another was truly a veteran pine, though his trunk was but six tenths of an inch in diameter, his height twenty-three inches, and his limb-spread thirty-one inches. His age was sixty-seven years. A midget that I carried home in my vest pocket was two inches high, had a limb-spread of about four inches, and was twenty-eight years of age. Timber-line is one of Nature's most interesting regions. Its location and also its marked characteristics are determined by climatic conditions--by cold, snow, wind, moisture, and drought. Wind is a most influential factor. The position of thousands of miles of timber-line is determined by it. At timber-line the Storm King says, "Thus far and no farther." The trees do not heed, but persistently try to go on, and the struggle for existence becomes deadly. They appear like our unfortunate brothers whom fate has chained in the slums. The trees try to stand erect and climb onward and upward, but in vain. The elements are relentless. The wind blows off their arms and cuts them with flying sand. The cold dwarfs them, and for nine months in the year the snow tries to twist and crush the life out of them. Some become hunchbacks; others are broken, bent, and half-flayed; while a few crouch behind the rocks. Many stretches of timber-line are so battered by the wind that the trees have the appearance of having been recently swept by a cyclone, or overthrown by a giant roller.