light appears to flash upward from the base of the tree incessantly. In the intervals of the flash it is often as if the tree were withdrawn altogether from sight. I see one large pine wood over whose whole top these cold electric flashes are incessantly passing off harmlessly into the air above. I thought at first of some fine spray dashed upward, but it is rather like broad flashes of pale cold light. Surely you can never, under other circumstances, see a pine wood so expressive, so speaking. This reflection of light from the waving crests of the earth is like the play and flashing of electricity. No deciduous tree exhibits these fine effects of light. Literally, incessant sheets not of heat, but of cold lightning, you would say, were flashing there. Seeing some just over the roof of a house which was far on this side, I thought at first that it was something like smoke even, though a rare kind of smoke, that went up from the house. In short, you see a play of light over the whole pine, similar in its cause to that seen on a waving field of grain, but far grander in its effects. Seen at mid-day even, it is still the light of dewy morning alone that is reflected from the needles of the pine. This is the brightening and awakening of the pines, a phenomenon, perchance, connected with the flow of sap in them. I feel somewhat like the
