cling, with nothing in the wide, bleak forests to keep them company save here and there a shivering lingerer upon the beech-tree. Often it is only when their successors come "to push them from their stools" that the old leaves quit the gallant oak and lie down to perish. So a health to the oak!
We will merely touch, in passing, upon the horse-chestnut, with its great glistening spring-buds bursting into cones of pearly, red-spotted blossoms that almost cover its noble dome of foliage; upon the hemlock, with its masses of evergreen needles, and the cedar, with its misty blue berries; upon those tree-like shrubs—the hopple, with its gigantic leaves serving as sylvan goblets at pic-nics; the sumac, with its clusters of splendid crimson; the sassafras, diffusing from its thick leaf a most delicious breath; the laurel, arching above the brooks a roof radiant with immense bouquets of rose-touched snow, and even garlanding the apex of the water-beech with its superb chalices, while its younger sister, the ivy, crouches at the foot of the tamarack and spruce, rich in red-streaked urns of blossoms; and the witch-hazel, smiling at winter, with its curled, sharp-cut flowers of golden velvet.
We come now to the pine, of all my greatest favorite.
Ho! ho! the burly pine! Hurrah! hurrah for the pine! The oak may be king of the lowlands, but the pine is the king of the hills—aye, and mountains too.
Ho! ho! the burly pine! how he strikes his clubbed foot deep into the cleft of the rock, or grasps its span with conscious power! There he lifts his haughty front like the warrior-monarch that he is. No flinching about the pine, let the time he ever so stormy. His throne is the crag, and his crown is a good way up in the heavens, and as for the clouds he tears them asunder sometimes, and uses them for robes. Then hurrah again for the pine! say I. Reader, did you ever hear him shout? Did you ever hear thunder?—for there is a pine mountain on the upper Delaware that out-roars, in a winter storm, all the thunder you ever heard! Stern, deep, awfully deep, that roar makes the heart quiver. It is an airquake of tremendous power. And his single voice is by no means silvery when he is "in a breeze." When
