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This arrangement renders them singularly well adapted to the making of brooms a use of the hemlock familiar to housekeepers in the country towns throughout New England. The leaves, which are extremely delicate and of a silvery whiteness on the under side, are arranged in a row on each side of the branchlets.
It now remains to determine how the branch was placed in the tree. It must have been upright or very nearly so, for the main axis is essentially straight and the branchlets are about equally developed on all sides; moreover, there is no indication in the bark that one exposure was the "weather side."
For the whole of the stem, from the very ground to the forks, and the larger fork-branches likewise, are feathered all over with numberless short prickly pendent branchlets, which roll outward, and then down, and then up again in graceful curves, and carry large pale crimson flowers, each with a pink hood in the middle, looking like a new-born baby's fist.
A few of the tallest specimens measured over eighty feet, with a diameter of eighteen inches; but many of the younger trees, growing in tufts, were nearly fifty feet high, with a diameter of only five or six inches, while their slender shafts were hidden from top to bottom by a close, fringy growth of tasseled branchlets.
The long pendulous leaves characteristic of this great mimosa and the drooping branchlets hung down much below the main shaft; but these, even if they touched the roof, would do no injury. It was, therefore, determined to let go the cable. It was now clear day, for they had been delayed a good while; but at length all was ready, and Guapo untied the cable, and drew the end on board.
On the rocky slopes the wild ginger shows its red-brown, long-eared urns, the white baneberry its short white plumes, the branchlets of the bladdernut are breaking into white clusters and columbine soon will "sprinkle on the rocks a scarlet rain" as it did in Bayard Taylor's time, although the "scarlet rain," like that of the painted cup in the lowlands, grows less and less each year.
One was in the form of an eagle's nest, and not nearly so large as that in which some eaglets are reared, made by interlacing branchlets of white mangrove until the mass was sufficient to support his weight. With a double ended paddle rudely shaped from the thin buttress roots of the red mangrove, and comic in the crudeness and disproportion of its parts, he felt himself safe miles out to sea.
I observed three or four hemlocks which had been struck by lightning, the first I noticed in Alaska. Some of the species on windy outjutting rocks become very picturesque, almost as much so as old oaks, the foliage becoming dense and the branchlets tufted in heavy plume-shaped horizontal masses.
It is, however, only indebted to the tree on which is grows for moisture, for it thrives if planted in a pot or basket in ordinary soil, and kept in a stove temperature. It is a native of Brazil, and was introduced in 1831. Stems as in R. Cassytha, but thicker, longer, and with the branchlets in compact clusters on the ends of the long, arching branches.
The long pendulous leaves characteristic of this great mimosa and the drooping branchlets hung down much below the main shaft; but these, even if they touched the roof, would do no injury. It was, therefore, determined to let go the cable. It was now clear day, for they had been delayed a good while; but at length all was ready, and Guapo untied the cable, and drew the end on board.
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