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All about the lake there are steep, rocky slopes, more or less completely covered with low arctic plants and stunted, storm-beaten hemlocks. From among the trees at the foot of the lake rises the roof of a miner's log cabin, and a few hundred feet beyond a small, dark opening in the face of a cliff shows where the miner is running a tunnel in his search for gold.
Frazer, will you tell me what sort of trees hemlocks are? Hemlocks in England are poisonous weeds." "These are not weeds, but large forest trees a species of pine. I will show you some the next time we go out for a drive they are very handsome trees." "And what are creeks, nurse?" "Creeks are small streams, such as in Scotland would be termed 'burns, and in England 'rivulets'"
For one thing, the sun and wind, best of all hemlocks, tanned his white skin into a tough all-American leather, seasoned his muscles into rawhide sinews, and, without burdening him with an extra ounce of flesh, sprinkled the red through his blood till, though thin, he looked apoplectic. Insensibly, too, something else came about.
It was some two miles long, and one wide; and held two or three little wooded islands, which were much resorted to in the summer. On two sides of the lake, rose high, rocky precipices; no landing was possible there: the other two sides were thick wooded forests of pines and hemlocks. Nothing could exceed in loveliness the situation of this lake.
None called good Mrs. Marjoram a witch. Her face was clear, her smile bright, her eyes sparkling, and she bore her years with an upright and cheerful carriage. The little, one-storied house where Aunt Hannah dwelt was situated in a hollow just out of the village, in the shadow of a grove of tangled hemlocks and pines.
In the last century, a colony of beavers dwelt here, though the oldest inhabitant cannot now point to even the traditional site of their dams. The ancient hemlocks, whither I propose to take the reader, are rich in many things besides birds. Indeed, their wealth in this respect is owing mainly, no doubt, to their rank vegetable growth, their fruitful swamps, and their dark, sheltered retreats.
Coming a little later to a group of magnificent hemlocks, with great, clean, towering trunks reaching up a hundred feet through the soft maples and yellow birches and beeches which seemed dwarfed by these veterans, I exclaimed in admiration. "Yes," he said, "them's mighty fine hemlocks. I calc'late thet one to the left would bark near five dollars' wuth!"
By "trees" in this chapter I mean only the evergreen trees the pines, firs, spruces, hemlocks, cedars, junipers and tamaracks. Many visitors like to know at least enough when they are looking at a tree, to tell which of the above species it belongs to.
Over us waved the big elms that grew up here and there out of the bottom, and around their feet clustered low cedars and hemlocks and balsams, while the sturdy, rugged oaks and delicate, trembling poplars clung to the rocky sides and clambered up and out to the canyon's sunny lips.
Then down we go on the other side, clambering down the rocky stairways till we reach quite a broad plateau that forms something like the shoulder of the mountain. On the brink of this there are many large hemlocks, and we scan them closely and rap upon them with our ax.
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