United States or Timor-Leste ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was a single gigantic ridge which we had passed through, standing up knife-like, built up entirely of great brick-shaped masses of bright-red rock, piled one on another by Titans. Pitch-pines grew out of these crevices, but there was not a vestige of soil. Beyond, wall beyond wall of similar construction, and range above range, rose into the blue sky.
This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use at least: the water standing at this great height for a year or more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise, pitch-pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others, and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many ponds, and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest.
A desolate wilderness of rolling sand-dunes, beach grass, huckleberry and bayberry bushes, cedar swamps, and small clumps of pitch-pines. Through this desert the three or four rutted, crooked sand roads, leading to and from the lights, turned and twisted. Along their borders dwelt no human being; but life was there, life in abundance.
Those particular trees had probably never been stared at so hard before, and the three children exclaimed almost together: "Some are rough, and some are smooth, and the rough ones have little bunches of leaves on 'em." "These are the pitch-pines," replied their governess. "They are the roughest of all our forest-trees, and they have a rounder head than any of the other American evergreens.
After we had explored the shore to our hearts' content and were tired, we rested for a while in the shadow of some gnarled pitch-pines which stood close together, as near the sea as they dared. They looked like a band of outlaws; they were such wild-looking trees. They seemed very old, and as if their savage fights with the winter winds had made them hard-hearted.
We were very glad to get on shore, and haul up the canoe. While some of the party collected wood for a fire, and made other preparations for camping, Munch, taking his gun and a small iron pot, asked me if I would accompany him into the forest. In a short time we reached a group of pitch-pines, one of which he tapped, and collected the juice in the pot.
On the side of the pond next my house, a row of pitch-pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroachments; and their size indicates how many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height.
So you will carry home not the song only, but "the river and sky." But if the kinglets were individually the best singers, I must still confess that the goldfinches gave the best concert. It was on a sunny afternoon, the 27th, and in a small grove of tall pitch-pines.
The smell of the wet pitch-pines was unusually sweet, and we wandered about for an hour or two there, to find some ferns we wanted, and then walked over toward East Parish, and home by the long beach late in the afternoon.
The White Pine, the most noble and the most beautiful tree of the whole coniferous tribe, predominates in the New-England forest; though some wide tracts are covered with the more homely Pitch-Pines, which are the trees that scent the atmosphere on damp still days with their delightful terebinthine odors.
Word Of The Day