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All that day the miners climbed the tall ridges where the sugar-pines stood like enormous pillars in the vast cathedral of the out of doors, until night found them in the midst of the forest right under the bare granite peaks. Here they made camp, and when the cold breath of the snow-fields came down upon them they kindled a great fire.
The big sugar-pines and the yellow-pines loomed so huge, towering above delicate birches and a hundred other lovely creatures, which they guarded as Eastern men guard the beauties of their harems. These are super-trees. "We drove on slowly, along a wide aisle paved with gold and sprinkled with gold-dust.
The gorge opened, and this mountain-girdled lake lay before me, with its margin broken up into bays and promontories, most picturesquely clothed by huge sugar-pines." From Lake Tabor Miss Bird returned to Truckee, and started on another excursion which brought her within view of the Great Salt Lake and the Mormon town of Ogden, and thence to Cheyenne, in the State of Wyoming.
The size of the trees they encountered was almost beyond belief, though none of them surpassed the giant of which an account has been already given. Among other curious trees they found sugar-pines growing in abundance in one part of the country. This is, perhaps, the most graceful of all the pines.
We knew that at times we hung perilously over the edge of slopes that eventually dropped a thousand feet sheer to the tops of the sugar-pines below, but we knew that Bill knew it also. The half visible heads of the horses, drawn wedge-wise together by the tightened reins, appeared to cleave the darkness like a ploughshare, held between his rigid hands.
Or I could make myself at home in any of those cabins that I found lying round loose. Or perhaps it would be cooler and pleasanter for me in my friend's cabin on the hill. Did I see those three large sugar-pines, and, a little to the right, a canvas roof and chimney, over the bushes? Well, that was my friend's, that was Dick Sylvester's cabin.
In their development they may, perhaps, lead us up to questions of considerable scientific interest. I shall not detain you with any remarks which would now be trite upon the size or longevity of these far-famed Sequoia-trees, or of the sugar-pines, incense-cedar, and firs associated with them, of which even the prodigious bulk of the dominating Sequoia does not sensibly diminish the grandeur.
In the Sierras, both in the sequoia groves and forests above the Big-Tree region, are very large sugar-pines, red firs, and yellow-pine trees, all of which make excellent lumber. Great forests of these trees, with cedars almost as large as the redwoods, are in the northern counties also.
Ben Gaynor had been spending money, a good deal of money. And no one knew better than Mark King that Ben had been close-hauled these latter years. He shrugged, telling himself to pull up short, and not find fault with his friend, or what his friend did, or with those whom his friend loved. An hour later he came to the grove of sugar-pines back of the house.
In the sunny fields and woods we shall find many of the land-birds, and first comes a family whose habits are so like those of chickens that they are called "scratchers." These birds depend for food upon seeds and bugs or worms they scratch out of the ground. Up in the Sierra sugar-pines and fir-woods lives the largest of these "scratchers," the brown grouse.
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