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Show J WOODS OF THE NORTHWEST I 4 Nowhere else In the world la there such a forest as this. A few steps In any direction from the roads of the loggers bring ono at onca to the primeval pri-meval wood. Turn to the north. A thousand and five hundred milea you may wander. If you will, and never escape the enclosing en-closing silences of tkla wood. Across the Ilrltlsh possessions, through endless end-less reaches of mountains, snow-rapped, snow-rapped, Inarroaslhle, and onward to Alaska, nothing hut trera and trees cedar, fir, hemlock, plno, spruce. Turn to the south. For thousand miles of Sierra, through the heart of California, where grows the sequoia, lha monarch among trees, to the very doaerts of the Meslran border, and you will find this forest sllll covering all the hills, thick, silent and all but undisturbed. A continent long la this wood, faring the Pacific, here 2110 miles wide, from the water'a edge across the hlghts of the Cascade and the Hlerra, thora narrowing to a tbin, straggling, yet persistent growTh along the mountain tops. This tree before you. rising 2M feet In air. straight and atrong, thick- coated with brown bark, Its mighty base setting firmly In the earth, Its roots gripping deep, was growing before be-fore Columbus taw America. Five hundred yenrs has It been standing thcro ralslrg Its head In the sliy. What storms has It pent before; under what ages of sunshine has It gained strength; what lightning strokes have threatened It, what sweeping Sres! And still It stands with tho sublime majesty of age and strength, frsrful of nothing and the aound of axes knocking In the valley below I ll'.it long before the seed of this hoary giant was town In the wind foresta were old on these hills. For 60,000 years and more have these mountains been forest-clad, one fot est rising In 6"0 years from youth to maturity, sinking away In ripe old age, ard giving room to another generation gen-eration of trees. Deep In tho earth to-day lie some of these ancient forests, for-ests, clisiccd by slow chemistry I nf the age Into coal, and now at last beginning to give out for men tho sunshine which they stored up centuries cen-turies before tho beginning of b! ' tory. Century Magailne. |