Page:Cathlamet On the Columbia.djvu/54

 ing upward to keep its head in the sunshine but making no attempt to reach out sideways, for this was hopeless. Only the stronger trees survived the struggle and thousands died each year shut out from light and life by their stronger brothers. The lower branches dropped off farther up every year as the green pile of the fir carpet was lifted higher and higher on the vigorous young stems. In perhaps fifty or a hundred years from the time the seed dropped on the ground there would be a compact young forest of beautiful timber fit for the masts and spars of ships, each tree eighteen or twenty -four inches through at the ground, gomg straight up into the air a beautiful straight shaft of nearly the same size a hundred feet without a branch or leaf, and then for fifty or one hundred feet tapering to the top and leafing out into the sun-