Page:Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy, Stockton, 1872.djvu/191

Rh to pass through these dense forests, often take to the small streams and wade along in the water, which is sometimes up to their shoulders, occasionally finding shallower places, or a little space on the banks where they can pick their way along for a few hundred yards before they are obliged to take to the stream again.

Everything is lovely and luxuriant here, but it will not do to stay too long. There are fevers and snakes.

Let us now go to the greatest woods in the whole world. I do not mean the most extensive forest, but that one where the trees are the grandest. This is the region where the giant trees of California grow.

Nowhere on the face of the earth are there such trees as these. Some of them stand over four hundred feet high, and are thirty feet in diameter!

Their age is believed to be about eighteen hundred years. Think of it! They have been growing there during the whole of the Christian era!

One of them, the very largest of all, has been lying on the ground for about one hundred and fifty years. When it was standing its diameter was about forty feet. Another trunk, which is lying on the ground, has been hollowed out by fire, and through this great bore or tube a whole company of horsemen has ridden.

One of these trees was cut down some years ago by a party of men, who, I think, should have been sent to prison for the deed. It took five men twenty-five days to cut it through with augers and saws, and then they were obliged to use a great wedge and a battering-ram to make it fall.

These are the kings of all trees. After such a grand sight, we will not want to see any more trees to-day, and we will leave the forests of Far-away and sit and think of them under our humble grape-vines and honeysuckles.