The spring tufts of the Norway spruce are of a bright yellow-green; those of the silver fir are paler and softer in tint, more like the primrose. When the sulphur butterfly lights on them we lose sight of him, so he flits from one to another, feeling quite safe, and keeping carefully away from those dark old leaves where he would be pounced upon at once.
The silver fir does not let its cones hang down; it holds them proudly erect on its branches; like little towers often eight inches high. We wonder how such slender twigs can hold up such large cones. They look like hairy giants, for their scales do not end in two little teeth, but in a long point which turns back and bends downwards.
The silver fir does not like quite such cold places as the spruce and the Scotch pine; it dwells lower down the mountain sides, and is at home in Central Europe.
All the pines and firs, like the Scotch pine, have those wonderful pipes and reservoirs of sticky turpentine juice inside their bark, but each kind of fir has its own way of making its stores, and so we get different kinds of resin and turpentine and balsams from different trees.
It is these stores of resin that make the pine wood burn so brightly. The Highland chief needed no gas for his great illuminations; he had only to call his followers to hold up branches of blazing pine. It is not very wise to light a picnic fire in a pine or fir wood, for sometimes a few sparks will set a whole forest in flames.
Fir—fire: how much alike these two words are! Do you think they must have some connection with one another? Were the first fires made of fir wood? or was this tree called fir because it made such good fires? These words are so old that we can only guess their history.
Those of you who like pretty things have often fingered admiringly some bright, shining necklace of amber beads. The pieces of amber from which those beads were cut were picked up on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and it is supposed that once upon a time some great pines or firs dropped their gummy juice and this hardened into these beautiful transparent stones.
Pines and firs are some of our greatest tree givers. They seem never tired of giving. Can you think of anything that is made of pine or fir wood? Perhaps you remember hearing that the seats or panels or ceilings in your school or church were of the wood of an American pine called the pitch pine. But common fir wood has a name of its own. Who has not heard of deal? A deal is a part or portion, and so we talk of a great deal of something meaning a large portion. Our fir wood comes in great quantities from Norway and Germany, where it is first cut and sawn into planks. Each plank is a deal—that is, a portion of the wood. It has been easy to leave out the article and call the wood deal.
Our white deal comes from the firs, chiefly from the Norway spruce. The darker-coloured deal is the gift of the Scotch pine.
How can the great trees be carried from the mountain-tops, do you suppose? The streams are the carriers; they float the great trunks down to the rivers, where they are tied together in great rafts and floated on again to their new home, or to the seaport from which they can be shipped to foreign lands. Sometimes when the nearest stream is at a long distance from the trees, a wooden slide is made to it. In the winter, water is poured down the slide, and when it freezes the trees easily shoot down the slippery way to the stream. Oh, what fun it must be! You would like to be there to see. In the year 1810, when all Europe was at war with the great Emperor Napoleon, the deal traffic on the Baltic Sea was stopped. What was to be done? Near the Lake of Lucerne there is a high mountain, called Mont Pilate, covered with great forests of pine and fir. If these could only be cut down and brought to the lake, they could easily be floated down the Rhine to the sea. So a tremendous slide was made from Mont Pilate to the lake. It was six feet broad, and from three to six feet deep, and eight miles long, and twenty-five thousand pine trees were used in making it. When water had been poured down and had frozen, the great trunks were started one at a time. Away they shot, and reached the lake, eight miles off, in six minutes, and in wet weather, when the slide was very slippery, they were only three minutes on the way.