WE made a side trip to the big trees of the Mariposa group, which are about one hour's ride from the hotel, says a correspondent of the Pittsburg Dispatch. If the smallest of these trees could be planted anywhere in Pennsylvania the railroads would run excursion trains to it and make money. The trees in this grove are so large that it takes a good while to fully appreciate the facts about the size of the biggest of them. The "Grizzly Giant" is thirty-four feet through at the base and over 400 feet high. This tree would overtop the spires on the Pittsburg cathedral by over 100 feet. The trunk of this tree is 100 feet clear to the first limb, which is twenty feet in circumference. Many other trees here are very nearly as large as this one, and there are 400 in the grove. Through several tunnels have been cut and a four-horse stage can go through these tunnels on the run and never graze a hub. You get an approach to an adequate idea of their size by walking off 100 yards or so while the stage is standing at the foot of a tree and glancing from top to bottom, keeping the stage in mind as a means of comparison. The stage and the horses look like the little tin outfit that Santa Claus brought you when you were a good little boy.
These trees are no longer to be called the largest in the world, however. A species of eucalyptus has been found in Australia as large or larger. Emerson warns us against the use of the superlative, but when you are in this region of the globe you can't get along without a liberal use of it. He himself says of Yosemite: "It is the only spot I have ever found that came up to the brag." And as I stood in the big tree grove I remembered that some one called Emerson himself "the Sequoia of the human race."
THE EDGE OF THE WOOD.
ELLA F. MOSBY.
THE ideal place for birds, says Mr. Frank Chapman, is the edge of the wood where field and forest meet, and a stream is not far off. If an orchard be in sight, so much the better. It was my delight to spend a summer, or part of it, in just such a spot not long ago, and I made many charming discoveries here. In the first place I learned that it is by no means necessary for birds to "be of a feather" in order "to flock together." I came one bright morning on a flock of indigo buntings near the water's edge, the proud father, in exquisite blue, like finest silk, with shimmering lights of green playing over it, the mother in siena brown, and the babies, neither blue nor brown, but a sooty black, with only a solitary wee feather now and then to show the blue that was coming. What an odd, but what a pretty, happy little family!
The banks of the stream were thickly overgrown with milk-white elder, orange butterfly-weed, and a thousand feathery grasses and nodding leaf-sprays, already touched on edge with crimson or gold "thumb-marks." On the tall stalks swung the goldfinches, "a little yellow streak of laughter in the sun," and every stake or post in the fence near by made a "coigne of vantage" for the merry wrens to call and whistle. The calls of birds express, bird-fashion, every feeling that the heart of man knows—surprise, fear, joy, hope, love, hate, and sorrow. If we could only contrive to think bird-thoughts, as perhaps an Audubon may have done, or a Wilson, we might understand these strange signals and cries, often uttered by invisible speakers from a world above ours.
I learned at this time that the quails, or Bob-Whites, have many calls instead of the one from which they are named. There is the low, sweet mother-talk to the brood, the notes of warning, the "scatter calls" of autumn from the survivors of an attack, "Where are you? Where are you?" and a sort of duet between male and female at nesting time. When she leaves the nest, she calls "Lou-is-e!" and he strikes in on the last syllable with "Bob;" she repeats, and he bursts forth "Bob White!" with emphasis. Then the clear, ringing whistles through midsummer sound up and down the meadow from one quail to another. The old farmer interprets their colloquy thus:—