Jumping to his feet he looked up into the branches. They were all bare except for the needles growing on the branchlets. The tree was dotted with the odd nuts.
“What kind of a tree are you? You are not at all like our pretty oak or maple trees. Your branches grow nearly straight out. I should not like to live in a graveyard and look at tombstones all the time.”
He hunted around for clods and dead branches which, in his efforts to throw over its crown, he threw into and through the tree.
“You’ll see, Mr. Tree, some day, I’ll be able to throw higher,” said our cheerful Jacob.
Just then Rover came running to him and they had one of their jolly romps on the dry grass and leaves. Presently, tired out with their sport, both boy and dog dropped to sleep. Now was the pine tree’s chance.
“Jacob, Jacob!” called the tree; “I am a pine tree.” One of the little, green fairy spirits who made her home among the branches had cast such a spell over Jacob that now he could hear every word the tree said as plainly as when his mamma spoke.
“When you come to know me and my friends better you will love us for our youth and worth as well as for our beauty,” said the pine. “See—the oaks and maples are mere dark skeletons. What you call needles are our leaves. They never all leave us at once. In our family our faithful leaves serve us for two years. When a new growth covered with fresh needles comes at the end of a branch the old needles drop, it is true, leaving our branches full of scars. Since others never grow in these same places our larger branches are left bare; but the bunches of needles on the new growth keep us always green.
“That hard thing which you found, and which you supposed to be a nut, was a mature dry cone. In our cones we hide our seeds, which have wings, so that they fly on the wind to a good resting and growing place. The little, tender balls which you found near the young bud at the end of the branchlet is a new cone just started this year. The harder, darker growth farther down among the needles is a last year’s cone.
“My home is not in this country. I was brought from a country of highlands and mountains where the Scottish people live. I am called a Scotch pine. I do not choose to live in a graveyard, but I am willing to serve man and God by doing my best wherever I chance to be. My comrades and I have been placed here by mourning friends for a token of the constant remembrances and love which are held for their friends who have passed away.
“In our native land my brothers grow to be very large, sometimes living for three or four hundred years. As we grow at the top, keeping our rounded shape, our lower branches drop off.”