The rocky pastures of the tract I have referred to--for they maintain
their ground best in a rocky field--are thickly sprinkled with these
little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or lichens,
and you see thousands of little trees just springing up between them,
with the seed still attached to them.

Being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge
with shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form, from
one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by the
gardener's art. In the pastures on Nobscot Hill and its spurs, they make
fine dark shadows when the sun is low. They are also an excellent covert
from hawks for many small birds that roost and build in them. Whole
flocks perch in them at night, and I have seen three robins' nests in
one which was six feet in diameter.

No doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the day
they were planted, but infants still when you consider their development
and the long life before them. I counted the annual rings of some which
were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found that they were
about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty! They were so
low that they were unnoticed by the walker, while many of their
contemporaries from the nurseries were already bearing considerable
crops. But what you gain in time is perhaps in this case, too, lost
in power,--that is, in the vigor of the tree. This is their pyramidal
state.

The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more, keeping
them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they are so broad
that they become their own fence, when some interior shoot, which their