could anywhere be found. Over the bare ground caused by a burn or windfall thousands of the cones of the fir tree would be scattered from the adjoining forest. Chattering pine squirrels and birds and the winds would carry the seeds. The next year the ground would be green with tiny trees, little fairy things of which there might be dozens to every square yard. In four or five years the ground would still be green, but the carpet of verdure would be perhaps six or seven feet deep, and of the little tiny trees perhaps nineteen out of twenty would have been crowded to death, and so dense would be the surface of this green carpet that the lower limbs of the little trees, and many of the little trees themselves, shut out from all light, would be dying and falling away. For two hundred years the process would go on, each young tree vigorously reach-
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THE FOREST WAYS
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