pierce the canopy of foliage. Somehow, the feeling roused by these things
loosened my tongue.

"This is an old hard-wood forest," I began. "Much of the white oak,
hickory, ash, maple, is virgin timber. These trees have reached maturity;
many are dead at the tops; all of them should have been cut long ago. They
make too dense a shade for the seedlings to survive. Look at that bunch of
sapling maples. See how they reach up, trying to get to the light. They
haven't a branch low down and the tops are thin. Yet maple is one of our
hardiest trees. Growth has been suppressed. Do you notice there are no
small oaks or hickories just here? They can't live in deep shade. Here's
the stump of a white oak cut last fall. It was about two feet in diameter.
Let's count the rings to find its age--about ninety years. It flourished in
its youth and grew rapidly, but it had a hard time after about fifty years.
At that time it was either burned, or mutilated by a falling tree, or
struck by lightning."

"Now, how do you make that out?" asked father, intensely interested.

"See the free, wide rings from the pith out to about number forty-five. The
tree was healthy up to that time. Then it met with an injury of some kind,
as is indicated by this black scar. After that the rings grew narrower. The
tree struggled to live."

We walked on with me talking as fast as I could get the words out. I showed
father a giant, bushy chestnut which was dominating all the trees around
it, and told him how it retarded their growth. On the other hand, the other
trees were absorbing nutrition from the ground that would have benefited
the chestnut.