been jogging across a gravelly plain studded at intervals of a
few yards with little bushes a foot high. The scenery is so
monotonous and the noon sunshine so warm that he almost falls
asleep. When he wakes from his daydream, so weird are his
surroundings that he thinks he must be in one of the places to
which Sindbad was carried by the roc. The trail has entered an
open forest of joshuas, as the big tree yuccas are called in
Arizona. Their shaggy trunks and uncouth branches are rendered
doubly unkempt by swordlike, ashy-yellow dead leaves that double
back on the trunk but refuse to fall to the ground. At a height
of from twelve to twenty feet each arm of the many-branched
candelabrum ends in a stiff rosette of gray-green spiky leaves as
tough as hemp. Equally bizarre and much more imposing is a desert
"stand" of giant suhuaros, great fluted tree-cacti thirty feet or
more high. In spite of their size the suhuaros are desert types
as truly as is sagebrush.

In America the most widespread type of forest is the evergreen
coniferous woodland of the north. Its pines, firs, spruces,
hemlocks, and cedars which are really junipers, cover most of
Canada together with northern New England and the region south of
Lakes Huron and Superior. At its northern limit the forest looks
thoroughly forlorn. The gnarled and stunted trees are thickly
studded with half-dead branches bent down by the weight of snow,
so that the lower ones sweep the ground, while the upper look
tired and discouraged from their struggle with an inclement
climate. Farther south, however, the forest loses this aspect of
terrific struggle. In Maine, for example, it gives a pleasant
impression of comfortable prosperity. Wherever the trees have
room to grow, they are full and stocky, and even where they are