crowded together their slender upspringing trunks look alert and
energetic. The signs of death and decay, indeed, appear
everywhere in fallen trunks, dead branches, and decayed masses of
wood, but moss and lichens, twinflowers and bunchberries so
quickly mantle the prostrate trees that they do not seem like
tokens of weakness. Then, too, in every open space thousands of
young trees bank their soft green masses so gracefully that one
has an ever-present sense of pleased surprise as he comes upon
this younger foliage out of the dim aisles among the bigger
trees.

Except on their southern borders the great northern forests are
not good as a permanent home for man. The snow lies so late in
the spring and the summers are so short and cool that agriculture
does not prosper. As a home for the fox, marten, weasel, beaver,
and many other fur-bearing animals, however, the coniferous
forests are almost ideal. That is why the Hudson's Bay Company is
one of the few great organizations which have persisted and
prospered from colonial times to the present. As long ago as 1670
Charles II granted to Prince Rupert and seventeen noblemen and
gentlemen a charter so sweeping that, aside from their own powers
of assimilation, there was almost no limit to what the "Governor
and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay"
might acquire. By 1749, nearly eighty years after the granting of
the charter, however, the Company had only four or five forts on
the coast of Hudson Bay, with about 120 regular employees.
Nevertheless the poor Indians were so ignorant of the value of
their furs and the consequent profits were so large that, after
Canada had been ceded to Great Britain in 1763, a rival
organization, the Northwest Fur Company of Montreal, was