Perhaps if my early home had stood upon an island of evergreens, or if I had dreamed my first bright dreams among pine hills and cliffs of laurel, I should have loved their changeless beauty less. But through all my early years I saw but little of our native evergreens, and none of cultured, save a stunted cedar, that grew, or, rather, refused to grow, in our front yard at home; and thus they have ever attracted me exceedingly—the charm of rarity and novelty being added for me to their exceeding beauty.

And yet, if brought up among them, I might but have loved them more. For all I know of philosophy, if I had been earlier familiar with shrubs, hedges, groups, cedared cliffs, and tall forests of evergreens, they might have brought me still nobler conceptions, a more exquisite sense of beauty, than they now do.

Be that as it may, two years 'among the pines' of Virginia and her piny mountains, have enriched my mind with rare pictures of scenic beauty that shall keep fresh and green in memory while memory endures! I am no botanist, I have made no studies of the evergreens, nor shall I attempt to write of them as scholar or critic, but only as a fascinated observer. I neither care to know or tell whether the shrubs and trees in my evergreen pictures are angiosperms or gymnosperms; we have no 'transportation' for text books for students! During these two years, however, I have been charmed with a thousand views of landscape scenery, embracing every form, hue, and combination of our lovely native evergreens, whether on mountain, hill, or plain. I have seen them along winding streams, with backgrounds of bold, rocky bluffs; sweeping across undulating plains; rising with the uplifting mountains; peering into and over romantic mountain gorges; and growing up through the interstices of bowldered cascades. Or, standing on the mountain peaks, I have seen them sweep away into the vastness and grandeur of mighty, varied, and almost boundless expanse. These are but parts of my evergreen pictures. I have looked upon a simple holly bush when the wind of winter was upon it, scattering in lovely fragments its pure white robe of snow, revealing the gleaming of the rich green leaves, and the half-hidden clusters of the carmine berries. Three distinct colors thrown carelessly together, but no want of harmony—only pure and exquisite beauty!

In the summer months our evergreens are greatly less noticeable. They are overshadowed and eclipsed by the rich and exuberant foliage of our common but noble forest trees; but their beauty is not, even then, lost. They give variety of hues to the forests which they fringe or help to form; variety of shapes, and always exquisite, spicy, and healthful odors. But when the autumn comes, with its infinitely varied tintings of orange and vermilion; when the frost works its wonders, and the wooded hills are clothed with splendor—then the rich groups of our native evergreens rise in their immortality of freshness. How exquisitely their bright unfading green sets off and contrasts with the rich golds, glowing scarlets, russet browns, purples, and crimsons, in all their delicate shades and evanescent hues! The forest leaves grow sere and fall from their stems, sailing down singly or in groups, like bevies of frightened birds, until the hickory, oak, maple, and elm stand uncrowned, disrobed, lifting their bare arms to the winter skies; then higher and ever higher rises, as the gloom of winter deepens, the glory of evergreen shrub and tree.

The fields are dull russet, the forests are black, each tree seems a skeleton; all nature, save the evergreen, looks dead. But our mountains of firs, our hills of pine, our groves of cedar, our thickets of holly, our cliffs crowned with laurel, full of life, and covered with unchangeable verdure, keep eternally fresh and beautiful. Then come the great white silent snowflakes, sailing round and falling gently down, alighting on trunk, branch, and leaf, and covering and draping the hills, until they are pure and fair as the hills of Beulah. There is a dreamlike beauty in an evergreen forest mantled with snow. What words could tell the purity of coloring, the gracefulness of form of the pine boughs bending under their white burden of feathery crystals? Especially is this true of the young and pliant trees in hedgerows and thickets, and such as are everywhere springing up over the waste and wornout lands of Virginia.

The old monarch pine stands out like a sculptured column of ebony against the blue sky. Its umbel top, crowned with white, makes a fitting capital for a shaft so noble. It is a picture, in and of itself. The shrubs and young trees, so rich in leaves and verdure, so pliant to the lines and curves of grace, when happily and picturesquely grouped, are almost bewilderingly beautiful. Yet perhaps that which contains in itself the greatest number of the elements of beauty, is the medium-sized pyramidal tree, be it of spruce, Norway pine, or balsam fir. It unites at once, in its pyramidal shape, the strength and majesty of the old, and in its gracefully curved limbs and abundant leaves, the beauty and freshness of the young tree. When loaded down with a spotless burden of snow until its limbs are almost ready to break, no pyramid of art, no monument chiselled by human hands, can hope to approach its pure and model beauty.

The evergreen itself, however, seems to know no season but spring. In none other does it appear to change, and even then it casts not off the old—it only puts on the new in tenderer and fresher beauty! The new growth of the spruce and fir, the pale yellowish-green tips set in the dark old background, are exquisitely lovely; nor are the light green shoots of the white, yellow, and pitch pine much, less beautiful.

Later comes the glory of the laurel bloom, the most beautiful woodflower in our climate. As the other trees put on their leaves successively, the tinting of light, dark, and yellowish green are infinitely varied and pleasing.

Nor must I pass over, in my picture of evergreen, the mosses and ferns of the mountains of Virginia. More fragile than the trees and shrubs, they cannot be considered less beautiful. Indeed, the mosses of Cheat Mountain are the most luxuriant, exquisite, delicate, and richly beautiful things in nature. No dream of fairyland could, to my imagination, be lovelier than are the evergreen heights of these mountains, covered, matted, fringed, heaped, piled as they are with the greatest variety of mosses of the most delicate texture, feathery forms, and wondrously beautiful combinations. No one who has not seen them can have any just conception of mountain mosses, nor of the marvellous luxuriance of beauty with which they clothe rock, and tree, and earth, and everything upon these lone wild slopes and summits. Over the rocks, amid the mosses, hang the long pendent ferns, in richer, darker green. And with the grand old pine and fir trees lifting their heads to the heavens, and the thick tanglewood of shrub and underbrush, there is grandeur, grace, and beauty in bewildering, changeful, and ravishing confusion.

How I have loved, in leisure hours, to turn aside from the stern duties of the field, or the dull monotony of the camp, to gallop under the great pines, or wind through pathless thickets and native parks of evergreen, feasting my very soul on their eternal freshness and glory! How I have loved to see 'Black Hawk' crush with his feet, and sink up to his fetlocks, in the tender and fairy-like mosses that drape the mountains! How I have delighted to weave the trailing evergreens into wreaths, trellises, and bowers in front of my white tent! And, alas! with hushed and solemn pride, I have planted the holly and the pine on the graves of my dead comrades, hoping they might live in all their wondrous beauty over the quiet mound, and keep green the memory of the brave forever!