“It’s funny,” said the young doctor that married a granddaughter of mine last summer, “that all your groves of trees seem to be in rows.  Left them that way, I suppose, when you cut down the forest.”

The country looks as well wooded as the farming regions of Ohio or Indiana.  Trees grew like weeds when we set them out; and we set them out as the years passed, by the million.  I never went to the timber when the sap was down, without bringing home one or more elms, lindens, maples, hickories or even oaks—­though the latter usually died.  Most of the lofty trees we see in every direction now, however, are cottonwoods, willows and Lombardy poplars that were planted by the mere sticking in the ground of a wand of the green tree.  They hauled these “slips” into Monterey County by the wagon-load after the settlers began their great rush for the prairies; and how they grew!  It was no bad symbol of the state itself—­a forest on four wheels.

What I began to write a few moments ago, though concerned the difference between our winter climate then and now.  Then the snow drifted before our northwest winds in a moving ocean unbroken by corn-field, grove, or farmstead.  It smothered and overwhelmed you when caught out in it; and after a drifting storm, the first groves we could see cast a shadow in the blizzard; and there lay to the southeast of every block of trees a long, pointed drift, diminishing to nothing at the point where ended the influence of the grove—­this new foe to the tempest which civilization was planting.  Our groves were yet too small of course to show themselves in this fight against the elements that first winter, and there I had hung like a leaf caught on a root in a freshet, an eighteen-year-old boy, lonely, without older people to whom I could go for advice or comfort, and filled with dreams, visions and doubts, and with no bright spot in my frosty days and frostier nights but my visions and dreams.

And I suppose my loneliness, my hardships, my lack of the fireplaces of York State and the warm rooms that we were used to in a country where fuel was plentiful, made my visions and dreams more to me than they otherwise would have been.  It is the hermit who loses the world in his thoughts.  And I dreamed of two things—­my mother, and Virginia.  Of my mother I found myself thinking with less and less of that keenness of grief which I had felt at Madison the winter before, and on my road west; so I used to get out the old worn shoe and the rain-stained letter she had left for me in the old apple-tree and try to renew my grief so as to lose the guilty feeling of which I was conscious at the waning sense of my loss of her.  This was a strife against the inevitable; at eighteen—­or at almost any other age, to the healthy mind—­it is the living which calls, not the dead.