CHAPTER XV

Summary

The Norfolk Island pine (Aracauria excelsa), of which, as I have before remarked, we had three magnificent specimens close to the house, is certainly the most noble and stately tree of all the pine family that I have ever seen, beautiful as are they all. The tall, erect, and tapering stem (seventy or eighty feet high), the regularity of the circling branches, lessening by small degrees from the widely-spread expanse below, to the tiny cross that crowns the summit of the exquisite natural spire, and the richly verdant, dense, massive foliage clothing the whole with an unfading array of scale-armour, form altogether the finest model of a pine that can be imagined. The cones too are worthy to grow on such a tree; solid ponderous things, as large as a child's head—not a baby's head, neither—with a fine embossed coat of mail, firmly seated on the beam-like branches, as if defying the winds to shake them.

Mr. Meredith climbed very nearly to the summit of our tallest pine, and said he had never seen anything more beautiful than the downward view into and over the mass of diverging branches spread forth beneath him. He brought me down one cone, with its spray, if so I may call the armful of thick green shoots that surrounded it, and I was gazing at it for half the day after; it was so different from anything I had seen before, so new, and so grandly beautiful.