Yellow Birch

The firelight flickers on the bark-covered rafters, lighting up the yellow-birch partition between living-room and bedroom downstairs, and plays upon the rustic stairway that leads to the two rooms overhead, as we sit before the hearth in quiet talk. ❋ Barrus, Clara, 1864-1931 (1914)

The long yellow-birch canoe is taken down from the shanty roof or from a sheltered scaffold, stitched, gummed, and launched; and the dogs are turned loose to fend for themselves. ❋ Ernest Thompson Seton (1903)

When nature had some special celebration with the trees, such as decking them with snow or ice or the first buds of spring, he frequently tramped eight or ten miles "to keep an appointment with a beech-tree or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines." ❋ Reuben Post Halleck (1897)

One was under a great yellow-birch tree, close to the bank of the river. ❋ Henry Van Dyke (1892)

In a yellow-birch top at a little opening near the old road we saw two partridges eating buds; Addison shot one of them and took it along, slung to his gun barrel. ❋ Unknown (1887)

They are very proper forest houses, the stems of the trees collected together and piled up around a man to keep out wind and rain, -- made of living green logs, hanging with moss and lichen, and with the curls and fringes of the yellow-birch bark, and dripping with resin, fresh and moist, and redolent of swampy odors, with that sort of vigor and perennialness even about them that toadstools suggest. ❋ Unknown (1858)

The Indian said that the white-maple punk was the best for tinder, that yellow-birch punk was pretty good, but hard. ❋ Unknown (1858)

But no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines; when the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir-trees; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking down another snow-storm on my head at every step; or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters. ❋ Unknown (1854)