emlock, it ran without
a break, clear, clean, of cloud-sweeping altitude, without underbrush.
Most of it was good bull-sap, which is known by the fineness of
the bark, though often in the hollows it shaded gradually into the
rough-skinned cork pine. In those days few people paid any attention to
the Norway, and hemlock was not even thought of. With every foot of the
way Thorpe became more and more impressed.

At first the grandeur, the remoteness, the solemnity of the virgin
forest fell on his spirit with a kind of awe. The tall, straight trunks
lifted directly upwards to the vaulted screen through which the sky
seemed as remote as the ceiling of a Roman church. Ravens wheeled and
croaked in the blue, but infinitely far away. Some lesser noises wove
into the stillness without breaking the web of its splendor, for the
pine silence laid soft, hushing fingers on the lips of those who might
waken the sleeping sunlight.

Then the spirit of the pioneer stirred within his soul. The wilderness
sent forth its old-time challenge to the hardy. In him awoke that
instinct which, without itself perceiving the end on which it is bent,
clears the way for the civilization that has been ripening in old-world
hot-houses during a thousand years. Men must eat; and so the soil must
be made productive. We regret, each after his manner, the passing of
the Indian, the buffalo, the great pine forests, for they are of the
picturesque; but we live gladly on the product of the farms that have
taken their places. Southern Michigan was once a pine forest: now the
twisted stump-fences about the most fertile farms of the north alone
break the expanse of prairie and of trim "wood-lots."

Thorpe knew little of this, and cared less. These feathered trees,
standing close-ranked and yet each isolate in the dignity and gravity
of a sphinx of stone set to dancing his blood of the frontiersman.
He spread out his map to make sure that so valuable a clump of timber
remained still unclaimed. A few sections lying near the headwaters were
all he found marked as sold. He resumed his tramp light-heartedly.

At the ten-mile point he came upon a dam. It was a crude dam,--built of
logs,--whose face consisted of strong buttresses slanted up-stream, and
whose sheer was made of unbarked timbers laid smoothly side by side at
the required angle. At present its gate was open. Thorpe could see
that it was an unusually large gate, with a powerful apparatus for the
raising a