nd sweeping down to Smelter City.

He used to dream, as he rode down the bridle path, of the day coming
when all the vast domain of National Forests would be like that trail;
not a stick of underbrush or slash as big as your finger; not a stump
above eighteen inches high; all the scaled logs piled neat as card
board boxes; open park below the resinous cinnamon-smelling lodge-pole
line and englemann spruce, hardly a branch lower on the trees than the
height of a man; and such a rain of tempered light from the clicking
pine needles and whorled spruces as might have come through the rose
window of a cathedral. A "show" picture of a properly conducted
National Forest has gone through all the magazines and newspapers--It
represents the piles of cordwood clean as piles of pencils, the trees
standing park-like with vistas and glades and opens beneath the tall
pinery. Wayland knew in his own heart that his Forest was better than
that "show" picture. No pictures could tell of the pine seedlings
stolen from a squirrel _cache_ scattered on the snows; the delicate
young pinery coming up among a protecting nursery of birch and poplar
and cottonwood. No picture could show "the dead tops" cut out; the
"cheesy" rotten heartwood burning on an altar of sacrifice to the deity
of the forest; the markings on "the dead tops" and ripe trees and trees
with broken top "leaders" for the lumberman to come and harvest. No
picture could give the jolly song of the cross-cut saw, the musical
ripping of the oiled blade through the huge logs, the odor of the
imprisoned sunbeams and flowers from the rain of the yellow saw-dust.
No picture could possibly tell you the life story of yon big tree, the
warrior of the woods who had beaten down all competitors and enemies
and wore his purple cones like the tasseled honor badges of a soldier,
with pendulous moving, plumy arms: yet to the eye of the Forester, the
life history was there, in the fluted grooved columnar bark, in the
knot scars where branches had been discarded to send the main trunk
towering above its fellows for light and air, in the wood rings, where
a branch had broken and fallen away in the struggle. Why, this noble
fellow had been a straggling sapling a thousand years before the birth
of Christ! Before Darius led his conquering hosts from realm to realm,
or ever Caesar knew life, or Christopher Columbus framed mast and spar
to discover America, this sun-crowned monarch had over-topped hi