s
fellows, and met the challenge of the blasts of heaven, and drunk of
the wines of the dews of an immortal youth, and dieted on the ambrosial
ether of gods, and sent his seedling offspring sailing ten thousand
airy seas with the wind for master pilot and never a craft but the
gypsy parachute of a seed with wings shaken out from the cones purpling
to the autumn heat!

Air ships? Had the modern world gone mad over air ships? This fellow
had been sending out whole navies of air ships for thousands of years;
seeding the mighty mountains; fighting all rivals; travelling on the
wings of the wind, and if consumed by fire, then, like the phoenix
springing to new life from the ashes, sending forth fresh armadas from
the pendant purplish cinnamon-scented cones split open by the heat and
so releasing fresh winged seeds!

Wayland used to dream, as he rode down the hog's back trail, of the day
coming when all the National Forests would be a great park, the
people's playground, yielding bigger annual harvest in ripe lumber than
the wheat fields or the corn; yielding income for the State and health
for the Nation. Germany did it. Why couldn't America? Why not,
indeed; except that she had not exterminated her pirates of the public
weal, her freebooters of the wilderness, her slippery fingered
pick-pockets, who shouted "_I am Uncle Sam_," while they picked Uncle
Sam's pockets?

Riding down the hog's back, you first left the larches and the junipers
below the snow line, the junipers beginning to show their berries, the
larches yellowing and shedding their golden shower to the approach of
autumn. Then, a turn of the trail; and you were among the hemlocks,
funereal and sombre in the distance, wonderfully lightened when you
were below them by the sage-green moss and the pale silver blue lining
on the under side of the leaves. Another turn or two, there came the
feathery sugar pine and the Douglas spruce--the monarchs of the
North-Western Forests--plume decked warriors carrying a glint of spears
with the scars of a thousand years and a thousand victories in the
wrinkled bark, with cones like tassels, and whorls like banners. You
could count these whorls, or the scars of the whorls; and you had their
years; and the bluish green shade was restful as the repose of age.
The smell of them, it was like incense; incense to the deity of the
woods; and when the wind blew, every old evergreen harped the age-old
melodies of Pan. And, oh,