sted.

"Well, Peter," I said, "I suppose I have made it easy enough for you:
We have another twelve miles to make. You'll have to get up." But Peter
this time did not stir till I touched him a flick with my whip.

The trail winds around, for it is a logging trail, leading up to the
best bluffs, which are ruthlessly cut down by the fuel-hunters. Only
dead and half decayed trees are spared. But still young boles spring up
in astonishing numbers. Aspen and Balm predominate, though there is some
ash and oak left here and there, with a conifer as the rarest treat for
the lover of trees. It is a pitiful thing to see a Nation's heritage
go into the discard. In France or in England it would be tended as
something infinitely precious. The face of our country as yet shows the
youth of infancy, but we make it prematurely old. The settler who should
regard the trees as his greatest pride, to be cut into as sparingly as
is compatible with the exigencies of his struggle for life--he regards
them as a nuisance to be burned down by setting wholesale fires to them.
Already there is a scarcity of fuel-wood in these parts.

Where the fires as yet have not penetrated too badly, the cutting, which
leaves only what is worthless, determines the impression the forest
makes. At night this impression is distinctly uncanny. Like gigantic
brooms, with their handles stuck into the ground, the dead wood stands
up; the underbrush crowds against it, so dense that it lies like huge
black cushions under the stars. The inner recesses form an almost
impenetrable mass of young boles of shivering aspen and scented balm.
This mass slopes down to thickets of alder, red dogwood, haw, highbush
cranberry, and honeysuckle, with wide beds of goldenrod or purple asters
shading off into the spangled meadows wherever the copses open up into
grassy glades.

Through this bush, and skirting its meadows, I drove for an hour. There
was another fork in the trail, and again I had to get out and walk on
the side, to feel with my foot for the rut where it branched to the
north. And then, after a while, the landscape opened up, the brush
receded. At last I became conscious of a succession of posts to the
right, and a few minutes later I emerged on the second east-west grade.
Another mile to the east along this grade, and I should come to the
last, homeward stretch.

Again I began to talk to the horse. "Only five miles now, Peter, and
then the night's rest. A good drink, a