se of the redwood region of California
are said to be the largest and most effective lumber-makers in the
world. Tacoma alone claims to have eleven sawmills, and Seattle about as
many; while at many other points on the Sound, where the conditions are
particularly favorable, there are immense lumbering establishments,
as at Ports Blakely, Madison, Discovery, Gamble, Ludlow, etc., with a
capacity all together of over three million feet a day. Nevertheless,
the observer coming up the Sound sees not nor hears anything of this
fierce storm of steel that is devouring the forests, save perhaps the
shriek of some whistle or the columns of smoke that mark the position of
the mills. All else seems as serene and unscathed as the silent watching
mountains.

XIX. People and Towns of Puget Sound

As one strolls in the woods about the logging camps, most of the
lumbermen are found to be interesting people to meet, kind and obliging
and sincere, full of knowledge concerning the bark and sapwood
and heartwood of the trees they cut, and how to fell them without
unnecessary breakage, on ground where they may be most advantageously
sawed into logs and loaded for removal. The work is hard, and all of
the older men have a tired, somewhat haggard appearance. Their faces are
doubtful in color, neither sickly nor quite healthy-looking, and seamed
with deep wrinkles like the bark of the spruces, but with no trace of
anxiety. Their clothing is full of rosin and never wears out. A little
of everything in the woods is stuck fast to these loggers, and their
trousers grow constantly thicker with age. In all their movements and
gestures they are heavy and deliberate like the trees above them, and
they walk with a swaying, rocking gait altogether free from quick, jerky
fussiness, for chopping and log rolling have quenched all that. They are
also slow of speech, as if partly out of breath, and when one tries
to draw them out on some subject away from logs, all the fresh, leafy,
outreaching branches of the mind seem to have been withered and killed
with fatigue, leaving their lives little more than dry lumber. Many a
tree have these old axemen felled, but, round-shouldered and stooping,
they too are beginning to lean over. Many of their companions are
already beneath the moss, and among those that we see at work some are
now dead at the top (bald), leafless, so to speak, and tottering to
their fall.

A very different man, seen now and then at