it to any one. How the guilty party was ever to be traced Charley
could not even imagine. The situation appeared hopeless.

However, Charley had small chance to worry about the matter. As the days
passed, the forester laid more and more duties upon him. Many a lad would
have thought the forester was imposing upon him, but Charley was eager to
do everything he possibly could. He realized that the more he
accomplished, the greater would be his experience; and that the larger his
experience was, the faster he ought to get ahead. He had the good sense to
know that the short way of spelling opportunity is <i>w-o-r-k</i>. And he
realized that he had his chance here and now. So he did everything he
possibly could do and asked for more.

The forester, like any other man in authority, was pleased beyond words at
this spirit. His response was to pile the work on Charley. He was testing
him out, to see whether the desire for work was just a whim or whether
Charley possessed that real ambition, that inward spirit of progress that
drives a man on and on through the years to greater and greater
accomplishments. For the best worker in the world is the man who works
because he wishes to work, and who is always striving to become a better
workman.

Certainly Charley became a better workman, as any one does who works in
the spirit he exhibited. The mere getting of a wage, the mere earning of a
living hardly figured in Charley's calculations. He was working to learn,
to get ahead, to climb up in the Forestry Service. Hence there was nothing
perfunctory in what he did. He strove for perfection; and like all who so
strive, he began to attain it.

Before he had been many weeks a ranger, Charley was as valuable a man in
many ways as the forester had under him. All Charley lacked to make him
perhaps the very best man was wider experience; and this was coming to him
daily. Furthermore, Charley was fortunate enough to have learned, through
his schooling, that although experience is the best teacher, he is a fool
who learns only through his own experience. All the information in all the
books that Charley had ever studied was the result of experience--somebody
else's experience. And he had early grasped the fact that to learn through
the experience of others is to save time and difficulty. So now he
supplemented his own experiences by much reading and study at night and by
the discussion of forest matters with the more intelligent of his workme