1010 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



plodding through brake and pink azalea by the brookside, 

 would have been up tiiere sweeping gracefully over yawn- 

 ing, moonlit depths from limb to bending limb and throw- 

 ing down nuts and sticks to tease the sabor-toothed tiger 

 and cave bear lurking in the shadows. 



There is no snow on the ground just now, and we are 

 struck with the beautiful precision with which each 

 sharp awl-like skunk cabbage, green or purple, sticks up 

 throusrh the frostv mud bv the brook. This skunk cab- 



A PICTURESQUE AND INVITING WOOD PATH IN LATE WINTER 



bage, blossoming among the snowbanks and mud-flats in 

 January, is the first flower of Spring, undoubtedly. 



What a jungle there is here in the bottom land of black 

 mucky loam ! Christmas ferns. Maidenhair ferns, rock 

 ferns, brakes, sarsaparilla, jack-in-the-pulpit, nioonwort. 

 snakeroot, pinkster, feverbush, sassafras, and dogwood, 

 all growing year after year, dropping withered leaf and 

 sere stalk back into the mixing bowl to rot and form that 

 wonderful black surface soil that is the fertilizer of the 

 great old forest trees towering above. This is Nature's 

 kitchen where she kneads over and over the earth-stufl:" 

 for reincarnating her little plant and mighty tree folk. 

 It is her laboratory, workshop, her hosjjital where she 

 l)erforms miracles of surgery and resuscitation. We reach 

 down among the decayed, lichen-covered roots of an 

 ancient hemlock stump and take up a handful of this 

 wonder-working black loam and ponder over it. It is 

 so clean we would not hesitate to taste it — and yet it is 

 the decay of centuries here in the forest, centuries of 

 bird, animal, in.sect, plant and fungus life. It is the 



stuft' that once may have been the bloom on the cheek of 

 an Algonquin maid, or the delicate veining in the lip of 

 the white violet, the tough heart of many an oak or 

 chestnut, or the taloons of eagle or fishhawk. It's the 

 dough from which all this loveliness about us was fabri- 

 cated, and, after a fashion, from which we, ourselves, 

 came. It comes the nearest to being the mysterious 

 Philosophers' Stone of the Alagi, for it is one thing that, 

 with careful conservation and manipulation, turns every- 

 thing to gold. It is the foundation of the forests which 

 are the foinidation of the wealth of the peoples. 



Note for a moment the fallen timber in this little patch 

 of wood. There are similar patches all over America. 

 Wiien I visited John Burroughs on his eighty-first birth- 

 day the country was anxious about the fuel supply, to 

 get it through the season of 1917-18, and Burroughs 

 agreed with nie that if the fallen wood in the forests of 



UP AMONG THE GREAT LEDGES THE FERNS ARE STILL GREEN 



the eastern states had been gathered it would have gone 

 far toward keeping the Storm King out of the sitting 

 rooms of America that winter. Of course there is the 

 labor problem — but take an old hay rack and a dozen 

 children down any picturesque wood path in Autumn and 

 see how quickly it can be filled with wood-knots and 

 bone-dry limbs that crumble naturally into castles of coals 

 in the open fireplace, and bake apples such a candied 

 brown on the hearth in front. Clearing up the under- 



