Next to the Ground 



sun-baking with wettings in between makes 

 it thin and slow and cloddy after years of 

 cultivation. 



Joe loved the woods, yet the clearing fas- 

 cinated him. He did not work there regu- 

 larly, though for five minutes or so he could 

 chop with the best of the men. It took mighty 

 and well-seasoned muscle to ply an ax day after 

 day. The black fellows knew all the art and 

 mystery of clearing which is not nearly so 

 much a haphazard performance as at first blush 

 it looks to be. Here upon the hillside they 

 could look up a tree before setting ax to it, 

 and tell which way it would fall if it fell of 

 its own mass. They could also throw it any 

 way that pleased them up hill, or down, or 

 across. Further they could judge by the bark 

 pretty well how the timber of a standing oak 

 would run. Rough, warty bark was a sure 

 sign of brash timber, never splitting true, but 

 with an eating cleavage. Where the outer 

 bark cracked in what looked like flights of 

 little stair-steps, the timber was warped so 

 much so sometimes that in the ten feet of a 

 rail-cut, the fibers made half a turn from top 

 to bottom. Crinkly crisscross patches of bark 

 meant wind-shakes underneath. Sometimes 

 in a big board-tree, the wind-shake ran only 

 through one eighth or one quarter of the trunk. 

 More commonly it spoiled a whole half. Oc- 



