1 10 IValks in New England 



through the land, sending out their sparks to set 

 fires that burn over in an hour 25 or 30 acres of 

 young forest and rob him of all their promise. 

 What has man been given reason for ? Appar 

 ently to make a dollar to-day, forgetting that 

 generations are to come after him to whom his 

 dollar will be valueless because long since ex 

 pended, and whom his destruction of the very 

 sources of life has left poor indeed. No, man 

 does not use his reason, with even his self-interest, 

 except for the bare moment. Obloquy has set 

 tled over more than one generation in the history 

 of man for the cause which was expressed in the 

 phrase of the Bourbon society of France before 

 its great Revolution &quot; After us, the deluge.&quot; 

 There is too much of this in even our civilization, 

 though the motto is not avowed. What the earth 

 is to render, what society is to become, when we 

 are gone, these things are not sufficiently re 

 garded by the present generation. 



Let us try to escape from these difficult and 

 dispiriting thoughts. Let us leave the city, in 

 these opening days of summer, forget its paved 

 streets and its clouds of black smoke clogging the 

 free air of God, and visit those precincts where 

 yet Nature reigns. It is long ere we reach those 

 unpolluted places. But once among the undis 

 puted tracts, where streets are not yet laid out, 



