WALKS IN THE WOODS 



1011 



brush gives young trees a chance, avoids forest fires, and 

 obviates the necessity of cutting down many live trees 

 for firewood. 



A tree has such a personality, a possibility for vast 

 good to the race to be considered, that no one should 

 cut it down without due thought and care. When we 

 have learned to respect our forests as we do our live- 

 stock, America will have laid the foundations for solving 

 many a tragic economic problem looming so darkly now. 

 Mankind in his primitive days lived in the forests. He 

 fled there for protection as to a mother in his infant cen- 

 turies. Robin Hood sought sanctuary there. The hunted 

 outlaw flees him to the greenwood tree. You and I are 

 out here today for rest and comfort in the strength of the 

 forests. When we in America have spent our rich in- 

 heritance in thoughtless living, our streams are drying 

 up, and the desert stretches across the continent without 

 the voice of bird or animal, 

 and our fields are running 

 out we'll return to the 

 protection of the forests as 

 once they protected and 

 cared for us, or we'll go the 

 way of Tyre, Sidon, and 

 the dodo. Not only must 

 we protect the Adirondack 

 forest, the great national 

 parks, the White Moun- 

 tains, but also every little 

 woodlot all across the 

 country like this at the 

 Grassy Sprain. 



Right here on the edge of 

 the bog, among the grass- 

 roots, ox-eyed daisies and 

 buttercups, last Spring, I 

 found the round leaved 

 orchis, though it does not grow commonly back in the 

 bog where the marsh marigold, the cowslip, grows. I 

 took it home for my wild garden and expect great things 

 of it next Spring. Incidentally it is interesting that so 

 many beautiful denizens of the wild wood grow in one 

 locality and do not appear in some other close by. The 

 wake-robin grows everywhere along the Palisades on 

 the west side of the Hudson, for instance, but I have 

 never found it in Hastings on the east side of the 

 river. 



While I am taking you along the State road to show 

 you where the watercress grows under a bridge in the 

 Sprain brook, and where the closed gentians are the 

 color of the bluebird's back in Autumn, where in the deep 

 troods the box turtles lie luxuriating in the cool edges 



LOTS OF FALLEN TIMBER IN THIS LITTLE PATCH OF WOOD 



of the swamp on hot summer days, I want to tell you 

 what I heard of the conversion of a very dyspeptic, cross, 

 material-minded man whose boast it was that there was 

 nothing in the world that couldn't be understood by his 

 common sense, and that he was from Missouri, anyway. 

 He was told by his physician that if he didn't get out 

 into the woods for a summer, he would die. He didn't 

 want to die, somehow, and so he came out here into the 

 Grassy Sprain forest, grumblingly and complainingly, as 

 a man going to his grave or a prison. In a juniper grove 

 where the gray squirrels woke him every morning with 

 their peculiar scolding, he lived all summer in a tent with 

 only the great shagbark hickories, white oaks, hemlocks 

 and junipers for companions. He went almost naked in 

 sunshine and rain, cooking his own food like a hunter, 

 and when he went back in the Fall, the color of a brown 

 nut and with added chest expansion, he had not only 



regained his bodily health, 

 but his boyish heart and a 

 close knowledge of the 

 habits of all the birds, ani- 

 mals and trees. What 

 seemed to me more import- 

 ant, though, was that 

 through the long evenings 

 sitting in his hammock by 

 the campfire and listening 

 to the music of whip-poor- 

 will and veery, he had gain- 

 ed a suspicion that there 

 were, perhaps, in the mystic 

 pathways where rabbits 

 flitted silently ; in the caves 

 under mossy stumps, and in 

 the moonlit spaces along 

 the brookside, tribes of 

 eerie Little People who 

 spent their days painting the delicate tints into the 

 jewelweeds and dogtooth violets, and coloring the pink 

 mushrooms and fungi, and their evenings dancing, prob- 

 ably, on mossy stones up among the great ledges where, as 

 we pass, we find the Christmas fern still green this winter 

 day. I don't say he believed these things, mind you, for 

 who really knows? But when he went back to the town 

 in the Autumn he was no longer sure there were not 

 things in the world that he had never seen with his two 

 cold, disbelieving eyes. That very suspicion, that there 

 might be things he didn't know about, filled his mind with 

 a new and delicious delight, a sense of baffling mystery, 

 and started it growing again. He had found a new inter- 

 est in living, and, more important, in dreaming, and 

 he was no longer a cynic. 



'"PHE first school of practical forestry in Scotland was 

 * recently opened at Birnam, in Perthshire. The 

 school building that has been erected at Birnam is itself 

 an example of what can be done in forestry, being en- 

 tirely built of home-grown wood. At present the school 

 has twelve students. The course will cover two years 



and will consist of both practical work and lec- 

 tures. The Duke of Athol has placed his wood- 

 lands at the board's disposal for practical instruction and 

 the aim of the school is both provision of technical 

 instruction and the furnishing of openings for dis- 

 charged service men. 



