CHAPTER XI 



The World Out of Doors 



The aesthetic importance of the forests; parks and 

 recreation grounds; memorial tree and roadside 

 planting; birds and animals of the forest. 



Are we such a money-loving people that only 

 commercial values and a foresight to provide for 

 our future needs and comforts can count? I think 

 not. What would childhood become without the 

 forest, without the forest stories of "Little Red 

 Riding Hood," "The Babes in the Woods," "Sleep- 

 ing Beauty" and "The Three Bears"? And grown- 

 ups flock to "Peter Pan." There is something 

 intangible about a tree which has made it through 

 generations one of man's best friends. Last summer 

 I journeyed through the devastated regions of 

 northern France. It was not the "Zone Rouge" or 

 the worst scenes of devastation that interested me 

 most — like many Americans, I had seen enough of 

 that during the war — but the roads rebuilt, and the 

 little towns and villages rising again from the flat 

 plains. They looked better and cleaner than before 



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