30 NEW HAMPSHIRE AGRICULTURE. 



While the present proprietor does not boast of his treatment 

 of these forest lands, he is unprepared to criticise it with very 

 great severity. He started with a belief entertained by older, 

 and, as he thought, wiser men than himself, that a forest of 

 miscellaneous trees of all sizes, ages, and conditions, had best 

 be swept off clean, when visited by the ox team and the axe, 

 and the land left bare for the production of a new one. 



In accordance with this belief, he sold for wood and timber 

 the entire growth of his pine lot. He also sold the land. In 

 this transaction he made two mistakes. The first was in selling 

 the land which he could have retained at a small discount from 

 the whole price, not then realizing that it costs little to keep 

 that which is of little value. The second was in not restricting 

 his sale to the mature growth, inasmuch as the remaining trees 

 would, in a generation or less, afford a second cutting, being 

 then for the most part of sizes sufficient to bear with little 

 harm the fires which swept over more or less of that plain 

 almost every year. 1 



Much of his upland forest was at first treated in the same 

 way, with the single variation that the ground upon which it 

 stood was not sold. Consequently his woods are now for the 

 most part of recent growths of from twenty to forty years. He 

 sincerely hopes that his successors, whomsoever they may be, 

 may prove wiser than has he, and adopt a more rational sys- 

 tem of forestry. To one who has failed to do as well as he 

 might, there is little consolation that his neighbors have done 

 no better, or perchance not quite so well. He is, however, 

 somewhat comforted by the thought that from a portion of the 

 old farm's forest mature trees only have been removed, and that 

 on this a second cutting may be made whenever his pocket- 

 book shall have a severe attack of that empty belly ache of 



berry, Vaecinium corymbosum; Winter Bush, Ilex verticellata; Sweet Fern, 

 Comptonia asplenifolia; Pussy Willow, Salix discolor; Common Alder, Alnus 

 serrulata. 



1 Denuded land on the Dark Plain, in Concord, was valued at only one or two 

 dollars an acre. If small trees are cut they afford only immature wood, meas- 

 ure but little and bring very little money in the market; but it may have taken 

 half a generation to produce them and a like time to raise others of equal size. 

 With a little care many such trees may be saved in lumbering and afford a 

 good start for a new growth. In short, they are worth more to stand than to 

 cut. 



