62 SUNSHINE AND SPORT IN 



The April sun, which, a few days earlier, had blazed 

 fiercely on the cities of the plain, was only agree- 

 ably warm in the dry air of high levels, and broke 

 gratefully through almost impenetrable screens of 

 wood and leaf and flower, flashing back from the 

 lumps of mica that strew every track. 



Not, though his appreciation of the beautiful in 

 Nature lagged not a step behind my own, did my 

 Argus-eyed cicerone miss a dollar of the immense 

 value of the lumber that makes such heavy con- 

 tribution to the picturesqueness of the scene. The 

 timber that he could see without even turning his 

 head totalled to millions of dollars. The high- 

 grade white pine, which towered above the road, 

 would, even at the modest average of ten dollars 

 the square, have kept a German princeling in the 

 lap of luxury for the rest of his royal career. 

 There was a nabob's fortune in inch-thick poplar 

 at fifty dollars the thousand. The bark that clothed 

 the jack-pines, scored though it was by untiring 

 woodpeckers, could all have been taken up by mills 

 in Pennsylvania that would convert it first to pulp 

 and then into postage stamps. Until quite recently, 

 the chestnut was reckoned ornamental only, which 

 means a low standard in American values. The 

 wood is the poorest of fuel and availed only for 

 fence-rails, owing, no doubt, to the ease with 

 which it splits lengthwise. All of a sudden, tanners 

 ran short of material and discovered that chestnut 

 bark would serve their purpose, so that this once 

 neglected lumber now commands three dollars a 

 cord. At such a price, fifty thousand sovereigns' 

 worth might easily be stripped off the landscape 

 without any eye being the wiser. Yet the value 



