and mountains, bringing with them 
vast quantities of sand and gravel to 
be spread over the lowlands. | 
Traveling a few years ago through 
Tunisie, I came suddenly upon a fine 
Roman bridge of stone over a wide, 
bate,udry river bed. It stood some 
thirty feet above the bed of the river 
and had once served the needs of a 
prosperous population. Marveling at 
the height of the bridge above the 
ground, I asked the French station 
master if the river ever rose to the 
arches which carried the roadway of 
the bridge. His answer testified to 
the flooding capacity of the river and 
to the strength of the bridge. He 
said; “I have been here four years, 
and three times I have seen the river 
running over the parapets of that 
bridge. That country was once one of 
the richest granaries of the Roman 
empire. It now yields a scanty sup- 
port for a sparse and semi-barbarous 
population.”’ The whole region round- 
about is treeless, The care of the 
national forests is a provision for fu- 
ture generations, for the permanence 
over vast areas of our country of the 
great industries of agriculture and 
mining upon which the prosperity of 
the country ultimately depends. A 
good forest administration would soon 
support itself—fFrom January Atlantic. 
SNOW PRISONS 
OF GAME BIRDS. 
LATE season snowstorm, with 
‘al the heavy precipitation that 
marked the storm of Feb. 28, 
gives the heart of the sports- 
man as well as that of the bird protec- 
tor a touch of anxiety on the score 
of the ruffed grouse and quail. A 
downfall of that kind, followed by a 
thaw and then by a freeze at night, 
means the death of hundreds of game 
birds. The quail simply get starved 
and cold _ killed, while the ruffed 
grouse, or partridges, get locked up 
by Jack Frost and die of hunger in 
their prisons. 
There is a patch of woods not far 
from Delavan, Wis., where there was 
until recently an abundance of these 
game birds. There was a local snow- 
‘storm there late in February last year, 
which was followed by a day of sun- 
shine and then by a frost which cov- 
ered the snow with a heavy crust. 
Grouse have a habit of escaping from 
the cold and blustering winds by bury- 
ing themselves in the big snow drifts 
at the edges of the woods. There 
they lie snug and warm and are per- 
haps loath to leave their comfortable 
quarters. They sometimes stay in the 
drift until the delay costs them their 
lives, the crust forming and walling 
them in. It so happened to sixteen 
partridges in the woodland patch near 
Delavan. With the melting of the 
season’s snows the bodies of the birds 
were found. They were separated 
from one another by only a few feet. It 
was a veritable grouse graveyard.— 
Tribune. 
Warm grows the wind, and the rain 
hammers daily, 
Making small doorways to let in the 
sun; 
Flowers spring up, and new leaves flut- 
ter gaily; 
Back fly the birdlings for winter is 
done. 
—Justine Sterns. 
164 
