232 Next to the Ground 



sun-baking with wettings in between makes 

 it thin and slow and cloddy after years of 

 cultivation. 



Joe loved the woods, yet the clearing fas- 

 cinated him. He did not work there regu- 

 larly, though for five minutes or so he could 

 chop with the best of the men. It took mighty 

 and well-seasoned muscle to ply an ax day after 

 day. The black fellows knew all the art and 

 mystery of clearing — which is not nearly so 

 much a haphazard performance as at first blush 

 it looks to be. Here upon the hillside they 

 could look up a tree before setting ax to it, 

 and tell which way it would fall if it fell of 

 its own mass. They could also throw it any 

 way that pleased them — up hill, or down, or 

 across. Further they could judge by the bark 

 pretty well how the timber of a standing oak 

 would run. Rough, warty bark was a sure 

 sign of brash timber, never splitting true, but 

 with an eating cleavage. Where the outer 

 bark cracked in what looked like flights of 

 little stair-steps, the timber was warped — so 

 much so sometimes that in the ten feet of a 

 rail-cut, the fibers made half a turn from top 

 to bottom. Crinkly crisscross patches of bark 

 meant wind-shakes underneath. Sometimes 

 in a big board-tree, the wind-shake ran only 

 through one eighth or one quarter of the trunk. 

 More commonly it spoiled a whole half. Oc- 



