xxiv INTRODUCTION. 
To destroy the forests of America has been a brief 
work; to replant and reproduce them will be the labor 
of forty generations, but it can be done. I have written 
many books and submitted them to my countrymen for 
their approval, but never have I approached a subject 
with such diffidence and consciousness of my inability 
to cope with it as the one treated of in the following 
pages. 
When I learned to love the trees I cannot remember, 
but I was born under the spurs of the Alleghanies, and 
passed my infancy in the umbrageous shade of their 
wide-spreading pines. I fished and hunted along the 
streams, and she who is the mother of my children often 
accompanied me in my rambles through the grand old 
mountain forests of Pennsylvania. How beautiful these 
mountains were, with their coats of pine, green as the 
sea! Shade so deep and dark it seemed like night on the 
brightest day ; babbling brooks with sly little nooks by 
bits of grass, and deep, cool pools where the hermit trout 
lay. Here was a mossy glen and there a waterfall, yon- 
der a clambering vine in many a wild festoon, and at 
our feet a bed of moss softer than down. If we turned 
over a rock in the mountain’s side we found ice beneath 
it even in the hottest days of August. Then there were 
caves, deep, dark, and cool, filled with ice on the sides 
dripping with cold water, and stalactites shining over- 
head. How I remember stealing away and hiding in 
one of these caves, years and years ago, while the boys 
brought our brave mountain girls to see it; and when I 
roared like a bear how they ran like frightened fawns, 
a white dress glinting here and there through the forest, 
until all were lost to view in the distance, and Annie 
Berry sprained her foot so terribly on that day she was 
