. 
VENEERED HUMAN NATURE. 
GRANT WALLACE, 
In the San Francisco Bulletin. 
All healthy and normal souls love the 
society of trees and mountains. What a 
relief to be away for a season from the 
crowded pavements and the marts of sordid 
men, where familiarity begets contempt and 
weariness of spirit, to the wilderness of 
crags and pines, fresh and inspiring as when 
spilled from the hand of the Creator, where 
familiarity begets only respect and tender- 
ness! , 
Forever, the highest wisdom springs from 
the tenderest feelings. Your laboratory 
scientist, coldly intellectual, unemotional, 
may observe external facts, and tabulate 
and compare; but he shall never lay hold 
on the big, eternal truths of life until he lets 
emotion play under intellect, even as the 
flame plays under the crucible of cold min- 
erals in his laboratory. Then the gold 
cometh. ; 
Your city man comes forth encrusted with 
materiality, functioning brilliantly enough 
on the mental plane, but lacking in that 
close sympathy with his brother men and 
his brother beasts and birds and that tender 
interest in and consideration for their lives 
and comfort whtich the quiet, observant 
rustic displays. 
The city for intellect, the country for 
genuine human feeling. The city for smug, 
refined hypocrisy in half the acts of life, 
the country for uncouth candor and un- 
manicured sincerity. 
For the most astounding examples of 
ironed and perfumed savagery, commend 
me to the urban product. The countryman, 
particularly the mountaineer, who has time 
for mediation, may wear clothes that do 
not fit him; he may mispronounce some of 
his words; but, as a rule, he is genuine and 
tender souled; but he never shoots a deer 
if he does not need it. 
The city either breaks or hardens the 
heart. It is ever the grave of innocence and 
wholesomeness and rest. The unnatural 
conditions of modern city life, the develop- 
ment of low cunning, the mad scramble for 
pelf and place, make brutes of men, and 
encase whatever of soul there may be left 
in them in a crust of heartless materiality, 
thick and impenetrable. Civilization has 
ever developed the physical amd the intel- 
lectual at the expense of the psychic, the 
humane and the spiritual. 
Such are a few of the reflections that 
crossed my mind as I lay, rolled in my 
blanket, on a luxurious and fragrant bed 
of yellow pine needles and blossoming wild 
buckwheat, in a gloomy rhus thicket on the 
lonely summit of the Sierra de la Liebre 
mountains. 
Range on range of sun-baked mountains, 
covering hundreds of square miles to the 
West and South, practically uninhabited 
save by the deer, the puma, the wildcat and 
the quail, had melted into hazy blue and 
had then merged into the general blackness. 
It was the heart of the deer country, and 
my duties as Government Ranger in the 
great forest reserve had been rendered 
doubly arduous for a month by the neces- 
sity of keeping a watchful eye on the bands 
of deer butchers from the cities, and in 
seeing that forest fires were not started 
from their camp fires. 
These conscienceless hunters seem, many 
times, to take a vicious pleasure in see- 
ing how rapidly and completely they can 
pull off their veneer of urban civilization and 
revert to their true characters of irresponsi- 
ble savages, as soon as they are out of the 
sight of the blue coated policemen. Time 
after time, in ranging up and down the 
mountain streams of Ventura, Los Angeles, 
San Diego and San Bernardino counties, I 
have found the outlets of the trout pools 
dammed up where these gentlemen sports- 
men from the city had waded in and thrown 
all the fish out on the banks, in order that 
they might carry into camp a great catch 
of 75 to 100 trout, and so make a record. 
It is these same gentry who boast of 
shooting 100 doves a day, whether nesting 
or not; who slaughter mother does and 
tiny milk-drinking, spotted fawns, when- 
ever the Ranger or the deputy game warden 
is not watching; who scatter leaden death 
among the mocking birds, the orioles and 
the little families of half grown quails, pip- 
ing behind their mothers around the water- 
holes in the canyons, and whose motto is 
“Kill, kill! No matter what it is, kill!” 
As I drowsed under the stars, I remem- 
bered how, a few hours before, in follow- 
ing the trail of a puma over the Liebre, 
it had led me to the recently abandoned 
camp of a party of 4 deer slayers, hard 
by the only water-hole in that region, I 
caught a glimpse of the tawny “terror of 
the mountains” as he slunk away, waving 
his long, black tipped tail with quick jerks 
as an angry house cat does. At the same 
time 2 coyotes and a family of silver foxes 
_scampered away into the buckthorn chapar- 
I2e 
ral at my approach. All had been devour- 
ing fragments of venison and gnawing at 
the half stripped carcases of deer surround- 
ing the abandoned camp. 

