234 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
run out of these immense forests all the finer, and more 
accessible pine timber, and then leave the bears to watch 
the decaying dams, not clearing nor cultivating the land, 
nor making roads, nor building houses, but leaving it a 
wilderness, as they found it. In many parts, only these 
dams remain, like deserted beaver-dams. Think how 
much land they have flowed, without asking Nature’s 
leave ! When the State wishes to endow an academy or 
university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw 
represents an academy; a gang, a university. 
The wilderness experiences a sudden rise of all her 
streams and lakes, she feels ten thousand vermin gnaw¬ 
ing at the base of her noblest trees, many combining, 
drag them off, jarring over the roots of the survivors, and 
tumble them into the nearest stream, till the fairest hav¬ 
ing fallen, they scamper off to ransack some new wilder¬ 
ness, and all is still again. It is as when a migrating 
army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper 
fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws 
them, — to get his living. You tell me that he has a 
more interesting family than the mouse. That is as it 
happens. He speaks of a “ berth” of timber, a good 
place for him to get into, just as a worm might. When 
the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell 
you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen 
stood on its stump ; as if that were what the pine had 
grown for, to become the footstool of oxen. In my mind’s 
eye, I can see these unwieldy tame deer, with a yoke 
binding them together, and brazen-tipped horns betray¬ 
ing their servitude, taking their stand on the stump of 
each giant pine in succession throughout this whole for¬ 
est, and chewing their cud there, until it is nothing but 
an ox-pasture, and run out at that. As if it were good 
