Forest and Stream 
$3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy, 
Six Months, $1.50. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1912. 
Entered as second-class matter at the Post-Office, New York, N. Y. 
VOL. LXXIX.—No. 23. 
127 Franklin St., New York. 
Getting a Christmas Tree 
By FRANK FARRINGTON 
Y OU may think it strange that a man living 
alone out in the woods as I do_ should have 
any use for a Christmas tree, and in a 
sense you are right. But if I did not myself 
expect to set up in my shanty, ‘‘Spruce Hut,” a 
beautiful, fresh evergreen and decorate it with 
candles and dance around it in their flickering 
light, I at least knew of some people who did 
expect to do something like that. 
The village storekeeper is a pretty good 
scout, as the boys say, and many a time he does 
me a favor that makes me feel pretty kindly 
toward him. 
He has two children, a small boy of three 
and a girl of five. He does not seem to have 
as much money as some people, but I have never 
seen him when that shortage was causing any 
grouchiness upon his part. 
His whole family have enough to eat, and 
he is saving up some money so that the boy and 
the girl can have an education that will fit them 
for something—and that is more than the chil¬ 
dren of a lot of people with more money will get. 
Christmas is the storekeeper’s busy time. He 
gets a chance to come out shooting with me 
occasionally in the fall, or fishing in the summer. 
He enjoys a good deal more liberty than his 
city cousins do. But not a bit of that liberty 
comes just; at the time when it is open season 
on Christmas trees. 
And so, after talking to his children about 
it one day in the store, I agreed to get them a 
Christmas tree if they would let me come and 
see it after it was decorated. 
Little Tommy and his motherly five-year-old 
sister Kate both grew very enthusiastic over the 
proposition, and I was committed to the task of 
bringing in a suitable tree, and I mentally de¬ 
termined that it should be the best of the woods, 
though it could not be more than eight and a 
half feet tall and stand up in the storekeeper’s 
parlor. 
Snow began to come early up in the moun¬ 
tains and the river was frozen up tight the first 
of December. One begins early to think about 
the holidays in such a year, and while I knew 
that it was not best to cut the tree too soon, I 
could not put it off any later than the 21st. 
There were some hemlocks and a few spruce 
on the hillside that sloped toward the village, 
but they were scraggly, unsymmetrical, ragged 
specimens and none of them was good enough 
for any friend of mine, so I determined to take 
a chance and go over into a piece of hemlock 
timber across the swamp from “Spruce Hut” 
and help myself to a young and perfect tree that 
stood not far from a board bearing the legend, 
“No Trespassing.” 
That sign is not as irritating to me as it is 
to some people, because I have grown used to 
seeing it there. I know the man who owns the 
property and I know that there is some reason 
in his posting his farm. He has had bars left 
down by hunters who did not care that the cows 
got out and into the corn. He has had pieces 
of stone wall and pieces of wire fence made 
easy gaps for stock by careless hunters climbing 
over them. He has had to get his neighbors to 
come and help him put out fires in his timber, 
fires that campers or picnickers started and left 
burning. 
If there were no trampling upon property 
owners’ rights by the people who go hunting and 
fishing, there would be few farmers who would 
take the trouble to post their farms. 
We had been treated to a fall of about eight 
inches of snow on the 20th, so that everything 
was white and clean when I started out the next 
morning to get my tree. 
I went around the swamp to where the little 
outlet stream flows along the edge of the posted 
woods, and thence off down the slope to the 
creek. The trees hung heavy with the snow and 
the brooklet itself was almost buried in it. I 
was familiar with every foot of the way and 
many a time I had marked that particular little 
hemlock as the perfect Christmas tree. 
I crawled through the fence, dragging my 
axe after me and measuring with my eye what 
I thought would be about the right height for 
the tree. I struck into it with a few sharp 
strokes and soon had the upper part, the part 
that I wanted, lying on the snow before me, 
while I was myself covered with a mass of white 
shaken off by the blows of the axe. 
I was trimming up the branches around the 
base of my prize when I heard a snapping of 
twigs and looked up to see the owner of the 
timber land striding toward me. 
There was no way of escape. I was caught 
with the goods on me. There was nothing to 
do but stand my ground and have it out with a 
man whom I had been caught robbing just as 
much as if I had been discovered taking a sack 
of grain out of his stable. 
“Whose trees are you cuttin’ down ?” he de¬ 
manded. 
“This is that tree that I wrote you about,” 
I said. 
“You ain’t wrote me about any tree,” said 
my visitor. “Can’t you see that sign over there, 
‘No Trespassin’’ ?” 
