io6 
the: story of TH£ oak tre)e: 
to know any more, you must hunt for them in the 
dictionary. 
It is all very thrilling, this business of the river drive, 
but nowadays, I am afraid, men have thought out quicker 
and less romantic means to bring the timber to the saw 
mill. Only certain kinds of wood are light enough to 
float upon the stream, so men have built logging rail¬ 
roads, timber slides—which are toboggan slides for 
trees—and flumes and cable tramways. If you had been 
born in Canada at the beginning of this century and 
your father had been a woodsman, you might very likely 
have ridden on the logs yourself. In driving season 
your father would have taken you and your mother and 
brother and sister upon a raft made of big logs, on top 
of which he had built a shanty. There you would have 
lived and watched the tree-clad river banks slide by, 
while at noon-time the smoke curled from the tin chimney 
rising crookedly from the stove where your mother was 
cooking the dinner. In Germany, too, men drive such 
rafts down the Rhine river from the Black Forest to the 
Row countries at the river’s mouth. 
In our western forest land live men called “cruisers” 
or “landlookers.” These men have grown up among 
the forests, they know the trees for hundreds of miles, 
and they can guide lumber dealers to the finest trees ; 
in their pockets they carry little blank books containing 
