THE HOLIDAY OF DREAMS 385 
and their resistless allies of sun and rain, in half a 
century would erase all but the ineradicable signs of 
the presence of the destroyer, presenting to some 
future generation the privilege of joining the beauty 
of the wilderness to the graces of civilized life. For 
the whole world is now one population, all knowing 
each other, and it is incredible that the work of the 
future will not be in the direction of abolishing war, 
misery, and ugliness. 
When the vitality of man and the energy of money 
are freed from the barbaric waste of to-day, physical 
and municipal, as they will be freed, and can be di- 
verted into making the earth beautiful, then, if not 
before, this enchanting region will be transformed 
into the paradise which is so evidently its function 
in the scheme of nature. For these mountains have 
been preserved as though on purpose for man's 
pleasure. Nowhere else does such variety of beauti- 
ful trees grow in natural forests, nowhere else do 
such flowers bloom in gardens of nature's planting. 
The long line of the Appalachian Mountains, the 
oldest land in this country, perhaps in the world, 
having in its southern part escaped the cold death 
of the glacier, is probably the original home whence 
many of our hardwood trees have spread over the 
Northern Hemisphere. Once connected by land with 
eastern Asia, North America shared the flora of that 
part of the world, and when the Ice Age spread its 
destroying mantle over the whole northern part of 
the earth, the plants of the New World, — which 
is, geologically speaking, a very old world, — re- 
