benign influences be diminished any more than the sun is diminished by shining. Mere destroyers, however, tree-killers, spreading death and confusion in the fairest groves and gardens ever planted, let the Government hasten to cast them out and make an end of them. For it must be told again and again, and be burningly borne in mind, that just now, while protective measures are being deliberated languidly, destruction and use are speeding on faster and farther every day. The axe and saw are insanely busy, chips are flying thick as snowflakes, and every summer thousands of acres of priceless forests, with their underbrush, soil, springs, climate, scenery, and religion, are vanishing away in clouds of smoke, while, except in the national parks, not one forest guard is employed.

All sorts of local laws and regulations have been tried and found wanting, and the costly lessons of our experience, as well as that of every civilized nation, show exclusively that the fate of the remnant of our forests is in the hands of the Federal Government, and that if the remnant is to be saved at all, it must be saved quickly.

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would plant

ing avail much toward getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. During a man's life only saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees tens of centuries old that have been destroyed. It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods - trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time and long before thatGod has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but He cannot save them from fools - only Uncle Sam can do that.

TALKING IN THEIR SLEEP*

BY EDITH M. THOMAS

"You think I am dead,"
The apple-tree said,

"Because I have never a leaf to show

Because I stoop

And my branches droop,

And the dull gray mosses over me grow!
But I'm alive in trunk and shoot;

The buds of next May

But I pity the withered grass at my foot."

* By permission of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

"You think I am dead,"

The quick grass said,

"Because I have parted with stem and blade! But under the ground

I am safe and sound,

With the snow's thick blanket over me laid.
I'm all alive, and ready to shoot

Should the spring of the year

Come dancing here

But I pity the flower without branch or root."

"You think I am dead,"

A soft voice said,

"Because not a branch or root I own!

I never have died,

But close I hide

In a plumy seed that the wind has sown.
Patient I wait through the long winter hours;
You will see me again

I shall laugh at you then,
Out of the eyes of a hundred flowers!"

THE FOREST

BY RICHARD JEFFERIES

From The Open Air

UNDER the trees the imagination plays unchecked, and calls up the past as if yew bow and broad arrow

were still in the hunter's hands. So little is changed since then. The deer are here still. Sit down on the root of this oak (thinly covered with moss), and on that very spot it is quite possible a knight fresh home from the Crusades may have rested and feasted his eyes on the lovely green glades of his own unsurpassed England. The oak was there then, young and strong; it is here now, ancient, but sturdy. Rarely do you see an oak fall of itself. It decays to the last stump; it does not fall. The sounds. are the same the tap as a ripe acorn drops, the rustle of a leaf which comes down slowly, the quick rushes of mice playing in the fern. A movement at one side attracts the glance, and there is a squirrel darting about. There is another at the very top of the beech yonder out on the boughs, nibbling the nuts. A brown spot a long distance down the glade suddenly moves, and thereby shows itself to be a rabbit. The bellowing sound that comes now and then is from the stags, which are preparing to fight. The swine snort, and the mast and leaves rustle as they thrust them aside. So little is changed; these are the same sounds and the same movements, just as in the olden time.

The soft autumn sunshine, shorn of summer glare, lights up with color the fern, the fronds of which are yellow and brown, the leaves, the gray grass, and hawthorn sprays already turned. It seems as if the early morning's mists have the power

of tinting leaf and fern, for so soon as they commence the green hues begin to disappear. There are swathes of fern yonder, cut down like grass or corn, the harvest of the forest. It will be used for litter and for thatching sheds. The yellow stalksthe stubble will turn brown and wither through the winter, till the strong spring shoot comes up and the anemones flower. Though the sunbeams reach the ground here, half the green glade is in shadow, and for one step that you walk in sunlight ten are in shade. Thus, partly concealed in full day, the forest always contains a mystery. The idea that there may be something in the dim arches held up by the round columns of the beeches lures the footsteps onward. Something must have been lately in the circle under the oak where the fern and bushes remain at a distance and wall in a lawn of green. There is nothing on the grass but the upheld leaves that have dropped, no mark of any creature, but this is not decisive; if there are no physical signs, there is a feeling that the shadow is not vacant. In the thickets, perhaps the shadowy thickets with front of thorn it has taken refuge and eluded us. Still onward the shadows lead us in vain but pleasant chase.

The oaks keep a circle round their base and stand at a majestic distance from each other, so that the wind and the sunshine enter, and their precincts