It remained, however, for our age, and especially North America, to make these tree tongues speak. The world never had enough paper until the process of making it from wood was discovered, and even now it can hardly cut down its forests fast enough to satisfy the insatiable demand of the printing press. I have visited paper mills in both the United States and Canada, and have watched the miracle of transforming a log into the medium of paper that carries the messages of our presidents, the doings of Congress, the news sensations of the times, or the strips of comic pictures we see every morning. Let me tell you how it is done. Most of the Canadian paper mills are located on rivers. The trees are cut during the winter, and hauled on sledges over ice and snow to the banks of the nearest stream. In the spring the logs float down with the freshets, and the only transportation expense is the crews of men who follow the “drive” and keep the mass of logs moving. Sometimes jams or blocks occur that can be loosened only by dynamite. As the logs move down stream the mills catch them with booms strung across the river. Each mill picks out its own logs and releases the rest to continue their journey. Labour agents in Montreal, Quebec, and other cities are now recruiting gangs of lumberjacks for this season’s operations. A single firm of this city employs six thousand men and has two thousand at work in the woods every winter. The lumberjacks live in camps, which each year are pushed farther north as the forests diminish. The work is hard, but the men are well fed and have no expenses, so that they can, if they choose, come out of the woods in the spring with a good sum in cash. At a mill, the logs are fed into the machinery by means of conveyors, and they hardly stop moving until they come out as paper. The first step is to cut them into two-foot lengths and strip off the bark. Then they are ready for grinding. This is done in batteries of mills, each containing a large grindstone making two hundred revolutions a minute. Several of these two-foot lengths are put into a mill at a time, and pressed against the grindstone in such a way that they are rapidly torn into fine splinters. As the wood is ground up it falls into the water in the lower part of the mill and flows off. I asked a workman to open a mill I was watching to-day. As he did so I reached in and drew out a handful of the dry pulp. It was hot, and I asked if hot water was used. He replied that the water went into the mill almost ice cold, but that the friction of grinding was so great that it soon boiled and steamed. [Illustration: The increasing demands of our printing presses are pushing Canada’s lumberjacks farther and farther into the forests to cut the spruce logs with which the paper mills are fed.]