The hurt does not matter from those who love us not. I was willing that the herd should think of me as it would, as its own little light permitted, but I had that pride of race which every honest man has, and I wanted the love of my fighting old grandsire. And he openly despised my profession, and he secretly despised me. "What’s the use of worrying about making more on an acre of this rich soil?" he would say. "Ain’t The Home Stretch rich enough? And fiddling about saving trees—why damn it, ain’t there too many of them already? Didn’t I have all the hard work of my life clearing some of the land, and my father before me, that it might make us a living!" He would never understand me, of course. The discoverer is never understood, and the forester falls in the same class, more maligned than any of them. He would never understand that it was not a sentimental dream to save trees because they are trees, but to grow them and harvest them in the right way, even as wheat is harvested: that we did not want to see rich acres, the homes of unborn people, covered only with trees, when the land was needed for bread, but the unfertile hillside, and the heads of our water streams. There, we insisted, trees should remain because that was Nature’s own way of protecting the land from droughts and floods. Nor could I hope to make him understand that rich as the land was—even as a man of genius—it should have a chance to bring forth all the fruit that was in it. That our waste was something appalling, our methods crude, and that our people, with all their plenty, were only half fed; that while we were rich and The Home Stretch was a garden, the poor farmers of the hills and less fertile places were living only half lives, they and their families, because there was no one to show them something better. My Aunt I knew was sorry for me; but I could see she hoped and believed I would yet get over it. And in my own heart I felt that if I had chosen West Point, perhaps Eloise— I flushed, ashamed. How prone our little weak Self always is to play Arnold with our Soul! I began at once to work. It is what one does with one’s own acre, not what one preaches should be done to the acres of others, that convinces his neighbors at last, and settles the standard of his life’s text among them. I started it on a gullied hillside of The Home Stretch. These gullies I filled. Young trees were easy to transplant from the over-crowded growth of the woodland. Nature is at last her own greatest doctor. I gave her the soil she had been begging for, and very quickly she studded it with little pioneers of the game black locust, to hold back that which she had, to shadow it with coolness and damp that grass might grow beneath, and mold form, and the blistered soil have yet another chance, and that later the trees might rear their great heads high, stealing from the clouds the moisture for the earth.