The story which they have left recorded on the face of the country is of this sort. At some very remote time they began agriculture in the valleys of the South-west. They found the rainfall of the region too limited for farming without irrigation, but the whole country was intersected by streams fed through summer by the snows of the mountain-tops and the abundant springs of the wooded slopes and uplands. Thus their crops were watered and yielded increase with a regularity unknown to farmers who must look to the summer rainfall for success. The people prospered, multiplied and spread over a wide country. In every green valley rose their great common dwellings and circular temples. By superior numbers and intelligence they were strong against their enemies. But the spreading population required a great wood-supply. The finest of the trees were felled for timbering their houses, and whole forests were swept away to give them fuel and perhaps to feed perpetual sacred fires. The country was all too little watered at the best, and the mountain-sides, once stripped of their covering, oftentimes dried up and no new growth of trees appeared. Old men began to observe that the streams did not maintain their even flow through the whole year as when they were young, and lamented the good old times when there was no lack of water for irrigation. The streams began to be swollen with disastrous floods in spring and winter, and to dwindle away alarmingly in summer. So through centuries the gradual destruction of the wood brought ever-increasing drought, and drought led in its train famine, disease and wholesale death. The people were decimated and discouraged, and on the northern frontier began to be at the mercy of savage raiders. They fled from their pleasant valley-homes to hide in caves and dens of the earth, and built the cliff-dwellings. There a remnant lingered in unceasing fear of the foes who coveted the fruits of their toil; but even from these refuges they were driven ages ago. Where they used to build villages and cultivate fields are now barren gulches where two or three times a year a resistless flood rushes down from the mountains that can no longer retain their moisture. Thus ended their national suicide. [Illustration: RUINS IN MONTEZUMA CAÑON.] It was a strange ignorance that led them to their own destruction, was it not? Yet we as a nation from Maine to California are recklessly working the same ruin. We are stripping our mountains a hundred times more rapidly than they, but who cares whether the forests are restored?