The outfit of the American forest-ranger is unique. He is usually provided with a rifle and revolver, but in addition to this has a kit of fire-fighting tools, as well as other implements. Entering one of the little cabins which form the homes of the rangers you will see coils of rope hanging from the walls, and axes and shovels piled in the corners. An army cot, or perhaps a framework of boughs, forms the bed, two or three logs the chairs, and the food is usually cooked in the big mud-plastered fireplace which occupies one end of the cabin. A single room is generally enough for all purposes, unless the ranger is married, when the Government may provide him a larger house with two or three apartments. He clears a little patch of land around his dwelling, where he can raise a few vegetables, and is allowed to kill game and catch fish if there are streams near him. In this way he adds to the stock of rations furnished by the Government. [Illustration: A FOREST FIRE SWEEPING ALONG AT TWELVE MILES AN HOUR BEFORE A BREEZE. _From a Photograph._] The ranger must always be on the lookout for fires, especially in summer, when, in many portions of America, the temperature becomes so hot that even rivers are dried up, leaves drop from the trees, and the underbrush of the woodlands is like a vast tinder-heap, ready to burst into flame at the contact of a single spark. At such times the greatest care must be taken about kindling fires near the woods, for if one spreads over a considerable area of ground, the intense heat creates a wind which grows stronger and stronger until it becomes a veritable hurricane, driving the fire before it and burning scores of miles of forest before it is extinguished. The havoc wrought by the fires was one of the chief reasons for the organization of the Forest Service. One of the worst of these conflagrations is well remembered in the States, although it occurred in what is known as Miramichi Valley, in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. It is an actual fact that for three months of summer no rain fell in this valley. Then, one afternoon in the month of October, a fire started in the Upper Miramichi--no one knows how--but it was supposed a woodsman did not take the trouble to extinguish the faggots by which he had cooked his dinner. The first man who discovered the blaze found a space about one hundred feet long and fifty feet wide in flames in the midst of a patch of bushes and young trees. He alarmed a camp of wood-choppers about two miles distant, and on returning half an hour later the party found that the fire had reached a thicket of pines, the flames running furiously along the top branches. It had spread so rapidly that a thousand men could not now have arrested its progress, and the choppers were obliged to run for their lives to escape. A small pond at the edge of the forest probably saved them, as by crossing it they reached the open country and a spot where half a mile of ploughed