And Fitz-Adams, too, found a curious balm for his troubled feelings. We were at the last cord, and he was cursing hard, while I panted and sweated in my straining efforts to pass the bark aboard. The strips were large and heavy, some of them, and they all lay rough side up; and as you lifted them over your head there fell upon you from each a shower of dust and dirt that had gathered in the crumbling outer bark. This filled your ears and hair, and found its way far down your back. I had blocked the wheel, but we were on a sharp descent, and the load was growing heavy. Evidently Fitz-Adams feared our breaking loose, and so he stopped me suddenly with an order to "make fast the lock-break." Now "the lock-break" conveyed the dimmest notion to my mind, and the boss would give no hint as to what it really was nor how it was to be "made fast;" instead, he stood and watched me, while, with awkward guesses as to its purpose, I succeeded in unhooking one end of a heavy chain that hung under the wagon, and having passed it between two spokes of a hind wheel, I clumsily made fast the hook in a link of the chain drawn taut. Fitz-Adams stood, meanwhile, in speechless anger, enraged beyond relief from oaths; and then the tension broke, with comical effect, in a sentence which seemed to come to him as a happy inspiration: "I'm damned, Buddy, if you ain't greener than a green Irishman; _greener than a green Irishman_." He repeated the phrase as though it exactly met the case, and brought him satisfaction far beyond the power of profanity; and then he shouted through the forest: "Hey, Bob!" "Hello!" "This Buddy, he's greener than a green Irishman!" and he laughed aloud, and there came an answering laugh from Bob; and the boss started down the mountain with his load, the locked wheel bounding and crunching among the stones, while he swore to steady the horses. That was all of the loading for the morning, so Toler and I joined company. Toler had in charge the cutting of roads to the bark-piles, and I was to serve with him. The piles were, some of them, in most inaccessible places. The hemlock-trees on that side of the mountain had first been felled, then the bark was cut round on the trunks at intervals of four feet. Next the bark was peeled off and carefully heaped near by, while the trees themselves were trimmed and then sawed into logs of desired lengths, and these were "skidded" into piles. From the piles, in the spring, when the streams are high, the logs are sent by "skid ways" into the run, and, once in the water, the lumbermen use their finest skill in floating them to the market at Williamsport. In the meanwhile the bark must be got out and carted to the tannery, and Toler and I had our work laid out in cutting ways for the wagons. Supplied each with an axe, a cant-hook, and a grabbing-hoe, we began the work of cutting through the brushwood and clearing away the stumps, and laying rough bridges over the small streams.