"Then, it's a matter of six weeks before you can put decency and respect for law in that gentleman's heart?" I asked. "Perhaps longer," said the college man without a suspicion of irony, "and he has given us trouble this way ever since he has come to the Forests." "And will continue to give you trouble till the law gives you a free hand to put such blackguards to bed till they learn to be good." "Yes, that's right. This isn't the first time men have tried to get away with logs that didn't belong to them. Once, when I came back to the first Forest where I served, there was a whole pile of logs stamped U. S. that we had never scaled. By the time we could get word back from Washington, the guilty party had left the State and blame had been shunted round on a poor half-witted fellow who didn't know what he was doing; but we forced pay for those logs." It is a common saying in the Northwest that it takes eight years to make a good Mounted Policeman--eight years to jounce the duffer out and the man in; but in the Forest Service, men over forty-five are not taken. For men who serve up to forty-five, the inducements of salary beginning at $65 a month and seldom exceeding $200 are not sufficient to retain tested veterans. The big lumber companies will pay a trained forester more for the same work on privately owned timber limits; so the rangers remain for the most part young. Would the same difficulties rise if wise old dogs were on guard? I hardly think so. * * * * * What manner of man is the ranger? As we sat round the little parlor of the cabin that night in the Vasquez Forest, an army man turned forester struck up on a piano that had been packed on horseback above cloud-line strains of Wagner and Beethoven. A graduate of Ann Arbor and post-graduate of Yale played with a cigarette as he gazed at his own fancies through the mica glow of the coal stove. A Denver boy, whose mother kept house in the cabin, was chief ranger. In the group was his sister, a teacher in the village school; and I fancy most of the ranger homes present pretty much the same types, though one does not ordinarily expect to hear strains of grand opera above cloud-line. Picture the men dressed in sage-green Norfolk suits; and you have as rare a scene as Scott ever painted of the men in Lincoln green in England's borderland forests.