devised for his own use. And now, when the crown has widened out to sun and air, it stops growing and bears its seeds--seeds shaped like parachutes and canoes and sails and wings, to overcome the law of its own fixity--life striving to surpass itself, as the symbolists and the scientists say, though symbolist and scientist would break each other's heads if you suggested that they both preach the very same thing. And a lost tree is like a lost life; utter loss, bootless waste. You see it in the bleached skeleton spars of the dead forest where the burn has run. You see it where the wasteful lumberman has come cutting half-growns and leaving stumps of full-growns three or four feet high with piles of dry slash to carry the first chance spark. The leaf litter here would have enriched the soil and the waste slash would keep the poor of an Eastern city in fuel. Once, at a public meeting, I happened to mention the ranger's rule that stumps must be cut no higher than eighteen inches, and the fact that in the big tree region of the Rocky Mountains many stumps are left three and four feet high. Someone took smiling exception to the height of those stumps. Yet in the redwood and Douglas fir country stumps are cut, not four feet, but nine feet high, leaving waste enough to build a small house. And it will take not a hundred, not two hundred, but a thousand years, to bring up a second growth of such trees. * * * * * Sitting down to dinner at a little mountain inn, I noticed only two families besides ourselves; and they were residents of the mountain. I thought of those hotels back in the cities daily turning away health seekers. "How is it you haven't more people here, when the cities can't take care of all the people who come?" I asked the woman of the house. "People don't seem to know about the National Forests," she said. "They think the forests are only places for lumber and mills." CHAPTER III THROUGH THE PECOS NATIONAL FORESTS OF NEW MEXICO