Standing on the top of one of these Coast Mountains, the eye ranges for many miles over hill and dale, dotted everywhere with the huge black trunks, the relics of the great conflagration. Many standing yet, some towering high into the sky, testify of their former gracefulness by the symmetrical tapering of the tall trunk, and the regular positions of the broken limbs and branches. But Nature is busily at work repairing damages; each winter's rains penetrate more deeply into the fabric of the trunk; each winter's gales loosen yet more the roots in which the living sap was long ago destroyed; each spring the wind brings down additions to the graveyard of trees, rotting away into mold; while a few young successors to the former race of firs are showing themselves clothed in living green, and a dense growth of copse-wood, hazel, cherry, vine-maple, arrow-wood, and crab-apple is crowding the hollows of the cañons on the hill-sides. The brake-fern covers the hills, attaining a growth of five, six, or eight feet, and sheltering an undergrowth of wild-pea and native grass. Section 33 lies between the burned timber and the living forest, but its chief value is in the valley of some three hundred acres of alluvial land forming its center, through which winds here and there the Mary River, at this distance from its mouth scarcely more than a clear and rapid brook. Eight of us started on the clearing-party with two light wagons, and a good supply of food, blankets, and axes and saws. A squatter had settled on one corner and built himself a hut and a little barn, and had got four or five acres of land cleared and plowed. But he had abandoned his improvements and gone some ten miles off, to clear another homestead among the thick woods. The first night we camped out in a grassy corner by the wood-side, while the horses were tethered near. [Sidenote: _CHOPPING BY BEGINNERS._] The next day we began. Two or three of us had some little knowledge of the virtue of an axe, but the rest were new to the art. It was amusing to watch their eager efforts to hit straight and firm. One or two of our Oregonian neighbors came and looked on with rather scoffing faces, but advised us how to lay the brush we cut in windrows, with a view to the future burning.