[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO SHERMAN TREE GIANT FOREST, SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK] How happily trees have mingled with our lives! Ever since our lowly ancestors crawled from gloomy caves, stood erect in the sunlight, wondered at this calm, mysterious world, and at last made homes beneath the hemlock and the pine--ever since then, down through the ages, through the dim, sad centuries, all the way from cave to cottage, the forest has been a mother to our good race. How different our history had this wooded and beautiful world been treeless and lonely! Groves stand peaceful and prominent on every hill, in every dale of history that encourages or inspires. If we should lose the hospitality of the trees and the friendship of the forest, our race too would be lost, and the desert's pale, sad sky would come to hover above a rounded, lifeless world. The trees are friends of mankind. The forest that you see on the heights across the valley, that stands so steadfast upon the billowed and broken slopes, that drapes the dales and distances with peaceful, purple folds, and makes complete with grace and grandeur a hanging garden of the hills--this is the forest that sheltered our ancestors through the past's slow-changing years. The trees have wandered over the earth and prepared it for our race. Their low green ranks encircle the cold white realm of Farthest North; they grow in luxuriance beneath the equatorial sun; they have climbed and held the heights though beaten and crushed with storm and snow; they have dared the desert's hot and deadly sand; they stand ankle-deep in bayous wrapped in tangled vines; they have breasted the surf and pushed out into the surges of the ocean; they have conquered and reclaimed the rocks on continents and islands; they have plumed with palms the white reefs of the blue and billowed sea; their triumphant masses stand where the Ice King rules; and in volcanoes' throats they have given beauty for ashes. Their banners wave under every sun and sky. Wherever our race has gone to live, the trees have given welcome and shelter. The picturesque woodsman with his axe has helped to build nations and to improve and sustain them after they were built. He will play his part in the future. An axeman at work in the woods makes even a more stirring and romantic picture than does the reaper in his harvest home on autumn's golden fields. It is good to hear the sounds of the axe as they echo and reëcho among wooded wilds and then fade away, a melody amid the forested hills. The echoes of the axe suggest the old, old story--tell of a love-touched dream come true, of another home to be. When under the axe an old tree falls, it is the end of a life well lived, the end of a work well done. But this tree may rise, helped and shaped by happy hands, and become the most sacred place in all this world of ours--a home where lovers live--a cottage with hollyhocks and roses by the door.