dripping faces. Far below from the valley come occasionally the rattling, tinny sounds of the donkey-engine as it winds in on its cables, and less frequently the whistled signal of some invisible log-boss in the woods. A kerf, or notch, three feet deep in the clean white wood is finished at last, the earth underneath it covered with pitchy chips. Skilfully has this notch been made, for it is this that governs the fall of the

tree.

Chris makes no errors. Where he says a tree will fall, there it falls. Set a stake a hundred feet from the foot of a fir, and he will so cut the kerf that the falling tree will drive it into the ground.

Now they have had their lunch : for each one a heaped pyramid of cold beans, three cups of coffee, three boiled eggs, five or six wedges of bread, cold ham in quantities, cake, and crackers-a meal there in the rain in proportion to the work. They shift their spring-boards to the other side of the great tree, and the long, doublehandled saw rasps into the rough bark. Back and forth they sway, balancing perfectly on the narrow boards, Jack at one side, Chris at the other. Their heads are bare in the drizzling rain, their sleeves rolled up over their hairy arms; through their wet shirts one sees the play of the muscles in their shoulders. So, steadily, unrelentingly, the back-breaking task goes forward for hours. Occasionally, as the saw cuts deeper, they pause to change the spring-boards, and pour a little kerosene from their flat pocket-flasks on the saw, to clean it of pitch. They shout their signals, for the tree is so huge that they work without seeing each other.

Through nearly five feet of solid green timber have they thus cut their way, little jets of sawdust following each withdrawal of the saw; their trousers and shoes are yellow with it. But the fir has given no sign of yielding, still towering mighty among the smaller hemlocks and cedars. One's interest grows acute. It is nothing less than a tragedy that this majestic tree should be laid low; it seems impossible, indeed, that it can be made to fall from its wide-spreading foundation, after five hundred years of the stout survival of storm and shock.

Chris and Jack have been discussing in brief scraps the vagaries of a certain camp cook, who, it seems, had served a baked

mouse with the beans. Now, still unconcerned with the impending catastrophe, they withdraw the hot saw. Wedges they place in the saw kerf opposite the undercut, sledging them in.

"Watch out there!" roars Jack. "Watch out over the hill!"

His voice echoes through the hushed distances of the forest. Strange sound here, this human cry; strange and full of portent. We withdraw far up the hill, for, in the ruin which follows the fall of one of these giants, branches are sometimes hurled for hundreds of feet.

"If you stay too clost," warns Chris, "you get killt pooty quick."

We hear the crack, crack of the sledge on wedge metal, then suddenly a sharp, penetrating, unearthly snapping, rending, tearing, which thrills through the dripping forest. Away plunge the fellers, shouting: "Watch out below! Watch out! Watch out!"

The great fir, for the first time, gives sign of distress, of yielding; a shiver passes through its mighty bulk; there are other sounds of rending wood, far-reaching, overpowering; then, slowly, with stately majesty, the noble tree sways aside, with matchless dignity even to the last. Its lofty head, gray, gnarled, stupendous, gives way, and opens a wide space of leaden sky, letting in a garish light to the wood. Faster it falls, striking the earth with a hollow roar, jarring the whole forest as with an earthquake, the sound of it reverberating through the valley, deep, hoarse, appalling the death-cry of the fir!

Though the earth is moist with rain, the air fills with dust, followed for seconds afterward by a shower of falling branches, some as large as a man's body. And such ruin as the fall has wrought in the wood! Here is a young hemlock, a magnificent tree in any forest but this, stripped clean on one side of every limb and all its bark. Lightning could do no worse. Here are a dozen young cedars crushed to splinters; smaller shrubs are driven into the soft earth, where the giant now lies as in a trough.

Silence again in the forest, except for the dripping of rain on the leaves, the occasional snap of a twig as the fir settles in its resting-place. Then the calm, matterof-fact voices of Chris and his companion, coming leisurely forward:

Better make thirty-sixes and thirtyeights out of it."

They are taking a fresh chew of tobacco; they reek with the odor of toil.

We walk along the body of the prostrate fir, seemingly even more immense now that it has fallen, lying like a bridge through the wood. It is bare in places

fifty to four hundred dollars, and sometimes more.

While we speculate on the lumber possibilities of a single tree, the swampers have been at work on the forest hillside, clearing a trail through the thick undergrowth, and here and there, where necessary, laying down a pathway of short

8.

where the bark has been torn off in the catastrophe. The bucker-he who is now to cut the tree into log lengths - comes measuring and notching, making ready for the saw. And he finds that the fir, noble as it had looked in life, was decayed at the top, so that, in falling, a hundred feet of the mighty summit was splintered and broken. "Rotten as a pumpkin," he comments. "It'll make only three logs."

But such logs-six feet through and thirty-six and thirty-eight feet long! Lumber enough to build a small house. One good tree of this size will yield from fifteen to eighteen thousand feet of good lumber, besides shingles, lath, and fire-wood, a money value of from two hundred and

timbers or skids along which the logs can be dragged out of the wood. Other Chrises or Jacks in overalls and with spiked shoes come to "snipe," or bevel, off the ends of the logs, and to clean the bark from the "riding side," so that the logs will slip easily along the miles of skidways which they must now travel. All this work is done with splendid system and despatch, the buckers following the sawyers, the snipers and barkers following the buckers, and

so on.

Now painfully up the hill they drag the heavy wire cable from the donkeyengine, assisted by a pulley-horse in the valley below, and attach it by means of hooks set in notches near the end of the