Through Our Unknown Southwest Part 2

"It has been a detestable trip" (A New Yorker relieving surcharged feelings). "It has been a skin game from start to finish, pullman, baggage, hotels, everything. And how much of the West have we really seen? Not a glimpse of it. We had all seen these Western cities before.

They are not the West. They are bits of the East taken up and set down in the West. How is the Easterner to see the West? It isn't seeing it to go flying through these prairie stations. Settlement and real life and wild life are always back from the railroad. How are we to get out and see that unless we can pay ten dollars a day for guides? I don't call it _seeing_ the mountains to ride on a train through the easiest pa.s.ses and sleep through most of them. Tell us how we are to get out and see and experience the real thing?"

"H'm, talk about seeing the West" (This time from a Texas banker). "Only time we got away from the excursion party was when a land boomster took us up the river to see an irrigation project. That wasn't seeing the West. That was a buy-and-sell proposition same as we have at home. What I want to know is how to get away from that. That boomster fellow was an Easterner, anyway."

Which of these three really found the playground each was seeking? Not the duet that went round the cities in a sightseeing car and judged the West from hotel rotundas. Not the New Yorker, who saw the prairie towns fly past the car windows. Not the Texans who were guided round a real estate project by an Eastern land boomster. And each wanted to find the real thing--had paid money to find a holiday playground, to forget care and stab apathy and enlarge life. And each complained of the extortionate charges on every side in the city life. And two out of three went back a little disappointed that they had not seen the fabled wonders of the West--the big trees, the peaks at close range, the famous canons, the mountain lakes, the natural bridges. When I tried to explain to the New Yorker that at a cost of one-tenth what the big hotels charge, you could go straight into the heart of the mountain western wilds, whether you are a man, woman, child, or group of all three--could go straight out to the fabled wonders of big trees and mountain lakes and snowy peaks--I was greeted with that peculiarly New Yorky look suggestive of Ananias and De Rougement.

[Ill.u.s.tration: One way of entering the desert is with wagons and tents, but unless it is the rainy season the tents are unnecessary]

Sadder is the case of the invalid migrating West. He has come with high hopes looking for the national health resort. Does he find it? Not once in a thousand cases. If health seekers have money, they take a private house _in the city_, where the best of air is at its worst; but many invalids are scarce of money, and come seeking the health resort at great pecuniary sacrifice. Do they find it? Certainly not knocking from boarding house to boarding house and hotel to hotel, re-infecting themselves with their own germs till the very telephone booths have to be guarded. At one famous "lung" city where I stayed, I heard three invalids coughing life away along the corridor where my room happened to be. The charge for those stuffy rooms was $2 and $3 and $5 a day without meals. At a cost of $10 for train fare, I went out to one of the National Forests--the pa.s.s over the Divide 11,000 feet, the village center of the Forest 8,000 feet above sea level, the charge with meals at the hotel $10 a week. Better still, $10 for a roomy tent, $1.50 for a camp stove and as much or as little as you like for a fur rug, and the cost of meals would have been seventy-five cents a day at the hotel, seventy-five cents for life in air that was almost constant suns.h.i.+ne, air as pure and life-giving as the sun on Creation's first day. That alt.i.tude would probably not suit all invalids--that is for a doctor to say; but certainly, whether one is out for health or play, that regimen is cheaper and more life-giving than a stuffy hotel at $2, $3 and $5 a day for a room alone.

It is incredible when you come to think of it. Here is a nation of ninety million people scouring the earth for a playground; and there is an undiscovered playground in its own back yard, the most wonderful playground of mountain and forest and lake in the whole world; a playground in actual area half the size of a Germany, or France, with wonders of cave and waterway and peak unknown to Germany or France. What are the railroads thinking about? If three million people visited an exposition to see the West, how many would yearly visit the National Forests if the railroads granted facilities, and the ninety million Americans knew how? It is absurd to regard the National Forests purely as timber; and timber for politics! They are a nation's playground and health resort; and one of these times will come a Peary or an Abruzzi discovering them. Then we'll give him a prize and begin going.

You will not find Newport; and you will not find Lenox; and you will not find Saratoga in the National Forests. Neither will you find a dress parade except the painter's brush with its vesture of flame in the upper alpine meadows. And you will not find gaping on-lookers to break down fences and report your doings, unless it be a Douglas squirrel swearing at you for coming too near his _cache_ of pine cones at the foot of some giant conifer. There is small noise of things doing in the National Forests; but there is a great tinkling of waters; and there are many voices of rills with a roar of flood torrents at rain time, or thunder of avalanche when the snows come over a far ridge in spray fine as a waterfall. In fair weather, you may spare yourself the trouble of a tent and camp under a stretch of sky hung with stars, resinous of balsams, spiced with the life of the cinnamon smells and the ozone tang. There will be lakes of light as well as lakes of water, and an all-day diet of condensed sunbeams every time you take a breath. Your bed will be hemlock boughs--be sure to lay the branch-end out and the soft end in or you'll dream of sleeping transfixed and bayoneted on a nine foot redwood stump. Sage brush smells and cedar odors, you will have without paying for a cedar chest. If you want softer bed and mixed perfumes, better stay in Newport.

The Forestry Department will not resent your coming. Their men will welcome you and help you to find camping ground.

Meanwhile, before the railroads have wakened up to the possibilities of the National Forests as a playground, how is the lone American man, woman, child, or group of all three, to find the way to the National Forests? What will the outfit cost; and how is the camper to get established?

Take a map of the Western States. Though there are bits of National Forests in Nebraska and Kansas and the Ozarks, for camping and playground purposes draw a line up parallel with the Rockies from New Mexico to Canada. Your playground is from that line westward. To me, there is a peculiar attraction in the forests of Colorado. Nearly all are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet above sky-line--high, dry park-like forests of Engelmann spruce clear of brush almost as your parlor floor.

You will have no difficulty in recognizing the Forests as the train goes panting up the divide. Windfall, timber slash, stumps half as high as a horse, brushwood, the bare poles and blackened logs of burnt areas lie on one side--Public Domain. Trees with two notches and a blaze mark the Forest bounds; trees with one notch and one blaze, the trail; and across that trail, you are out of the Public Domain in the National Forests.

There is not the slightest chance of your not recognizing the National Forests. Windfall, there is almost none. It has been cleared out and sold. Of timber slash, there is not a stick. Wastage and brush have been carefully burned up during snowfall. Windfall, dead tops and ripe trees, all have been cut or stamped with the U. S. hatchet for logging off.

These Colorado Forests are more like a beautiful park than wild land.

Come up to Utah; and you may vary your camping in the National Forests there, by trips to the wonderful canons out from Ogden, or to the natural bridges in the South. In the National Forests of California, you have pretty nearly the best that America can offer you: views of the ocean in Santa Barbara and Monterey; cloudless skies everywhere; the big trees in the Sequoia Forest; the Yosemite in the Stanislaus; forests in the northern part of the State where you could dance on the stump of a redwood or build a cabin out of a single sapling; and everywhere in the northern mountains, are the voices of the waters and the white, burnished, s.h.i.+ning peaks. I met a woman who found her playground one summer by driving up in a tented wagon through the National Forests from Colorado to Montana. Camp stove and truck bed were in the democrat wagon. An outfitter supplied the horses for a rental which I have forgotten. The borders of most of the National Forests may be reached by wagon. The higher and more intimate trails may be essayed only on foot or on horseback.

How much will the trip cost? You must figure that out for yourself.

There is, first of all, your railway fare from the point you leave. Then there is the fare out to the Forest--usually not $10. Go straight to the supervisor or forester of the district. He will recommend the best hotel of the little mountain village where the supervisor's office is usually located. At those hotels, you will board as a transient at $10 a week; as a permanent, for less. In many of the mountain hamlets are outfitters who will rent you a team of horses and tented wagon; and you can cater for yourself. In fact, as to clothing, and outfit, you can buy cheaper camp kit at these local stores than in your home town. Many Eastern things are not suitable for Western use. For instance, it is foolish to go into the thick, rough forests of heavy timber with an expensive eastern riding suit for man or woman. Better buy a $4 or $6 or $8 khaki suit that you can throw away when you have torn it to tatters. An Eastern waterproof coat will cost you from $10 to $30. You can get a yellow cowboy slicker (I have two), which is much more serviceable for $2.50 or $3. As to boots, I prefer to get them East, as I like an elk-skin leather which never shrinks in the wet, with a good deal of cork in the sole to save jars, also a broad sole to save your foot in the stirrup; but avoid a conventional riding boot. Too hot and too stiff! I like an elk-skin that will let the water out fast as it comes in if you ever have to wade, and which will not shrink in the drying. If you forswear hotels and take to a sky tent, or canvas in misty weather, better carry eatables in what the guides call a tin "grub box," in other words a cheap $2 tin trunk. It keeps out ants and things; and you can lock it when you go away on long excursions. As to beds, each to his own taste! Some like the rolled rubber mattress. Too much trouble for me.

Besides, I am never comfortable on it. If you camp near the snow peaks, a chill strikes up to the small of your back in the small of the morning. I don't care to feel like using a derrick every time I roll over. The most comfortable bed I know is a piece of twenty-five cent oilcloth laid over the slicker on hemlock boughs, fur rug over that, with suit case for pillow, and a plain gray blanket. The hardened mountaineer will laugh at the next recommendation; but the town man or woman going out for play or health is not hardened, and to attempt sudden hardening entails the endurance of a lot of aches that are apt to spoil the holiday. You may say you like the cold plunge in the icy water coming off a snowy mountain. I confess I don't; and you'll acknowledge, even if you do like it, you are in such a hurry to come out of it that you don't linger to scrub. I like my hot scrub; and you can have that only by taking along (no, not a rubber bath) a $1.50 camp stove to heat the water in the tent while you are eating your supper out round the camp fire that burns with such a delicious, barky smell. Besides, late in the season, there will be rains and mist. Your camp stove will dry out the tent walls and keep your kit free of rain mold. Do you need a guide? That depends entirely on yourself. If you camp under direction and within range of the district forester, I do not think you do.

Whether you go out as a health seeker, or a pleasure seeker, $8 to $10 will buy you a miner's tent--a miner's, preferable to a tepee because the walls lift the canvas roof high enough not to b.u.mp your head; $2 will buy you a tin trunk or grub box; $1.50 will cover the price of oilcloth to spread over the boughs which you lay all over the floor to keep you above the earth damp; $2 will buy you a little tin camp stove to keep the inside of your tent warm and dry for the hot night bath; $10 will cover cost of pail and cooking utensils. That leaves of what would be your monthly expenses at even a moderate hotel, $125 for food--bacon, flour, fresh fruit; and your food should not exceed $10 each a month. If you are a good fisherman, you will add to the larder, by whipping the mountain streams for trout. If you need an attendant, that miner's tent is big enough for two. Or if you will stand $5 or $6 more expense, buy a tepee tent for a bath and toilet room. There will be windy days in fall and spring when an extra tent with a camp stove in it will prove useful for the nightly hot bath.

What reward do you reap for all the bother? You are away from all dust irritating to weak lungs. You are away from all possibility of re-infecting yourself with your own disease. Except in late autumn and early spring, you are living under almost cloudless skies, in an atmosphere steeped in suns.h.i.+ne, spicy with the healing resin of the pines and hemlocks and spruce, that not only scent the air but literally permeate it with the essences of their own life. You are living far above the vapors of sea level, in a region luminous of light. Instead of the clang of street car bells and the jangle of nerves tangled from too many humans in town, you hear the flow and the sing and the laughter and the trebles of the glacial streams rejoicing in their race to the sea.

You climb the rough hills; and your town lungs blow like a whale as you climb; and every beat pumps inertia out and the sun-healing air in. If an invalid, you had better take a doctor's advice as to how high you should camp and climb. In town, amid the draperies and the portieres and the steam-heated rooms, an invalid is seeking health amid the habitat of mummies. In the Forests, whether you will or not, you live in suns.h.i.+ne that is the very elixir of life; and though the frost sting at night, it is the sting of pulsing, superabundant life, not the lethargy of a gradual decay.

At the southern edge of the National Forests in the Southwest dwell the remnants of a race, can be seen the remnants of cities, stand houses near enough the train to be touched by your hand, that run back in unbroken historic continuity to dynasties preceding the Aztecs of Mexico or the Copts of Egypt. When the pyramids were young, long before the flood gates of the Ural Mountains had broken before the inundating Aryan hordes that overran the forests and mountains of Europe to the edge of the Netherland seas, this race which you can see to-day dwelling in New Mexico and Arizona were spinning their wool, working their silver mines, and on the approach of the enemy, withdrawing to those eagle nests on the mountain tops which you can see, where only a rope ladder led up to the city, or uncertain crumbling steps cut in the face of the sheer red sandstone.

And besides the prehistoric in the Forests--what will you find? The plains below you like a scroll, the receding cities, a patch of smoke.

You had thought that sky above the plains a cloudless one, air that was pure, buoyant champagne without dregs. Now the plains are vanis.h.i.+ng in a haze of dust, and you--you are up in that cloudless air, where the light hits the rocks in spangles of pure crystal, and the tang of the clearness of it p.r.i.c.ks your sluggish blood to a new, buoyant, pulsing life. You feel as if somehow or other that existence back there in towns and under roofs had been a life with cobwebs on the brain and weights on the wings of the spirit. I wonder if it wasn't? I wonder if the ancients, after all, didn't accord with science in ascribing to the sun, to the G.o.d of Light, the source of all our strength? Things are accomplished not in the thinking, but in the clearness of the thinking; and here is the realm of pure light.

Presently, the train carrying you up to the Forests of the Southwest gives a b.u.mp. You are in darkness--diving through some tunnel or other; and when you come out, you could drop a stone sheer down to the plains a couple of miles. That is not so far as up in South Dakota. In Sundance Canon off the National Forests there, you can drop a pebble down seven miles. That's not as the crow flies. It is as the train climbs. But patience! The road into Sundance Canon takes you to the top of the world, to be sure; but that is only 7,000 feet up; and this little Moffat Road in Colorado takes you above timber line, above cloud line, pretty nearly above growth line, 12,000 feet above the sea; at 11,600 you can take your lunch inside a snow shed on the Moffat Road.

Long ago, men proved their superiority to other men by butchering each other in hordes and droves and shambles; Alva must have had a good 100,000 corpses to his credit in the Netherlands. To-day, men make good by conquering the elements. For four hours, this little Colorado road has been cork-s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the face of a mountain pretty nearly sheer as a wall; and for every twist and turn and tunnel, some engineer fellow on the job has performed mathematical acrobatics; and some capitalist behind the engineer--the man behind the modern gun of conquest--has paid the cost. In this case, it was David Moffat paid for our dance in the clouds--a mining man, who poked his brave little road over the mountains across the desert towards the Pacific.

[Ill.u.s.tration: From a lookout point in the Coconino Forest of Arizona]

You come through those upper tunnels still higher. Below, no longer lie the plains, but seas of clouds; and it is to the everlasting credit of the sense and taste of Denver people, that they have dotted the outer margin of this rock wall with slab and log and s.h.i.+ngle cottages, built literally on the very backbone of the continent overlooking such a stretch of cloud and mountain and plain as I do not know of elsewhere in the whole world. In Sundance Canon, South Dakota, summer people have built in the bottom of the gorge. Here, they are dwellers in the sky.

Rugged pines cling to the cliff edge blasted and bare and wind torn; but dauntlessly rooted in the everlasting rocks. Little mining hamlets composed of matchbox houses cling to the face of the precipice like cardboards stuck on a nail. Then, you have pa.s.sed through the clouds, and are above timber line; and a lake lies below you like a pool of pure turquoise; and you twist round the flank of the great mountain, and there is a pair of green lakes below you--emerald jewels pendant from the neck of the old mountain G.o.d; and with a b.u.mp and a rattle of the wheels, clear over the top of the Continental Divide you go--believe me, a greater conquest than any Napoleon's march to Moscow, or Alva's shambles of headless victims in the Netherlands.

You take lunch in a snow shed on the very crest of the Continental Divide. I wish you could taste the air. It isn't air. It's champagne. It isn't champagne, it's the very elixir of life. There can never be any shadows here; for there is nothing to cast the shadow. Nightfall must wrap the world here in a mantle of rest, in a vespers of wors.h.i.+p and quiet, in a crystal of dying chrysoprase above the green enameled lake and the forests below, looking like moss, and the pearl clouds, a sea of fire in the sunset, and the plain--there are no more plains--this is the top of the world!

Yet it is not always a vesper quiet in the high places. When I came back this way a week later, such a blizzard was raging as I have never seen in Manitoba or Alberta. The high spear gra.s.s tossed before it like the waves of a sea; and the blasted pines on the cliffs below--you knew why their roots had taken such grip of the rocks like strong natures in disaster. The storm might break them. It could not bend them, nor wrench them from their roots. The telegraph wires, for reasons that need not be told are laid flat on the ground up here.

When you cross the Divide, you enter the National Forests. National Forests above tree line? To be sure! These deep, coa.r.s.e upper gra.s.ses provide ideal pasturage for sheep from June to September; and the National Forests administer the grazing lands for the general use of all the public, instead of permitting them to be monopolized by the big rancher, who promptly drove the weaker man off by cutting the throats of intruding flocks and herds.

Then, the train is literally racing down hill--with the trucks b.u.mping heels like the wheels of a wagon on a sluggish team; and a new tang comes to the ozone--the tang of resin, of healing balsam, of cinnamon smells, of incense and frankincense and myrrh, of spiced sunbeams and imprisoned fragrance--the fragrance of thousands upon thousands of years of dew and light, of pollen dust and ripe fruit cones; the attar, not of Persian roses, but of the everlasting pines.

The train takes a swift swirl round an escarpment of the mountain; and you are in the Forests proper, serried rank upon rank of the blue spruce and the lodgepole pine. No longer spangles of light hitting back from the rocks in sparks of fire! The light here is sifted pollen dust--pollen dust, the primordial life principle of the tree--with the purple, cinnamon-scented cones hanging from the green arms of the conifers like the chevrons of an enranked army; and the cones tell you somewhat of the service as the chevrons do of the soldier man. Some conifers hold their cones for a year before they send the seed, whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviating pixy parachutes, airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest growth, though the process may take the trifling aeon of a thousand years or so.

At one season, when you come to the Forests, the air is full of the yellow pollen of the conifers, gold dust whose alchemy, could we but know it, would unlock the secrets of life. At another season--the season when I happened to be in the Colorado Forests--the very atmosphere is alive with these forest airs.h.i.+ps, conifer seeds sailing broadside to the wind. You know why they sail broadside, don't you? If they dropped plumb like a stone, the ground would be seeded below the heavily shaded branches inches deep in self-choking, sunless seeds; but when the broadside of the sail to the pixy's airs.h.i.+p tacks to the veering wind, the seed is carried out and away and far beyond the area of the shaded branches; to be caught up by other counter currents of wind and hurled, perhaps, down the mountain side, destined to forest the naked side of a cliff a thousand years hence. It is a fact, too, worth remembering and crediting to the wiles and ways of Dame Nature that destruction by fire tends but to free these conifer seeds from the cones; so that they fall on the bare burn and grow slowly to maturity under the protecting nursery of the tremulous poplars and pulsing cottonwoods.

The train has not gone very far in the National Forests before you see the sleek little Douglas squirrel scurrying from branch to branch. From the tremor of his tiny body and the angry chitter of his parted teeth, you know he is swearing at you to the utmost limit of his squirrel (?) language; but that is not surprising. This little rodent of the evergreens is the connoisseur of all conifers. He, and he alone, knows the best cones for reproductive seed. No wonder he is so full of fire when you consider he diets on the fruit of a thousand years of sunlight and dew; so when the ranger seeks seed to reforest the burned or scant slopes, he rifles the _cache_ of this little furred forester, who suspects your noisy trainload of robbery--robbery--sc--scur--r--there!

Then, the train b.u.mps and jars to a stop with a groaning of brakes on the steep down grade, for a drink at the red water tank; and you drop off the high car steps with a glance forward to see that the baggage man is dropping off your kit. The brakes reverse. With a scrunch, the train is off again, racing down hill, a blur of steamy vapor like a cloud against the lower hills. Before the rear car has disappeared round the curve, you have been accosted by a young man in Norfolk suit of sage green wearing a medal stamped with a pine tree--the ranger, absurdly young when you consider each ranger patrols and polices 100,000 acres compared to the 1,700 which French and German wardens patrol and daily deals with criminal problems ten times more difficult than those confronting the Northwest Mounted Police, without the military authority which backs that body of men.

You have mounted your pony--men and women alike ride astride in the Western States. It heads of its own accord up the bridle trail to the ranger's house, in this case 9,000 feet above sea level, 1,000 feet above ordinary cloud line. The hammer of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r, the scur of a rasping blue jay, the twitter of some red bills, the soft _thug_ of the unshod broncho over the trail of forest mold, no other sound unless the soul of the sea from the wind harping in the trees. Better than the jangle of city cars in that stuffy hotel room of the germ-infested town, isn't it?

If there is snow on the peaks above, you feel it in the cool sting of the air. You hear it in the trebling laughter, in the trills and rills of the brook babbling down, sound softened by the moss as all sounds are hushed and low keyed in this woodland world. And all the time, you have the most absurd sense of being set free from something. By-and-by when eye and ear are attuned, you will see the light reflected from the pine needles glistening like metal, and hear the click of the same needles like fairy castanets of joy. Meantime, take a long, deep, full breath of these condensed sunbeams spiced with the incense of the primeval woods; for you are entering a temple, the temple where our forefathers made offerings to the G.o.ds of old, the temple which our modern churches imitate in Gothic spire and arch and architrave and nave. Drink deep in open, full lungs; for you are drinking of an elixir of life which no apothecary can mix. Most of us are a bit ill mentally and physically from breathing the dusty street sweepings of filth and germs which permeate the hived towns. They will not stay with you here! Other dust is in this air, the gold dust of sunlight and resin and ozone. They will make you over, will these forest G.o.ds, if you will let them, if you will lave in their sunlight, and breathe their healing, and laugh with the chitter and laughter of the squirrels and streams.

And what if your spirit does not go out to meet the spirit of the woods halfway? Then, the woods will close round you with a chill loneliness unutterable. You are an alien and an exile. They will have none of you and will reveal to you none of their joyous, dauntless life secrets.

CHAPTER II

AMONG THE NATIONAL FORESTS OF THE SOUTHWEST

You have not ridden far towards the ranger's house in the Forest before you become aware that clothing for town is not clothing for the wilds.

No matter how hot it may be at midday, in this high, rare air a chill comes soon as the sun begins to sink. To be comfortable, light flannels must be worn next the skin, with an extra heavy coat available--never farther away from yourself than the pack straps. Night may overtake you on a hard trail. Long as you have an extra heavy coat and a box of matches, night does not matter. You are safer benighted in the wilds than in New York or Chicago. If you have camp fire and blanket, night in the wilds knows nothing of the satyr-faced spirit of evil, sand-bagger and yeggman, that stalks the town.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The forest-ranger in action, fighting a ground fire with his saddle blanket in one of the National Forests of the West]

To anyone used to travel in the wilderness, it seems almost like little boys playing Robinson Crusoe to give explicit directions as to dress.

Yet only a few years ago, the world was shocked and horrified by the death of a town man exploring the wilds; and that death was directly traceable to a simple matter of boots. His feet played out. He had gone into a country of rocky portages with only one pair of moccasins. I have never gone into the wilds for longer than four months at a time. Yet I have never gone with less than four sets of footgear. Primarily, you need a pair of good outing boots; and outing boots are good only when they combine two qualities--comfort and thick enough soles to protect your feet from sharp rock edges if you climb, broad enough soles, too, to protect the edge of your feet from hard knocks from pa.s.sing trees and jars in the stirrup. For the rest, you need about two extras in case you chip chunks out of these in climbing; and if you camp near glaciers or snow fields, a pair of moccasins for night wear will add to comfort. You may get them if you like to spend the money--$8 leggings and $8 horsehide shoes and cowboy hat and belted corduroy suit and all the other paraphernalia by which the seasoned Westerner recognizes the tenderfoot. You may get them if you want to. It will not hurt you; but a $3 cowboy slicker for rainy days and a pair of boots guaranteed to let the water out as fast as it comes in, these and the ordinary outing garments of any other part of the world are the prime essentials.

This matter of proper preparation recalls a little English woman who determined to train her boys and girls to be resourceful and independent by taking them camping each summer in the forests of the Pacific Coast.

They were on a tramp one day twelve miles from camp when a heavy fog blew in, and they lost themselves. That is not surprising when you consider the big tree country. Two notches and one blaze mark the bounds of the National Forests; one notch and one blaze, the trail; but they had gone off the trail trout fis.h.i.+ng. "If they had been good path-finders, they could have found the way out by following the stream down," remarked a critic of this little group to me; and a very apt criticism it was from the safe vantage point of a study chair. How about it, if when you came to follow the stream down, it chanced to cut through a gorge you couldn't follow, with such a sheer fall of rock at the sides and such a crisscross of big trees, house-high, that you were driven back from the stream a mile or two? You would keep your directions by sunlight? Maybe; but that big tree region is almost impervious to sunlight; and when the fog blows in or the clouds blow down thick as wool, you will need a pocket compa.s.s to keep the faintest sense of direction. Compa.s.s signs of forest-lore fail here. There are few flowers under the dense roofing to give you sense of east or west; and you look in vain for the moss sign on the north bark of the tree.

All four sides are heavily mossed; and where the little Englishwoman lost herself, they were in ferns to their necks.