SPARE THE TREES

All the protection that the law can give will not prevent the game naturally belonging to a wooded country from leaving it when it is deforested, nor keep fish in waters that have shrunk to a quarter of their ordinary volume before midsummer. The streams of such a country will thus shrink when the mountains, where the snows lie latest and the feeding springs are, and the swamps, which dole out their slow but steady tribute, are bereft of shade. The thin soil of a rocky hill, when deprived of its shelter of branches, will be burned by the summer sun out of all power to help the germination of any worthy seed, or to nurture so noble a plant as a tree through the tender days of its infancy. It supports only useless weeds and brambles. Once so denuded, it will be unsightly and unprofitable for many years if not always. Some swamps at great expense may be brought into tillage and meadow, but nine times out of ten, when cleared of the lusty growth of woods, they bear nothing but wild grass, and the streams that trickled from them all the summer long in their days of wildness show in August only the parched trail of the spring course.

Our natives have inherited their ancestors' hatred of trees, which to them were only cumberers of the ground, to be got rid of by the speediest means; and our foreign-born landholders, being unused to so much woodland, think there can be no end to it, let them slash away as they will.

Ledges and steep slopes that can bear nothing but wood to any profit, are shorn of their last tree, and the margins of streams to the very edge robbed of the willows and water-maples that shaded the water and with their roots protected the banks from washing. Who has not known a little alder swamp, in which he was sure to find a dozen woodcock, when he visited it on the first day of the season each year? Some year the first day comes and he seeks it as usual, to find its place marked only by brush heaps, stubs, and sedges; and for the brook that wimpled through it in the days of yore, only stagnant pools. The worst of it is, the owners can seldom give any reason for this slaughter but that their victims were trees and bushes.

The Yankee, with his proverbial thriftiness and forecast, appears entirely to lose these gifts when it comes to the proper and sensible management of woodlands. Can he not understand that it is more profitable to keep a lean or thin soil that will grow nothing well but wood, growing wood instead of worthless weeds? The crop is one which is slow in coming to the harvest, but it is a sure one, and is every year becoming a more valuable one. It breaks the fierceness of the winds, and keeps the springs from drying up, and is a comfort to the eye, whether in the greenness of the leaf or the barrenness of the bough, and under its protecting arms live and breed the grouse, the quail and the hare, and in its shadowed rills swim the trout.