the twenty spread from a heap of old snow-shed timbers that the railway people burned as rubbish, and might have been avoided by burning them in wet weather instead of dry. To the credit of the company it should be said that it set a large force of men at work to put this fire out, and that, while the fire covered a good deal of ground, it did not destroy much valuable timber.

Four fires were started by donkey-engines in the lumber camps. These also

clared that this is too expensive and cannot be done, but of late they seem to be making up their minds that they must do it anyhow, whether they can or not. Ultimately, of course, the consumer will pay the freight if there is any to pay, but burning the brush will not raise the price of lumber as much as burning stumpage.

This seems a good place to say that the lumbermen and railway men are not entirely to blame for their slowness in adopting such remedies as these. For instance,

it is difficult to construct a spark-arrester that will really arrest sparks without working more or less loss of power in the engine, and if there is any engine in the world that needs all the power it can raise it is a locomotive hauling trains over the mountain grades in some of the National forests.

One fire spread from a burning brushpile and was probably started by some settler clearing land. Some of the forest States have passed laws forbidding the burning of brush by ranchers except under permit from the county warden; and though it is difficult to enforce such regulations, it will probably grow easier as settlers come to realize the necessity.

The other fifteen fires were all started by campers. Many people know how to build a camp-fire so that it will not endanger the surrounding forest. Many others do not, or, knowing, do not care. But some of these may learn in the course of time.

One morning, not many years ago, a forest ranger on patrol duty came upon a camp that had evidently been deserted only a few minutes before. A fire had been built at the foot of a tall stub, had run to the top, and was throwing sparks into the woods around it. Fortunately, the stub stood on the bank of a stream. The ranger had an ax, and by half an hour's hard work he felled it, dropping it on a bar of bare gravel. Then he put out the fire with water from the creek and went after the campers. They had a long start, but he was a trained woodsman and knew how to walk, and eight miles down the trail he overtook them and charged them with having left their fire burning. At first they tried to deny it, but he insisted that they were guilty, and they finally owned up. They had meant to put it out, they said, but it went up the stub and they could not reach it and did not know what to do. He told them they must go back, fell the stub, and extinguish every last spark. They laughed at him, but he assured them that it was not a subject for merriment. He was an officer of the law, and if they did not obey him he would take them to the nearest settlement and put them in jail. They were four to one, but he overawed them, and they started back up the trail, swearing like the army in Flanders. The day

was hot, the miles were long, and they soon grew footsore and weary. As the hours went by their stream of profanity steadily increased. But when at last they mounted a low ridge, looked down on their camping-ground of the night before, and realized that the stub was already felled and the fire out, they took it in dead silence. They were too mad to speak.

The various ways in which the fortyseven fires were extinguished make an interesting story, but too long to give in detail.

Twenty-six were put out by the rangers who found them, without assistance and before they had spread far enough to do any harm whatever. Yet any one of these twenty-six, if left to itself, might have started a great conflagration and done inestimable damage. Ten others were a little larger, so that the rangers had to have help, but they, too, were extinguished before they had done any appreciable harm. The remaining eleven were more extensive, but only one of them the unnecessary one that started in the slashings at the foot of the mountain-succeeded in destroying more than a few hundred dollars' worth of timber. And yet this forest is undermanned and is not equipped as it should be for efficient fire-fighting. In some respects it is more fortunate than others farther inland. Although it was without rain for weeks together, yet the mere presence of the moisture in the atmosphere, brought in from the Pacific by the westerly winds, was a decided protection. But when every allowance has been made for this there is still a chance, at the very least, that if the proper measures could have been taken at the proper time the great fires in Minnesota and Idaho, which a few months ago caused such terrible loss of life and property, might have been prevented entirely or put out before they had done much harm. That those measures have not always been taken is not the fault of the Forest Service, which as yet has never had the financial resources to handle the situation adequately.

There are those who say that it is impossible to put a stop to forest fires and that it does not pay to try. The experience of this Pacific Coast forest in the long, dry summer of 1910 would seem to indicate that it pays most handsomely.

CHAPTER I

Y tenth birthday was celebrated in northern England, almost within hailing distance of the Irish Sea. Chaddy Ashworth, the grocer's son, helped me eat the birthday cake with the ten raisins on its buttered top.

As old Bill Scrogs was wont to boast, "Hadfield was in the right proper place, it being in the best shire in the Kingdom. Darby-shir [Derbyshire] is where Mr. George Eliot [only he said "Helliot "] got his Adam Bede' frum [only he said "Hadam Bede "]. Darby-shir is where Hum-fry Ward [he said "Waard"] placed the Hist'ry o' Davvid Grieve.' If that don't top off the glory, it is Darby-shir that has geen to the waarld Florence Nightengale!"

It was in the first of those ten years that I was bereft of my parents and went to live with my Aunt Millie and Uncle Stanwood. They kept a fish and poultry shop on Railway Road, and in this shop, over which a sign announced that "everything in its season was kept, came ducks, rabbits, watercress, sole, haddock, and all manner of shellfish. There was a weekly exhibition of a gigantic ray, which sat in a low chair with his tail flappers comically curled forward, with a plug hat aslant his beady left eye, and with a pipe prodded in his silly mouth.

My Uncle Stanwood was never intended by nature or ambition to impress the

world with the fact of his presence in it. The only occasions when he ever called attention to himself were when he peddled fish and loudly shouted: "Fish alive! Buy them alive! Kill them as you want 'em !" and when he played on his flute. His musical skill was limited to tunes from "Easy Pieces for Learners," and their rendition never brought him more than a perfunctory morsel of applause. His eagerness for an audience, however, led him at night to the smoke-laden parlors of the Blue Sign and the Linnet's Nest, the public-houses, where applause was generally given in the shape of noggins of punch and mugs of hot porter with a red-hot poker dipped in and seasoned with pepper and salt. Uncle Stanwood's will was not impervious to the fumes of these decoctions, and after a concert he generally forgot his flute and I was sent after it the next day, when the barmaid usually tried a note before letting me have it. "Brindin and his flute " was always a phrase brought in whenever a public-house concert was proposed.

My uncle always maintained a neutral attitude to his business. He neither shouted up and down the street, as the butcher did, that his was the trade of a gentleman, nor did he ever despise it in so many spoken words. It yielded him a comfortable living, for it was not every house in Hadfield that had a piano or could afford to have enlarged portraits of