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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.

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"LIFE ON THE DUMPS WAS GENERALLY A RETURN TO THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST""

Through the Mill

By Al Priddy

With Drawings by Wladyslaw T. Benda

This story of the life of a mill-boy is an autobiography in the fullest sense. The facts and experiences presented are absolutely true, although imaginary names have been used, and some of the methods of fiction have been followed in the manner of writing. The story will appear in six illustrated installments in Magazine Numbers of The Outlook.-THE EDITORS.

M

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

the family framed in gilt and hung above Dickens, and thus stole his wife's thunder, the horsehair furniture.

My Aunt Millie was positively positive in every part of her nature. She was positive that "Rule Britannia" should come next after" Nearer, My God, to Thee." She was positive as to the validity of her own ideas. Her will, once made up-and it did not take long brooding for that-was inflexible. She was positive in asserting that "every one of us should know our place in life. It's no use trying to pass off as middle class if you aren't middle class, and why should a middle-classer try to pose as a gentleman?" She was always reciting to me how, when the carriage of a squire swept by, she had always courtesied graciously and humbly. Once she had seen a real lord, and the vision had taken her breath away. Her father had been a musical genius, who, like all geniuses, had always been poor. He had been a player on, and a builder of, church organs. He also had made family blacking, family pills (of soap, sugar, and some herb compounded); he had composed music for the local share in a national fête, and on the merit of that my aunt said, "Many and many's the time have gentle men, real gentlemen, driven up to our door just merely to have a look at father!"

Aunt and Uncle suffered from an incompatibility of temper. Not pondering the matter in her heart, my aunt took many opportunities of reminding Uncle that she had had better chances !"

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In these family debates, which generally turned into harangues, my aunt always effectively silenced the weak batteries of my uncle by shooting shafts of allusions, analogies, and similes from the Dickens gallery of types. When my uncle was gloating over the prospect of not taking his wife to Manchester on the next trip, my aunt met him with, "Yes, there you sit, rubbing your slimy hands like Uriah Heep!" When my uncle was contending that the business would pick up in a day or so" in spite of the apparent "slackness just now," my aunt "ha-ha’d” tauntingly, and then sneered: “Oh, yes, 'it will pick up in a day or so '! I see it! You're just like Micawber, the old sniffer, always waiting for something to turn up!" But it was not long one-sided, for my uncle not only drew from the gallery of

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but he also fell back on Thackeray. "There you go," he would say, "everlastingly like Becky Sharp, with her lying insinuations!" One day my aunt was "Mrs. Gamp," loving the comforts of life a little too much, and another time my uncle actually included his wife among Mrs. Jarley's wax works!

Nothing delighted my aunt more than occasional visits to the different chemists' shops, where she could get free samples of liver medicines, Beecham's pills, ointments, and herbs. She tried them all on herself even when she had no specific ailment. When I remonstrated with her, urging that one day she would poison herself, she replied: "You see, Al, I sort of enjoy it. Some of the pills are candy-coated and some are peppermint. I just like to try them out, and, when I find one that really does me good, I buy it the next time I am ill!" In her own way my aunt was benevolently inclined. She was always sitting up with the sick and leaving Uncle to shift for himself. She kept an old clock on hand purposely for the towncrier, a shiftless man, to mend. The clock never ticked five minutes after the old man had tinkered with it, but my aunt used it as an excuse to give the man a penny. She once employed this bellman to paint some panel pictures on the chamber doors. When the work was done, my aunt asked him why, in every picture, the cows stood up to their knees in water. The old man replied that he had never learned to paint "'oofs," so he always stuck the cattle into water!

At the ivy-clothed school which I attended, in addition to the usual studies, we boys were taught knitting, plain sewing, darning, and crotcheting. On the way from school in the spring and summer we always stopped before a high brick wall over which one branch of a crabapple tree wavered. On that branch flourished the only apple I ever saw grow in England. We watched it develop from a white blossom splashed with crimson into a green knot, and from the green knot into a blushing, shiny, mature fruit. Never did we hurl stick or stone at it. It was too sacred and wonderful in our eyes for that. On Saturday mornings, when I had daubed red and blue stone over the

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"I SETTLED MYSELF IN THE COMPARTMENT, WONDERING WHY MY AUNT WAS CRYING, AND COUNTING THE PENNIES IN MY POCKET. WITH WHICH I INTENDED TO BUY SOME ORANGES IN LIVERPOOL

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