He used to dream, as he rode down the bridle path, of the day coming when all the vast domain of National Forests would be like that trail; not a stick of underbrush or slash as big as your finger; not a stump above eighteen inches high; all the scaled logs piled neat as card board boxes; open park below the resinous cinnamon-smelling lodge-pole line and englemann spruce, hardly a branch lower on the trees than the height of a man; and such a rain of tempered light from the clicking pine needles and whorled spruces as might have come through the rose window of a cathedral.  A “show” picture of a properly conducted National Forest has gone through all the magazines and newspapers—­It represents the piles of cordwood clean as piles of pencils, the trees standing park-like with vistas and glades and opens beneath the tall pinery.  Wayland knew in his own heart that his Forest was better than that “show” picture.  No pictures could tell of the pine seedlings stolen from a squirrel cache scattered on the snows; the delicate young pinery coming up among a protecting nursery of birch and poplar and cottonwood.  No picture could show “the dead tops” cut out; the “cheesy” rotten heartwood burning on an altar of sacrifice to the deity of the forest; the markings on “the dead tops” and ripe trees and trees with broken top “leaders” for the lumberman to come and harvest.  No picture could give the jolly song of the cross-cut saw, the musical ripping of the oiled blade through the huge logs, the odor of the imprisoned sunbeams and flowers from the rain of the yellow saw-dust.  No picture could possibly tell you the life story of yon big tree, the warrior of the woods who had beaten down all competitors and enemies and wore his purple cones like the tasseled honor badges of a soldier, with pendulous moving, plumy arms:  yet to the eye of the Forester, the life history was there, in the fluted grooved columnar bark, in the knot scars where branches had been discarded to send the main trunk towering above its fellows for light and air, in the wood rings, where a branch had broken and fallen away in the struggle.  Why, this noble fellow had been a straggling sapling a thousand years before the birth of Christ!  Before Darius led his conquering hosts from realm to realm, or ever Caesar knew life, or Christopher Columbus framed mast and spar to discover America, this sun-crowned monarch had over-topped his fellows, and met the challenge of the blasts of heaven, and drunk of the wines of the dews of an immortal youth, and dieted on the ambrosial ether of gods, and sent his seedling offspring sailing ten thousand airy seas with the wind for master pilot and never a craft but the gypsy parachute of a seed with wings shaken out from the cones purpling to the autumn heat!

Air ships?  Had the modern world gone mad over air ships?  This fellow had been sending out whole navies of air ships for thousands of years; seeding the mighty mountains; fighting all rivals; travelling on the wings of the wind, and if consumed by fire, then, like the phoenix springing to new life from the ashes, sending forth fresh armadas from the pendant purplish cinnamon-scented cones split open by the heat and so releasing fresh winged seeds!