ten eleven, with the antlers).... You strip off its hide,
because that is the common trophy, and moreover you have heard it
may be sold for mocassons--cut a steak from its body, and leave the
huge carcass 'to smell to heaven' for you. It is no better, at
least, than to assist at a slaughter house. This afternoon's
experience suggested to me how base or coarse are the motives which
commonly carry men into the wilderness. The explorers and lumberers
generally are hirelings, paid so much a day for their labor, and as
such they have no more love for wild nature than wood sawyers have
for forests. Other white men and Indians who come here are for the
most part hunters, whose object is to slay as many moose and other
wild animals as possible. But pray, could not one spend some weeks
or years in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other
employments than these--employments perfectly sweet, innocent, and
ennobling? For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a
thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and imperfect use
Indians and hunters make of nature! No wonder that their race is so
soon exterminated. I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my
nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was
reminded that our life should be lived as tenderly and daintily as
one would pluck a flower.'

Again:

'As I sat before the fire on my fir-twig seat, without walls above
or around me, I remembered how far on every hand that wilderness
stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated fields, and
wondered if any bear or moose was watching the light of my fire;
for nature looked sternly upon me on account of the _murder of the
moose_.

'Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine
lives and grows and spires, lifting its ever-green arms to the
light--to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold
it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem
_that_ its true success. But the pine is no more lumber than man
is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and
highest use, than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and
made into manure. There is a higher law affecting our relation to
pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a
pine t