er means, don't you? You lived long enough on Paw
Hoover's farm at Hedgeville to know that?"

"Yes, indeed! It's bad for the crops; they all get burned up. We had
a drought two or three years ago. It never rained at all, except for
little showers that didn't do any good, all through July and August,
and for most of June, as well. Paw Hoover was all broken up about it.
He said one or two more summers like that would put him in the
poor-house."

"Well, if there weren't any forests, all our summers would be like
that. The woods are great storehouses of moisture, and they have a lot
to do with the rain. Countries where they don't have forests, like
Australia, are very dry. And that's the reason."

"They have something to do with floods, too, don't they, Wanaka?" asked
Dolly. "I think I read something like that, or heard someone say so."

"They certainly have. In winter it rains a good deal, and snows, and
if there are great stretches of woods, the trees store up all that
moisture. But if there are no trees, it all comes down at once, in the
spring, and that's one of the chief reasons for those terrible floods
and freshets that do so much damage, and kill so many people."

"But if that's so, why are the trees cut down so often?"

"That's just one of the things I was talking about. Some men are
selfish, you see. They buy the land and the trees, and they never
think, or seem to care, how other people are affected when they start
cutting. They say it's their land, and their timber; that they paid
for it."

"Well, I suppose it is--"

"Yes, but like most selfish people, they are short-sighted. It is very
easy to cut timber so that no harm is done, and in some countries that
really are as free and progressive as ours, things are managed much
better. We waste a whole forest and leave the land bare and full of
stumps. Then, you see, it isn't any use as a storehouse for moisture,
which nature intended it to be, and neither is it any use to the timber
cutters, so that they have to move on somewhere else."

"Could they manage that differently?"

"Yes, if they would only cut a certain number of trees in any
particular part of the woods in any one year, and would always plant
new ones for every one that is taken out, there wouldn't be such a
dreadful waste, and the forests would keep on growing. That's the way
it is usually done abroad--in Germany, and in Russia, and places like
that. Over there they make e