and. Wherever there is genuine metal, prospectors
can go in and stake their claims and take lumber for their preliminary
operations; but they cannot stake thousands of fictitious claims, then
yearly turn over a quarter of a million dollars' worth of timber free to
a big smelting trust--a merry game worked in one of the Western States
for several years till the rangers put a stop to it.

To build roads through an empire the size of Germany would require
larger revenues than the Forests yet afford; so the experiment is being
tried of permitting lumbermen to take the timber free from the space
occupied by a road for the building of the road. When you consider that
you can drive a span of horses through the width of a big conifer, or
build a cottage of six rooms from a single tree, the reward for road
building is not so paltry as it sounds.

Presently, your pony turns up a by-path. You are at the ranger's
cabin,--picturesque to a degree, built of hewn logs or timbers, with
slab sides scraped down to the cinnamon brown, nailed on the hewn wood.
Many an Eastern country house built in elaborate and shoddy imitation of
town mansion, or prairie home resembling nothing in the world so much as
an ugly packing box, might imitate the architecture of the ranger's
cabin to the infinite improvement of appearances, not to mention
appropriateness.

Appropriateness! That is the word. It is a forest world; and the ranger
tunes the style of his house to the trees around him; log walls, log
partitions, log veranda, unbarked log fences, rustic seats, fur rugs,
natural stone for entrance steps. In several cases, where the cabin had
been built of square hewn timber with tar paper lining, slabs scraped of
the loose bark had been nailed diagonally on the outside; and a more
suitable finish to a wood hermitage could hardly be devised--surely
better than the weathered browns and dirty drabs and peeling whites that
you see defacing the average frontier home. Naturally enough, city
people building cottages as play places have been the first to imitate
this woodsy architecture. You see the slab-sided, cinnamon-barked
cottages among the city folk who come West to play, and in the lodges of
hunting clubs far East as the Great Lakes. Personally I should like to
see the contagion spread to the farthest East of city people who are
fleeing the cares of town, "back to the land;" but when there are taken
to the country all the cares of the city house, a reg