s, for reasons that need not be
told are laid flat on the ground up here.

When you cross the Divide, you enter the National Forests. National
Forests above tree line? To be sure! These deep, coarse upper grasses
provide ideal pasturage for sheep from June to September; and the
National Forests administer the grazing lands for the general use of all
the public, instead of permitting them to be monopolized by the big
rancher, who promptly drove the weaker man off by cutting the throats of
intruding flocks and herds.

Then, the train is literally racing down hill--with the trucks bumping
heels like the wheels of a wagon on a sluggish team; and a new tang
comes to the ozone--the tang of resin, of healing balsam, of cinnamon
smells, of incense and frankincense and myrrh, of spiced sunbeams and
imprisoned fragrance--the fragrance of thousands upon thousands of years
of dew and light, of pollen dust and ripe fruit cones; the attar, not of
Persian roses, but of the everlasting pines.

The train takes a swift swirl round an escarpment of the mountain; and
you are in the Forests proper, serried rank upon rank of the blue spruce
and the lodgepole pine. No longer spangles of light hitting back from
the rocks in sparks of fire! The light here is sifted pollen
dust--pollen dust, the primordial life principle of the tree--with the
purple, cinnamon-scented cones hanging from the green arms of the
conifers like the chevrons of an enranked army; and the cones tell you
somewhat of the service as the chevrons do of the soldier man. Some
conifers hold their cones for a year before they send the seed,
whirling, swirling, broadside to the wind, aviating pixy parachutes,
airy armaments for the conquest of arid hills to new forest growth,
though the process may take the trifling aeon of a thousand years or so.
At one season, when you come to the Forests, the air is full of the
yellow pollen of the conifers, gold dust whose alchemy, could we but
know it, would unlock the secrets of life. At another season--the season
when I happened to be in the Colorado Forests--the very atmosphere is
alive with these forest airships, conifer seeds sailing broadside to the
wind. You know why they sail broadside, don't you? If they dropped plumb
like a stone, the ground would be seeded below the heavily shaded
branches inches deep in self-choking, sunless seeds; but when the
broadside of the sail to the pixy's airship tacks to the veering wind,
the seed is c