sale values if the prospective buyer is
from the East or from our own cities or tree-less regions. Such
are attracted strongly by the grove-like effect of a few trees left
around the house. Their desire for this is as strongly ingrained
as the average local resident's desire for a completely free outlook
to mark his victory over unfriendly nature. The appeal a place
makes to a buyer as a pleasant home has frequently as important
an influence on his decision as its purely practical merits.

His judgment of the latter, however, is also affected by his earlier
environment. If he has lived where farming land is open, evidences
of the labor of clearing are discouraging. The untouched forest,
being totally beyond his capacity to estimate the labor its removal
entails, repels him less than stumps, logs, desolate burnings and
like detailed evidences of the work which lies before him. This
is another reason why the clearing of clearly fertile land may
be better business than the half-clearing of land perhaps best
suited for forest growth anyway. Again, not fully realizing the
plentifulness of forest products in the new locality, he may actually
overestimate the value of an attractive piece of forest land showing
evidence of the thoughtful care suggested in a preceding paragraph.

USE OF FIRE

Above all, it pays the settler in wooded regions to be careful
with fire. Properly directed and confined, fire is necessary in
clearing land. But there is no profit in allowing uncontrolled
fire to spread from the actual clearing to create a snarl of dead,
decaying and falling trees and underbrush. It is usually harder
to extend the clearing into such ground than into green timber.
This added work later is many times that necessary to safeguard
the burning in the first place.

In every case that fire ever escaped from clearing operations,
the cause was either thoughtlessness or unwillingness to perform
certain work. Because it is easier to burn a slashing than to pile
and burn; or when a ground burn is desirable, because it is easier
to take chances than to clear a fire line around the area and have
a force of men present; because burning at a dry, dangerous time
will be cleaner and thus save work after the fire; inexperience,
coupled with unwillingness to take advice from the experienced--these
and like reasons are responsible for the destruction of lives and
property worth over and over again the sum that was saved by the
attempted