THE FOOL I' THE FOREST.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVI, Issue 112, 7 November 1908, Page 10

THE FOOL I' THE FOREST.

Something more than mere sentimentalism will move the Californian to rejoice that "The Mother of the Forest" of the Calaveras grove of Big Trees still stands in columnar majesty with her stalwart family of great-girthed, russetmailed, emerald-plumed giants. For a time it was feared that those trees were fated to perish from tho earth ; that the flames creeping out from a sheepherder's pot-boiling camp fire or the embers of a fool " camper's " baconfrying contrivance would destroy the only living survival of the age beyond " the dawr of history." Happily this disaster was averted and only the bald and ragged crest of "The Mother" was scorched, another scar added to those already inflicted by time and the hand of God. Better, far better, that these age-defy-ing monarchs should parish by the slivering stroke of the thunderbolt than that they should waste to cinders and ashes in the ignoble flame of a fire kindled by a Slavonian goatherd or a grocer's clerk obtruding his puny presence upon Nature in her solitude. Long before the herder's ancestry learned the use of the element which their' illiterate and sacrilegious descendant employed to warm a can full of cheap chicory to appease the craving of a degenerate stomach, these trees were sturdy saplings ; a thousand years anterior to the period when the most ancient progenitors of the grocer's clerk took for themselves the names of their overlords and abandoned their holes in' the rock to make local habitation in abject villeinage to a barbarian chieftain, these trees were deep-rooted in the glacial mud of the mountains still trembling in the throes of their upheaval. When Abraham fed his flocks on the scant pasture of "Ur in the land of the Chaldees, the giant redwoods of California were vigorous shoots not yet barked to record their age in annular growth, though centuries had elapsed since their seed had thawed from the cold embrace of the ice-drift; while the armies of Sesostris were devastating tbe world from Ethiopia to the Indus the last of the post-pliocene mastodons may have rubbed his gigantic tusks against the rough bark of " The Father of the Forest/ now prostrate and dry-rotted in the Calaveras grove ; if ethnologists have guessed accurately, the southward wandering Tolqtec tribes paused in the shade of these trees to recuperate from the fatigue of their long march, and that was three centuries before Columbus set foot on the islands of the Carib Sea. Dynasties founded to outlast the memory of man have passed to oblivion since the seed of the sequoia winged its flight on the north-west wind to its final resting place on the slope of the California Sierra; J racial types have changed to fit their j shifting environment and mingled to produce a hundred new phases of humanity since our redwoods began to grow ; nations have come and gone, and onl" man has persisted coeval with these trees as they now stand. So old are the ever-living redwoods of the Sierran forests that they have outlived the use of commerce. The centuries have eaten their hearts, and they are no longer timber ; they have ceased to be appraised in the lumber market; they are interrogation marks and exclamation points on the pages of the Book of Time. John Muir, venerable guardian of this garden of the Lord, once Said that the Almighty could plant these trees and blast them with the wrath of his storms -bHrougH all t-He ages, permitting the"m to survive every vicissitude of milennial existence, and that at last a fool and a touchwood splinter tipped with sulphur in incen-

diary coniunction with a fistful of crackling twigs could destroy the divina handiwork in a few hours of a midsummer day. Once upon a time this Brother of the Forest, traversing hia usual way through the country of ths giants, discovered a grease-grimed herdsman, born in a land where the vegeta* tion creeps on the surface of the earth, in the act of building a fire at the bas» of a sequoia. The fire was never lighted. The twigs and brambles were kicked into tho canon by indignant feet heavy, booted for a long journey. T.hen tha astonished and terrified exile of Tuscany listened to a brief history of the tree upon which he had sought to commit this sacrilege —history intermingled with up-to-date objurgation. When, Muir had ended, the Italian (degenerate scion of the Caesars, perchance) muttored his "No savvey," and silently, slunk away, only delaying, like the Arab, to fold his dirty blankets. Bub even the eloquence and admonition of John Muir is powerless against the match of the sheep-herding Goth and the cheese-paring Vandal; and some day, there will be no more redwoods in California.—Argonaut.