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From the top of a ridge it looked a good deal like a northern cut-over pine country grown up very heavily to blackberry vines; although, of course, when we came nearer, the "blackberry vines" proved to be ten or twenty feet high. This was a district of which Horne had warned us. The natives herein were reported restless and semi-hostile; and in fact had never been friendly.

The Forest Service estimates that by protecting our cut-over and waste lands from fire and practicing care to secure reproduction after logging on our remaining virgin forest land, we can produce annually at least 27,750,000,000 cubic feet of wood, including 70,000,000,000 board feet of sawtimber.

To the deserts of the West we have brought the creative touch of water, and we must find a way to go on with this work. But it is of equal importance that we should liberate rich areas now held in bondage by the swamp, convert millions of acres of idle cut-over lands to profitable use, and raise from the dead the once vigorous agricultural life of our abandoned farms.

There are many instances, particularly of swamp and cut-over areas, where land that may be bought for $10 an acre and reclaimed at a cost of $25 to $50 per acre, has an actual market value of $100 to $200 per acre the moment it is put into shape for cultivation.

Much of this was cut-over and so severely burned before the creation of the forests that it bears no tree growth. Some of these lands will reseed themselves naturally while other areas have to be seeded or planted by hand. In this way the lands that will produce profitable trees are fitted to support forest cover.

He cocked his head, and purred, "Well, I guess if I cashed in on all my securities and farm-holdings and my interests in iron on the Mesaba and in Northern timber and cut-over lands, I could push two million dollars pretty close, and I've made every cent of it by hard work and having the sense to not go out and spend every " "I think I want most of it from you!"

It is necessary that suitable measures be adopted to induce private owners to preserve and protect their woodlands. The timberlands must be protected against forest fires. Timber must be cut so as to aid natural reproduction of forest. Cut-over lands must be reforested.

Sarah Shepard had come from a people and a country quite different in its aspect from that in which she now lived. Her own people, frugal New Englanders, had come West in the year after the Civil War to take up cut-over timber land in the southern end of the state of Michigan.

There are but 4,237,587 acres in state forests in the United States. This is only 1-1/2 per cent. of the cut-over and denuded land in the country which is useful only for tree production. The lack of funds prevents many states from embarking more extensively in this work.

The autumn seeds are sailing too the pitching parachutes of thistle and fall dandelion and wild lettuce, like fleets of tiny yachts under sail a breeze from a cut-over ridge in the woods blowing almost cottony with the soft down of the tall lettuce that has come up thick in the clearing. As I watch the strowing of the winds, my melancholy slips away.