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SILAS STRONG

I

THE song of the saws began long ago at the mouths of the rivers. Slowly the axes gnawed their way southward, and the ominous, prophetic chant followed them. Men seemed to goad the rivers to increase their speed. They caught and held and harnessed them as if they had been horses and drove them into flumes and leaped them over dams and pulled and hauled and baffled them until they broke away with the power of madness in their rush. But, even then, the current of the rivers would not do; the current of thunderbolts could not have whirled the wheels with speed enough.

Now steam bursts upon the piston-head with the power of a hundred horses. The hungry steel races through columns of pine as if they were soft as butter and its' bass note booms night and day to the heavens. Hear it now. The burden of that old song is m-o-r-e, m-o-r-e, m-o-r-e!

It is doleful music, God knows, but, mind you, it voices the need of the growing land. It sings of the doom of the woods. It may be heard all along the crumbling edge of the wilderness from Maine to Minnesota. Day by day hammers beat time while the saws continue their epic chorus.

There are towers and spires and domes and high walls where, in our boyhood, there were only trees far older than the century, and these rivers that flow north go naked in open fields for half their journey. Every spring miles of timber come plunging over cataracts and rushing through rapids and crowding into slow water on its way to the saws. There a shaft of pine which has been a hundred years getting its girth is ripped into slices and scattered upon the stack in a minute. A new river, the rushing, steam-driven river of steel, bears it away to the growing cities.