“It was a plan of my own, this replanting where the pine forest has been cut,” he explained, as he sat down by Beatrice on the grassy slope, evidently delighted to have some one to listen to his enthusiasm. “The Government does a good deal of this reforesting where tracts have been cut down or burned, but they can’t give the trees the care that I do. Nobody could except a man who loves them. As they grow big I keep taking out some for Christmas-trees or for small timber, but the bulk of them shall never be cut until they have grown to be giants, a hundred feet high. I love to sit here and watch them, each year a little bigger, each year more valuable. It will be a wonderful piece of timber land fifty, sixty, seventy years from now.”
“But—but——” began Beatrice and stopped. She had almost blurted out that a man who was gray-haired at the planting of these trees could not hope to see them grow to that mighty forest of which he dreamed.
“Oh, I know I will be gone long before then,” he replied serenely, “but what does it matter? We live here in the mountains to keep Miriam well; she doesn’t get on in the valleys and towns. She has her garden and I have my trees and we are happy enough, thinking about the future, even if it is a future long beyond our time. Mines that we never heard of will be timbered from these trees, to bring out gold and silver for our children’s children; there will be ships with these pines for masts that will sail to ports I never saw. There will be houses built—I can almost see the people that will be born and live and die under the roofs that my trees will make.”
His eyes had been on the far distance, but he turned to fix them intently on Beatrice’s.
“If you live on a mountain,” he said, “you can see much more than if you belong to the crowded, pushing, hurrying people that stay in the valley.”
“And now,” he declared, after a little pause, “here I have talked and talked just as Miriam said I would, but I want you to have a turn. You have told us your name and that you know John Herrick, but may I hear the rest? Where are you living and how did you happen to come to Ely? Strangers are not so common but that we backwoods people like to know all about them.”