workers to either mill or camp. It was a dissipated and irregular life, and a shifting crew. The common saying went that a camp had three crews 'one coming, one going, one at work.'

No families were ever taken into the woods, and all the vices flourished there, with at least the tacit encouragement of the owners; for though ostensibly high wages were paid, it was expected that most of this would return to the company either directly through the high prices the men were compelled to pay at the commissary (company store), or indirectly through the leasing of this privilege of exploitation. Like the turpentine-camp of to-day, it was a synonym for almost intolerable conditions. No land was taken up in the town by employees, no houses built; but when the timber was cut off to such a distance from the saw-mill that it was no longer profitable to haul it in by primitive methods, the company moved on from the denuded land, the camp vanished, and the town dwindled.

Moreover, in the best of circumstances, the supply of logs to the mill was most irregular. For this reason, a mill never ran steadily throughout the year, but was always stopping and starting up, to the great detriment of the working efficiency of its force. So bad was the traditional reputation of these lumber towns and camps, and of the management of the companies, that it was almost impossible to get banking accommodation for a lumbering proposition. No industry suffered such deep distrust on the part of bankers, and the consequent hand-to-mouth methods of financing completed the vicious circle. Moral and physical ugliness, dreariness and sloth, marked the Southern lumber country.

It remained for a Westerner with imagination to transform these conditions in one town, and, by force of example, largely throughout the South. He saw

that an element of permanence must be given to what seems in its nature the most unstable and nomadic of industries. This man of insight came South in the early nineties from a wide western experience in lumbering. He found at Vateria the usual moribund company with a small saw-mill nearly at the end of its possible hauling distance with ox-teams. The town was then a dismal little community of some two hundred souls, getting a precarious living from its few cotton-fields dotted here and there among the pines. The farmers were in the grip of the vicious 'credit system,' under which they owed the store-keeper three prices for all supplies advanced before harvest, and were held fast by their creditor to the single 'money crop'-cotton. Timber land was a drug on the market at any distance from the railroad, and cleared land did not produce more than fifteen dollars worth of cotton the acre. The inhabitants were on the cultural level of full fifty years ago. Cooking was still done entirely in open fireplaces; few had ever seen a stove, much less a steamengine. The story is still told of the countryman who came into the tent of a surveyor for the first railroad, not long before our story begins, and said, looking at the iron stove, 'Well, now, they tell me that is a very fine invention. I suppose all you have to do is to build a fire in that thing and off you go!' It was his notion of a locomotive.

The destiny of such a lumber town hangs on its mill, and the prosperity of the mill, to an extent few people understand, on the efficiency of the loggingcamp. Saw-mill practice has been almost completely standardized. The economical size of the mill, the order and method of procedure, and the proportionate space allotted to different activities, are all well known. Few variations, except in the way of dealing with the personnel, are to be found over the

whole country. But in the field it is different. The unlike types of timber, of situation, of transportation, of climatic conditions of work, furnish infinitely varied problems. In buying, cutting, loading, and hauling timber, in maintaining hundreds of men in the wilderness, here lie the moral and the financial risks, and the opportunities for generalship. The great lumbermen have had their hearts in their camps, and our Westerner was no exception to the rule. I shall follow the transformation of the industry and of its people, then, from camp to town.

It was clear that, for permanence in the lumber industry, the first requirement was a steady unfailing supply of raw material for the mill, and the new owner's first means to that end was a logging railroad to the camp. This railroad was built of standard gauge, but light and flexible, so as to be easily carried from one timber 'stand' to another. It goes ahead with its temporary spurs at the rate of a mile and a half every four days, curling into every 'forty' ahead of the sawyers, who cut their twenty acres a day. Twenty miles of it have since been sold to a new railroad, which has made Vateria a branch; to-day cutting is going on thirty-five miles away from the mill. The life of the mill operations has been extended at least another generation, and entire steadiness ensured throughout the year.

To follow the logging railroad into these woods on a February day is to voyage into an aromatic fairyland. It may be only a chance unawareness of my own, but it seems to me that no one has ever truly described the happy, sturdy beauty of the Mississippi forest. All my literary premonitions were of muddy river-bottoms, sinister cane-brakes, and dark, lowering, moss-hung swamps. But no swamps are here. There are, rather, several levels: first, the creek-bed and

banks; then the thick-grown bottomlands, so-called, which are sometimes overflowed, but except for an occasional marshy hollow, mostly dry; and then a third rolling level, where the longleaved pine trees grow, beautifully open and free from underbrush, and covered with a bright-green coarse grass. The bottom-lands are dense with broadleaved evergreens and hardwoods, — cottonwood, sycamore, beech, and poplar, this last of enormous growth never seen in the North. Spruce-pine grows here, too, with gray bark instead of redbrown; sometimes headed up, at sixty feet above the ground, into a bit of dense greenery like a clipped evergreen on a lawn; and ancient cypresses, with their lower trunks spreading out into deep flutings, like wooden buttresses. The cheerful trees, however, are the broad-leaved evergreens, magnolia, holly, and bay; clothed in dark green, incredibly polished leaves, the sunlight striking from them all over little gleaming points. And draped from tree to tree, over the flowering wild plum, the red blossoms of the buckeye, and the milk-white starry dogwood, the yellow jasmine flaunts its golden trumpets.

This is on the lowlands. But the longleaved pine forest on the rolling uplands is more beautiful than words can tell. Even the young shoot is tall and vigorous, like a mammoth painter's brush, before it branches at all, and of a rich and juicy growth. Alongside the other little pine saplings it looks like a lion's cub beside a terrier. The grown tree has very few branches, and these short and irregular, with few branchlets. But each one of these twigs and branchlets bears a whorl of pine-leaves, two or three times as large as a man's head, and retracts in its growth, presenting the tip of its whorl upward. The trees grow rather sparely, each one to be seen in outline; the deep-red bole,

smoothly marked, with a long clear trunk straight as an arrow; then the fascinating sparse irregularity of the branches with their cloudy whorls, like a parure of choice jewels, outlined in black and green against the sky. The branches, too, however gnarled and unsymmetrical, preserve a wonderful balance of arrangement. Each tree is a unique composition, but even the imperfect ones seem to have this gift of hidden symmetry; so that a cut-over field, where the small, worthless trees have been left standing, is still a thing of beauty. Each tree has caught a trick of balance in its branches and branchlets worthy of a Japanese painting.

Along the fringes of this sylvan paradise stretches a quite other world, the world of service and of devouring utility. On the flexible track, which yielded visibly to our passing, we made way ever and again for long trains of enormous logs, going to the saw-mill at Vateria. They were hauled by a curious disjointed sort of engine, known as the shay-geared, which is so contrived as to give to every irregularity of the track. This makes possible the easy and safe hauling of heavy loads—or, rather, makes possible such a light and temporary railroad to haul them on, as can serve every nook and corner of the timber stand. The camp itself was our goal, but since the camp as it is grew out of the revolution in methods inaugurated by the new company, I will try to describe those methods first.

Prior to the coming of the Vateria Company it was general practice in such logging camps to fell the trees each side of the railroad, haul them up.to the track with horses or mules, and hoist them on an ox-chain to the car-trucks. One of the first great changes of the new company was to bring in the steam 'skidder,' which hauls in logs from a distance of nearly a thousand feet from the track. This machine is formid

able in its

able in its appearance and terrifying in its action. It consists of two car-trucks carrying the engines and the derricks of two powerful steam hoisting-machines. The engine-car is chained to the track, and the derrick-car is anchored from its top both ways with heavy steel guylines. From four great steel drums, four three-quarter-inch steel cables, terminating in steel hooks, pass through as many blocks rigged on this derrick-car. The ends of the cables are dragged out by the horses, and hooked each about a felled log within the semi-circle of seven hundred feet radius. Then, at a signal, the engine races, the drums wind up the cables, and the great logs come tearing and crashing in like so many furious beasts uprooting saplings, rending even good-sized trees, till they bring up end-on on the pile. Six hundred logs a day can be brought up to the track in this way. When the full circle on both sides has been cleared of logs, the machine is unclamped from the track, moves on, under its own steam, to its next station, and in four minutes is pulling in another log.

After the skidder comes the steam loader. The first one was brought to the South by the Vateria Company in 1895, to replace the old slow method of the inclined plane and ox-chain. This machine, though not so startling in action, is, perhaps, more wonderful in its achievements than the skidder. It is operated by three men, or rather by the driver and two helpers, for the first is incomparably the most important. The loader- also mounted on a truckis a great steam crane, swinging freely on a central pin, and carrying a sliding steel cable ending in sharp steel tongs, like ice-tongs. The driver swings his boom around to the waiting pile of logs, at the same time releasing the cable, which whirls the heavy tongs out and down. At the exact moment they are caught by the man on the pile of logs,

and hooked about one. The boom whirls again, carrying up the great log, which is, as if by magic,- really by the skillful paying out of the cable, -deposited in the exact spot indicated by the man on the empty truck, who has hardly even to direct its fall. The driver becomes immensely dexterous with this monstrous weapon, all the more fearsome in that he is dealing with two variables, the moving boom and the weighted cable which slides out on it. Watching this perilous play I could not help thinking of that dictum of a certain judge, in deciding an accident case in favor of an electric-car conductor: 'You cannot wield a trolley-car like a rapier.' The learned justice could never have said that of the steam loader.

Along with these two great machines to multiply the work achieved by a given number of men, there should be recalled another, which is, perhaps, not less an instrument of saving. Of course, the power in such a camp is all from the waste wood as fuel; but the old casual hit-or-miss method of gathering wood for the locomotives along the tracks has been superseded by a most ingenious fuel machine, which supplies seven locomotives with wood of the right size. At intervals, the steam skidder assembles a car-load of 'culls' or useless logs, -the defective 'dead-heart' logs, or the gnarled branches. These are hauled down to the yard where stands the fuel machine, every inch of solid steel. A log is hoisted by a small donkey-engine on the machine truck to an endlesschain conveyer, which brings it under a steam cross-cut drag-saw. After the saw has cut it into lengths it slides on, still on its conveyer, to where a negro waiting with a hook, like a cotton-hook, twists it around to stand on end under something between a pile-driver and a guillotine. That is, the pile-driver is fitted with a guillotine of five knives set in star-fish shape. At the signal the pile

driver comes down with a 'short, sharp shock,' and the log falls apart, neatly split in five sections. If the skidder is terrific, and the loader elegant, the wood machine can only be described as incisive! Certainly one watches it with amusement, and can hardly refrain from attributing to it an all but human temperament.

The tremendous increase over the old method, in the number of logs thus harvested, and the great skill and daring developed in the wielders of these machines, have their influence on the prosperity of the company and on the earnings and morale of the men. But, before and beyond this, the whole group of conditions has been, it is not too much to say, metamorphosed by the presence of the loader, so that the camp has been made a place for human living.

Up to 1895 no families ever lived at a logging-camp - there was no place for them. The men slept in bunk-cars and ate in a cook-car; with the methods of payment and camp rule then in vogue, what that meant in vicious living and slovenly habits of work I have tried to indicate. And even now, as Professor Hart says in his recent Southern South, "The great lumber camps give employment to thousands of people, and are on the whole demoralizing, for liquor there flows freely, the life is irregular, and saw-mill towns may suddenly decay.' Yet with a probable seven hundred and fifty people or so to care for in a migratory camp, no other disposition seemed possible. But with the cheap, quickly-made tracks, and the powerful loading machine, the problem was solved by the Vateria owners. If logs could be lifted on and off cars with ease and expedition, so could other things. The company proceeded to devise a unit shack, twelve feet by eighteen, with a hole through the floor and roof through which an iron rod with an

eye on top, like a huge needle, could be bolted. In the South small cabins always stand on posts, free of the ground. How easy, then, to bring up the loader on a temporary spur, hook into this needle's eye, and swing the shack up on a railway truck, to be deposited in the same way fifty feet from the track in the heart of the new camp.

To-day the camp has a completely developed family life. Every workman has his one or two shacks free, and as many more as he wants to pay for, at a dollar a month or so. In a region where the common type of farmhouse - and the best for country living is two rooms set some six feet apart with a raised common roof over all, the shacks are a most liberal substitute. The usual arrangement copies this, or assembles three or more shacks end-on to a central square or platform, and covers the whole with a raised roof, built either by the men themselves or the company's carpenters. Many of these houses have fenced-in gardens, full of flowers and vegetables, with vines running luxuriantly over roofs and fences.

Thus the unit shack and the loader together have made it possible for four hundred or more men to keep their wives and children with them through frequent changes of camp, with all that that means for thrifty living and steady work. It has meant that the best workmen in the country have come and stayed with the Vateria Company, and by their skill and productive work have contributed again to the same efficiency which first gave the basic conditions of their life.

It is, however, not family life alone that has been made possible. Other lumber-camps, if not utterly neglected, are cared for with benevolent despotism. That the camp and the store, boarding-house and hospital cars, are lighted with electricity from a company plant, and supplied with water from an

artesian well, and that the employees have the free use of the company's telephone, shows only the care of the company to abolish so far as possible the minor hardships of camp life. But it has been the practice of the Vateria Company to have each logging-camp regularly incorporated as a town under Mississippi law, with alderman, constables, school board, and so forth. And it is the laboring men, not the superintendents, who become the responsible town officers. As the camp has a full life of some two years, and, thereafter, frequently remains a way station on the logging railroad, this is entirely feasible. The company builds a schoolhouse and a Y. M. C. A. building with baths, and a combined church and schoolhouse for the negro end of the camp; but the citizens of the town' pay for their own teachers, and, as members, for the services of the Y. M. C. A. director. There are now three teachers and over a hundred children in the white school, which compares favorably with any rural school I have seen. The workmen also largely sustain the camp doctor, with a drug store and good operating-room arranged in a car. The company store sells for cash at ordinary town prices.

It is easy to see what an independent and self-respecting community is thus encouraged; but what is not so obvious is the far-reaching importance of a very simple economic change made by the company, which preceded and conditioned all these developments. To an Easterner it would seem only ordinary business method; but from the point of view of universal lumbering practice in the South, it was nothing less than revolutionary.

The real great secret of the recklessness and irresponsibility of the lumber crew was their financial bondage. In all lumber-camps and saw-mill towns the men were compelled to trade at the company store, and were paid only by