from the sawmill 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-tomouth 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 sawmill 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 storekeeper 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 steam-engine. 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 logging-camp. Sawmill 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. . .

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 formidable in its appearance and terrifying in its action. It consists of two cartrucks 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 guy lines. 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 semicircle 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 truck is 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 skilful 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 carload 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 endless-chain 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 starfish 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.

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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 sawmill 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