his furnace fires on his red shirt, and his alert, intelligent eyes, was
the genie of that devastation, and the toiling leader of the shadowy,
toiling figures around him.




CHAPER III.


Amid the beauty of the most uncultivated and untrodden wilderness there
are certain localities where the meaner and mere common processes
of Nature take upon themselves a degrading likeness to the slovenly,
wasteful, and improvident processes of man. The unrecorded land-slip
disintegrating a whole hillside will not only lay bare the delicate
framework of strata and deposit to the vulgar eye, but hurl into the
valley a debris so monstrous and unlovely as to shame even the hideous
ruins left by dynamite, hydraulic, or pick and shovel; an overflown and
forgotten woodland torrent will leave in some remote hollow a disturbed
and ungraceful chaos of inextricable logs, branches, rock, and soil that
will rival the unsavory details of some wrecked or abandoned settlement.
Of lesser magnitude and importance, there are certain natural
dust-heaps, sinks, and cesspools, where the elements have collected the
cast-off, broken, and frayed disjecta of wood and field--the sweepings
of the sylvan household. It was remarkable that Nature, so kindly
considerate of mere human ruins, made no attempt to cover up or disguise
these monuments of her own mortality: no grass grew over the unsightly
landslides, no moss or ivy clothed the stripped and bleached skeletons
of overthrown branch and tree; the dead leaves and withered husks rotted
in their open grave uncrossed by vine and creeper. Even the animals,