"Yes, and pine was the great thing even up to the Civil War," said Joel Winthrop. "But that was the last of it, and a couple of years after the war ended spruce came to the front, and now, as you perhaps know, we cut five times as much spruce as we do anything else."
"I've often wondered how many men worked in Maine at lumbering," said Owen. "There must be a small army of us, all told."
"I heard that last year more than fourteen thousand men were in the woods," came from Andrews. "The total number of feet of all kinds of lumber cut was over half a billion."
"What a stack of logs!" cried Dale.
"No wonder we have a pine tree on the coat of arms of the State," added Owen. "But it ought to be a spruce tree now instead of a pine," he continued.
"I can remember the day when the lumber camps claimed the very best of our people," said Joel Winthrop. "Folks wasn't stuck up in them days, and many of the richest men in Bangor and Portland earned their first dollar choppin' down pine trees. But now we've got all sorts in the camps, an' have to take 'em or git nobody. Not but what we've got good men at our camp," he added hastily.
"I wouldn't mind a job as a lumber surveyor," said Dale. "They get good wages, don't they?"
"A deputy surveyor gets ten cents a thousand on all the lumber he checks off," answered Gilroy. "I've known a man to make six to ten dollars a day at it. The fellows who overhaul the lumber for him get seven and a half cents a thousand each. The surveyor-general of the county gets a cent a thousand on all lumber passed on in the county."
"Some day I reckon I'll be a surveyor-general," observed Owen dryly.
"I'd rather own a rich lumber tract," returned Dale. "I'd work it systematically, cutting nothing but big trees and planting a new tree for every old one cut. By that means I'd make the tract bring me in a regular income."