"Well, I suppose it is—"
"Yes, but like most selfish people, they are short-sighted. It is very easy to cut timber so that no harm is done, and in some countries that really are as free and progressive as ours, things are managed much better. We waste a whole forest and leave the land bare and full of stumps. Then, you see, it isn't any use as a storehouse for moisture, which nature intended it to be, and neither is it any use to the timber cutters, so that they have to move on somewhere else."
"Could they manage that differently?"
"Yes, if they would only cut a certain number of trees in any particular part of the woods in any one year, and would always plant new ones for every one that is taken out, there wouldn't be such a dreadful waste, and the forests would keep on growing. That's the way it is usually done abroad—in Germany, and in Russia, and places like that. Over there they make ever so much more money than we do out of forests, because they have studied them, and know just how everything ought to be done."
"Don't we do anything like that at all?"
"Yes, we're beginning to now. The United States government, and a good many of the states, have seemed to wake up in the last few years to the need of looking after the woods better, and so I really believe that in the future things will be managed much better. But there has been a terrible lot of waste, here and in Canada, that it will take years to repair."
"They don't spoil the woods about here that way, do they?"
"No; but then, you see, this is a private preserve, and one of the reasons it is so well looked after is that some of the men who own it like to come here for the shooting."
"I know," said Margery. "I thought that was why the guides were kept here."
"It is, but it's only one reason. A few miles away, if we go that way, I can show you acres and acres of woods that were burned two years ago, and you never saw such a desolate spot in all your life. It's beginning to look a little better now, because, if you give nature a chance, she will always repair the damage that men do from carelessness, and from not knowing any better."