[A FOREST FIRE.]
This year the forest fires have been more extensive and more destructive than usual, especially in Michigan, where not a drop of rain had fallen for nearly eighty days. The fire, when once started, rushed on through green trees and dry trees, through corn fields and clover fields, at the rate of twenty miles an hour. Swamps full of stagnant water were dried up in a flash. Horses galloped wildly before the flame, but were overtaken by it, and left roasting on the ground. Trees two miles distant from the flames had their leaves withered by the heat. Some sailors who were out on the lake found the heat uncomfortable when they were seven miles from shore. Of course, wherever the lake was near, people tried to reach it. One farmer put all his family into his wagon, and started off. The fire was so close that the sparks burned holes in the children's dresses. Just then the tire came off one of the wheels. Usually, when this accident happens, the wagon has to stop, for the best of wheels generally fall to pieces in a few rods when they have lost their tires; but this wheel stood seven miles of jolting and bumping, up hill and down, over roots and ruts, while the frightened horses were galloping like mad creatures. Another farmer had gathered his neighbors about him to assist him in threshing his wheat. While the great machine was doing its work, the alarm was given that the woods were on fire. Hastily putting horses to the machine and to a wagon, the farmer and his friends abandoned homestead and newly gathered crop, and made an effort to save the valuable threshing-machine, even if all else must go. Before they gained the road a mare with a colt at her heels came madly galloping toward them, and becoming entangled among the horses attached to the machine, blocked their progress. The fire was almost upon them. The men cut the traces and let the horses go, but the great threshing-machine, to whose very existence fire was a necessity, had to be abandoned to the fury of the devouring element.
In the lake, people waded into the water up to the neck; then they were safe indeed from the flame, but almost choked by the smoke, while the sparks fell on them like snow-flakes in a heavy storm. Thousands of land-birds were suffocated as they flew before the flames, or were drowned in the lake. Bears and deer in their terror sought the company of man. A man and a bear stood together up to their necks in water all night, and the man said that the bear was as quiet as a dog. Two other bears came and stood close to a well from which a farmer was flinging water over his house. Our artist saw a very pathetic scene: the flames had swept away the homestead, and when the wave of fire had passed, no living thing remained but the faithful house-dog, which had crouched down in a ditch. It went again to its old place, and neither hunger nor solitude could persuade it to quit the ruins where its master had perished. It stood at its post, faithfully guarding the charred timbers of what a short time before had been a happy home.
[A FOLDING CAMP-STOOL.]
Fig. 1.
Girls and boys who are looking for a useful and tasteful holiday gift for mother, aunt, or elder sister, may unite in the making of the folding camp-stool, which we illustrate below. It is made of black walnut rods, joined, with hinges and with a broad cross-bar. On the top of the cross-bar is fastened a leather handle, by which to carry the stool when folded (Fig. 2). The upright wooden rods in the back are hinged to and support the cane seat, as shown by Fig. 1. The other upper rods are pushed into the notches on the under side of the seat in unfolding the chair. A leather satchel may be added, as in the engraving, but this is not necessary. The seat is covered with a four-cornered piece of brown woollen Java canvas, embroidered in cross stitch with fawn-colored filling silk in three shades. Ravel out the threads of the canvas from the last cross stitch row to a depth of an inch and a quarter, fold down the canvas on the wrong side so as to form loops a quarter of an inch deep on the edge, and catch every ten such loops together with a strand of fawn-colored silk in three shades, for a tassel, which is tied with similar silk. Cut the tassels even, and underlay the cover with a thin cushion.
