On either side the road lay swamps, their gaunt trees festooned, or rather garroted, with vines, and draped with gray moss; while all about and among them lay their comrades already prostrate and decaying. On the higher lands fields had been fenced in, and cleared by burning the trees, whose charred skeletons still stood, holding black and fleshless arms to heaven in mute appeal against man's reckless abuse of Nature's dearest children.
Later Miselle took occasion to express her horror at the wholesale destruction of her beloved forests to a land-owner of the region. He laughed, and stared at the sentimental folly, and then said, conclusively,—
"Oh, but the land, you know,—we want to get at the land; and the quickest way of disposing of the trees is the best."
"But even if they must be felled, it is wicked to destroy them entirely, when so many people freeze to death every winter for want of fuel."
"Well, I suppose they do," said the land-owner, suppressing a yawn. "But we can't send them this wood, you know, or even get it down Oil Creek, where there is a market."
"At least, the poor people about here need never be cold. I suppose fuel is very cheap through all this country, isn't it?"
"Down the Creek we pay ten dollars a cord for all the wood, and a dollar a bushel for all the coal we burn, and both grow within a mile of the wells; but the trouble is the labor. Every man about here is in oil, somehow or another; and even the farmers back of the Creek prefer bringing their horses down and teaming oil to working the land or felling wood. This is emphatically the oil region."
Arrived at Schaeffer's or Shaffer's Farm, the present terminus of the Oil Creek Railway, Miselle was relieved from much anxiety by seeing upon the platform Friend Williams, to whom she had, in a fit of temporary insanity, written that she should leave home on Tuesday instead of Monday.
"And how shall we go down the Creek?" asked she, when the first greetings had been exchanged.
"In the packet-boat, to be sure. The hack-carriage will take us right down to the wharf."