Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 November 1890 — A Lamber Camp in Winter. [ARTICLE]

A Lamber Camp in Winter.

St. Nicholas. Life in the lumbermen's winter camps, deep in the backwoods of New Brunswick, Maine, or in Quebec, is not so adventurous as might at first appear. It grows monotonous to the visitor as soon as the strangeness of it has worn off. The noises of the chopping, the shouting, the clanking and trampling of the teams, give sufficient (warning to all the wild creatures of the woods, and they generally agree in giving a wide berth to a neighborhood which has suddenly become so dangerous. The lumbermen are incessantly occupied, chopping and haul* ing from dawn to sundown; and at night they have little energy to ex* pend on the hunting of hears and panthers. Their bunks and their blankets mcquire an overwhelming attraction for them; and by the time the camp has concluded its after supper smoke rad the sound of a few noisy songs has died away, the wild beasts might creep near enough to camp to smell the pork and beans with little risk. At rare intervals, however,the monotony of profound and soundless snows, of endless forests, of felled trees, of devious wood roads, of ax and sled and chain, is sharply broken, and something ocours to remind the heedless woodsman that though in the wilderness he is yet not truly of it* He is suddenly made aware of those 6hy but savage forces which, regarding him as a trespasser on their domain, have been vigilantly keeping him under a keen and angry w atch. The spirit of the violated forest strikes a swift and sometimes effectual blow for revenge. A yoke of oxoff ire straining at their load; a great branch seems, with conscious purpose, to reaoh down and seize the nearest ox by his horns, and the poor brute falls with his neck broken. A stout sapling is bent to the ground by a weight of Ice and snow; the thaw or a passing team releases it, and by the fierce recoil a horse's leg is fractured. A lumberman strays off into the woods. by himself, and is found days afterward, half eaten by bears and foxes. A solitary chopper drops his ax, and leans against a tree to rest or to dream of his sweetheart in the distant settlements, and a panther drops from the branches above and seriously wounds him. Yet the forest’s vengeance is seldom accomplished, and on the careless woodsman the threat of it produces uo permanent effect. His on ward march will not be stayed. His ax goes •very where. Dr. George F. Root, the composer of Rally Round the Flag, Boys, and a hundred other famous songs, celebrated the seventieth anniversary of his Mrith in Chicago Saturday. He wrote the famous song on the morning following Lincoln’s second call for troops. - A Legal Point—Witness—He lookjm straight in the eye— ■ Lawyer—There, sir, you've flatly contradicted your former statement. r — Witness—How so? Lawyer—You said before that he bent his gaze on you. and now you’l! please explain bow he could look yee straight in the eye with a bent' gaze. (Witness feints.) The Jester. 1