Irving Bacheller

Silas Strong Irving Bacheller

There are towers and spires and domes and high walls where, in our boyhood, there were only trees far older than the century, and these rivers that flow north go naked in open fields for half their journey. Every spring miles of timber come plunging over cataracts and rushing through rapids and crowding into slow water on its way to the saws. There a shaft of pine which has been a hundred years getting its girth is ripped into slices and scattered upon the stack in a minute. A new river, the rushing, steam-driven river of steel, bears it away to the growing cities. Silas Strong once wrote in his old memorandum-book these words: "Strong says to himself seems so the world was goin' to be peeled an' hollered out an' weighed an' measured an' sold till it's all et up like an apple."