As he stood there--the man beside the Tree--into the picture entered
three other men, looking down upon him from their portraits on the
walls.
One portrait represented the first man of his family to scale the
mountains of the Shield where its eastern rim is turned away from the
reddening daybreak. Thence he had forced his way to its central
portions where the skin of ever living verdure is drawn over the
rocks: Anglo-Saxon, backwoodsman, borderer, great forest chief, hewing
and fighting a path toward the sunset for Anglo-Saxon women and
children. With his passion for the wilderness--its game, enemies,
campfire and cabin, deep-lunged freedom. This ancestor had a lonely,
stern, gaunt face, no modern expression in it whatsoever--the timeless
face of the woods.
Near his portrait hung that of a second representative of the
family. This man had looked out upon his vast parklike estates hi the
central counties; and wherever his power had reached, he had used it
on a great scale for the destruction of his forests. Woods-slayer,
field-maker; working to bring in the period on the Shield when the
hand of a man began to grasp the plough instead of the rifle, when the
stallion had replaced the stag, and bellowing cattle wound fatly down
into the pastures of the bison.
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