This man had the face of his
caste--the countenance of the Southern slave-holding feudal lord. Not
the American face, but the Southern face of a definite era--less than
national, less than modern; a face not looking far in any direction
but at things close around.
From a third portrait the latest ancestor looked down. He with his
contemporaries had finished the thinning of the central forest of the
Shield, leaving the land as it is to-day, a rolling prairie with
remnants of woodland like that crowning the hilltop near this
house. This immediate forefather bore the countenance that began to
develop in the Northerner and in the Southerner after the Civil War:
not the Northern look nor the Southern look, but the American look--a
new thing in the American face, indefinable but unmistakable.
These three men now focussed their attention upon him, the fourth of
the line, standing beside the tree brought into the house. Each of
them in his own way had wrought out a work for civilization, using the
woods as an implement. In his own case, the woods around him having
disappeared, the ancestral passion had made him a student of forestry.
The thesis upon which he took his degree was the relation of modern
forestry to modern life.
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