Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/296

Rh lovely. An Indian warrior begging on Broadway; a buffalo from the wilds yoked to a market-wagon; any degrading and antagonistic picture of life were more endurable and more hopeful than these majestic ridges stripped and burned into commonplace and repulsive bareness.

But the injured hills, like all old and strong children of nature, curse their destroyer as they die. The railroads have killed the trees, and the death of the trees is as surely killing the river. Year by year its life-blood decreases; it grows narrower, shallower, yet more fitfully dangerous. Scores and hundreds of miles it runs, drinking in the volume of the streams; but in all this distance its own volume does not increase.

Marvellous and shocking! The Susquehanna is no deeper at Harrisburg than at Towanda. Its evaporation equals its growth. The shorn hills can hold no moisture. The rain and dew are dried in the morning sun like a breath on a mirror. But when the heavy clouds roll in and rain for weeks, there are no thirsty roots to hold the water, no myriad-leafed miles to be drenched before a rill is formed below. Then the dried veins are suddenly and madly filled, tearing down to the lowlands with unchecked violence. The river, swollen with drunken fury, becomes the brute that civilization is always making—