Page:Florida Trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive.djvu/376

 of the sun is distilling this from all barrens, for the sap is exultant in the trees and all the turpentine camps are in full swing.

People who regret the turpentine camps set the day not far ahead, in three years or in five, when the smoke of the last still will have vanished and the ruthless ax of the woodsman following will have cut the last tree for the second-quality lumber which the turpentine-bleeding process leaves behind. Others say the end of the trees is something like the end of the world. It has been prophesied almost since the beginning and has never yet happened. Certain it is that turpentining is to-day being carried on within a few miles of Jacksonville, Florida's principal city, just as ruthlessly as it was a dozen years ago, and though the end of the world has surely come for the trees in certain tracts, in others they still give up amber tears of resin under the wounds that are re-opened weekly that they may continue to bleed.

Young trees grow where the old ones have been taken out and in many a once-ploughed field stands to-day a young growth that will soon be big enough to yield a "crop of boxes." It takes but fifteen years of growth under favorable circumstances to make a tree large enough to be profitable. From the time such a tree feels the ax of the turpentiner until it ceases to bleed