Here and there, on a definite plan, a small tree had been spared, and when he joined the men ahead, Peter learned how careful were the French in all this apparently wholesale felling.

In the forest, as they saw as they reached it, the lines were numbered and lettered and in some distant office every woodland group was known with its place and age.

There are few foresters like the French, and it was cheering to think that this great levelling would, in a score of years, do more good than harm.
Slowly biting into the untouched regiments of trees were the men, helped in their work by a small power engine.

The great trunks were lopped and roughly squared here, and then dragged by motor traction to a slide, which they now went to view.

It was a fascinating sight.