The choppers expressed themselves as disappointed that they could not just then show me the fall of a tree ten or twelve feet in diameter, and over two hundred feet high.  In one logging camp I visited there remained a stump fourteen feet high.  At this height the tree was fourteen feet in diameter, perfectly round and sound, and it had been sawn into seventeen logs, each twelve feet long.  The upper length was six feet in diameter.  Probably the tree was three hundred feet long, for the top for a long distance is wasted.

So many of the trees and so many parts of trees are splintered or broken in the fall, that the master of a logging camp told me he thought they wasted at least as much as they saved; and as the mills also waste a good deal, it is probable that for every foot of this lumber that goes to market two feet are lost.  A five-foot tree occupies a chopper from two and a half to three and a half hours, and to cut down a tree eight feet in diameter is counted a day’s work for a man.

When the tree is down the sawyers come.  Each has a long saw; he removes the bark at each cut with an axe, and then saws the tree into lengths.  It is odd enough to go past a tree and see a saw moving back and forward across its diameter without seeing the man who moves it, for the tree hides him completely from you, if you are on the side opposite him.  Then come the barkers, with long iron bars to rip off the thick bark; then the jack-screw men, three or four of whom move a log about easily and rapidly which a hundred men could hardly budge.  They head it in the proper direction for the teamsters and chain-men, and these then drag it down to the water over roads which are watered to make the logs slide easily; and then, either at high tide or during the winter freshets, the logs are run down to the mill.

The Maine men make the best wood-choppers, but the logging camp is a favorite place also for sailors; and I was told that Germans are liked as workmen about timber.  The choppers grind their axes once a week—­usually, I was told, on Sunday—­and all hands in a logging camp work twelve hours a day.

The Government has lately become very strict in preserving the timber on Congress land, which was formerly cut at random, and by any body who chose.  Government agents watch the loggers, and if these are anywhere caught cutting timber on Congress land their rafts are seized and sold.  At present prices, it pays to haul logs in the redwood country only about half a mile to water; all trees more distant than this from a river are not cut; but the rivers are in many places near each other, and the belt of timber left standing, though considerable, is not so great as one would think.

Redwood lumber has one singular property—­it shrinks endwise, so that where it is used for weather-boarding a house, one is apt to see the butts shrunk apart.  I am told that across the grain it does not shrink perceptibly.