The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol

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[Illustration: The Forester, Charley and Lew Crossed to the Brook Where the Battle with the Flames Had Begun]

The Young Wireless Operator--As a Fire Patrol

The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol

Lewis E. Theiss

Illustrated by Frank T. Merrill

W. A. Wilde Company Chicago Boston

The Young Wireless Operator--As A Fire Patrol.

This book is dedicated to

Gifford Pinchot

sometime forester for the United States of America, and now Commissioner of Forestry for Pennsylvania, whose ceaseless and undiscouraged efforts to save from spoliation the vast timber stands and other natural resources of America have inspired this story

Foreword

Boys and dogs go well together. So do boys and trees. When a boy gets to love the forest and can live in it, that is best of all. For the forest makes real boys and real men.

Not only does the forest do that, but it keeps the Nation alive. No one can eat a meal without the help of the forest, for it takes more than half the wood cut every year in the United States to enable the farmer to grow the food and the fibres to feed and clothe the Nation. No one can live in a house without the help of the forest, for whether we speak of it as a wooden house, a brick house, a stone house, or a concrete house, still there is wood in it, and without wood it could not have been built.

We are apt to think of the city dwellers as people who are not dependent on the forest. As a matter of fact, they are the most dependent of all, for the cities would be deserted, the houses empty, and the streets dead, except for the things which could not be grown nor mined nor manufactured nor transported without the help of wood from the forest.

Pennsylvania--Penn's Woods--is the greatest industrial commonwealth in the world. Without its woods, it could never have been made so. Unless its woods are restored, it cannot continue to be so, and unless forest fires are stopped, there is no way to restore Penn's Woods.

I have read "The Young Wireless Operator--As a Fire Patrol" with the keenest interest, not only because it is about the forest, but because it is a thrillingly interesting story of a real boy and the real things he did in the woods. I like it from end to end, and that is why, when Mr. Theiss asked me to write this foreword, I gladly consented.

No one loves the woods more than I, as boy and man, or loves to be in them better. One of the things I want most is to see more and better forests in our great State of Pennsylvania, and in the whole United States. Without our forests we could not have become great, nor can we continue to be so. For the men and boys who love the forest and understand it are of the kind without whom great nations are impossible.

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