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THE CRAFTSMAN

PUBLISHED BY THE CRAFTSMAN PUBLISHING CO.

VOLUME XXX., JUNE, 1916 NUMBER 3

THE TWELVE SECRETS OF THE WOODS: A WOODCRAFT GIRL KNOWS THEM AND OTHER BEAUTIFUL AND WISE THINGS: BY ERNEST THOMPSON SETON, FOUNDER AND CHIEF OF THE WOODCRAFT LEAGUE

(Marginal Sketches from "Two Little Savages," by Ernest Thompson Seton; Courtesy of Doubleday, Page and Co., Publishers)

Do you know the "Twelve Secrets of the Woods?" Not just any twelve wonderful things that you may have discovered in the woods, but the twelve great secrets that all the Woodcraft Girls know, that make them intimate with Nature, that they have discovered camping out deep in the woods or close to the edge of a stream in the trails leading up some rich, green hillside. There are always wonderful mysteries to be discovered by everyone who knows the trail to the heart of Nature, but these especial twelve secrets are practical as well as mysterious, and are really part of the equipment of every nature lover and every girl who knows anything of outdoor life — that is, who has lived out of doors as the Indians used to live, taken care of herself, fed herself, made her own bed, built her own fire, watched the dawn come through the trees and slept soundly through wind and rain.

I am not going to answer all the questions involved in these twelve secrets, because if you are really interested in them you will join the Woodcraft League and learn them by heart as well as many other beautiful and wise things. But I am going to ask you a Woodcraft secret and see if you can answer it for yourself, and if you can, you are by instinct one of us, and if you cannot, I think you will feel a little sad. "Have you proved the balsam fir in all its fourfold gifts — as a Christmas tree, as a healing balm, as a consecrated bed, as a wood of friction fire?" If you do not know the balsam fir in these four relationships you have missed one of the great gifts that nature holds for you. One of the twelve secrets this knowledge of the fir, the right use of the fir for your own happiness.

If you have ever walked down a shady pathway of an autumn day or over a hillside ..text pokračuje