Part 35

Going thence by rail north to Santa Barbara, I inspected the narrow strip of the Santa Ynez Reserve, and the eastern and western sections of the Zaca Lake and Pine Mountain Reserve. These are under the control of different forest supervisors; they are both largely composed of chaparral country, with scattered "pineries" on the mountains. The hunting here is regulated, to a certain degree, by the problem of feed and water for the stock used by the hunters in gaining access to the ground. Many enter these tracts from the south, as well as from the region adjacent to Santa Barbara, and the deer have a somewhat harassed and chivied existence, although, owing to the impenetrable nature of the chaparral outside of the pineries, there is a natural limit to the power of the sportsman to accomplish their entire extermination. The present control of hunters by the forest rangers is only tentative; naturally we hope to have in an ever-increasing degree more scientific management both of the deer and of those who illegally kill them. The sentiment of the community is enlightened, and would strengthen the hands of the Government in enforcing the law. At present a ranger can do little more than maintain, so far as he can, his authority by threats--threats which he has not the power to enforce.

In the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Reserves one finds himself at last in a forest country, with mountains which command respect, a section full of superb feed for the deer, feed of many sorts, for the deer have an attractive and varied bill of fare. Whole hillsides are found of scrub oak, their chief stand-by, and of wild lilac or "deer brush," the latter familiar to all readers of Muir as the Cleanothus, in those long periods of Miltonic sweep and dignity in which he summons the clans of the California herbs and shrubs; an enumeration as stately as the Homeric catalogue of the ships, and, to such as lack technical knowledge of botany, imposing respect rather by sonorous appeal to the ear than by visual suggestion to the memory. That herbs should be marshalled in so impressive an array fills one with admiration and with somewhat of awe for these representatives of the vegetable kingdom. As Muir pronounces their full-sounding titles, one feels that each is a noble in this distinguished company. No one unprotected by a botany should have the temerity to enter, amid these lists, alone.

We visited this country in the season of flowers. Whole hillsides of chámisal ("chamìz" or greasewood) bore their delicate, spirea-like, cream-colored blossoms--when seen at a distance, like a hovering breath, as unsubstantial as dew, or as the well-named bloom on a plum or black Hamburg grape. The superb yucca flaunted its glorious white standards, borne proudly aloft like those of the Roman legions, each twelve or fifteen feet in height, supporting myriads of white bells. The Mexicans call this the "Quixote"--a noble and fitting tribute to the knight of La Mancha. The tender center of the plant, loved as food equally by man and beast, is protected by many bristling bayonets, an ever-vigilant guard. At an altitude of seven thousand or eight thousand feet, one passed through acres of buckthorn, honey-fragrant, this also a favorite of the deer, now visited by every bee and butterfly of the mountain side. It is to be noted that as one ascends the mountains the butterflies increase in numbers as well as the flowers which they so closely resemble, save only the latter's stationary estate.

One sees in its perfection of color the "Indian paint brush," with its red of purest dye, and adjoining it solid fields of blue lupine--the colors of Harvard and Yale, side by side, challenging birds and all creatures of the air to a decision as to which of them bears itself the more bravely. Here is a chestnut tree; but look not overhead for its sheltering branches. This is a country of surprises, and if the alder tree towers on high, the dwarf chestnut or chinkapin here delegates to the mountains the pains of struggling toward the heavens, and, contented with its lowly estate, freely offers to the various "small deer" of the forest its horde of sweet, three-cornered nuts.

Under the pines one catches a distant gleam of the snow plant, an exquisite sharp note of color, of true Roman shade, such as Rossetti loved to introduce into his pictures, shrill like the vibrant wood of the flute. When a ray of the sun happens to strike this it gleams like a flaming fiery sword, symbol of that which marked the entrance to Paradise. One can circumvent this guard here, and when he is in these hills he is not far removed from a country well worth protecting by all possible ingenuity, a paradise open to all such as love pure air and wholesome strong exercise.

Much of the San Gabriel Reserve is rugged and well protected by nature to be the home of the deer. San Bernardino, on the contrary, is the most accessible of the southern reserves, with abundant feed for the horses of those who visit it, well watered, and full of noble trees. So open is the forest that in the hunting season much of it must be abandoned by the deer, who are perfectly cognizant of their danger, and, with somewhat of aid from man, are quite capable of taking care of themselves.

After visiting these southern reserves, I outfitted at Redstone Park, above Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley, and cruised through the Sequoia National Park, among the big trees, at that time patrolled by colored soldiers under the able command of Captain Young, an officer who possesses the distinction of being the only negro graduate of West Point, I believe, now holding a commission in the United States Army. The impression produced by the giant Sequoias is one of increasing effect as the time among them is extended. In their province the world has nothing to offer more majestic and more satisfying than these trees; one must live among them to come fully beneath their charm.

Since the National Parks and military reservations are already game refuges, it was of importance that I should see the Mt. Whitney Military Reservation, and for this purpose I crossed the Sierra Reserve, through broad tracts suitable for Game Refuges, thus acquiring familiarity with a large and most interesting section of forest country. From the top of Mt. Whitney, the highest bit of land in the United States, exclusive of Alaska, one looks down two miles in altitude to Owen's Lake almost directly beneath. I picked up, on the plateau of the summit, a bit of obsidian Indian chipping, refutation in itself of the frequently repeated statement that Indians do not climb high peaks. A month was spent with great profit in and about the Sierra Reserve, and one might go there many summers, ever learning something new.

Having seen these southern reserves, and desiring to bring home with me an impression of the northern woods, sharpened by immediate contrast, I next visited that one which is the most to the northwest of them all, the Olympic Reserve in Washington. Here, at the head of the Elwha Valley, near Mt. Olympus, we lived among the glaciers. The forest between the headwaters and the sea affords a superb contrast to California; here are found fog and moisture, and super-abounding heavy vegetation. In the thick shade grow giant ferns of tropic luxuriance. The rhododendron thrives, its black glossy leaves a symbol of richly nourished power. The devil's club flaunts aloft its bright berries, and poisonously wounds whomsoever has the misfortune even to touch its great prickly leaves, nearly as big as an elephant's ear; if there be a malignant old rogue of the vegetable kingdom, this is he, sharing with the wait-a-bit thorn of Africa an evil eminence. Many new plants meet the eye, a wealth of berries--the Oregon grape, the salmon berry, red or yellow, as big as the yolk of an egg, the salal berry, any quantity of blueberries, huckleberries, both red and blue, sarvis berries, bear berries, mountain ash berries (also loved of bears), thimble berries, high bush cranberries, gooseberries--large and insipid--currants, wild cherries, choke cherries; many of these friends of old, others seen here for the first time, dainty picking in the autumn for deer, bears, foxes, squirrels and many birds. What particularly appealed to me was a wild apple, no larger than the eye of a hawk, but quite able to survive in a fierce contest for life, and with a pleasant, clean, sharp taste, very tonic to the palate, and with diminutive rosy cheeks as tempting as a stout Baldwin--a fine, courageous little product of the wild life, symbol of the energetic quality of the Olympic air. I, for one, am a firm believer in the axiom that a climate which will give the right "tang" to an apple will also produce determined and energetic men; this whole region, spite of its fogs, has a glorious future before it. Superb firs towered hundreds of feet above our heads, and archaic-looking cedars, a thousand years old, thrust their sturdy shoulders firmly against the storms and the winds. But the valleys, the trees and the glaciers, were only the mise-en-scène of that which constituted primarily the reason of my visiting this peninsula. Here is the only wild herd of elk of any considerable size outside of the Yellowstone National Park, a most beautiful elk now separated from the Rocky Mountain species. Besides this herd there are only a few survivors of the once innumerable herds of the Pacific Coast, one little bunch in California, and a few scattered individuals in the mountains of Oregon and Washington. It is excessively hard to form any correct estimate of how many remain; probably there are at least a thousand, possibly several times that number. At all events, there is a scattered herd large enough to insure the existence of the species if they might now be protected. Unfortunately the sentiment of the community in the vicinity of the Olympics is just about what it was in Colorado in the seventies and in the early eighties--almost complete apathy, so far as taking effective precaution is concerned, to prevent the killing of these animals in violation of the law. I saw one superb herd south of the headwaters of the Elwha, and was informed that in the winter a large number come lower down into the valley of that river; here and elsewhere the finest specimens are slaughtered by head-hunters for the market, and by anyone, in fact, who may covet their hides or meat or their "tusks," now unfortunately very valuable.

Presumably, in so killing them, picked specimens are selected. Of course the finest bulls may not thus be systematically eliminated without causing the general deterioration of the herd. Nature's method of progress is by the survival of the fittest. Man reverses this so soon as cupidity makes him the foe of wild animals. The country here is an excessively hard one to get about in with stock, owing to its very rugged nature and to the scarcity of feed, so that there is slight danger of the extermination of these elk by sportsmen during the open season. In the winter, however, the hunters have them at their mercy. I was assured by one very level-headed man that, in the winter of 1902-3, two men killed seventeen elk from the Elwha herd. Since the individuals who killed the elk are well known and are practically unmolested, the immunity which they enjoy tempts others to similar violation of the law. More recently still, during this last winter, the game warden of Washington reports the finding of the carcasses of nineteen elk, killed for their tusks.

This country, with its splendid glaciers and mountains covered with snow, presents quite the most beautiful scenery to be found within the limits of the United States, exclusive of Alaska, and, before many years, is destined to become a place of general resort for travelers. For this to be accomplished, all that is needed is greater facility of travel. It would be a thousand pities if we should tolerate the extermination of the elk, which would afford delight to every one who visited the Olympics, if only the herd might be preserved. One can hardly blame the hunters for taking advantage of the laxity of public sentiment. The State has it within its power easily to protect these animals by the employment of two or three game detectives of the right sort--keen, energetic men. These would soon break up the illicit traffic and bring the offenders to justice. The people of the whole Pacific seaboard, who are justly proud of their region, and of every trait peculiarly its own, would bitterly lament the final disappearance of elk from this whole countryside, yet the fact remains that hardly a voice there, outside of the organization of the "Elks," is raised to protest against these flagrant acts of vandalism which are taking place beneath their very eyes.

This visit to the northern forest was full of varied and commanding interest, but the chief occupation of my summer, when all is said, was with California.

Deer are practically the only game to be considered in these southern California reserves. There are mountain sheep to the east, in the mountains of the Mojave and Colorado deserts, but they are almost unmolested by the hunters of the seaboard country, and, except in rare instances, are no longer found in the reserves. Occasionally odd ones are seen, venturesome, determined individuals, on their travels, in the energy of youthful maturity, tempted by curiosity, but these soon realize that they are not secure where so many humans abound, and scurry back to their desert fastnesses. As refuges are created and breeding grounds established, sheep will return, and, it is hoped, make their permanent home in the reserves. There are still enough of them in scattered places for this purpose. I was told of one method of hunting in the desert hills, sometimes resorted to by Indians and white men of the baser sort, that seems hateful and unsportsmanlike. The springs at which they drink are long distances apart. In some instances the alleged sportsmen camp by these and watch them without intermission for three days and nights, at the end of which period, when the sheep are exhausted by thirst, the hunter has them at his mercy. This has nearly as much to commend it to the self-respecting sportsman as the practice of imitating the cry of the female moose to lure the bull to mad recklessness and his undoing, a challenge hard for a courageous animal to resist, a treacherous snare set before his feet. It would seem as if a right-minded man would hesitate to take so base an advantage as by either of these two methods of hunting.

Antelope are nearly exterminated in southern California, and there is but a single little bunch of elk--those in the San Joaquin Valley, sole survivors of the vast herds which ranged throughout those lowlands when Fremont came to the country in 1845. These elk are smaller than those of the mountains, and bear a striking resemblance to the Scotch red deer, so familiar to us in Landseer's pictures. For years they have been protected by the generosity and wisdom of one man, now no longer young, an altogether public-spirited and generous act. I was taken by the manager of this ranch to see these elk as they came at night to feed in the alfalfa fields, and again in the morning we followed their trail into the foothills and had a capital view of seven superb bulls in their wild estate, as pretty a sight as one might see in California. Who can feel ought save commiseration for a man who, standing on London bridge, could say, "Earth has not anything to show more fair"?

Twice during the summer was I told of the presence in the mountains, by men who thought they had seen them, of the mythical ibex. My informant, in each instance a ranger, assured me that he had had a good look at the animal, and was sure that it was not a mountain ram. The back-curving horns he said were "as long as his forearm," one added instance of the fact that a fish in the brook is worth two on the string--if a good story be at stake! What my informant had seen, of course, was a ewe, or young mountain ram before he had arrived at the age when the horns begin to form their characteristic spiral. As for the great size of the horns, the animal was running away, and every hunter is aware of the enormous proportions which the antlers attain of an escaping elk or deer. How they suddenly shrink when the beast is shot is another story.

Incidentally, the refuges of southern California will include the breeding places of the trout in the upper reaches of the streams, and will afford protection to grouse, quail, and other birds, but primarily their purpose is to prevent the extermination of big game. In California this has gone as far as it is safe to go if we are to save the remnant. Even the California grizzly has been killed off so relentlessly that it was a question, when I was there, whether a single pair survived which might possibly in that State preserve the species. The ranger who knew the most about this was of the opinion that two or three were still left alive. He had seen their tracks within a year. There are, I have been assured, others in Oregon.

If I had my way, the first act in creating a game refuge should be to insure the survival of the few that remain. These bears are pitifully wary as compared with their former bold and domineering attitude; they would gladly keep out of harm's way if only they might be allowed to do so. It is time, it seems to me, to call a truce to man's hostility to them, once a foe not to be despised. Now they are so completely conquered that man owes it to himself not too relentlessly to pursue a vanquished enemy. When we think of the enormous period of time, involving millions of years, required to develop a creature of such gigantic strength as the California grizzly, so splendidly equipped to win his living and to maintain his unquestioned supremacy--the Sequoia of the animal kingdom of America--and when we contemplate this creature as the very embodiment of vitality in the wild life, we shall not wantonly permit him to be exterminated, and thus deprive those who are to come after us of seeing him alive, and of seeing him where his presence adds a fine note of distinction to the landscape, a fitting adjunct to the glacier-formed ravines of the Sierras.

The domestic sheep, which were once the prey of the bears, no longer range in these forests, and so far as the depredation of bears among cattle is concerned, it is of so trifling a nature as practically not to exist. It would seem that a nation of so vast wealth as ours could afford to indulge in an occasional extravagance, such as keeping alive these few remaining bears; of maintaining them at the public expense simply for the gratification of curiosity, of a quite legitimate curiosity on the part of those who love the wild life, and every last vanishing trait that remains of its old, keen energy. So far as danger to man is involved by their presence, the experience in the Yellowstone National Park is that there is no such danger; when allowed to do so, they draw their rations as meekly as a converted Apache; if they err at all, it is on the side of exaggerated and rather pitiful humility.

It is mainly with the deer, however, that we are concerned. It is out of the question for any thinking man who takes the slightest interest in these creatures to stand passively by and permit them to be exterminated. To prevent such a catastrophe proper measures must be taken. The hunting community increases with as great rapidity as that with which game decreases. Where one man hunted twenty-five years ago, a score hunt for big game to-day. Unfortunately it has become the fashion. It is a diversion involving no danger and, for those that understand it, but slight hardship. If people are to continue to have this source of amusement, some well matured and concerted plan must be devised to insure the continuance of game. Never in the past history of the world has man held at his command the same potential control of wild beasts as now, the same power to concentrate against them the forces of science. Man's supremacy has advanced by leaps and bounds, while the animal's power to escape remains unchanged; all the conditions for their survival constantly become more difficult. Man has, in its perfection, the rapid-firing rifle, which, with the use of smokeless powder, gives him an enormous increase of effectiveness in its flat trajectory. This is quite as great an element of its destructiveness as its more deadly power and capacity for quick shooting, since it eliminates the necessity for accurately gauging distance, one of the hardest things for the amateur hunter to learn. If man so desires, he can command the aid of dogs. By their power of scent he has wild animals at his mercy, and unless he deliberately regulates the slaughter which he will permit, their entire extermination would be a matter of only a few years. Only at the end of the last year we were told of the celebration in the Tyrol of the killing, by the Emperor of Austria, of his two thousandth chamois. Eight years ago this same record was achieved by another Austrian, a Grand Duke. This was in both instances, as I understand, by the means of fair and square stalking, quite different from the methods of the more degenerate battue. At a single shooting exhibition of this latter sort by the Crown Prince of Germany at his estate in Schleswig, on one day in December last, were killed two hundred and ten fallow deer, three hundred and forty-one red deer, and on the day following, eighty-seven large wild boar, one hundred and twenty-six small ones, eighty-six fallow deer, and two hundred and one red deer. Any man, private citizen as well as emperor or prince, has it within his power, if he be possessed of the blood craze, to kill scores and hundreds of every kind of game. By the facilities of rapid travel the hunter, with the least possible sacrifice of time, is transported with whatever of luxury a Pullman car can confer (luxury to him who likes it) to the haunts and almost within the very sanctuaries of game. Where formerly an expedition of months was required, now in a few days' time he is carried to the most out-of-the-way places, to the barrens, the forests, the peaks, the mountain glades--almost to the muskeg and the tundra.

How far the rage for hunting has captured the community in this country of the western seaboard it is surprising to learn. In the year 1902 there were issued for the seven forest reserves south of the Pass of Tehachapi, a tract three-quarters the size of Massachusetts, four thousand permits to hunt. Inasmuch as one permit may admit more than a single person to the privileges of hunting, it was estimated that at least five thousand people bearing rifles entered the reserves. This besides the enormous horde of the peaceably disposed who also seek diversion here, and who naturally disturb the deer to a certain extent. The supervisor of two reserves--the San Gabriel and San Bernardino--embracing a tract less than half the size of Connecticut, assured me that in 1902 sixty thousand persons entered within their borders; in the summer of 1903 this number was estimated at no less than ten thousand in excess of the previous year. In these two reserves the number of permits for rifles and revolvers issued between June 1 and December 31, increased from 1,900 in the year 1902, to 3,483 in 1903, and as, in some cases, these were issued for two or more persons, the supervisor estimates that at least 4,500 rifles were carried last summer into these two reserves. He was of the opinion that two-thirds of these were borne by hunters, the remainder as protection against bears and other ferocious wild beasts, which exist only in imagination.

It is to be borne in mind that all through this California country there exists a race of hunters--active, determined men, who passionately love this diversion. The people there have not been so long graduated as we of the Atlantic Coast from the conditions of the frontier. The ozone of a new country stirs more quickly the predatory instinct, never quite dead in any virile race. The rifle slips easily from its scabbard, and there in plain sight before them are the forest-clad mountains, a mile above their heads, in the cool and vital air, ever beckoning the hunter to be up and away. These people feel in their blood the call of the wild. With a very considerable proportion of the people upon farms, and still more in villages and small towns, the Fall hunt is the commanding interest of the year. This is the one athletic contest into which they enter heart and soul; it is foot-ball and yachting and polo and horse racing combined. For a young man to go into the forest after deer and to come back empty-handed, is to lose prestige to a certain extent among his fellows. Oftentimes, when a beginner returns in this way unsuccessful, he is so unmercifully chaffed by his companions that he mentally records a vow not to be beaten a second time, and, when he finds himself again in the forest for his annual hunt, with the enthusiasm of youth, he would almost rather die than be defeated.

How hard the conditions are for the hunter no one would believe who has not himself seen the country. In many places the hills are covered with an almost impenetrable chaparral of scrub oak, buckthorn, greasewood, manzanita, and deer-brush, in which the wary deer have taken refuge. In and through these, guided sometimes by the tracks of the deer, or encouraged by the presence of such tracks even if he cannot follow them, up steep mountains, exposed to the heat of the sun, in dust, over rocks, and without water, toils the hunter, who accounts himself lucky if, by tramping scores of miles through this sort of impediment, he succeeds, after days of toil, in killing his deer. Perhaps he has been without fresh meat for a week or a fortnight, and often on short commons; is it to be wondered at that when a shot offers he avails himself of the opportunity even if it be a doe that he fires at? How can the deer withstand such concentration of fury?

Dr. Bartlett, Forest Supervisor of the Trabuco and San Jacinto Reserves, assured me that the number of licenses to hunt in those two reserves issued annually exceeded, in his opinion, the entire number of deer within their boundaries.

Everyone now is ready to admit that the extermination of the herd of buffalo in the seventies was permitted by a crude, short-sighted policy on our part as a nation, and should we of the early twentieth century allow the remaining deer, elk, mountain sheep, and antelope, the last of the great bears, and the innumerable small creatures of the wild, to be crowded off the face of the earth, we should be depriving our children and our children's children of a satisfaction and of a source of interest which they would keenly regret. It would be well if we bore in mind that we stand in a sort of fiduciary relation to the people who are to come after us, so far as the wild portion of our land is concerned, those few remote tracts still untarnished by man's craze to convert everything in the world, or beneath the surface of the earth, into dollars for his own immediate profit. He has the same short-sighted policy in his hunting. He is content to gratify the impulse of the hour without thought of those who are to spend their lives here when we have led our brief careers and have gone to a well merited oblivion, to reap our reward--

Heads without names, no more remembered.

Let us look this matter squarely in the face. We are the inheritors of these domains. It is one of the most precious assets of posterity. Here, year by year, in steadily increasing proportion, as wisdom more prevails, will men take comfort; and as the comprehension of nature's charms penetrates their minds will they find content. One chief satisfaction that every American feels from the mere fact of his nationality is the full assurance in his heart that any measure founded on sound reason and prompted by generous impulse will receive, if not immediate acceptance, at all events eventual recognition. In the end justice will prevail. Thus, in this matter before us, it will naturally take a few years for Congress to realize that a genuine demand exists for the creation of these refuges in every State, East as well as West, but the interest in wild creatures, and the desire for their protection, if not a clamorous demand, is one almost universally felt. All men, except a meager few of the dwarfed and strictly city-bred, partake of this, and it is so much a sign of the times that no Sunday edition is complete without its column devoted to wild creatures, their traits, their habits, or their eccentricities. One could hardly name, outside of money-making and politics, an interest which all men more generally share.

Every lad is a born naturalist, and the true wisdom, as all sensible people know, is to carry unfatigued through life the boy's power of enjoyment, his freshness of perception, his alertness and zest. Where the child's capacity for close observation survives into manhood, supplemented by man's power of sustained attention, we have the typical temperament of the lover of the woods, the mountains, and the wild--of the naturalist in the sense that Thoreau was a naturalist, and many another whose memory is cherished.

It is not impossible for a man to be deeply learned and still to lack the power of awakening enthusiasm in others; as a matter of fact, to be so heavily freighted with information that he forgets to nourish his own finer faculties, his intuition, his sympathy, and his insight. One must have lived for a time in the California mountains to realize how great is the service to the men of his own and to succeeding generations of him who more than any one else has illuminated the study of the Sierras and of all our forest-clad mountains, our glacier-formed hills, valleys and glades. Not by any means do all lovers of nature, however faithful their purpose, come to its study with the endowment of John Muir. In him we see the trained faculties of the close and accurate observer, joined to the temperament of the poet--the capacity to think, to see and to feel--and by the power of sustained and strong emotion to make us the sharers of his joy. The beauty and the majesty of the forest to him confer the same exaltation of mind, the same intellectual transport, which the trained musician feels when listening to the celestial harmonies of a great orchestra. In proportion as one conceives, or can imagine, the fineness of the musical endowment of a Bach or Beethoven, and in proportion as he can realize in his own mind the infinity of training and preparation which has contributed to the development of such a master musician--in such proportion may he comprehend and appreciate the unusual qualities and achievements of a man like Muir. He will realize to some degree--indistinctly to be sure, "seeing men as trees walking"--the infinity of nice and accurate observation, the discriminating choice of illustration, the infallible tact and unvarying sureness with which he holds our interest, and the dominant poetic insight into the nature of things, which are spread before the reader in lavish abundance, in Muir's two books, "The Mountains of California" and "Our National Parks." No other books, in this province, by living author offer to the reader so rich a feast. Recognizing the fine endowments of Thoreau, and how greatly all are his debtors, still we of this generation are lucky in having one greater than he among us, if wisdom of life and joyousness be the criterion of a sound and of a sane philosophy. The time will come when this will be generally recognized. The verdict of posterity is the right one, and the love of mankind is given throughout the centuries to the men of insight, who possess the rare mental endowment of sustained pleasure. Call it perpetual youth, or joyousness, or what you like, the fact remains that the power of sustained enthusiasm, lightness of heart and gaiety, with the faculty of communicating to others that state of mind, is not one of the commonest endowments of the human brain. It is one that confers great happiness to others, and one to whose possessor we are under great obligation. Compare the career of Thoreau, lonely, sad, and wedded to death--on the one hand, with that of Muir, on the other--a lover of his kind, healthful, inspiring to gaiety, superabounding in vitality. Naturalists of this type of mind, and so faithful in perfecting the talents entrusted to them, do not often appear in any age.