The Power of the Scalawag


  A FORESTRY Commissioner had just felled a giant tree when, seeing 
an honest man approaching, he dropped his axe and fled.  The next 
day when he cautiously returned to get his axe, he found the 
following lines pencilled on the stump:

  "What nature reared by centuries of toil,
A scalawag in half a day can spoil;
An equal fate for him may Heaven provide -
Damned in the moment of his tallest pride."