"Nowadays almost all
man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the
cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform
the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people
who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I
saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the
prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his
bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see
the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole
in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in
the middle of a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he
had found his bounds without a doubt three little stones, where a
stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of
Darkness was his surveyor".
