BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 103 
which side of anut is buttered. They have 
long ago learned that it is the inside. From 
Florida to Michigan one may run the gamut of 
nuts, beginning with the lily-nuts, or water 
chinquepins, and running up to the great 
black-walnut, including every shade of flavor 
and fatness. ‘They are all good. They were 
made to eat in the open air; and he who takes 
them, as the squirrels do, after vigorous ex- 
ercise in the woods, will find great comfort in 
them. I cannot rank the artist or poet very 
high whose stomach is too aristocratic for 
wild berries, nuts, and aromatic bark. I fear 
that such an one has long since allowed 
that trace of savage vigor, which made him 
of kin to Pan and Apollo, to slip away and be 
lost. Shall we doubt that Burns got his sweet 
strength and freshness, in a great measure, 
out of the cool, fragrant loam his ploughshare 
turned? The gracious ways of nature are so 
simple and so manifold. She gives up to us 
by such subtle vehicles of conveyance the 
precious essences of suggestion. She draws 
us back from overculture to renew our virility 
with her simples. She gives us dew instead 
of philosophy, perfumes instead of science, 
flowers in place of art, fruit in lieu of lectures, 
and nuts instead of sermons. 
In the manifest life of an individual no ele- 
ment is so pleasing as that trace of force 
which suggests his kinship to wild nature. 
Out of this springs a sweet stream of originality 
and freshness, a sincerity and outrightness of 
thought and action, of great value fer se. I 
have met men whose talk was spicy and aro- 
matic; from whose lips simple words fell with a 
new, racy meaning. ‘Their thoughts were red- 
