64 BIRDS AND POETS 
suggests a high, elastic instep. It is the face o} 
order and proportion. Those arches are the symbols 
of law and self-control. The point of greatest in- 
terest is the union of the nose with the brow, — 
that strong high embankment; it makes the bridge 
from the ideal to the real sure and easy. All his 
ideas passed readily into form. In the modern face 
the arches are more or less crushed, and the nose 
severed from the brow, — hence the abstract and the 
analytic; hence the preponderance of the speculative 
intellect over creative power. 
XVI 
I have thought that the boy is the only true lover 
of Nature, and that we, who make such a dead set 
at studying and admiring her, come very wide of the 
mark. ‘The nonchalance of a boy who is sure of 
his dinner,” says our Emerson, “is the healthy atti- 
tude of humanity.” The boy is a part of Nature; 
he is as indifferent, as careless, as vagrant as she. 
He browses, he digs, he hunts, he climbs, he hal- 
loes, he feeds on roots and greens and mast. He 
uses things roughly and without sentiment. The 
coolness with which boys will drown dogs or cats, 
or hang them to trees, or murder young birds, or 
torture frogs or squirrels, is like Nature’s own mer- 
cilessness. 
Certain it is that we often get some of the best 
touches of nature from children. Childhood is a 
world by itself, and we listen to children when they 
frankly speak out of it with a strange interest 
