260 In Touch with Nature. 



the inferences of the most prominent men in their 

 line are but too apt to fall upon deaf ears. 



As men like Fenny deciphered it, this world 

 was thoroughly intelligible to them. They were 

 all deists, of course, and delved no more deeply 

 into matters spiritual. There was a tendency to 

 spiritualism of the modern kind, because so much 

 was beyond their comprehension, so unsolvable 

 to them, but plain to the learned. This gave them 

 their poetry, and their lives were full of it ; but 

 this feeling extended beyond such things to the 

 trivial incidents of every-day life. Fenny wore 

 upon his little finger a rudely-carved bone ring. 

 I once questioned him about it, and, holding it 

 before him, he said, with a strange change of voice, 

 " It's nothin' of itself, but the sunshiny days of one 

 summer come back whenever I look at it." 



But let us take a walk with Fenny in the woods. 

 If he did not know a tree botanically he did prac- 

 tically. He laid no claim to why or how the 

 growth was thus and so, but he did know what 

 every tree passed through from the sprouting of 

 the seed to maturity. His knowledge shone with 

 positive splendor when he remarked, " That tree's 



