BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 103 



which side of a nut 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 per 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- 



