A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



water-marks. Now is your time, old fellow. 

 Take yourself by the hand, let yourself climb up 

 on your knees and enfold you in protective inno 

 cence and reproach you with warm kisses. There 

 is a millennial touch in it, believe me, for you 

 will have gotten rid of your carnivorous egotism 

 and will lie down with the lamb. A touch of 

 prophecy, too, if you will but remember. For 

 is it not written that ( a little child shall lead 

 them ? &quot; 



Literally to renew one s youth, according to the 

 Doctor s prescription, turned out to be a series of 

 gracious surprises. With Charlie s hand in mine, 

 I walked into some mysteries that gladly turned 

 into revelations. We took up with some toys in 

 our imaginations, and let the real fairies into our 

 experiences, so that little curtains were lifted all 

 round us on worlds unrealized. 



One hot day we lay flat on our stomachs under 

 the shade of a beech, among the June grass and 

 the daisies, peering down into a magic spectacle, 

 and yet it was the planet s history in petto. The 

 great loom of the universe was working there 

 with miniature continents. It was a paleontologi- 

 cal glimpse of the pre-world, as if Nature kept 

 ceaseless memoranda in shorthand of all her mon 

 strous cycles of change. There were the equato 

 rial forests and the prehistoric monsters. All one 

 had to do was to get the inverse scale adapted, and 

 ^the gigantic fronds waved their plumes, and stran 

 gling creepers wound in tangles, and strange forms 

 of life wandered through. Green leviathans 



36 



