NATURE AND THE CITY. 



329 



drudgery of living; but behold! they find themselves 

 enmeshed in a much greater entanglement than they 

 had suspected, and some get still further ensnared into 

 failure. They miss the very freedom and relief which 

 they had hoped to find, and end by losing what fine old 

 natural instincts they had, so that their last state is 

 much worse than the first. Men pay pretty dearly for 

 their refinements, in the loss of that for which, after 

 all, the refinements are, and can be, no substitute. And 

 so, because of the limitations of each kind of life, we 

 have the strange spectacle of country people aping the 

 ways of city people, and losing the very simplicity they 

 were supposed to have, and city people constantly re- 

 verting to the country to find it. 'T is the old story of 

 Maud Muller and the Judge which is daily enacted 

 before our eyes. 



I do not say what is the remedy for all this. Each 

 one of us most solve that for himself. We are not 

 necessarily clumsy ignoramuses because we live in the 

 country, nor are we all conventionalized hypocrites 

 whose lot has fallen in the city. But decentralization, 

 and the gradual increase of a semi-rural population, 

 made possible by the introduction of the trolley car, 

 with its cheap fares, must by every one be regarded as a 

 force for good, and for good only. 



Yet I would voluntarily narrow my life if I might 

 only know more of Nature. I can not tell you with 

 what feelings I regard Nature, I regard her so sacredly. 

 I wish that others could enter into my life, and see 

 the beauty. T would share the loveliness of the earth. 

 It is not mine only, but all may see it, if they enter 

 the fields with receptive mind and heart, equally with 



