OLT> STORT 3 



the creatures of the wild. The arm-chair critic, ever 

 anxious, after the manner of his kind, to classify and 

 label, complacently sets down each naturalist as the 

 follower of a school. Yes, but it is the great school in 

 which their lives are spent : a school not of men or 

 printed books ; a school in which " Nature, the dear old 

 nurse," spreads wide before the eyes of loving learners 

 pages of " the manuscript of God." 



It is no doubt hard for an outsider a man whose 

 opportunities or tastes have never made him free of 

 Nature's vast and wandering realm to realise how full 

 of life are woods and fields and country lanes. The 

 picture of a woodland walk seems to him too full of 

 figures, exaggerated, unreal. 



A man who never from a bivouac among the moun- 

 tains saw the splendour of an Alpine dawn, who never 

 from his lonely hut has watched the sun go down behind 

 the mountain wall and leave the mighty ramparts glow- 

 ing with the fire of heaven, sees an Alpine landscape 

 painted as the artist saw it, and coolly writes that the 

 tints are overdone, the colouring impossible. 



So is it in descriptions of Nature. " A realist might 

 find something suspicious," says another critic on the 

 hearth, " in the crowd of figures with which the writer 

 peoples all his woods and fields," and cannot read 

 between the lines that the pictures were painted on the 

 spot, and that every figure was copied from the life. 



Another man reads a sketch of a ramble in the woods. 

 His soul is stirred by the description of what are spoken 

 of as familiar sights and sounds. He recognises the 



