OCTOBER 235 



ideal and for learning to rate lower things 

 at their true value can nowhere else be 

 found. 



I think I once said that in all my life I 

 had never read a page from a printed book 

 out of doors. Nor ever will ! Books are 

 for winter for nights, for stormy days, and 

 for times of ailing health. Why spend time 

 in reading, when we might be seeing? And 

 are not our eyes to be trusted as well as 

 another's ? 



There is no prohibition, however, against 

 thinking in the open that which has been 

 learned by the study fire, and he walks 

 through a garden but poorly fitted for its best 

 enjoyment who has not the companionship of 

 the thoughts other men have had there. The 

 eyes of Richard Jeffries, of Thoreau, of 

 Burroughs and of Bradford Torrey ; of Izaak 

 Walton, of Dean Hole, and Canon Ellacombe, 

 of Maeterlinck, and of White of Selborne 

 to name a few favourite out-of-door observers 

 who write what is called prose, but which is 

 often the highest poetry open our own to a 

 thousand things unnoted before. There are 

 some precious books by women Mrs C. W. 



