THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 85 



authority of one who keeps hens. Though a man 

 give his life to the study of the skunk, and have 

 not hens, he is nothing. You cannot say, "Go to, 

 I will write an essay about my skunks." There 

 is no such anomaly as professional nature-loving, 

 as vocational nature-writing. You cannot go into 

 your woods and count your skunks. Not until 

 you have kept hens can you know, can you even 

 have the will to believe, the number of skunks 

 that den in the dark on the purlieus of your farm. 



That your neighbors keep hens is not enough. 

 My neighbors' hens were from the first a stone of 

 stumbling to me. That is a peculiarity of next- 

 door hens. It would have been better, I thought 

 if my neighbors had had no hens. I had moved 

 in among these half-farmer folk, and while I found 

 them intelligent enough, I immediately saw that 

 their attitude toward nature was wholly wrong. 

 They seemed to have no conception of the beauty 

 of nature. Their feeling for the skunk was typi- 

 cal : they hated the skunk with a perfect hatred, 

 a hatred implacable, illogical, and unpoetical, it 

 seemed to me, for it was born of their chicken- 

 breeding. 



Here were these people in the lap of nature, 



