THE NATURE-WRITER 127 



siderable difference between the inherent market- 

 ableness of a cold thought and a warm, purely 

 personal emotion. One has a right to sell one's 

 ideas, to barter one's literary inventions ; one has 

 a right, a duty it may be, to invent inventions for 

 sale ; but one may not, without sure damnation, 

 make " copy " of one's emotions. In other words, 

 one may not invent emotions, nor observations 

 either, for the literary trade. The sad case with 

 much of our nature-writing is that it has become 

 professional, and so insincere, not answering to 

 genuine observation nor to genuine emotion, but 

 to the bid of the publisher. 



You will know the sincere nature-writer by his 

 fidelity to fact. But, alas ! suppose I do not know 

 the fact? To be sure. And the nature-writer 

 thought of that, too, and penned his solemn, 

 pious preface, wherein he declares that the fol- 

 lowing observations are exactly as he personally 

 saw them ; that they are true altogether ; that he 

 has the affidavits to prove it; and the Indians 

 and the Eskimos to swear the affidavits prove it. 

 Of course you are bound to believe after that; 

 but you wish the preface did not make it so un- 

 necessarily hard. 



