NATURE IN LITTLE 



he is at home in the landscape, he is never disgrun- 

 tled. Come rain, come shine, come heat, come snow, 

 he is on his job and is always reassuring. 



The book of nature is always open winter and 

 smnmer and is always within reach, and the print is 

 legible if we have eyes to read it. But most persons 

 are too preoccupied to have their attention arrested 

 by it. Think of the amazing number of natural 

 things and incidents that must come under the ob- 

 servations of the farmer, the miner, the hunter, that 

 do not interest him, because they are aside from his 

 main purpose. I see a farmer getting his cows every 

 morning in the early dawn while the dew is on the 

 grass and all nature is just waking up, and think, 

 during the twenty or more years that he has been 

 doing this, what interesting and significant inci- 

 dents he might have witnessed in the lives of the 

 wild creatures, if his mind had been alert to such 

 happenings! But it was not. He noticed only his 

 cows, or where his fences needed mending, or where 

 a spring needed clearing out. What a harvest 

 Thoreau would have gathered during that score 

 or more of years! From ant to bumble-bee, and 

 from bumble-bee to hawks and eagles, he would 

 have caught the significant things. Rarely can the 

 farmer tell the poet or the naturalist anything he 

 wants to know, because he has not the seeing eye 

 or the hearing ear. The fox-hunter can tell you of the 



121 



