Where Town and Country Meet 



exhalation penetrating through the senses 

 to the inmost soul. 



A little distance from where I sat rest- 

 ing on the root of the pine, was a tumble- 

 down, tangled barbed-wire fence, over- 

 grown by the long vines of the trailing 

 green brier. The strands of wire and the 

 brier vines were almost indistinguishable, 

 and it suddenly occurred to me that here 

 was an instance of the natural association 

 of type and prototype. Approaching closer, 

 I was struck by the remarkable resemblance 

 between the vines and the wire. The latter 

 was just about the same size as the former, 

 and bore its clusters of radiating barbs at 

 precisely the same intervals as the thorns 

 of the vines. The barbs and the thorns 

 were arranged similarly, in bunches of three 

 or four, bristling opposite ways, and of 

 about the same size, though nature's barbs 

 were the neater and finer and sharper- 

 pointed. Surely, I thought, man must have 

 got his notion of the barbed-wire fence from 

 nature, and he has followed his model so 

 closely that, if nature were allowed patents, 

 the infringement would be ground for legal 

 action. 



