Where Town and Country Meet 



for his rambles over frozen November 

 ground. 



And yet, though nature dreads the win- 

 ter struggle, she knows that it is wholesome 

 for her. She knows, in the main, it will 

 be a victory for her most vital forms; and 

 that whatever perishes is simply so much 

 of the weaker stuff of the physical creation 

 tested, condemned, and swept out of the 

 path of higher evolution. Natural selection 

 is cruel to the isolated unit, but how kind 

 to the associated whole ! How it raises the 

 average of all life, by providing for the 

 unit-to-be a more vigorous parentage and 

 a less vitiated environment! Yes, the hard 

 places are wholesome places, in the end, for 

 all life, physical or spiritual. God has writ- 

 ten this fact very plainly throughout his uni- 

 verse, and he holds to it with an inflexible 

 love that men sometimes call Fate. Yet I 

 think we shall not always spell Fate with 

 the same four letters. 



It is beautiful, to me, to note the thor- 

 oughness, fidelity, and exquisite adaptation 

 of means to end with which nature, in our 

 short Northern clime, makes her preparation 

 for winter. She is bound to save, at any 

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