180 Drifting 



in a boat, we must keep bending to the oars. 

 It is this miserable fallacy that makes so many 

 an out-door man and woman lose more than 

 half of that for which they went into the 

 fields. Who cares if you did see a chippy at 

 every turn and flushed a bittern at the edge 

 of the marsh ? If you had been there before 

 them, and these birds did the walking, you 

 would have gone home the wiser. It is not 

 the mere faft that there are birds that con- 

 cerns us, but what are they doing ? why are 

 they doing it ? This the town-pent people 

 are ever anxious to know, and the fafts cannot 

 be gathered if you are forever on the move. 

 Suppose I rush across the river and back, 

 what have I seen ? The bottom of the boat. 

 I came to see the river and the sky above, 

 and if this is of no interest to the reader, let 

 him turn the leaf. 



Does every storm follow the track of the 

 sun? As the sun rose there were clouds 

 in the east and south and a haziness over 

 the western sky. Had I asked a farmer as 

 to the weather probabilities, he would have 

 looked everywhere but due north. Why 

 does he always ignore that quarter ? There 

 may be great banks of cloud there, but they 



