84 WINTER 



meadow. Only strength and craft may win; only 

 those who have all of their teeth. The muskrat 

 with a single missing tooth never enters the real race 

 of life at all. He slinks from some abandoned bur- 

 row, and, if the owl and mink are not watching, he 

 dies alone in the grass, and we rarely know. 



I shall never forget the impression made upon me 

 by those quiet bones. It was like that made by my 

 first visit to a great city hospital out of the busy, 

 cheerful street into a surgical ward, where the 

 sick and injured lay in long white lines. We tramp 

 the woods and meadows and never step from the 

 sweet air and the pure sunlight of health into a hos- 

 pital. But that is not because no sick, ill-formed, or 

 injured are there. The proportion is smaller than 

 among us humans, and for very good reasons, yet 

 there is much real suffering, and to come upon it, 

 as we will, now and then, must certainly quicken 

 our understanding and deepen our sympathy with 

 the life out of doors. 



No sensible person could for a moment believe 

 the animals capable of suffering as a human being 

 can suffer; nor that there is any such call for our 

 sympathy from them as from our human neighbors. 

 But an unselfish sharing of the life of the fields 

 demands that we take part in all of it. 



Nature wears a brave face. Her smile is ever in 

 the open, her laughter quick and contagious. This 

 brave front is no mask. It is real. Sunlight, song, 



