26 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
But, after all, the secret charm of all these 
sports and studies is simply this, —that they 
bring us into more familiar intercourse with 
Nature. They give us that vétam sub divo in 
which the Roman exulted,— those outdoor 
days, which, say the Arabs, are not to be reck- 
oned in the length of life. Nay, to a true lover 
of the open air, night beneath its curtain is as 
beautiful as day. The writer has personally 
camped out under a variety of auspices, — be- 
fore a fire of pine logs in the forests of Maine, 
beside a blaze of faya-boughs on the steep side 
of a foreign volcano, and beside no fire at all — 
except a possible one of Sharp’s rifles —in 
that domestic volcano, Kansas ; and every such 
remembrance is. worth many nights of indoor 
slumber. There is never a week in the year, 
nor an hour of day or night, which has not, in 
the open air, its own special interest. One 
need not say, with Reade’s Australians, that 
the only use of a house is to sleep in the lee of 
it; but one might do worse. As for rain, it is 
chiefly formidable indoors. Lord Bacon used 
to ride with uncovered head in a shower, and 
loved “to feel the spirit of the universe upon 
his brow;” and I once knew an enthusiastic 
hydropathic physician who loved to expose him- 
self in thunderstorms at midnight, without a 
shred of earthly clothing between himself and 
