The Lay of the Band 
does the peas you plant, and she will cherish you as 
she does them. This farm, or haunt, or range, you 
will come to know intimately: its flowers, birds, 
walls, streams, trees, — its features large and small, 
as they appear in June, and as they look in July and 
in January. 
For the first you will need the how-to-know books, 
— these while you are getting acquainted; but soon 
acquaintance grows into friendship. You are done 
naming things. The meanings of things now begin 
to come home to you. Nature is taking you slowly 
back to herself. Companionship has begun. 
Many persons of the right mind never know this 
friendship, because they never realize the necessity 
of being friendly. They walk through a field as they 
walk through a crowded street; they go into the 
country as they go abroad. And the result is that all 
this talk of the herbalist and birdlorist, to quote the 
philosopher again, seems “little better than cant 
and self-deception.” 
But let the philosopher cease philosophizing (he 
was also a hermit), and leave off hermiting; let him 
live at home with his wife and children, like the rest 
of us; let him work in the city for his living, hoe in 
72 
