She Lay of the Band 
patch ; for, once you have digged into earth of your 
own, then have a care, else along with the cucumber 
seed you will plant your soul. The man in the Scrip- 
tures who bought a piece of land and wished there- 
after only to dig, had a real case. 
Owning a farm is not necessary. To be near the 
open country is enough, so near that you can know 
it intimately the year around. “ He is a thoroughly 
good naturalist,” says Kingsley, “who knows his 
own parish thoroughly.” He was thinking of Gilbert 
White, I am sure,— tnat gentle rector who /ved in 
Selborne, and there grew old with his tortoise. 
This is all there is to nature study, this growing 
old with your garden and your tame tortoise. The 
study of the out-of-doors is not a new cult; it is not 
a search after a living uintatherium, or after a frog 
that can swallow his pond, or a fish hawk that reads, 
~—not a hunt for the extraordinary or the marvelous 
at all, but for things as the Lord made them. Nature 
study is the out-of-door side of natural history, the 
unmeasured, unprinted side of poetry. It is joy in 
breathing the air of the fields; joy in seeing, hear- 
ing, living the life of the fields; joy in knowing and 
loving all that lives with you in your out-of-doors. 
