HIGHER LAWS. 
227 
They early introduce us to and detain us in scenery with 
which otherwise, at that age, we should have little ac¬ 
quaintance. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and 
others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a 
peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in 
a more favorable mood for observing her, in the inter¬ 
vals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, 
who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid 
to exhibit herself to them. The traveller on the prairie 
is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the Mis¬ 
souri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. 
Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns 
things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor 
authority. We are most interested when science re¬ 
ports what those men already know practically or in¬ 
stinctively, for that alone is a true humanity , or account 
of human experience. 
They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few 
amusements, because he has not so many public holidays, 
and men and boys do not play so many games as they 
do in England, for here the more primitive but solitary 
amusements of hunting fishing and the like have not yet 
given place to the former. Almost every New England 
boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling piece 
between the ages of ten and fourteen ; and his hunting 
and fishing grounds were not limited like the preserves 
of an English nobleman, but were more boundless even 
than those of a savage. No wonder, then, that he did 
not oftener stay to play on the common. But already a 
change is taking place, owing, not to an increased human¬ 
ity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the 
hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted, not 
excepting the Humane Society. 
