168 EXTRACTS FROM HIS WORKS [ch. yii. 
advance with rapidity, moving their wings with 
quick strokes, and making the air whistle as they 
glide along; while the two white gulls, with their 
outstretched, long, arched wings, float buoyantly 
in the clear sky, bending gently to either side, as 
they advance from the sea .—-Bvitisli Bii ds, vol. i., 
p. 238. 
4 _A Lover of Nature—Audubon. 
We are all school-boys, or at least scholars, and 
when we forget that we are so, we become fools. 
If we go to the school of Nature, and study God’s 
providence, we can be better employed only when 
in the school of revelation we study God’s grace. 
Let us ever retain our school-boy feelings, so long 
as they are innocent. There is a freshness of heart 
manifest in every real lover of Nature—a delightful 
feeling, gratifying not to one’s self only, but to his 
companions. When it is gone, and the frost of 
worldly wisdom has chilled the affections, the 
naturalist becomes a pompous, pedantic, stiff¬ 
necked, cold-blooded thing, from which you shrink 
back unwittingly. I have the pleasure of being 
familiar with an ornithologist who has spent thirty 
years in study, who has ransacked the steaming 
swamps of Louisiana, traversed the tangled and 
trackless woods of the Missouri, ascended the 
flowery heights of the Alleghanies, and clambeied 
