building-stones and sand and
gravel,--gravel from the glaciers. Here goes the hay for ten thousand
horses. Here go the wheat, and here the apples, and the animals. Here
are the votes that hold the people steady.

Somewhere there is the background. Here is the background. Here things
move slowly. Trees grow slowly. The streams change little from year to
year, and yet they shape the surface of the earth in this hill country.
In yonder fence-row the catbird has built since I was a boy, and yet I
have wandered far and I have seen great changes in yonder city. The
well-sweep has gone but the well is still there: the wells are gone from
the city. The cows have changed in color, but still they are cows and
yield their milk in season. The fields do not perish, but time eats away
the city. I think all these things must be good and very good or they
could not have persisted in all this change.

In the beginning! Yes, I know, it was holy then. The forces of eons
shaped it: still was it holy. The forest came: still holy. Then came the
open fields.

_The background spaces.--The ancestral sea_

The planet is not all land, and the sea is as holy as the soil. We speak
of the "waste of waters," and we still offer prayers for those who go
down to the sea in ships.

Superstition yet clings about the sea. The landsman thinks of the sea as
barren, and he regrets that it is not solid land on which he may grow
grass and cattle. And as one looks over the surface of the waters, with
no visible object on the vast expanse and even the clouds lying
apparently dead and sterile, and when one considers that three-fourths
of the earth's surface is similarly covered, one has the impression of
utter waste and desolation, with no good thing abiding there for the
comfort and cheer of man.

The real inhabitants of the sea are beneath the surface and every part
is tenanted, so completely tenanted that the ocean produces greater bulk
of life, area for area, than does the solid land; and every atom of this
life is as keen to live and follows as completely the law of its
existence as does the life of the interiors of the continents. The vast
meadows of plankton and nekton, albeit largely of organisms microscopic,
form a layer for hundreds of feet beneath the surface and on which the
great herbivora feed; and on these animals the legions of the carnivora
subsist. Every vertical region has its life, peculiar to it, extending
even to the bottoms o