auties and ready to meet on
friendly and cordial terms the animal life whose home it is. The wild
world is, indeed, a wonderful world; how wonderful and interesting we
learn only by degrees and actual experience. It is free, but not
lawless; to enter it fully we must obey these laws which are slowly and
silently impressed upon us. It is a wholesome, life-giving, inspiring
world, and when you have learned to conform to its rules you are met on
every hand by friendly messengers to guide you and teach you the ways of
the wild: wild birds, wild fruits and plants, and gentle, furtive, wild
animals. You cannot put their messages into words, but you can feel
them; and then, suddenly, you no longer care for soft cushions and rugs,
for shaded lamps, dainty fare and finery, for paved streets and concrete
walks. You want to plant your feet upon the earth in its natural state,
however rugged or boggy it may be. You want your cushions to be of the
soft moss-beds of the piny woods, and, with the unparalleled sauce of a
healthy, hearty appetite, you want to eat your dinner out of doors,
cooked over the outdoor fire, and to drink water from a birch-bark cup,
brought cool and dripping from the bubbling spring.

You want, oh! how you want to sleep on a springy bed of balsam boughs,
wrapped in soft, warm, woollen blankets with the sweet night air of all
outdoors to breathe while you sleep. You want your flower-garden, not
with great and gorgeous masses of bloom in evident, orderly beds, but
keeping always charming surprises for unexpected times and in
unsuspected places. You want the flowers that grow without your help in
ways you have not planned; that hold the enchantment of the wilderness.
Some people are born with this love for the wild, some attain it, but in
either case the joy is there, and to find it you must seek it. Your
chosen trail may lead through the primeval forests or into the great
western deserts or plains; or it may reach only left-over bits of the
wild which can be found at no great distance from home. Even a bit of
meadow or woodland, even an uncultivated field on the hilltop, will give
you a taste of the wild; and if you strike the trail in the right spirit
you will find upon arrival that these remnants of the wild world have
much to show and to teach you. There are the sky, the clouds, the
lungfuls of pure air, the growing things which send their roots where
they will and not in a man-ordered way. There is the wild l