y their leaves to and fro, beckoning to each other with wayward
amorous gestures, but has known that these are not dead things?

Watch the stream coming down the hill with a flash and a laugh in the
sunlight, look into the dark brown pools in the deep shadows beneath
the rocks, or voyage a whole night upon the breast of the great river,
drifting past ghostly monasteries and silent villages, and then say if
there be no life in the waters, if they, too, are dead things. There is
no consolation like the consolation of Nature, no sympathy like the
sympathy of the hills and streams; and sympathy comes from life. There
is no sympathy with the dead.

When you are alone in the forest all this life will come and talk to
you, if you are quiet and understand. There is love deep down in the
passionate heart of the flower, as there is in the little quivering
honeysucker flitting after his mate, as there was in Romeo long ago.
There is majesty in the huge brown precipice greater than ever looked
from the face of a king. All life is one. The soul that moves within you
when you hear the deer call to each other far above in the misty meadows
of the night is the same soul that moves in everything about you. No
people who have lived much with Nature have failed to descry this. They
have recognised the life, they have felt the sympathy of the world about
them, and to this life they have given names and forms as they would to
friends whom they loved. Fairies and goblins, fauns and spirits, these
are but names and personifications of a real life. But to him who has
never felt this life, who has never been wooed by the trees and hills,
these things are but foolishness, of course.

To the Burman, not less than to the Greek of long ago, all nature is
alive. The forest and the river and the mountains are full of spirits,
whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all kinds of Nats, good and bad,
great and little, male and female, now living round about us. Some of
them live in the trees, especially in the huge fir-tree that shades half
an acre without the village; or among the fernlike fronds of the
tamarind; and you will often see beneath such a tree, raised upon poles
or nestled in the branches, a little house built of bamboo and thatch,
perhaps two feet square. You will be told when you ask that this is the
house of the Tree-Nat. Flowers will be offered sometimes, and a little
water or rice maybe, to the Nat, never supposing that he is in need of