mystery and the charm because it removes the horizon
farther off. We cease to fear, perhaps, but how can one cease to
marvel and to love?

The fields and woods and waters about one are a book from which he may
draw exhaustless entertainment, if he will. One must not only learn
the writing, he must translate the language, the signs, and the
hieroglyphics. It is a very quaint and elliptical writing, and much
must be supplied by the wit of the translator. At any rate, the lesson
is to be well conned. Gilbert White said that that locality would be
found the richest in zooelogical or botanical specimens which was most
thoroughly examined. For more than forty years he studied the
ornithology of his district without exhausting the subject. I thought
I knew my own tramping ground pretty well, but one April day, when I
looked a little closer than usual into a small semi-stagnant lakelet
where I had peered a hundred times before, I suddenly discovered
scores of little creatures that were as new to me as so many nymphs
would have been. They were partly fish-shaped, from an inch to an inch
and a half long, semi-transparent, with a dark brownish line visible
the entire length of them (apparently the thread upon which the life
of the animal hung, and by which its all but impalpable frame was held
together), and suspending themselves in the water, or impelling
themselves swiftly forward by means of a double row of fine, waving,
hair-like appendages, that arose from what appeared to be the back,--a
kind of undulating, pappus-like wings. What was it? I did not know.
None of my friends or scientific acquaintances knew. I wrote to a
learned man, an authority upon fish, describing the creature as well
as I could. He replied that it was only a familiar species of
phyllopodous crustacean, known as _Eubranchipus vernalis_.

I remember that our guide in the Maine woods, seeing I had names of my
own for some of the plants, would often ask me the name of this and
that flower for which he had no word; and that when I could recall the
full Latin term, it seemed overwhelmingly convincing and satisfying to
him. It was evidently a relief to know that these obscure plants of
his native heath had been found worthy of a learned name, and that the
Maine woods were not so uncivil and outlandish as they might at first
seem: it was a comfort to him to know that he did not live beyond the
reach of botany. In like manner I found satisfaction in knowing that