The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Nature Faker, by Richard Harding Davis

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Title: The Nature Faker

Author: Richard Harding Davis

Posting Date: October 28, 2008 [EBook #1763]
Release Date: May, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NATURE FAKER ***

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THE NATURE FAKER

By Richard Harding Davis

Richard Herrick was a young man with a gentle disposition, much
money, and no sense of humor. His object in life was to marry Miss
Catherweight. For three years she had tried to persuade him this could
not be, and finally, in order to convince him, married some one else.
When the woman he loves marries another man, the rejected one is
popularly supposed to take to drink or to foreign travel. Statistics
show that, instead, he instantly falls in love with the best friend of
the girl who refused him. But, as Herrick truly loved Miss Catherweight,
he could not worship any other woman, and so he became a lover of
nature. Nature, he assured his men friends, does not disappoint you. The
more thought, care, affection you give to nature, the more she gives
you in return, and while, so he admitted, in wooing nature there are
no great moments, there are no heart-aches. Jackson, one of the men
friends, and of a frivolous disposition, said that he also could admire
a landscape, but he would rather look at the beautiful eyes of a girl
he knew than at the Lakes of Killarney, with a full moon, a setting sun,
and the aurora borealis for a background. Herrick suggested that,
while the beautiful eyes might seek those of another man, the Lakes of
Killarney would always remain where you could find them. Herrick pursued
his new love in Connecticut on an abandoned farm which he converted into
a "model" one. On it he established model dairies and model incubators.
He laid out old-fashioned gardens, sunken gardens, Italian gardens,
landscape gardens, and a game preserve.

The game preserve was his own especial care and pleasure. It consisted
of two hundred acres of dense forest and hills and ridges of rock. It
was filled with mysterious caves, deep chasms, tiny gurgling streams,
nestlin