leaves. And there are other rewards one gets by lying down. It is all very
well to talk proudly about man's walking with his head erect and his face
to the heavens, but if we keep that posture all the time we miss a good
deal. The attitude of the toad and the lizard is not to be scorned, though
when the needs of locomotion convert it into the fisherman's "sneak," it
is, as I have suggested, to be sparingly indulged in. But if we could only
nibble now and then from "the other side" of Alice's mushroom, what a new
outlook we should get on the world that now lies about our feet! What new
aspects of its beauty would be revealed to us: the forest grandeurs of the
grass, the architecture of its slim shafts with their pillared aisles and
pointed arches of interlocking and upspringing curves, their ceiling
traceries of spraying tops against a far-away background of sky!

To know arbutus, you must stoop to its level, and look across the fine,
frosty fur of its stiff little leaves, and feel the nestle of its stems to
the ground, the little up-fling of their tips toward the sun, and the neat
radiance of its flower clusters, with their blessed fragrance and their
pure, babyish color.

But after that? You want to pick it. Yes, you really want to pick it!

In this it is different from other flowers. Most of them I am well content
to leave where they grow. In fact, the love of picking things--flowers or
anything else--is a youthful taste: we lose it as we grow older; we become
more and more willing to appreciate without acquiring, or rather,
appreciation becomes to us a finer and more spiritual form of acquiring.
Is it possible that, after all, the old idea of heaven as a state of
enraptured contemplation is in harmony with the trend of our development?

But if there is arbutus in heaven, I shall need to develop a good deal
further not to want to pick it. It suggests picking; it almost invites it.
There is something about the way it nestles and hides, that makes you want
to see it better. Here is a spray of pure white, living under a green tent
of overlapping leaves; one must raise it, and nip off just one leaf, so
that the blossoms can see out. There is another, a pink cluster, showing
faintly through the dry, matted grass. You feel for the stem, pull it
gently, and, lo, it is many stems, which have crept their way under the
tangle, and every one is tipped with a cluster of stars or round little
buds each on its long stem, fairly be