His heart went out to the tall poplars and the upright cedars with their tasselled fruit, and he felt virtue flow from them to him in return. He believed the old dryad stories, and became himself truly nympholeptic, and aware of presences in the woods. In August, 1877, he writes: "I have been almost two years, off and on, without drugs and medicines, and daily in the open air. Last summer I found a particularly secluded little dell off one side by my creek, originally a large dug-out marl-pit, now abandoned, filled with bushes, trees, grass, a group of willows, a straggling bank and a spring of delicious water running right through the middle of it, with two or three little cascades. Here I retreated every hot day, and follow it up this summer. Here I realise the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone. Never before did I come so close to Nature, never before did she come so close to me. By old habit I pencilled down from time to time almost automatically, moods, sights, hours, tints and outlines on the spot."[568] Unlike the ordinary naturalist he regarded the birds and trees, the dragon-flies and grey squirrels, the oak-trees and the breeze that sang among their leaves, as spirits; strange, but kindred with his own, members together with his of a transcendental life; and he communed with them. Something, he felt sure, they interchanged; something passed between them. Their mystical fellowship had its ritual, as have all religions. The place was sacred, and he did off, not only his shoes, but all his raiment, giving back himself to naked Mother-Nature, naked as he was born of her. In the solitude, among the bare-limbed gracious trees and the clear-flowing water, he enjoyed many a sun-bath, and on hot summer days, in his bird-haunted nook, many a bathing in the spring; many a wrestle, too, with strong young hickory sapling or beech bough, conscious, as they wrestled together, of new life flowing into his veins.[569] Whatever ignorance of names his Washington acquaintance may have discovered,[570] his diary at this time is full of nature-lore. It enumerates some forty kinds of birds, and he was evidently familiar with nearly as many sorts of trees and shrubs; while differentiating accurately enough between the sundry trilling insects, locusts, grasshoppers, crickets and katydids which populate the district, vibrant by day and night. Doubtless he had learnt much from the companionship of John Burroughs, but he was himself an accurate observer. The story of his visits to Timber Creek and its vicinity from 1876 to 1882 is told in _Specimen Days_, with much else beside--a book to carry with one on any holiday, or to make a holiday in the midst of city work. It is, for the rest, an admirable illustration of the saying of the philosopher-emperor, that virtue is a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature.[571] * * * * *