“This is one of the most wonderful cities in the world,” I whispered, “and there are hundreds and thousands of such cities, some of them within the reach of all.” The musical ripple of a creek came to our ears. And then, slowly at first, there came upon my friend the wonder of it all. He understood--at last. About us, through all that forty acres of wood, the air seemed to whisper forth a strange and wonderful life. Over our heads, we heard a grating sound. It was a squirrel gnawing through the shell of a last autumn’s nut. On an old stub, a woodpecker hammered. Close about us were the “cheep, cheep, cheep,” and “twit, twit, twit,” of little brown brushbirds. A warbler burst suddenly into a glorious snatch of song. A quarter of a mile away, a crow cawed, and between us and the crow we heard a fox-squirrel barking, and, a little later, saw it, with its mate, scrambling in play up and down the trees. My friend caught my arm and pointed. He was becoming interested, and what he saw was a fat young woodchuck passing near us on a foraging expedition to a neighboring clover field. For an hour we did not move, and through all that city was the drone and voice of life, and that life was a soft and wonderful song, soothing one almost to sleep. And when, at last, my friend whispered again, “It sounds as though everything is talking,” I knew that the spirit of the thing had got into him. Then I drew his attention to a colony of big black ants whose fortress was in the log against which we were resting. They were working. Two of them were trying to drag a dead caterpillar over my friend’s knee. When we rose to go, I led him past a little swale in which a score of blackbirds had bred their young. On a slender willow, a bobolink was singing. A land-turtle lumbered back into the water, and the bright eyes of green-headed frogs stared at us from patches of scum. Under a bush, a score of toads were teaching their tiny youngsters to swim. When my friend saw the little fellows clinging to their mothers’ backs, he laughed--the first time in many months. When we went back to the car, I said: “You have seen just one ten-thousandth of what nature holds for you and every other man and woman. You haven’t believed in God very strongly. But you’ve got to now. That’s God back there in the wood.”