Because I have spent much of my time in adventuring in distant wildernesses, and exploring where other men have not gone, it has been accepted by many that my love for nature means a love for the distant and, for most people, the inaccessible wilds. It is true that in the vast and silent places one comes nearer, perhaps, to the deeper truths of life. Of the wild and its miracles I love to write, and when I come to that part of my story, I shall possibly be happiest. But I would be unfair to myself, and the religion of nature itself, if the great truth were not first emphasized that its treasures are to be possessed by mankind wherever one may turn--even in a prison cell. I was personally in touch with one remarkable instance of this in the Michigan State Penitentiary, at Jackson, where a canary-bird and a red geranium saved a man from madness and eventually gained him a pardon, sending him out into the world a living being with a new and better religion than he had ever dreamed of before. But the open skies and the free air were intended from the beginning of things as the greatest gifts to man, and it is there, if one is sick in body or soul, that one should seek. Whether it is a mile or a thousand miles from a city makes little difference. For nature is the universal law. It is everywhere. It is neither mystery nor mysterious. Its pages are open; its life is vibrant with the desire to be understood. The one miracle is for man to bring himself down out of the clouds of his egoism and replace his passion for destruction with the desire to understand. * * * * * I have in mind a case in point. I had a very dear friend, a newspaper man, whose wife had died. I don’t know that I ever saw a man more utterly broken up, for his love for her was more than love. It was worship. He grew faded and thin, and a gray patch over his temple turned white. The mightiest efforts of his friends could do nothing. He wanted to be alone, alone in his home, where he could grieve himself to death by inches. I knew that his case was harder because he was merely tolerant of religion. One day, the idea came to me that resulted in his spiritual and physical salvation. I took him in my auto, and we went out into the country four or five miles, opened a gate, drove down a long lane, and stopped at the edge of a forty-acre wood. “Fred, I am going to show you a wonderful city,” I said. “Come with me--quietly.” We climbed over the fence, and I led him to the heart of the wood, and there we sat down, with our backs to a log. “Now, just to humor me, be very still,” I said. “Don’t move, don’t speak--just listen.” It was three o’clock in the afternoon, that wonderful time of a summer day when nature seems to rouse herself from midday slumber to fill the world with her rustling life. The sun fell slantwise through the wood, and here and there, under the roofs of the trees, we could see golden pools and streams of it on the cool earth.