It is remarkable that Kalm says in 1748 (being in Philadelphia): “Coals have not yet been found in Pennsylvania; but people pretend to have seen them higher up in the country among the natives. Many people however agree that they are met with in great quantity more to the north, near Cape Breton.” * * * * * As we grow old we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. We are more careless about our diet and our chastity. But we should be fastidious to the extreme of sanity.[349] All wisdom is the reward of a discipline, conscious or unconscious. By moonlight at Potter’s Field toward Bear Garden Hill, 8 P. M. The whip-poor-wills sing. Cultivate reverence. It is as if you were so much more respectable yourself. By the quality of a man’s writing, by the elevation of its tone, you may measure his self-respect. How shall a man continue his culture after manhood? Moonlight on Fair Haven Pond seen from the Cliffs. A sheeny lake in the midst of a boundless forest, the windy surf sounding freshly and wildly in the single pine behind you; the silence of hushed wolves in the wilderness, and, as you fancy, moose looking off from the shore of the lake. The stars of poetry and history and unexplored nature looking down on the scene. This is my world now, with a dull whitish mark curving northward through the forest marking the outlet to the lake. Fair Haven by moonlight lies there like a lake in the Maine wilderness in the midst of a primitive forest untrodden by man. This light and this hour take the civilization all out of the landscape. Even in villages dogs bay the moon; in forests like this we listen to hear wolves howl to Cynthia. Even at this hour in the evening the crickets chirp, the small birds peep, the wind roars in the wood, as if it were just before dawn. The moonlight seems to linger as if it were giving way to the light of coming day. The landscape seen from the slightest elevation by moonlight is seen remotely, and flattened, as it were, into mere light and shade, open field and forest, like the surface of the earth seen from the top of a mountain. How much excited we are, how much recruited, by a great many particular fragrances! A field of ripening corn, now at night, that has been topped, with the stalks stacked up to dry,—an inexpressibly dry, rich, sweet, ripening scent.[350] I feel as if I were an ear of ripening corn myself. Is not the whole air then a compound of such odors undistinguishable? Drying corn-stalks in a field; what an herb-garden![351]