Book knowledge can never equal living knowledge. He whose mind is stored with what he has read too often only thinks he knows, while the one whose facts are gained at first hand from the real objects themselves knows that he knows. A man in a factory as a rule, in these days of specialization, is only a cog in a wheel, a part of a great machine. Be he a woodworker, he does not make any complete piece of furniture. He saws on one part; another on another; a third on still another; a fourth, who knows nothing of shaping the parts, assembles the whole, and a fifth puts them together; a sixth sandpapers; a seventh stains or varnishes; and an eighth polishes and finishes. So with watchmaking and everything used by human hands. Nobody, nowadays, has the joy of "doing it all." But in the country a man plows, harrows, sows the seed and cultivates, and during it all he is in the open, seeing all the wonderful phenomena of Nature pass before him in everchanging panorama each hour. That is, of course, providing he has not been ground down by too many hours of hard physical labor until he has become a mere "brother to the ox," and the stolid and stunned creature so powerfully described by Edwin Markham in his _Man with the Hoe_. Every man needs something both of the city and the country. Rubbing up against his kind sharpens his wits; often makes him more selfish and indifferent to the rights and needs of others; and again prepares him more thoroughly to enjoy what the country offers. So, city man, with all your senses sharpened by contact with mankind, go out into the country to get your soul enlarged. For Nature is the great soul expander. Read John Muir's _Mountains of California_, and see how the out-door-life enlarged him, made him bigger, grander, nobler than he could ever have been had he stayed in the narrow confines of a city's walls. In one chapter he tells of his experience in a storm in a Sierra forest. Perched high on the mountains a great storm swept over the range. Most men would have remained indoors, afraid of the fierceness of the wind and the beating of the rain. Not so he! There were experiences to be had out there that could come to him in no other way; so out he went. After scrambling through underbrush, climbing hilly slopes, until his blood was fairly a-tingle in response to the power of the storm, watching the swaying of the trees, hearing the crash, every few moments, of a falling tree, he finally decided to see the whole thing from the top of a tree. So selecting a suitable tree he climbed to its topmost branches, and there, swaying to and fro like "a bobolink on a reed," he watched the wind playing with the gigantic trees and the tiny leaves, and listened to such an æolian concert as few men have ever dreamed of.