Living the Radiant Life: A Personal NarrativeJames, George Wharton
Religion
Living the Radiant Life: A Personal Narrative
James, George Wharton
Conduct of life
His apple trees are perfect marvels. Some of them bear upwards of two
hundred different kinds of apples, and he says it is comparatively easy
to produce an apple of any color, texture, size, flavor, and sweetness
desired.
Think what Nature has taught to such a man. He is not what you would
call a supereducated man in books; but he has read Nature as few men in
the history of the world have done, and she has revealed many of her
most intimate secrets to him. And as you talk with him you find in this
quiet, unassuming, sweet-spirited, gentle-hearted man a breadth, a
largeness, a sweep of soul that are rare.
And Nature gives this same largeness to a woman as well as a man. Women
who get into the bigness of the out-of-doors get away from feminine
pettinesses just as surely as men do from their narrownesses and
prejudices. I have two women friends in California (or had, until one
passed on), both of them expert and scientific florists. One lived at
San Buena Ventura, and the other at San Diego. The names of Mrs.
Theodosia Shepard and Miss Kate Sessions are known throughout the world.
Both women determined to devote their lives to a scientific study, _out
in the garden_, of plant life, and each has therefore done things,
achieved results that have made her world-famed. How much better this,
than to live the narrow, contracted life of most women.
Another woman friend, Mrs. Sarah Plummer Lemmon, wife of the well-known
botanist, and herself a botanist known to the whole scientific world,
for years accompanied her husband in his expeditions throughout the
wildest parts of Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Mexico. I doubt
whether there is a person living who has so real and intimate a
knowledge of all this country as has this brave and intrepid woman, who,
when Apaches were on the warpath, calmly and steadfastly sustained her
husband in his scientific work. In storms and perils, in danger from
wild animals and wilder men, away from all luxuries and comforts and
often deprived of what most people call necessities, this woman communed
with Nature and has thereby grown into a large, commanding, powerful,
all-embracing soul, as much above the average woman in intellect as an
athlete is above a baby.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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