I prefer an oak-tree to a temple; grass to a brick pavement; wild flowers beneath a blue sky to exotic orchids under glass. I would walk where I do not risk being jostled, and, if I see fit to swing my arms, leap a ditch, or climb a tree, I want no gaping crowd, when I do so, to hedge me in. In short, I prefer living “next neighbor to Nature.” I am free to admit I know very little about the town. It has ever been a cheerless place to me: cold as charity in winter, hot as an oven in summer, and lacking nearly all those features that make the country well-nigh a paradise in spring and autumn. Vividly do I recall the saddest sight in my experience—that of seeing on the window-sill of a wretched tenement-house a broken flower-pot holding a single wilted buttercup, and near it was the almost fleshless face of a little child. To be indifferent to the town is to be misanthropic, says one; and is affectation, says another. Perhaps so; I neither know nor care. It concerns me only to know it is the truth. None loves company better than I; but may I not choose my friends? If I prefer my neighbor’s dog to my neighbor, why not? I have not injured him, and, if harm comes of it, it is the dog that suffers. Have not most people far too many friends? Hoping to please all, you impress no one. You hold yourself up as a model, and the chances are you are secretly voted a bore. Certainly, he who lives where human neighbors are comparatively few and far between runs the least risk of social disasters. But there is a deal in the world besides humanity worth living for; and I count it that the world was not made for man more than for his brute neighbors. They, too, and their haunts, are worthy of man’s contemplation. Is it spring? I would catch the first whisperings of the soft south wind, and hug the precious secret known, save to the flowers, only to myself. And, as the days roll by, would watch the opening leaf-buds one by one, and greet the first blossoms peeping above the dead year’s scattered leaves. Is this a waste of time? If so, how is it, then, that the earliest spring flowers need but to be taken to town to set the people, one and all, agape? Is it nothing to brighten the dull eyes of the weary toilers in the city? Verily, a violet plucked in February preaches a refreshing sermon. And, yet again, when a faint shimmer of green tints the wide landscape, I would catch the earliest note of the returning bird as it floats across the wide meadow or rings with startling clearness through the wood. Perchance along the river’s shore I would hear the heaped ice crack and groan as the breath of Spring snaps its bonds and sends this rugged gift of Winter whirling to the sea.