"The woodchuck can no more see the propriety of fencing off--though he admits that stone walls are fine refuges, in case he has to run for it--a space of the very best fodder than the British peasant can see the right of shutting him out of a grove where there are wild rabbits, or forbidding him to fish in certain streams. So he climbs over, or digs under, or creeps through, the fence, and makes a path or a playground for himself amid the timothy and the clover, and laughs, as he listens from a hole in the wall or under a stump, to hear the farmer using language which is good Saxon but bad morals, and the dog barking himself into a fit."[29] [29] Ingersoll: "Wild Neighbors." II. THE SCHOOL OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS I don't mean to say, mind you, that the farmer hasn't any rights in his own fields, and that he should turn everything over to the woodchuck and the rest, but I do mean to say that our wild kinsmen have rights and that there is a lot more to be got out of them than their flesh or their hides or the pleasure of killing them. For one thing, the ant and the angleworm, the birds and the woodchucks, the little lichens and the big trees, the winds and the rains, are all teachers in the Great School of Out-of-Doors, and in this school you can learn almost everything there is to be learned. It's really a university. Nature study, as you call it in the grades, besides all the facts it teaches you, trains the eye to see, and the ear to listen, and the brain to reason, and the heart to feel. STORY OF THE LONDON BANKER AND HIS ANTS [Illustration: SIR JOHN LUBBOCK The great London banker who carried ants in his pocket.] Once there was a London banker who used to go around with--what do you think--in his pockets? Money? Yes, I suppose so; but what else? You'll never guess--ants! He was a lot more interested in ants than he was in money; and so, while the business world knew him as a big banker, all the scientific world knew him as a great naturalist. He wrote not only nature books but other books, including one on "The Pleasures of Life," and among life's greatest pleasures he placed the "friendship," as he puts it, of things in Nature. He said he never went into the woods but he found himself welcomed by a glad company of friends, every one with something interesting to tell. And, in speaking of the wide-spread growth of interest in Nature in recent years, he said: "The study of natural history indeed, seems destined to replace the loss of what is, not very happily, I think, termed 'sport.'"