It may be, after all, that my politics and ethics and religion need disturbing, as the soil about my fruit trees needs it. Is it the tree? or is it the soil that I am trying to grow? Is it I, or my politics, my ethics, my religion? I will go over to the toad, no matter the cost. I will sit at his feet, where time is nothing, and the worry of work even less. He has all time and no task; he is not obliged to labor for a living, much less to think. My other teachers all are; they are all professional thinkers; their thoughts are words: editorials, lectures, sermons,--livings. I read them or listen to them. The toad sits out the hour silent, thinking, but I know not what, nor need to know. To think God’s thoughts after Him is not so high as to think my own after myself. Why then ask this of the toad, and so interrupt these of mine? Instead we will sit in silence and watch Altair burn along the shore of the sky, and overhead Arcturus, and the rival fireflies flickering through the leaves of the apple tree. The darkness has come. The toad is scarcely a blur between me and the stars. It is a long look from him, ten feet above me, on past the fireflies to Arcturus and the regal splendors of the Northern Crown--as deep and as far a look as the night can give, and as only the night can give. Against the distant stars, these ten feet between me and the toad shrink quite away; and against the light far off yonder near the pole, the firefly’s little lamp becomes a brave but a very lesser beacon. There are only twenty-four hours to the day--to the day and the night! And how few are left to that quiet time between the light and the dark! Ours is a hurried twilight. We quit work to sleep; we wake up to work again. We measure the day by a clock; we measure the night by an alarm clock. Life is all ticked off. We are murdered by the second. What we need is a day and a night with wider margins--a dawn that comes more slowly, and a longer lingering twilight. Life has too little selvage; it is too often raw and raveled. Room and quiet and verge are what we want, not more dials for time, nor more figures for the dials. We have things enough, too, more than enough; it is space for the things, perspective, and the right measure for the things that we lack--a measure not one foot short of the distance between us and the stars. If we get anything out of the fields worth while, it will be this measure, this largeness, and quiet. It may be only an owl or a tree-toad that we go forth to see, but how much more we find--things we cannot hear by day, things long, long forgotten, things we never thought or dreamed before. The day is none too short, the night none too long; but all too narrow is the edge between. IV THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS