From the crest of my ridge I looked out over the treetops far away to the Blue Hills still slumbering in the purple west. How huge and prone they lie! How like their own constant azure does the spirit of rest seem to wrap them round! On their distant slopes it is never common day, never more than dawn, for the shadows always sleep among their hollows, and a haze of changing blues, their own peculiar beauty, hangs, even at high noon, like a veil upon them, shrouding them with largeness and mystery. A rustle in the dead leaves down the slope recalled me. I reached instinctively for the gun, but stayed my hand. Slowly nosing his way up the ridge, came a full-grown skunk, his tail a-drag, his head swinging close to the ground. He was coming home to the den, coming leisurely, contentedly, carelessly, as if he had a right to live. I sat very still. On he came, scarcely checking himself as he winded me. How like the dawn he seemed!--the black of night with the white of day--the furtive dawn slipping into its den! He sniffed at the gun and cannon-cracker, made his way over them, brushed past me, and calmly disappeared beneath the stump. The chewink still sang from the top of the sapling, but the tame broad day had come. I stayed a little while, looking off still at the distant hills. We had sat thus, my six-year-old and I, only a few days before, looking away at these same hills, when the little fellow, half questioningly, half pensively asked, “Father, how can the Blue Hills be so beautiful and have rattlesnakes?” I gathered up the kit, gun and cannon-cracker, and started back toward home, turning the question of hills and snakes and skunks over and over as I went along. Over and over the question still turns: How can the Blue Hills be so beautiful? The case of my small wood-lot is easier: beautiful it must ever be, but its native spirit, the untamed spirit of the original wilderness, the free wild spirit of the primeval forest, shall flee it, and vanish forever, with this last den of the skunks. V THE NATURE-WRITER THE NATURE-WRITER Dwelling inland, far from those of us who go down to the sea in manuscripts, may be found the reader, no doubt, to whom the title of this essay is not anathema, to whom the word nature still means the real outdoors, as the word culture may still mean things other than “sweetness and light.” It is different with us. We shy at the _word_ nature. Good, honest term, it has suffered a sea-change with us; it has become literary. Piety suffers the same change when it becomes professional. There has grown up about nature as a literary term a vocabulary of cant,--nature-lover, nature-writer, nature-- Throw the stone for me, you who are clean! Inseparably now these three travel together, arm in arm, like Tom, Dick, and Harry--the world, the flesh, and the devil. Name one, and the other two appear, which is sad enough for the nature-writer, because a word is known by the company it keeps.