Most of us recover from this shock in regard to books, asking only that they seem real. But we are eternally childish, curious, credulous, in our thought of nature; she is so close and real to us, and yet so shadowy, hidden, mysterious, and remote! We are eager to listen to any tale, willing to believe anything, if only it be true. Nay, we are willing to believe it true--we _were_, I should say, until, like the boy with the book, we were rudely told that all this fine writing was made up, that we have no such kindred in the wilds, and no such wilds. Then we said in our haste, all men--who write nature-books--are liars. “How much of this is real?” asked a keen and anxious reader, eyeing me narrowly, as she pointed a steady finger at an essay of mine in the “Atlantic.” “Have you, sir, a farm and four real boys of your own, or are they _faked_?” “Good heavens, madam!” I exclaimed. “Has it come to this? My boys faked!” But it shows how the thoughtful and the fearful regard the literary naturalist, and how paramount is the demand for honesty in the matter of mere fact, to say nothing of the greater matter of expression. Only yesterday, in a review in the “Nation” of an animal-man book, I read: “The best thing in the volume is the description of a fight between a mink and a raccoon--or so it seems. Can this be because the reader does not know the difference between a mink and a raccoon, and does know the difference between a human being and the story-teller’s manikin?” This is the wandering wood, this Errour’s den, is the feeling of the average reader--of even the “Nation’s” book reviewer--nowadays, toward nature-writing, a state of mind due to the recent revelations of a propensity in wild-animal literature to stand up rather than to go on all fours. Whatever of the Urim and of the Thummim you put into your style, whatever of the literary lights and the perfections, see to it that you make the facts “after their pattern, which hath been shewed thee in the mount.” Thou shalt not bear false witness as to the facts. Nor is this all. For the sad case with much nature-writing, as I have said, is that it not only fails to answer to genuine observation, but it also fails to answer to genuine emotion. Often as we detect the unsound natural history, we much oftener are aware of the unsound, the insincere, art of the author.