When I protested with a popular nature-writer some time ago at one of his exciting but utterly impossible fox stories, he wrote back,-- “The publishers demanded that chapter to make the book sell.” Now the publishers of this book make no such demands. Indeed they have had an expert naturalist and woodsman hunting up and down every line of this book for errors of fact, false suggestions, wrong sentiments, and extraordinaries of every sort. If this book is not exciting it is the publishers’ fault. It may not be exciting, but I believe, and hope, that it is _true_ to all of my out of doors, and not untrue to any of yours. The charge of insincerity, the last in the list, concerns the author’s style and sentiments. It does not belong in the same category with the other two, for it really includes them. Insincerity is the mother of all the literary sins. If the writer cannot be true to himself, he cannot be true to anything. Children are the particular victims of the evil. How often are children spoken to in baby-talk, gush, hollow questions, and a condescension as irritating as coming teeth! They are written to, also, in the same spirit. The temptation to sentimentalize in writing of the “beauties of nature” is very strong. Raptures run through nature books as regularly as barbs the length of wire fences. The world according to such books is like the Garden of Eden according to Ridinger, all peace, in spite of the monstrous open-jawed alligator in the foreground of the picture, who must be smiling, I take it, in an alligatorish way at a fat swan near by. Just as strong to the story-writer is the temptation to blacken the shadows of the picture--to make all life a tragedy. Here on my table lies a child’s nature-book every chapter of which ends in death--nothing but struggle to escape for a brief time the bloody jaws of the bigger beast--or of the superior beast, man. Neither extreme is true of nature. Struggle and death go on, but, except where man interferes, a very even balance is maintained, peace prevails over fear, joy lasts longer than pain, and life continues to multiply and replenish the earth. “The level of wild life,” to quote my words from “The Face of the Fields,” “of the soul of all nature is a great serenity. It is seldom lowered, but often raised to a higher level, intenser, faster, more exultant.”