This being settled to his satisfaction, he hurried impatiently back to his woodland pasture. It had seemed empty of living creatures when he entered it; soon it had revealed itself as a whole teeming world. The mere green carpet of the woods was one vast birthplace and nursery, concert hall, playground, battlefield, slaughter-pen, cemetery. "But my ignorance!" he complained. "I have good strong eyes, but all these years they have been required to look at dead maps, dead books, dead pencils and figures, dead everything: not once in all that time have they been trained upon the study of a living object." His ears were as ignorant as his eyes: he had not been educated to hear and to know what he heard. Innumerable strange sounds high and low beat incessantly on them--wave upon wave of louder and fainter melodies, the summer music of the intent and earnest earth. And everywhere what fragrances! The tonic woody smells! Each deep breath he drew laved his lungs with sun-clean, leaf-sweet atmosphere. Hour after hour of this until his whole body and being--sight, smell, hearing, mind and spirit--became steeped in the forest joyousness. * * * * * Now it was alone in the June woods that long bright afternoon that Webster took final account of the last wonderful things the geologist had told them that memorable morning. He pondered those sayings as best he could, made out of them what he could: "_I am not afraid to trust you, the young, with big ideas which will lift your minds as on strong wings and carry them swiftly and far through time and space. If you are taught to look for great things early in life, you will early learn how to find great things; and the things you love to find will be the things you will desire and try to do. I wish not to give you a single trivial, mean weak thought._" * * * * * "_The Kentucky warbler for over a hundred years has worn the name of the State and has carried it all over the world--leading the students of bird life to form some image of a far country and to fix their thoughts at least for some brief moment on this same beautiful spot of the world's surface. As long as he remains in the forests of the earth, he will keep the name of Kentucky alive though all else it once meant shall have perished and been forgotten. He is thus, as nearly as anything in Nature can be, its winged worldwide emblem, ever young as each spring is young, as the green of the woods is young._" * * * * *