But you must be limited. It is a small amount of land that one man can till with profit. Your very bees range hardly more than two miles from the hive. They cannot fly farther than that and store honey. Within this little world, however, they know every bank whereon the honey-yielding flowers grow. In early August I can follow their line of flight westward, through the woods for more than a mile, to an old pasture where great patches of dwarf sumac are in bloom. The bees hum about me in a fever of excitement. Then I fetch a compass far around toward home, and wherever I find the sumac in blossom, whether a hundred clustered bushes, or a single panicle of flowers hidden deep in the woods, there I find my golden bees. I wonder if, in all their range, they let waste one drop of this heavy golden sumac honey? Do you know the flowers in your range as well as the bees know them in theirs? And, what is more, are you getting the honey? Do you know your dead trees and stone piles, and the folk who dwell in them? Could you take me, silent and soft of foot, from hole to hole, from nest to nest, from hedgerow to thicket, to cripple, to meadow, making me acquainted with your neighbors? This is what Gilbert White could have done had you visited him at Selborne. This is what John Burroughs still does when the college girls go out to Slabsides. Owning a farm is not necessary for all of this. Only the parish house and the yard belonged to the old naturalist of Selborne. Sometimes, indeed, I am quite convinced that, for pure and lasting joy in the fields, you should not be possessed even of a garden patch; for, once you have digged into earth of your own, then have a care, else along with the cucumber seed you will plant your soul. The man in the Scriptures who bought a piece of land and wished thereafter only to dig, had a real case. Owning a farm is not necessary. To be near the open country is enough, so near that you can know it intimately the year around. “He is a thoroughly good naturalist,” says Kingsley, “who knows his own parish thoroughly.” He was thinking of Gilbert White, I am sure,—that gentle rector who _lived_ in Selborne, and there grew old with his tortoise. This is all there is to nature study, this growing old with your garden and your tame tortoise. The study of the out-of-doors is not a new cult; it is not a search after a living uintatherium, or after a frog that can swallow his pond, or a fish hawk that reads,—not a hunt for the extraordinary or the marvelous at all, but for things as the Lord made them. Nature study is the out-of-door side of natural history, the unmeasured, unprinted side of poetry. It is joy in breathing the air of the fields; joy in seeing, hearing, living the life of the fields; joy in knowing and loving all that lives with you in _your_ out-of-doors. The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS U · S · A