If you don’t find the frontier in the daylight, wait for the dark. Every night is a fresh frontier. There are no landmarks of the day but are blotted out by the dark as the lines are sponged in the wake of a steamer’s keel. On the shortest night of this year wild rabbits were in my garden, fox-hounds were baying beyond the quarries, and through the thin early mist of the dawn we were all at the window watching a wild doe behind the barn. She nipped the clover nervously, twitched her tail, pricked her ears (for the day was approaching), and took the high wire fence at a bound. She was as wild and free as the wind. A few Sunday nights ago I was at church when the minister announced a series of evening sermons for young people, and, to my utter astonishment, his first talk was to be “Against Sowing Wild Oats.” I was greatly tempted to ask him if he intended to prevent his young people from doing any more farming. If they couldn’t sow wild oats, what kind of oats could they sow? Did he ever see any tame oats? Those preachers imagine a vain thing who think we ever cease to sow wild oats (at least, there is many a late crop, as Thackeray says). The truth is there are no oats but wild ones. I do not know what seed catalogue you order your garden seeds out of; I get mine out of one marked “Honest Seeds”; it is assuring to have an order-book of this sort plainly stamped “honest” on the cover. In this honest-seed catalogue for the current year the seedsman, on page 56, is describing his oats. Let the preacher on wild oats note with critical care the terms of this description. There is something theological, at least, revivalistic, about them. It is the only oat described in the catalogue; and it would be the only oat to plant in all the world, if it were, as it is described, a “Regenerated Select Swedish Oat.” A “regenerated” (that is Methodist) “select” (that is Presbyterian) oat! But read on through this catalogue, and you will find that every seed and tuber from artichoke to zinnia has been to a revival since last summer and hit the “sawdust trail.” Great revivalists are the seedsmen! Their work, however, is not permanent. For they know, and we all know, that every regenerated select Swedish oat in their bins is a backslider at heart, as wild as the wild ass of the wilderness that scorneth the crying of the driver.