“In him that on the rugged breast of mountain Finds his joy and his repose, Who makes the pine his fellow, and with zest Treads the great glaciers and their kindred snows, A strength is planted that in direst test Dares all the devils of Danger to oppose.” Then, too, there are marvelous healing powers in God’s great out-of-doors. The _vis medicatrix Naturæ_ is no fiction of the imagination. If sick people knew enough, were wise enough, to go out into the open and discard all civilized modes of life, climbing mountains, sleeping on pine boughs, swimming in the streams, working in the soil, dabbling in the hot or cold springs, eating the ripe fruits and nuts, and bathing the whole body daily in bright sunshine, they would be brought to a health and vigor they had never before known. I have often wondered why thoughtful white people have not observed that insanity is practically unknown amongst the Indians. Why? Our own great Emerson once wrote a clear answer. “It was,” said he, “the practice of the Orientals, especially of the Persians, to let insane persons wander at their own will out of the towns, into the desert, and, if they liked, to associate with wild animals. In their belief, wild beasts, especially gazelles, collect around an insane person, and live with him on a friendly footing. The patient found something curative in that intercourse, by which he was quieted and sometimes restored. But there are more insane persons than are called so, or are under treatment in hospitals. The crowd in the cities, at the hotels, theaters, card-tables, the speculators who rush for investment at ten per cent, twenty per cent, cent per cent, are all more or less mad--these point the moral, and persuade us to seek in the fields the health of the mind.” But not only does healing come to the _mind_ in Nature: the diseased _soul_ there finds medicine and health. The well-beloved Robert Louis Stevenson was well aware of this out-of-door joy. Among many other fine things on the subject he once wrote the following which fully expresses my idea: “To wash in one of God’s rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the imagination takes no share in such a cleansing.” [Illustration: AN APACHE GRANDMOTHER AND SOME BASKETS OF HER OWN DESIGN AND WEAVE. ALL MADE IN THE OPEN AIR.]