We need to know our country. Purposeful travel is educational. Our National Parks should stimulate travel, and a trip to them is an educational advantage to any one making it. One can hardly be especially interested in any single feature of these Parks without also becoming acquainted with others. Each year every city should honor itself by sending a number of individuals to study one or more of these Parks. Each school should send its brightest pupil; chambers of commerce might send representatives; women's clubs, D.A.R. organizations, and even the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. might well be represented in such a delegation. This custom would give us nation-wide knowledge and sympathy. It appears impossible to exaggerate the importance of knowing our wilderness lands--the frontier of yesterday. During all the years--the long centuries between cave and cottage--our good ancestors ever traveled among Nature's inspiring pictured scenes. With interest and with awe they watched the silent movements of the clouds across the sky; they heard with speechless wonder the mysterious echo that lived and mimicked in the viewless air; they puzzled over the strange, invisible wind that shook the excited trees and whispered in the rustling grass. They saw the wondrous sunrise; the light of day; the darkness; the fireflies in the forest; the lonely, changing moon. They heard the echoing crash of thunder. Lightning,--the branched golden river in the cloud mountains of the sky,--the clouds themselves, and the silken rainbow, were woven into beautiful myths. Thus, through changing seasons and the passing years, these splendid facts and fancies in Mother Nature's school fired the imagination with poetic wonder-tales and built the brain for our restless, triumphant race. The pathway to the Heroic Age lies out with Nature. XXII WHY WE NEED NATIONAL PARKS The Piute Indians have a legend which says that just at the close of creation the woman was consulted. She at once called into existence the birds, the flowers, and the trees. That is the kind of a woman with whom to start a world. We still need park places full of hope and beauty, with birds, flowers, and trees, that with their help we may live long and happily and harmoniously upon a beautiful world. Scenic parts of this poetic and primeval world--parts rich in loveliness and grandeur--are saved for us in our National Parks. The National Parks and Monuments are filled with Nature's masterpieces, and contain splendid scenic and scientific features not elsewhere to be seen. The traveler might spend a lifetime in them without exhausting even their best attractions. A National Park is an island of safety in this riotous world. Splendid forests, the waterfalls that leap in glory, the wild flowers that charm and illuminate the earth, the wild sheep of the sky-line crags, and the beauty of the birds, all have places of refuge which parks provide.