CHAPTER I. MY APPRENTICESHIP TO NATURE. "These as they change, Almighty Father, these -Thomson's Seasons. The above lines from a book early and often read by me, express what, from my earliest recollection, has been to me the constant, universal voice that speaks from Nature's heart. I loved the poets because they uttered the wonder and the worship of which my soul was full; my mother's memory was stored with their words of inspiration, and from her lips I learned much of Coleridge, Cowper, Thomson, and other great interpreters. I have never elsewhere heard Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" repeated with the delicate appreciation that was in her voice when she once more rendered it for me recently, on the verge of her eighty-fifth year. How often looking up into the heavens from the wide prairies of our farm, I repeated, almost with tears, what she had taught me from Joseph Addison: "The spacious firmament on high And all the blue ethereal sky With spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their Great Original proclaim; The unwearied sun from day to day Doth his Creator's power display, And publishes to every land The work of an Almighty hand." "Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God," has always been a truth upspringing like a prayer out of my heart, and turning bitter things to sweet. 16 "Near to Nature's Heart." My mother says that her own mother, an unschooled but a God-smitten nature, who knew nothing of the poets, loved to walk the woods and fields alone, and to go forth under the open sky at night, praising with voice of rapture, the great and blessed Spirit who had made the universe so beautiful. My father had a heart that beat closer to Nature's own, than mother's, even she felt the moral aspects of birds and woods and sky; he loved them simply for themselves. He felt at one with them; their sweet, shy secrets seemed to be open to him. The ways of birds and butterflies, the habits of gophers, squirrels, and ants he seemed to know about them as a faun might, and he taught us, Sunday and every day, to learn them; to know the various herbs and what their uses were; to notice different grasses and learn their names; to tell the names of curious wild flowers. When he found something new to him in any floral line, he brought it home as a great curiosity to "study up." As a gardener and pomologist, he had few equals, and, later on, he was for years president of the State Agricultural and Horticultural Society. He always carried his little spy-glass, folded two-foot measure, and pocket thermometer, teaching us how to use them. He carried a tape-line, too, and was fond of measuring the girth of trees, and he taught us to make a thorough study of the weather as well as of the woods. All these observations were made at " Forest Home" a farm in Wisconsin where we lived from my seventh to my nineteenth year, a farm that we made out of the woods and prairies, little by little, putting up all the buildings and stocking it so well that it became the prize farm of Rock county. The way of it was this: after four years of hard study in Oberlin College, my father's health, which never was strong, showed symptoms of a decline, and he decided to go West. There was no railroad and so we put our household goods into whitecovered wagons, of which father drove one; my brother Oliver, twelve years old, another; and my mother the third. In front of her, on father's writing-desk, sat my little sister and I, aged seven and four. The big Newfoundland dog, Fido, trotted behind this procession. When we reached Chicago we found so many mud holes with big signs up, "No bottom here," that father said he "would n't be hired to live in such a place." When we saw the Outdoors on "Rock Prairie." 17 great Lake Michigan, we little girls were afraid. Oliver brought us pretty pebbles with wave-ripples marked on them, and I threw them away, saying they "made me hear the roaring of that awful sea." Once the horse that mother drove went down in the quicksand almost to the ears, and men had to come with rails from the fences and pry him out. We never traveled on Sunday, and it took us over three weeks to reach our destination, and after living in Janesville, the county-seat, a few weeks, while the house on the farm was building, we moved into it before it had any windows or much of any roof. But it was beautiful June weather, and we children thought the whole affair a sort of joke and "as good as a picnic." The cook-stove was set up out-ofdoors, and the shavings and bits of shingles made nice playthings. Oliver built a play-house for his sisters, with a make-believe oven where we could have a real fire, and also a make-believe stable for Fido, who was our make-believe horse. Father's tenants, who lived in a log-house by the beautiful Rock river near by, brought us fish and game, and vegetables from their garden. There were calves, pigs and chickens to play with, and we children, who had always lived in town, thought there was never anything half so delightful as this new home in the edge of the fine groves of oak and hickory that lined the river, and looking out on the prairie that stretched away toward the east until it met the sky. As years passed on, we learned to love it more and more, and never thought of being lonesome; though, except the tenants, we had no neighbors within a mile and never went anywhere in general or saw anybody in particular. We had no toys except what we made for ourselves, but as father had a nice "kit" of carpenter's tools, we learned to use them, and made carts, sleds, stilts, cross-guns, bows and arrows, "darts," and I don't know what besides, for our amusement. Oliver was very kind to his sisters and let us do anything we liked that he did. He was not one of those selfish, mannish boys, who think they know everything and their sisters nothing, and who say, "You're only a girl, you can't go with me," but when he was in the fields plowing he would let us ride on the beam or on the horse's back; and when he went hunting I often insisted on going along, and he never made fun of me but would even let me load the gun, and I can |