“No, you can’t think without them.”
“Well—where are we, anyway?” he asked placidly.
“I don’t know at all. Only I feel sure that leading the simple life doesn’t depend on the things you do it with. Feeding your own cows and pigs and using pumps and candles brings you no nearer to it than marketing by telephone and using city water supply and electric lighting. I don’t know what does bring you nearer, but I’m sure it must be something inside you.”
“That sounds rather reasonable,” said Jonathan; “almost scriptural—”
“Yes, I know,” I said.
IV
After Frost
It is late afternoon in mid-September. I stand in my garden sniffing the raw air, and wondering, as always at this season, will there be frost to-night or will there not? Of course if I were a woodchuck or a muskrat, or any other really intelligent creature, I should know at once and act accordingly, but being only a stupid human being, I am thrown back on conjecture, assisted by the thermometer, and an appeal to Jonathan.