"Who said there wasn't?"
Webster, beginning this morning to use his eyes, took notice of something which greatly interested him as the wagon moved slowly off down the pike: strands of hemp clung to it here and there like a dry hanging moss. The geologist had told them that his own boyhood lay far back in the era of great Kentucky hemp-raising. Much of the hemp was broken in March, the month of high winds. As the hemp-breakers busily shook out their handfuls while separating the fibre from the shard, strands were carried away on the roaring gales, lodging against stubble and stumps and fences of the fields or blown further on into the pastures. Later when it was baled and hauled in, other filaments were caught on the rafters and shingles of hemp-houses and barns. Thus when in April the northward migration of birds reached Kentucky, this material was everywhere ready and plentiful, and the Baltimore orioles on the bluegrass plateau built their long hanging nests of Kentucky hemp.
Webster, sitting on the fence and thinking of this, meantime laid his plans for the larger adventure of the following day: the clue he sought had unexpectedly been found: he would go out to the place where young cane grew: there he might have a real chance at the warbler.
This being settled to his satisfaction, he hurried impatiently back to his woodland pasture. It had seemed empty of living creatures when he entered it; soon it had revealed itself as a whole teeming world. The mere green carpet of the woods was one vast birthplace and nursery, concert hall, playground, battlefield, slaughter-pen, cemetery.
"But my ignorance!" he complained. "I have good strong eyes, but all these years they have been required to look at dead maps, dead books, dead pencils and figures, dead everything: not once in all that time have they been trained upon the study of a living object."
His ears were as ignorant as his eyes: he had not been educated to hear and to know what he heard. Innumerable strange sounds high and low beat incessantly on them—wave upon wave of louder and fainter melodies, the summer music of the intent and earnest earth. And everywhere what fragrances! The tonic woody smells! Each deep breath he drew laved his lungs with sun-clean, leaf-sweet atmosphere. Hour after hour of this until his whole body and being—sight, smell, hearing, mind and spirit—became steeped in the forest joyousness.
Now it was alone in the June woods that long bright afternoon that Webster took final account of the last wonderful things the geologist had told them that memorable morning. He pondered those sayings as best he could, made out of them what he could:
"I am not afraid to trust you, the young, with big ideas which will lift your minds as on strong wings and carry them swiftly and far through time and space. If you are taught to look for great things early in life, you will early learn how to find great things; and the things you love to find will be the things you will desire and try to do. I wish not to give you a single trivial, mean weak thought."