You see he believed that the way to gain command of Earth is through learning to read the open book of Nature. That book is closed to most of us to-day, but we are just beginning to spell out something of its message, and as we begin to understand we feel that it is not a strange speech but our own true mother tongue, which ears, deafened by the noise of the busy world, have almost ceased to hear and understand. There comes a time, however, when we feel "the call of the wild." We long to get away from the hoarse cries of engines, and the grinding roar of turning wheels, to a quiet that is unbroken even by a passing motor horn.
Have you ever found yourself for a happy half-hour alone among the great trees of the friendly woods? You must have felt that in getting near to Nature you were finding yourself. Did not the life of the trees, of the winged creatures of the branches, of the cool mossy ground itself, seem a part of your life?
Have you ever climbed a hill when it seemed that the wind was blowing something of its own strength and freshness into your soul? Did you not feel as if you were mounting higher and higher into the air and lifting the sky with you? Have you ever found yourself at evening in a great clear open place where the tent of the starry heavens over your head seemed nearer than the shadowy earth and all the things of the day?
This is the story of a girl who loved to listen to the deep chant of the ocean, to the whisper of the wind in the trees, and to the silence in the heart of the hills. She came to feel that there was a joy and a power in the open—in the big, free, unspoiled haunts of furtive beasts and darting birds—that all the man-made wonders of the world could not give.
"If I am so much happier and more alive," she said to herself, "in the days that I spend under the open sky, what must it be like always to live this freer life? Did not the people who lived as Nature's own children in these very woods that I come to as the guest of an hour or a summer, have a wisdom and a strength that our life to-day cannot win?"
Again and again the thought came knocking at her heart: "The men whom we call savages, whom we have crowded out of the land they once roamed over freely, must have learned very much in all the hundreds of years that they lived close to Nature. They could teach us a great deal that cannot be found in books."
Alice C. Fletcher grew up in a cultured New England home. She had the freedom of a generous library and early learned to feel that great books and wise men were familiar friends. They talked to her kindly and never frightened her by their big words and learned looks. She looked through the veil of words to the living meaning.
She was, too, very fond of music. Playing the piano was more than practising an elegant accomplishment—just as reading her books was more than learning lessons. As the books stirred her mind to thinking and wondering, so the music stirred her heart to feeling and dreaming.
It often seemed, however, that much that her books and music struggled in vain to bring to her within walls was quite clear when she found herself in the large freedom of Nature's house. The sunshine, the blue sky, and the good, wholesome smell of the brown earth seemed to give a taste of the
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,