You can enter a wider family if you are gentle. The rabbit which tempts your stones will come and smell at your toes, the birds will hop on you and sing as you lie in the grass, even the alleged ferocious animals, such as bears, will come and take bread from your hands—if they feel you are near to them.
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small
means he liveth best. Pan is indeed more truly our god than Diana. The chaste Diana, the great huntress, is a romantic figure—but not one of us. She would not have us with her, we will not have her with us. We will keep company with wood nymphs and satyrs, and will help to turn the animals another way when we hear Diana’s horn resounding in the forest. She shall go on and find the world a wilderness in front of her—the living and the loving all slipping behind.
Nature unfolds herself slowly like a snail if you are still in front of her. You cannot know what you are walking over till you cease walking. The lizard which has eyed you furtively from under a stone comes forth and squeaks to you—you make friends with him, in fact. And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.
The noontide meal is a siesta which can be very pleasantly prolonged. It only takes half an hour to make the fire and boil the pot, but you have left no “back in half an hour” notice in any town; there should be no “got to be” anywhere at any time, no hotel that you are making for twenty miles the other side of the range; no rendezvous with a young cousin or an old man at the crossroads at sundown, but a blessed insouciance regarding men and things.
The grand desideratum is to have found an agreeable spot. “We can put in forty minutes here!”—“My friend, hours!”
The ants shall carry away the sausage rind and the beetles devour the cucumber peeling; bees shall sip where sweet coffee has fallen, shy rodents shall clear earth’s table of crumbs—while the heart wells up with joyful conversation, or the eyes drowsily settle on their lower lids. There is a joyous, light-green glittering sleep between the hours of two and four, hours not lost nor to be missed in the temporal economy of the tramp.
There arrive light and happy dreams, the soft-stepping arrières pensées of the tramping life. The whole soul has relaxed, the mainspring of citizenship has run down, and will ring no alarms. It means a change in the condition of passivity. You are at home to fairies and fancies and to the spider of happiness who spins golden webs. It is a fallacy to think that during the siesta you do not tramp; you are tramping, wandering in unknown parts, exploring the primitive, opening doors, making new connections with the great unity of which you have been a nonconscious part.
You wake with no headache, but with, instead, a freshness and eagerness. You do not start at the unfamiliar scene; you know yourself to be at home. You look upon your companion still sleeping—did you ever look upon your friend asleep—not in a bed in a hotel, or on a red sofa after dinner, or in the dim corner of a jolting train—but in Nature’s house? There you will feel him nearer, more of a friend, more kindred. The same wood sprites have hopped on you both while you slumbered and dreamed.