“Well, a cultivated field, which is a work of art, dressed with artificial manures, and tilled with artificial tools, perhaps by steam, is called the smiling face of nature. Here nature is strong and there exhausted, now animated and then asleep. At the poles, the features of nature are all frozen, and as stiff as a poker, and in the West Indies burnt up to a cinder. What a pack of stuff it is! It is just a pretty word like pharmacopia and Pierian spring, and so forth. I hate poets, stock, lock, and barrel; the whole seed, breed, and generation of them. If you see a she one, look at her stockings; they are all wrinkled about her ancles, and her shoes are down to heel, and her hair is as tangled as the mane of a two-year old colt. And if you see a he one, you see a mooney sort of man, either very sad, or so wild-looking you think he is half-mad; he eats and sleeps on earth, and that’s all. The rest of the time he is sky-high, trying to find inspiration and sublimity, like Byron, in gin and water. I like folks that have common-sense.”
Well, to get back to my story. Said Jessie to me: “Mr Slick, what is natur?”
“Well,” sais I, “Miss, it’s not very easy to explain it so as to make it intelligible; but I will try. This world, and all that is in it, is the work of God. When he made it, he gave it laws or properties that govern it, and so to every living or inanimate thing; and these properties or laws are called their nature. Nature therefore is sometimes used for God himself, and sometimes for the world and its contents, and the secret laws of action imposed upon them when created. There is one nature to men (for though they don’t all look alike, the laws of their being are the same), and another to horses, dogs, fish, and so on. Each class has its own nature. For instance, it is natural for fish to inhabit water, birds the air, and so on. In general, it therefore means the universal law that governs everything. Do you understand it?” says I.
“Not just now,” she said, “but I will when I have time to think of it. Do you say there is one nature to all men?”
“Yes, the same nature to Indian as to white men—all the same.”
“Which is the best nature?”
“It is the same.”
“Indian and white, are they both equal?”
“Quite—”
“Do you think so?”