MAPLE-SUGAR TIME
To see and hear these outdoor sights and sounds is to be born into vital relations with man’s natural background and to come unconsciously into possession of some of the greatest truths which life has to teach. It is also to be born on intimate terms with bluebirds and cherries!
THE BLACK SHEEP
“If you want to know where the biggest cherries are to be found,” said Goethe, “consult the boys and the blackbirds.” There is a natural affinity between the two, and the boy who does not grow up in natural relationship with birds and trees suffers a loss of privilege which can never be entirely made up. For it is a great deal easier to make the acquaintance of nature in childhood than in those later years which bring “the philosophic mind,” but which leave the senses untrained for that instinctive observation which enables the boy to see without knowing that he sees.
THE MILL-POND
John Burroughs has given us a charming description of the joys of boyhood on a farm, and has perhaps unconsciously betrayed the secret of his own extraordinary familiarity with the out-of-doors world. No knowledge is quite so much a part of ourselves as that which we gain without conscious effort; which we breathe in with the morning air of life.
NOON IN THE SHEEP-LOT