The Hindoos have an idiomatic word or phrase for a walk before breakfast, which may be translated, “eating the morning air.”
The boy on the farm sees nature before breakfast, when senses and mind and heart are on the alert, when experience has not brought sophistication with it, and when sensation still keeps its pristine freshness.
FEEDING THE CHICKENS
The healthy boy is one great appetite for sights and sounds, and nothing escapes him. He knows every path through the woods, every pool in the brook, every cavern in the hills, every sequestered hollow where the noise of the world is softened into the silence of rustling leaves and murmuring streams. One of the most erudite of American scholars, whose large learning has not smothered the instincts of his youth, declares that he is never entirely happy until he stands barefooted in the old fields.
PICKING DAISIES
Nature’s true lovers perceive this, and demand that the companion whom he takes into the wilderness with him shall be of the right sort; one who, as Burroughs says, will not “stand between you and that which you seek.”
“I want for companion,” he continues, “a dog or a boy, or a person who has the virtues of dogs and boys—transparency, good-nature, curiosity, open sense, and a nameless quality that is akin to trees, and growths, and the inarticulate forces of nature. With him you are alone and yet you have company; you are free; you feel no disturbing element; the influences of nature stream through and around him; he is a good conductor of the subtle fluid.
“The quality or qualification I refer to belongs to most persons who spend their lives in the open air—to soldiers, hunters, fishers, laborers, and to artists and poets of the right sort.”