uth I never went to Sunday-school, and I was not often seen
inside the church. My Sundays were spent rather roaming in the woods and
fields, or climbing to "Old Clump," or, in summer, following the streams
and swimming in the pools. Occasionally I went fishing, though this was
to incur parental displeasure--unless I brought home some fine trout, in
which case the displeasure was much tempered. I think this Sunday-school
in the woods and fields was, in my case, best. It has always seemed,
and still seems, as if I could be a little more intimate with Nature
on Sunday than on a week-day; our relations were and are more ideal, a
different spirit is abroad, the spirit of holiday and not of work, and
I could in youth, and can now, abandon myself to the wild life about me
more fully and more joyously on that day than on any other.

The memory of my youthful Sundays is fragrant with wintergreens, black
birch, and crinkle-root, to say nothing of the harvest apples that grew
in our neighbor's orchard; and the memory of my Sundays in later years
is fragrant with arbutus, and the showy orchid, and wild strawberries,
and touched with the sanctity of woodland walks and hilltops. What day
can compare with a Sunday to go to the waterfalls, or to "Piney Ridge,"
or to "Columbine Ledge," or to stroll along "Snake Lane"? What sweet
peace and repose is over all! The snakes in Snake Lane are as free from
venom as are grasshoppers, and the grasshoppers themselves fiddle and
dance as at no other time. Cherish your Sundays. I think you will read
a little deeper in "Nature's infinite book of secrecy" on Sunday than on
Monday. I once began an essay the subject of which was Sunday, but never
finished it. I must send you the fragment.

But I have not yet solved my equation--what sent me to nature? What made
me take an intellectual interest in outdoor things? The precise value of
the _x_ is hard to find. My reading, no doubt, had much to do with it.
This intellectual and emotional interest in nature is in the air in our
time, and has been more or less for the past fifty years. I early read
Wordsworth, and Emerson and Tennyson and Whitman, and Saint-Pierre's
"Studies of Nature," as I have before told you. But the previous
question is, why the nature poets and nature books appealed to me. One
cannot corner this unknown quantity. I suppose I was simply made that
way--the love of nature was born in me. I suppose Emerson influenced me
most, beginning w