arming vermin that are bred in earth;
and the weevil, and the ant that fears a destitute old age, plunder the
great pile of spelt_."

Perhaps some reader had been disposed hastily to say: "What did you want
with hooks out of doors? Was not Nature enough?" No one who loves both
books and Nature would ask that question, or need to have explained why a
knapsack library is a necessary adjunct of a walking-tour.

For Nature and books react so intimately on each other, and, far more
than one realizes without thought, our enjoyment of Nature is a creation
of literature. For example, can any one sensitive to such considerations
deny that the meadows of the world are greener for the Twenty-third
Psalm, or the starry sky the gainer in our imagination by the solemn
cadences of the book of Job? All our experiences, new and personal as
they may seem to us, owe incalculably their depth and thrill to the
ancestral sentiment in our blood, and joy and sorrow are for us what they
are, no little because so many old, far-away generations of men and women
have joyed and sorrowed in the same way before us. Literature but
represents that concentrated sentiment, and satisfies through expression
our human need for some sympathetic participation with us in our human
experience.

That a long-dead poet walking in the Spring was moved as I am by the
unfolding leaf and the returning bird imparts an added significance to my
own feelings; and that some wise and beautiful old book knew and said it
all long ago, makes my life seem all the more mysteriously romantic for
me to-day. Besides, books are not only such good companions for what they
say, but for what they are. As with any other friend, you may go a whole
day with them, and not have a word to say to each other, yet be happily
conscious of a perfect companionship. The book we know and love--and, of
course, one would never risk taking a book we didn't know for a
companion--has long since become a symbol for us, a symbol of certain
moods and ways of feeling, a key to certain kingdoms of the spirit, of
which it is often sufficient just to hold the key in our hands. So, a
single flower in the hand is a key to Summer, a floating perfume the key
to the hidden gardens of remembrance. The wrong book in the hand, whether
opened or not, is as distracting a presence as an irrelevant person; and
therefore it was with great care that I chose my knapsack library. It
consisted of these nine books:

Mackail'