r of bird songs. And so for a little while longer I
still held my picture intact, a magic scape, a hundred yards square
and an hour long, set in the heart of the Guiana jungle.

And when at last I had to desert Canada, and relinquish New Jersey, I
slipped only a few hundred miles southward. For another twenty minutes
I clung to Virginia, for the enforced shift was due to a great Papilio
butterfly which stopped nearby and which I captured with a lucky sweep
of my net. My first thought was of the Orange-tree Swallow-tail, _nee_
_Papilio cresphontes_. Then the first lizards appeared, and by no
stretch of my willing imagination could I pretend that they were
newts, or fit the little emerald scales into a New England pasture.
And so I chose for a time to live again among the Virginian
butterflies and mockingbirds, the wild roses and the jasmine, and the
other splendors of memory which a single butterfly had unloosed.

As I looked about me, I saw the flowers and detected their fragrance;
I heard the hum of bees and the contented chirp of well-fed birds; I
marveled at great butterflies flapping so slowly that it seemed as if
they must have cheated gravitation in some subtle way to win such
lightness and disregard of earth-pull. I heard no ugly murmur of long
hours and low wages; the closest scrutiny revealed no strikes or
internal clamorings about wrongs; and I unconsciously relaxed and
breathed more deeply at the thought of this nature world, moving so
smoothly, with directness and simplicity as apparently achieved
ideals.

* * * * *

Then I ceased this superficial glance and looked deeper, and without
moralizing or dragging in far-fetched similes or warnings, tried to
comprehend one fundamental reality in wild nature--the universal
acceptance of opportunity. From this angle it is quite unimportant
whether one believes in vitalism (which is vitiating to our "will to
prove"), or in mechanism (whose name itself is a symbol of ignorance,
or deficient vocabulary, or both). Evolution has left no chink or
crevice unfilled, unoccupied, no probability untried, no possibility
unachieved.

The nearest weed suggested this trend of thought and provided all I
could desire of examples; but the thrill of discovery and the artistic
delight threatened to disturb for the time my solemn application of
these ponderous truisms. The weed alongside had had a prosperous life,
and its leaves were fortunate in the