cause I have cherished the winter duckweed on my lawn.

Those who find their greatest intellectual and emotional satisfaction
in the study of nature are apt to refer their spiritual problems also
to science. That is how it went with me. Long before my introduction
to natural history I had realized, with an uneasy sense of the
breaking of peace, that the questions which I thought to have been
settled years before were beginning to tease me anew. In Russia I had
practised a prescribed religion, with little faith in what I
professed, and a restless questioning of the universe. When I came to
America I lightly dropped the religious forms that I had half mocked
before, and contented myself with a few novel phrases employed by my
father in his attempt to explain the riddle of existence. The busy
years flew by, when from morning till night I was preoccupied with the
process of becoming an American; and no question arose in my mind that
my books or my teachers could not fully answer. Then came a time when
the ordinary business of my girl's life discharged itself
automatically, and I had leisure once more to look over and around
things. This period coinciding with my moody adolescence, I rapidly
entangled myself in a net of doubts and questions, after the
well-known manner of a growing girl. I asked once more, How did I come
to be?--and I found that I was no whit wiser than poor Reb' Lebe, whom
I had despised for his ignorance. For all my years of America and
schooling, I could give no better answer to my clamoring questions
than the teacher of my childhood. Whence came the fair world? Was
there a God, after all? And if so, what did He intend when He made me?

It was always my way, if I wanted anything, to turn my daily life into
a pursuit of that thing. "Have you seen the treasure I seek?" I asked
of every man I met. And if it was God that I desired, I made all my
friends search their hearts for evidence of His being. I asked all the
wise people I knew what they were going to do with themselves after
death; and if the wise failed to satisfy me, I questioned the simple,
and listened to the babies talking in their sleep.

Still the imperative clamor of my mind remained unallayed. Was all my
life to be a hunger and a questioning? I complained of my teachers,
who stuffed my head with facts and gave my soul no crumb to feed on.
I blamed the stars for their silence. I sat up nights brooding over
the emptiness of knowledge, and pray