in
search of food. I stopped now and again to examine the lizards unhoused
by the shares, ... and I measured the little granaries of wheat which
the mice and gophers had deposited deep under the ground, storehouses
which the plow had violated. My eyes dwelt enviously on the sailing hawk
and on the passing of ducks.... Often of a warm day I heard the
sovereign cry of the sand-hill crane falling from the azure throne, so
high, so far, his form could not be seen, so close to the sun that my
eyes could not detect his solitary, majestic, circling sweep.... His
brazen, reverberating call will forever remain associated in my mind
with mellow, pulsating earth, spring grass and cloudless glorious
May-time skies."

Henry Fawcett lived at about the same period in a rural district in
England. He, too, delighted to ramble in the fields. One day, when he
was out hunting with his father, an accidental gunshot deprived him of
his eyesight. But the boy would not think of shutting himself away from
the joys of nature which meant so much to him. "I very soon came to the
resolution to live, as far as possible, just as I had lived before....
No one can more enjoy catching a salmon in the Tweed of the Spey, or
throwing a fly in some quiet trout stream in Wiltshire or Hampshire."

In the story of the life of John J. Audubon an incident is told that
shows how the greatest joy can be found in what seems like one of the
most ordinary things in the life of the forest--the nesting of the
birds:

"He became interested in a bird, not as large as the wren, of such
peculiar grey plumage that it harmonized with the bark of the trees, and
could scarcely be seen. One night he came home greatly excited, saying
he had found a pair that was evidently preparing to make a nest. The
next morning he went into the woods, taking with him a telescopic
microscope. The scientific instrument he erected under the tree that
gave shelter to the literally invisible inhabitants he was searching
for, and, making a pillow of some moss, he lay upon his back, and
looking through the telescope, day after day, noted the progress of the
little birds, and, after three weeks of such patient labor, felt that he
had been amply rewarded for the toil and the sacrifice by the results he
had obtained."

When a boy David Livingstone laid the foundation for the love of the
open that helped to make his life in Africa a never-ending delight.
"Before he was ten he had wandered all over