What this person explains is not, after all, the Universe—­but himself, his own limited, faithless personality.  I shall not accept his explanation.  I escape him utterly!

Not long ago, coming in from my fields, I fell to thinking of the supreme wonder of a tree; and as I walked I met the Professor.

“How,” I asked, “does the sap get up to the top of these great maples and elms?  What power is there that should draw it upward against the force of gravity?”

He looked at me a moment with his peculiar slow smile.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“What!” I exclaimed, “do you mean to tell me that science has not solved this simplest of natural phenomena?”

“We do not know,” he said.  “We explain, but we do not know.”

No, my Explanatory Friend, we do not know—­we do not know the why of the flowers, or the trees, or the suns; we do not even know why, in our own hearts, we should be asking this curious question—­and other deeper questions.

* * * * *

No man becomes a great writer unless he possesses a highly developed sense of Mystery, of wonder.  A great writer is never blase; everything to him happened not longer ago than this forenoon.

The other night the Professor and the Scotch Preacher happened in here together and we fell to discussing, I hardly know how, for we usually talk the neighbourhood chat of the Starkweathers, of Horace and of Charles Baxter, we fell to discussing old Izaak Walton—­and the nonsense (as a scientific age knows it to be) which he sometimes talked with such delightful sobriety.

“How superior it makes one feel, in behalf of the enlightenment and progress of his age,” said the Professor, “when he reads Izaak’s extraordinary natural history.”

“Does it make you feel that way?” asked the Scotch Preacher.  “It makes me want to go fishing.”

And he took the old book and turned the leaves until he came to page 54.

“Let me read you,” he said, “what the old fellow says about the ‘fearfulest of fishes.’”

“’...  Get secretly behind a tree, and stand as free from motion as possible; then put a grasshopper on your hook, and let your hook hang a quarter of a yard short of the water, to which end you must rest your rod on some bough of a tree; but it is likely that the Chubs will sink down towards the bottom of the water at the first shadow of your rod, for a Chub is the fearfulest of fishes, and will do so if but a bird flies over him and makes the least shadow on the water; but they will presently rise up to the top again, and there lie soaring until some shadow affrights them again; I say, when they lie upon the top of the water, look at the best Chub, which you, getting yourself in a fit place, may very easily see, and move your rod as slowly as a snail moves, to that Chub you intend to catch, let your bait fall gently upon the water three or four inches before him, and he will infallibly take the bait, and you will be as sure to catch him....  Go your way presently, take my rod, and do as I bid you, and I will sit down and mend my tackling till you return back——­’”