Yet Nature never grows outworn,—­is unwearied in the bounty which she bestows on the seeker.  I said a strip of sandy beach, just now.  For that I beg leave to refer the reader to Mr. Kingsley’s fascinating “Glaucus,” and to the delightful papers which appeared in “Blackwood” a year or two ago.  My business is with the woods and fields.  Certainly some who read my pages will have leisure to climb a stone wall now and then, and for them the following sketches of New England wood-walks may serve to show how much enjoyment may be got with but little outlay of appliances.  Of course the most tempting thing to seek is sport.  But the gun and the fishing-rod are useless in many towns, from the disappearance of all worthy objects for their exercise.  The birds are wild and shy; the trout have been coculus-indicused out of the mountain-brooks to supply metropolitan hotel-tables and Delmonican larders.  Let us go after more attainable things.  And first, being a true nemophilist, I protest against botany.  A flower worth a five-mile walk and a wet foot is worthy of something better than dissection with the Linnaean classification, afterward adding insult to injury.  The botanist is not a discoverer; he is only a pedant.  He finds out nothing about the plant; he serves it as we might fancy a monster doing, who should take this number of the “Atlantic” and sit down, not to read it, not to inhale the delicate fragrance of its thought, but to count its articles, examine their titles, and, having compared them with the newspaper advertisement, sweep the whole contentedly into the dust-heap.  To study the plant, to see how it gets its living, why it will grow on one side of a brook in profusion, and yet refuse to seek the other bank, is not his care.  It is simply to see whether he can abuse its honest English or New-English simplicity by calling it by one set or another of barbarous Latin and Greek titles.  Pray, my good Sir, does a man go to see the elephant only to call him a pachydermatous quadruped?

But we are wasting time and shall never get into the woods.  In the winter wild you will hardly get far into them, except at the Christmas season for greenery.  Gathering this by deputy is poor business.  It is all very well, if you can do no better, to engage Mr. Brown to engage some one else to bring in the needed spruce, fir, and hemlock with which to obscure the fresco deformities of St. Boniface’s; but it is far better to hunt for them yourself.  There is something intensely delightful in the changes of the search; for it begins dull enough.  You start in the drear December weather, with a gray sky and leaden clouds softly shaded in regular billows, like an India-ink ocean, overhead, and a somewhat muddy lane before you.  Then to pick one’s way across the plashy meadows, and, after a ticklish pass of jumping from one reedy tussock to another, to get once more upon the firm soil, while the grass, dry and crisp under your feet, gives a pleasant whish,