How do I pass the hours?  Leaving my friends, I wander forth, after breakfast, in any direction that pleases me.  Take today this sheep path; it leads me to a pebbly beach at a swift turn of the Merced.  That clump of trees produces the best harvest of frost-pointed leaves; there are new varieties offered every day at an alarming sacrifice, and I invest largely in these fragile wares.  Tomorrow, I shall go yonder across three tumultuous streams, upon three convenient logs, broad and mossy.  Some book or other goes with me, and is opened now and then.  Such books as Plant Life, The Sexuality of Nature, Studies in Animal Life, suggest themselves.  Open these anywhere, and each is annotated and illustrated by the scene before me.  Every page is a running text to the hour I glorify.

Perhaps a leaf falls into my lap as I sit over the brook, on a log—­a single leaf, gilded about its border, in the centre a crimson flush, fast swallowing up the original greenness; the whole will presently be bronzed and sombre.  O, Leaf! how art thou mummified!  We do not think of these little things of Nature.  Look at this leaf.  What is its record?  How many generations, think you, are numbered in its ancestry?  A perpetual intermarriage has not weakened its fibres.  The anatomy of this leaf is perfect, and the sap of this oak flows from oak to acorn, from acorn to oak, in an interminable and uninterrupted succession since the first day.  What are your titles and estates beside this representative?  What is your heraldry, with its two centuries of mold; your absurd and confused genealogies, your escutcheons, blotted no doubt with crimes and errors, when this scion, which I am permitted to entertain for a moment, comes of a race whose record is spotless and without stain through ten thousand eventful years.  Why, Eve would recognize the original of this stock from the mere family resemblance.

Do you think these days tiresome?  It is embarrassing for some people to be left alone with themselves.  They can no longer play a part, for there are none like themselves to play to.  The sun and stars know you well enough—­most likely, better than you yourselves do.  I like this.  I would out and say to myself:  “Here is a confidant.  Day hides nothing from me, or you; it expresses all, exposes all—­even that which we might not ask to see.  It is best that we should see it; there are no errors in Nature.”

Walking, the squirrel nods to me.  I nod back; and why shouldn’t I?  Nature has familiarly introduced us.  Squirrel munches under his tail canopy till I am out of sight, jabbering all the while.  What sage little fellows go on four feet!  I believe an animal has all the instincts of Adam.  He should never be tamed, however, lest he lose his identity.  Civilization rubs down the points in our character.  As the surf rounds the pebble, the masses round us.  We are polished and insufferably proper, but have no angles left!  It is the angles that give the diamond its lustre.