For my part, as I grow older I am more and more inclined to reduce my baggage, to lop off superfluities.  I become more and more in love with simple things and simple folk—­a small house, a hut in the woods, a tent on the shore.  The show and splendor of great houses, elaborate furnishings, stately halls, oppress me, impose upon me.  They fix the attention upon false values, they set up a false standard of beauty; they stand between me and the real feeders of character and thought.  A man needs a good roof over his head winter and summer, and a good chimney and a big wood-pile in winter.  The more open his four walls are, the more fresh air he will get, and the longer he will live.

How the contemplation of Nature as a whole does take the conceit out of us!  How we dwindle to mere specks and our little lives to the span of a moment in the presence of the cosmic bodies and the interstellar spaces!  How we hurry!  How we husband our time!  A year, a month, a day, an hour may mean so much to us.  Behold the infinite leisure of Nature!

A few trillions or quadrillions of years, what matters it to the Eternal?  Jupiter and Saturn must be billions of years older than the earth.  They are evidently yet passing through that condition of cloud and vapor and heat that the earth passed through untold aeons ago, and they will not reach the stage of life till aeons to come.  But what matters it?  Only man hurries.  Only the Eternal has infinite time.  When life comes to Jupiter, the earth will doubtless long have been a dead world.  It may continue a dead world for aeons longer before it is melted up in the eternal crucible and recast, and set on its career of life again.

Familiarity with the ways of the Eternal as they are revealed in the physical universe certainly tends to keep a man sane and sober and safeguards him against the vagaries and half-truths which our creeds and indoor artificial lives tend to breed.  Shut away from Nature, or only studying her through religious fears and superstitions, what a mess a large body of mankind in all ages have made of it!  Think of the obsession of the speedy “end of the world” which has so often taken possession of whole communities, as if a world that has been an eternity in forming could end in a day, or on the striking of the clock!  It is not many years since a college professor published a book figuring out, from some old historical documents and predictions, just the year in which the great mundane show would break up.  When I was a small boy at school in the early forties, during the Millerite excitement about the approaching end of all mundane things, I remember, on the day when the momentous event was expected to take place, how the larger school-girls were thrown into a great state of alarm and agitation by a thundercloud that let down a curtain of rain, blotting out the mountain on the opposite side of the valley.  “There it comes!” they said, and their tears flowed copiously.  I remember