I have thought that the boy is the only true lover of Nature, and that
we, who make such a dead set at studying and admiring her, come very
wide of the mark. "The nonchalance of a boy who is sure of his dinner,"
says our Emerson, "is the healthy attitude of humanity." The boy is a
part of Nature; he is as indifferent, as careless, as vagrant as she. He
browses, he digs, he hunts, he climbs, he halloes, he feeds on roots
and greens and mast. He uses things roughly and without sentiment. The
coolness with which boys will drown dogs or cats, or hang them to trees,
or murder young birds, or torture frogs or squirrels, is like Nature's
own mercilessness.
Certain it is that we often get some of the best touches of nature from
children. Childhood is a world by itself, and we listen to children when
they frankly speak out of it with a strange interest. There is such a
freedom from responsibility and from worldly wisdom,--it is heavenly
wisdom. There is no sentiment in children, because there is no ruin;
nothing has gone to decay about them yet,--not a leaf or a twig. Until
he is well into his teens, and sometimes later, a boy is like a
bean-pod before the fruit has developed,--indefinite, succulent, rich in
possibilities which are only vaguely outlined. He is a pericarp merely.
How rudimental are all his ideas! I knew a boy who began his
school composition on swallows by saying there were two kinds of
swallows,--chimney swallows and swallows.
Girls come to themselves sooner; are indeed, from the first, more
definite and "translatable."