This adaptation to nature is easy for us, for we are rustics by
inheritance. Our ancestors lived in the open, and kept their flocks
and were mighty hunters long before towns were ever thought of. So
when we go into the woods in the spring, our self-consciousness leaves
us and we speedily make ourselves at home. We take things for granted,
and are not careful about trifles. A great many things are going on,
but the multiplicity does not distract us. We do not need to
understand.

For we have primal sympathies which are very good substitutes for
intelligence. We do not worry because nature does not get on faster
with her work. When we go out on the hills on a spring morning, as our
forbears did ten thousand years ago, it does not fret us to consider
that things are going on very much as they did then. The sap is
mounting in the trees; the wild flowers are pushing out of the sod;
the free citizens of the woods are pursuing their vocations without
regard to our moralities. A great deal is going on, but nothing has
come to a dramatic culmination.

Our innate rusticity makes us accept all this in the spirit in which
it is offered to us. It is nature's way and we like it, because we are
used to it. We take what is set before us and ask no questions. It is
spring. We do not stop to inquire as to whether this spring is an
improvement on last spring or on the spring of the year 400 B.C. There
is a timelessness about our enjoyment. We are not thinking of events
set in a chronological order, but of a process which loses nothing by
reason of repetition.

Our attitude toward a city is usually quite different. We are not at