and the sky, that in due calendar time they might be brought to bud
and blossom as the rose. Our efforts are of no avail when we seek to
turn his attention to wild roses, or to the fact that both ocean and
sky are already about as rosy as possible--the one with stars, the
other with dulse, and foam, and wild light. The practical
developments of his culture are orchards and clover-fields wearing a
smiling, benevolent aspect, truly excellent in their way, though a
near view discloses something barbarous in them all. Wildness charms
not my friend, charm it never so wisely: and whatsoever may be the
character of his heaven, his earth seems only a chaos of agricultural
possibilities calling for grubbing-hoes and manures.

Sometimes I venture to approach him with a plea for wildness, when he
good-naturedly shakes a big mellow apple in my face, reiterating his
favorite aphorism, "Culture is an orchard apple; Nature is a crab."
Not all culture, however, is equally destructive and inappreciative.
Azure skies and crystal waters find loving recognition, and few there
be who would welcome the axe among mountain pines, or would care to
apply any correction to the tones and costumes of mountain waterfalls.
Nevertheless, the barbarous notion is almost universally entertained
by civilized man, that there is in all the manufactures of Nature
something essentially coarse which can and must be eradicated by human
culture. I was, therefore, delighted in finding that the wild wool
growing upon mountain sheep in the neighborhood of Mount Shasta was
much finer than the average grades of cultivated wool. This FINE
discovery was made some three months ago[1], while hunting among the
Shasta sheep between Shasta and Lower Klamath Lake. Three fleeces
were obtained--one that belonged to a large ram about four years old,
another to a ewe about the same age, and another to a yearling lamb.
After parting their beautiful wool on the side and many places along