about anything that hits me. How does that strike you as a
job for a naturalist?"

"It's a job for a human naturalist. I think you'll cover
it."

If you know the dunes, which you probably don't, you know
why they did not get off at Millers, with the crowd, but
rode on until they were free of the Sunday picnickers.
Then they got off, and walked across the tracks, past
saloons, and a few huddled houses, hideous in yellow paint,
and on, and on down a road that seemed endless. A stretch
of cinders, then dust, a rather stiff little hill, a great
length of yellow sand and--the lake! We say, the lake! like
that, with an exclamation point after it, because it wasn't
at all the Lake Michigan that Chicagoans know. This vast
blue glory bore no relation to the sullen, gray, turbid
thing that the city calls the lake. It was all the blues of
which you've ever heard, and every passing cloud gave it a
new shade. Sapphire. No, cobalt. No, that's too cold.
Mediterranean. Turquoise. And the sand in golden contrast.
Miles of sand along the beach, and back of that the dunes.
Now, any dictionary or Scotchman will tell you that a dune
is a hill of loose sand. But these dunes are done in
American fashion, lavishly. Mountains of sand, as far as
the eye can see, and on the top of them, incredibly, great
pine trees that clutch at their perilous, shifting foothold
with frantic root-toes. And behind that, still more
incredibly, the woods, filled with wild flowers, with
strange growths found nowhere else in the whole land, with