This we know, and yet we doubt if God can keep in touch with us and answer our prayers." Many people wondered why a man like Uncle Zed was content to live in the country.

The answer seemed to be found in a number of slips: "How peaceful comes the Sabbath, doubly blessed, In giving hope to faith, to labor rest.
Most peaceful here:--no city's noise obtains, And God seems reverenced more where silence reigns." Once Dorian had been called a "Clod hopper." As he read the following, he wondered whether or not Uncle Zed had not also been so designated, and had written this in reply: "Mother Earth, why should not I love you?
Why should not I get close to you?
Why should I plan to live always in the clouds above you, gazing at other far-distant worlds, and neglecting you?
Why did I, with others, shout with joy when I learned that I was coming here from the world of spirits?
I answer, because I knew that 'spirit and element inseparately connected receiveth a fullness of joy.' I was then to get in touch with 'element' as I had been with 'spirit.' This world which I see with my natural eyes is the 'natural' part of Mother Earth, even as the flesh and bones and blood of my body is the element of myself, to be inseparately connected with my spirit and to the end that I might receive a fullness of joy.

The earth and all things on it known by the term nature is what I came here to know.

Nature, wild or tamed, is my schoolroom--the earth with its hills and valleys and plains, with its clouds and rain, with its rivers and lakes and oceans, with its trees and fruits and flowers, its life--about all these I must learn what I can at first hand.

Especially, should I learn of the growing things which clothe the earth with beauty and furnish sustenance to life.