The eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception.

Once more their weird laughter of the loons comes to my ear, the distance lends it a musical, melancholy sound. For a dangerous ledge off the lighthouse island floats in on the still air the gentle trolling of a warning bell as it swings on the rocking buoy; it might be tolling for the passing of summer and sweet weather with that persistent, pensive chime.

The toad has indeed no superior as a destroyer of noxious insects, and he possesses no bad habits and is entirely inoffensive himself, every owner of a garden should treat him with utmost hospitality.

It seems to me the worst of all the plagues is the slug, the snail without a shell. He is beyond description repulsive, a mass of sooty, shapeless slime, and he devours everything.

Like the musician, the painter, the poet, and the rest, the true lover of flowers is born, not made. And he is born to happiness in this vale of tears, to a certain amount of the purest joy that earth can giver her children, joy that is tranquil, innocent, uplifting, unfailing.

I am fully and intensely aware that plants are conscious of love and respond to it as they do to nothing else.

It is curious that the leaf should so love the light and the root so hate it.