{"product_id":"2940014872669","title":"A Garden Diary","description":"An excerpt from the beginning:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeptember 1, 1899.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A WANDERER is man from his birth,\" and some of us who have done comparatively little wandering in our own persons, have done our full share of those less palpable divagations which may be performed within a very small compass of the earth's surface, nay even within the radius of a single garden chair.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe gipsy dies hard in many people, and the dreams which have fluttered round our youthful fancy flutter round it still, though youth may have become a memory, and the chances of any serious explorations be reduced to a scarce perceptible minimum. To be a traveller in the real and heroic sense is a very great and a very stirring ambition. To have the hope of wandering far and fruitfully; of bringing home the results of those wanderings; such a hope and such an aspiration is one of the biggest things that can be set before a youthful ambition. With a disregard of probabilities, which, looking back, I can only characterise as magnificent, such an ambition had I, in early days, set before myself. To be a traveller on the great scale; a visitor of remote solitudes, and practically untrodden shores; a discoverer of undescribed forms; a rifler of Natures still unrifled treasure-houses— such was the hope, and such the happy dream. The words \"Unknown to science\" floated in those days before my youthful fancy, and were to it a shibboleth, as other and more obviously stimulating words have been to other youthful brains. Fate has not willed that any such resounding lot should be mine, nor was it, to tell the truth, particularly likely that it should so will it. To few of our race has it been given to add, by even a little, to the knowledge of that race, and I am not aware that any portion of my own equipment had particularly marked me out for this role that I had so confidently assigned to myself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLuckily we learn to grow down gracefully, as the sedums and the pennyworts do. A lot that at ten years old seems unendurably pitiful in its narrowness, at five times that mature age comes to be regarded as quite a becoming lot, leaving room for plenty of easy self-respect, and even for a spurt or two of the purest and most invigorating vanity. As that down-growing process advances we assure ourselves, more and more confidently, that all the really important, the vital part of such explorations belongs to us, at least as much as to the explorers themselves. If we have not thridded Amazonian forests in our own persons with Mr. Bates, or Nicaraguan jungles with Mr. Belt, we know all that those indefatigable travellers have seen, done, discovered, experienced, and only need to take down their books from the shelf to be in the thick of those experiences once more.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo too, with the rest — the botanists, zoologists, paleontologists—greater, as well as less great. With the prince of them all one starts once more upon that immortal Voyage of the Beagle, which, besides circumnavigating the world, enables one to accumulate those prodigious stores of observation, destined by-and-by to make one's own name famous to the world's end, and to endow that world itself with one or two practically new departments. With Professor Wallace, one spends years in the Malay Archipelago, till the geography of even the obscurer members of that bewildering group becomes rather more familiar than that of the next parish. With Collingwood one pores over the rock-pools of Chinese seas, which never before reflected human face, or at most that of some shore-haunting Mongolian, uninterested in zoology. With the savants of the Challenger one sets forth, with all the pomp of subsidised science, upon a three years' cruise, in search of Globigerinae, of blind Decapoda, of Coccospheres, of Rhabdospheres, and other long-titled occupants of abyssmal depths. And if one has been tempted to now and then share the dismay felt by the youthful lieutenant, upon being shown that single teaspoonful of grey slop, as the result of nights of toil, which kept the whole crew of , Her Majesty's ship from their bunks, well, one reflected that the wise men probably knew what they were about, and that the teaspoonful in question could hardly be an ordinary teaspoonful. Later, hand in hand one has journeyed with other travellers, some biological, others merely exploratory, or geographical. With Stanley groped for weeks in African forests, and been shot at by unpleasant little beasts with hands. With Miss North travelled far, yet unweariedly, in search of unknown flowering trees, and other forms of vegetation. With Nansen, until one grew to feel brittle as any icicle, and occasionally almost as callous as one. With Mrs. Bishop, across many seas, and scenes;...","brand":"OGB","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47146171334896,"sku":"2940014872669","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940014872669_p0.jpg?v=1763616530","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940014872669","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}