Page:Clarence S. Darrow - Realism in Literature and Art (1899).djvu/19

 Rh the spring, when singing school is out, he visits her on Sunday eve without excuse. If the girl had not lived so near the boy would have fancied another girl about the same age, who also went to singing school. Back of the second farmer's house is another woodchuck hole and woodchuck home. After a year or two of courtship the boy and girl are married, as their parents were before, and they chose a pretty spot beside the road, and built another house near by, and settle down to common life; and so the world moves on. And the woodchuck on one farm meets a woodchuck on the other, and they choose a quiet place beside a stump, in no once way, where they think they have a right to be, and dig another hole and make another home." For, after all, men and animals are much alike, and nature loves them both and loves them all, and sends them forth to drive the loneliness from off the earth, and then takes them back into her loving breast to sleep.

It may be that there are few great incidents in the realistic tale, but each event appeals to life and cannot fail to wake our memories and make us live the past again. The great authors of the natural school—Tolstoi, Hardy, Howells, Daudet, Ibsen, Flaubert, Zola and their kind, have made us think and live. Their words have burnished up our minds and re-