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Chis Coition is limited to One Chougany Sets

Kibersive Coition

THE WRITINGS OF
JOHN BURROUGHS
VOLUME IX

5

THE WRITINGS OF
JOHN BURROUGHS

Rihecgite hition

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

RIVERBY

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Che iversive Pres, Cambridge

1895
hie

Copyright, 1894, 1895,
By JOHN BURROUGHS.

All rights reserved.

e ni &
= se

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. 8. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co.

PREFATORY NOTE

I HAVE often said to myself, “‘Why should not
one name his books as he names his children, arbi-
trarily, and let the name come to mean much or
little, as the case may be?” In the case of the
present volume — probably my last collection of Out-
of-door Papers —I have taken this course, and have
given to the book the name of my place here on the
Hudson, “ Riverby,’’ by the river, where the sketches
were written, and where for so many years I have
been an interested spectator of the life of nature, as,
with the changing seasons, it has ebbed and flowed

past my door.
J. B.

I.
IL.

. A Youne Marsy Hawk.

CONTENTS

AMONG THE WILD-FLOWERS .
Tue Heart or tue SouTHERN CATSKILLS

. Birps’ Eces

. Brrp CourRTsHIP .

. NoTES FROM THE PRAIRIE
. Eyse-BEAms

THE CHIPMUNK

. Spring JoTTInes
. GLIMPsEs oF WILD LIFE
. A Lire or FEAR

Lovers or NATURE

. A Taste oF Kentucky BLue-GRAss .
. In Mammotu Cave

. Hasty OBSERVATION i

. Brrp Lire in an Otp APPLE-TREE .

. THE Ways or SPORTSMEN

. TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS

INDEX .

138

203
221
241
251
271
277
283
317

The frontispiece is from a photograph of Mr. Burroughs taken
The vignette was etched by Mr. W. H. W. Bicknell
after a photograph of the house at Riverby, Mr. Burroughs’s place
on the Hudson.

in 1895.

RIVERBY

I
AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS

I

IN See every season I make the acquaintance

of one or more new flowers. It takes years
to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one con-
siderable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead
set at it, like an herbalist. One likes to have his
floral acquaintances come to him easily and naturally,
like his other friends. Some pleasant occasion
should bring you together. You meet in a walk,
or touch elbows on a picnic under a tree, or get
acquainted on a fishing or camping-out expedition.
What comes to you in the way of birds or flowers,
while wooing only the large spirit of open-air na-
ture, seems like special good fortune. At any rate,
one does not want to bolt his botany, but rather to
prolong the course. One likes to have something
in reserve, something to be on the lookout for on
his walks. I have never yet found the orchid
called calypso, a large, variegated purple and yel-

2 RIVERBY

low flower, Gray says, which grows in cold, wet
woods and bogs, — very beautiful and very rare.
Calypso, you know, was the nymph who fell in love
with Ulysses and detained him seven years upon her
island, and died of a broken heart after he left her.
I have a keen desire to see her in her floral guise,
reigning over some silent bog, or rising above the
moss of some dark glen in the woods, and would
gladly be the Ulysses to be detained at least a few
hours by her.

I will describe her by the aid of Gray, so that if
any of my readers come across her they may know
what a rarity they have found. She may be looked
for in cold, mossy, boggy places in our northern
woods. You will see a low flower, somewhat like
a lady’s-slipper, that is, with an inflated sac-shaped
lip; the petals and sepals much alike, rising and
spreading ; the color mingled purple and yellow; the
stem, or scape, from three to five inches high, with
but one leaf, —that one thin and slightly heart-
shaped, with a stem which starts from a solid bulb.
That is the nymph of our boggy solitudes, waiting
to break her heart for any adventurous hero who
may penetrate her domain.

Several of our harmless little wild flowers have
been absurdly named out of the old mythologies:
thus, Indian cucumber root, one of Thoreau’s favor-
ite flowers, is named after the sorceress Medea, and
is called “‘ medeola,” because it was at one time
thought to possess rare medicinal properties; and
medicine and sorcery have always been more or less

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 3

confounded in the opinion of mankind. It is a
pretty and decorative sort of plant, with, when per-
fect, two stages or platforms of leaves, one above
the other. You see a whorl of five or six leaves, a
foot or more from the ground, which seems to bear
a standard with another whorl of three leaves at the
top of it. The small, colorless, recurved flowers
shoot out from above this top whorl. The whole
expression of the plant is singularly slender and
graceful. Sometimes, probably the first year, it
only attains to the first circle of leaves. This is
the platform from which it will rear its flower col-
umn the next year. Its white, tuberous root is
crisp and tender, and leaves in the mouth distinctly
the taste of cucumber. Whether or not the In-
dians used it as a relish as we do the cucumber, I
do not know.

Still another pretty flower that perpetuates the
name of a Grecian nymph, a flower that was a new
find to me a few summers ago, is the arethusa.
Arethusa was one of the nymphs who attended
Diana, and was by that goddess turned into a foun-
tain, that she might escape the god of the river,
Alpheus, who became desperately in love with her
on seeing her at her bath. Our Arethusa is one of
the prettiest of the orchids, and has been pursued
through many a marsh and quaking bog by her
lovers. She is a bright pink-purple flower an inch
or more long, with the odor of sweet violets. The
sepals and petals rise up and arch over the column,
which we may call the heart of the flower, as if

4 RIVERBY

shielding it. In Plymouth County, Massachusetts,
where the arethusa seems common, I have heard
it called Indian pink.

But I was going to recount my new finds. One
sprang up in the footsteps of that destroying angel,
Dynamite. A new railroad cut across my tramping-
ground, with its hordes of Italian laborers and its
mountains of giant-powder, etc., was enough to banish
all the gentler deities forever from the place. But
it did not.

Scarcely had the earthquake passed when, walk-
ing at the base of a rocky cliff that had been partly
blown away in the search for stone for two huge
abutments that stood near by, I beheld the débris at
the base of the cliff draped and festooned by one
of our most beautiful foliage plants, and one I had
long been on the lookout for, namely, the climbing
fumitory. It was growing everywhere in the great-
est profusion, affording, by its tenderness, delicacy,
and grace, the most striking contrast to the destruc-
tion the black giant had wrought. The power that
had smote the rock seemed to have called it into
being. Probably the seeds had lain dormant in
cracks and crevices for years, and when the catas-
trophe came, and they found themselves in new soil
amid the wreck of the old order of things, they
sprang into new life, and grew as if the world had
been created anew for them, as in a sense it had.
Certainly, they grew most luxuriantly, and never
was the ruin wrought by powder veiled by more

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 5

delicate, lace-like foliage.1 The panicles of droop-
ing, pale flesh-colored flowers heightened the effect
of the whole. This plant is a regular climber; it
has no extra appendages for that purpose, and does
not wind, but climbs by means of its young leaf-
stalks, which lay hold like tiny hands or hooks.
The end of every branch is armed with a multitude
of these baby hands. The flowers are pendent, and
swing like ear jewels. They are slightly heart-
shaped, and when examined closely look like little
pockets made of crumpled silk, nearly white on the
inside or under side, and pale purple on the side
toward the light, and shirred up at the bottom.
And pockets they are in quite a literal sense, for,
though they fade, they do not fall, but become
pockets full of seeds. The fumitory is a perpetual
bloomer from July till killed by the autumn frosts.

The closely allied species of this plant, the di-
centra (Dutchman’s breeches and squirrel corn), are
much more common, and are among our prettiest
spring flowers. JI have an eye out for the white-
hearts (related to the bleeding-hearts of the gar-
dens, and absurdly called “‘ Dutchman’s breeches ”’)
the last week in April. It is a rock-loving plant,
and springs upon the shelves of the ledges, or in
the débris at their base, as if by magic. As soon
as blood-root has begun to star the waste, stony
places, and the first swallow has been heard in

1 Strange to say, the plant did not appear in that locality the
next season, and has never appeared since. Perhaps it will take
another dynamite earthquake to wake it up.

6 RIVERBY

the sky, we are on the lookout for dicentra. The
more northern species, called “ squirrel corn” from
the small golden tubers at its root, blooms in May,
and has the fragrance of hyacinths. It does not
affect the rocks, like all the other flowers of this
family.

My second new acquaintance the same season was
the showy lady’s-slipper. Most of the floral ladies
leave their slippers in swampy places in the woods;
only the stemless one (acaule) leaves hers on dry
ground before she reaches the swamp, commonly
under evergreen trees, where the carpet of pine
needles will not hurt her feet. But one may pene-
trate many wet, mucky places in the woods before
he finds the prettiest of them all, the showy lady’s-
slipper, — the prettiest slipper, but the stoutest and
coarsest plant; the flower large and very showy,
white, tinged with purple in front; the stem two
feet high, very leafy, and coarser than bear-weed.
Report had come to me, through my botanizing
neighbor, that in a certain quaking sphagnum bog
in the woods the showy lady’s-slipper could be
found. The locality proved to be the marrowy
grave of an extinct lake or black tarn. On the bor-
ders of it the white azalea was in bloom, fast fad-
ing. In the midst of it were spruces and black ash
and giant ferns, and, low in the spongy, mossy bot-
tom, the pitcher plant. The lady’s-slipper grew in
little groups and companies all about. Never have
I beheld a prettier sight, —so gay, so festive, so
holiday-looking. Were they so many gay bonnets

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 7

rising above the foliage? or were they flocks of white
doves with purple-stained breasts just lifting up
their wings to take flight? or were they little fleets
of fairy boats, with sail set, tossing on a mimic sea
of wild, weedy growths? Such images throng the
mind on recalling the scene, and only faintly hint
its beauty and animation. The long, erect, white
sepals do much to give the alert, tossing look which
the flower wears. The dim light, too, of its se-
cluded haunts, and its snowy purity and freshness,
contribute to the impression it makes. The purple
tinge is like a stain of wine which has slightly
overflowed the brim of the inflated lip or sac and
run part way down its snowy sides.

This lady’s-slipper is one of the rarest and choi-
cest of our wild flowers, and its haunts and its beauty
are known only to the few. Those who have the
secret guard it closely, lest their favorite be exter-
minated. A well-known botanist in one of the large
New England cities told me that it was found in but
one place in that neighborhood, and that the secret,
so far as he knew, was known to but three persons,
and was carefully kept by them.

A friend of mine, an enthusiast on orchids, came
one June day a long way by rail to see this flower.
I conducted him to the edge of the swamp, lifted up
the branches as I would a curtain, and said, ‘‘ There
they are.”

“Where?” said he, peering far into the dim re-
cesses.

“Within six feet of you,” I replied.

8 RIVERBY

He narrowed his vision, and such an expression
of surprise and delight as came over his face! A
group of a dozen or more of the plants, some of
them twin-flowered, were there almost within reach,
the first he had ever seen, and his appreciation of
the scene, visible in every look and gesture, was
greatly satisfying. In the fall he came and moved
a few of the plants to a tamarack swamp in his own
vicinity, where they throve and bloomed finely for a
few years, and then for some unknown reason failed.

Nearly every June, my friend still comes to feast
his eyes upon this queen of the cypripediums.

While returning from my first search for the
lady’s-slipper, my hat fairly brushed the nest of the
red-eyed vireo, which was so cunningly concealed,
such an open secret, in the dim, leafless underwoods,
that I could but pause and regard it. It was sus-
pended from the end of a small, curving sapling;
was flecked here and there by some whitish sub-
stance, so as to blend it with the gray mottled boles
of the trees; and, in the dimly lighted ground-floor
of the woods, was sure to escape any but the most
prolonged scrutiny. A couple of large leaves formed
a canopy above it. It was not so much hidden as it
was rendered invisible by texture and position with
reference to light and shade.

A few summers ago I struck a new and beauti-
ful plant in the shape of a weed that had only re-
cently appeared in that part of the country. I was
walking through an August meadow when I saw, on
a little knoll, a bit of most vivid orange, verging on

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 9

acrimson. I knew of no flower of such a complex-
ion frequenting such a place as that. On investiga-
tion, it proved to be a stranger. It had a rough,
hairy, leafless stem about a foot high, surmounted
by a corymbose cluster of flowers or flower-heads of
dark vivid orange-color. The leaves were deeply
notched and toothed, very bristly, and were pressed
flat to the ground. The whole plant was a veritable
Esau for hairs, and it seemed to lay hold upon the
ground as if it was not going to let go easily. And
what a fiery plume it had! The next day, in an-
other field a mile away, I chanced upon more of
the flowers. On making inquiry, I found that a
small patch or colony of the plants had appeared
that season, or first been noticed then, in a meadow
well known to me from boyhood. ‘They had been
cut down with the grass in early July, and the first
week in August had shot up and bloomed again. I
found the spot aflame with them. ‘Their leaves
covered every inch of the surface where they stood,
and nota spear of grass grew there. They were tak-
ing slow but complete possession; they were devour-
ing the meadow by inches. The plant seemed to be
a species of hieracium, or hawkweed, or some closely
allied species of the composite family, but I could
not find it mentioned in our botanies.

A few days later, on the edge of an adjoining
county ten miles distant, I found, probably, its head-
quarters. It had appeared there a few years be-
fore, and was thought to have escaped from some
farmer’s door-yard. Patches of it were appearing

10 RIVERBY

here and there in the fields, and the farmers were
thoroughly alive to the danger, and were fighting
it like fire. Its seeds are winged like those of the
dandelion, and it sows itself far and near. It would
be a beautiful acquisition to our midsummer fields,
supplying a tint as brilliant as that given by the
scarlet poppies to English grain-fields. But it would
be an expensive one, as it usurps the land com-
pletely.*

Parts of New England have already a midsummer
flower nearly as brilliant, and probably far less ag-
gressive and noxious, in meadow-beauty, or rhexia,
the sole northern genus of a family of tropical
plants. I found it very abundant in August in the
country bordering on Buzzard’s Bay. It was a new
flower to me, and I was puzzled to make it out.
It seemed like some sort of scarlet evening primrose,
The parts were in fours, the petals slightly heart-
shaped and convoluted in the bud, the leaves
bristly, the calyx-tube prolonged, etc. ; but the stem
was square, the leaves opposite, and the tube urn-
shaped. The flowers were an inch across, and
bright purple. It grew in large patches in dry,
sandy fields, making the desert gay with color;
and also on the edges of marshy places. It eclipses
any flower of the open fields known to me farther
inland. When we come to improve our wild
garden, as recommended by Mr. Robinson in his

1 This observation was made ten years ago. I have since
learned that the plant is Hieracium aurantiacum from Europe, a
kind of hawkweed. It is fast becoming a common weed in New
York and New England. (1894.)

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 11

book on wild gardening, we must not forget the
thexia.

Our seacoast flowers are probably more brilliant
in color than the same flowers in the interior. I
thought the wild rose on the Massachusetts coast
deeper tinted and more fragrant than those I was
used to. The steeple-bush, or hardhack, had more
color, as had the rose gerardia and several other
plants.

But when vivid color is wanted, what can surpass
or equal our cardinal-flower? There is a glow about
this flower as if color emanated from it as from a
live coal. The eye is baffled, and does not seem to
reach the surface of the petal; it does not see the
texture or material part as it does in other flowers,
but rests in a steady, still radiance. It is not so
much something colored as it is color itself. And
then the moist, cool, shady places it affects, usu-
ally where it has no floral rivals, and where the
large, dark shadows need just such a dab of fire!
Often, too, we see it double, its reflected image in
some dark pool heightening its effect. I have never
found it with its only rival in color, the monarda
or bee-balm, a species of mint. Farther north, the
cardinal-flower seems to fail, and the monarda takes
its place, growing in similar localities. One may
see it about a mountain spring, or along a meadow
brook, or glowing in the shade around the head of
a wild mountain lake. It stands up two feet high
or more, and the flowers show like a broad scarlet
cap.

12 RIVERBY

The only thing I have seen in this country that
calls to mind the green grain-fields of Britain
splashed with scarlet poppies may be witnessed in
August in the marshes of the lower Hudson, when
the broad sedgy and flaggy spaces are sprinkled with
the great marsh-mallow. It is a most pleasing spec-
tacle, — level stretches of dark green flag or waving
marsh-grass kindled on every square yard by these
bright pink blossoms, like great burning coals fanned
in the breeze. The mallow is not so deeply colored
as the poppy, but it is much larger, and has the tint
of youth and happiness. It is an immigrant from
Europe, but it is making itself thoroughly at home
in our great river meadows.

The same day your eye is attracted by the mal-
lows, as your train skirts or cuts through the broad
marshes, it will revel with delight in the masses of
fresh bright color afforded by the purple loosestrife,
which grows in similar localities, and shows here
and there like purple bonfires. It is a tall plant,
grows in dense masses, and affords a most striking
border to the broad spaces dotted with the mallow.
It, too, came to us from over seas, and first ap-
peared along the Wallkill, many years ago. It used
to be thought by the farmers in that vicinity that
its seed was first brought in wool imported to this
country from Australia, and washed in the Wallkill
at Walden, where there was a woolen factory.
This is not probable, as it is a European species,
and J should sooner think it had escaped from culti-
vation. If one were to act upon the suggestions of

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 13

Robinson’s “ Wild Garden,” already alluded to, he
would gather the seeds of these plants and sow
them in the marshes and along the sluggish inland
streams, till the banks of all our rivers were gay
with these brilliant exotics.

Among our native plants, the one that takes
broad marshes to itself and presents vast sheets of
color is the marsh milkweed, far less brilliant than
the loosestrife or the mallow, still a missionary in
the wilderness, lighting up many waste places with
its humbler tints of purple.

One sometimes seems to discover a familiar wild
flower anew by coming upon it in some peculiar and
striking situation. Our columbine is at all times
and in all places one of the most exquisitely beauti-
ful of flowers; yet one spring day, when I saw it
growing out of a small seam on the face of a great
lichen-covered wall of rock, where no soil or mould
was visible, —a jet of foliage and color shooting
out of a black line on the face of a perpendicular
mountain wall and rising up like a tiny fountain,
its drops turning to flame-colored jewels that hung
and danced in the air against the gray rocky sur-
face, —its beauty became something magical and
audacious. On little narrow shelves in the rocky
wall the corydalis was blooming, and among the
loose bowlders at its base the blood-root shone con-
spicuous, suggesting snow rather than anything more
sanguine.

Certain flowers one makes special expeditions for
every season. ‘They are limited in their ranges,

14 RIVERBY

and must generally be sought for in particular
haunts. How many excursions to the woods does
the delicious trailing arbutus give rise to! How
can one let the spring go by without gathering it
himself when it hides in the moss! There are ar-
butus days in one’s calendar, days when the trail-
ing flower fairly calls him to the woods. With me,
they come the latter part of April. The grass is
greening here and there on the moist slopes and by
the spring runs; the first furrow has been struck
by the farmer; the liver-leaf is in the height of its
beauty, and the bright constellations of the blood-
root shine out here and there; one has had his first
taste and his second taste of the spring and of the
woods, and his tongue is sharpened rather than
cloyed. Now he will take the most delicious and
satisfying draught of all, the very essence and soul
of the early season, of the tender brooding days,
with all their prophecies and awakenings, in the
handful of trailing arbutus which he gathers in his
walk, At the mere thought of it, one sees the sun-
light flooding the woods, smells the warm earthy
odors which the heat liberates from beneath the dry
leaves, hears the mellow bass of the first bumble-
bee,
“ Rover of the underwoods,”’

or the finer chord of the adventurous honey-bee
seeking store for his empty comb. The arriving
swallows twitter above the woods; the first che-
wink rustles the dry leaves; the northward-bound
thrushes, the hermit and the gray-cheeked, flit here

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 15

and there before you. The robin, the sparrow, and
the bluebird are building their first nests, and the
first shad are making their way slowly up the Hud-
son. Indeed, the season is fairly under way when
the trailing arbutus comes. Now look out for
troops of boys and girls going to the woods to gather
it! and let them look out that in their greed they
do not exterminate it. Within reach of our large
towns, the choicer spring wild flowers are hunted
mercilessly. Every fresh party from town raids
them as if bent upon their destruction. One day,
about ten miles from one of our Hudson River
cities, there got into the train six young women
loaded down with vast sheaves and bundles of
trailing arbutus. Each one of them had enough for
forty. They had apparently made a clean sweep of
the woods. It was a pretty sight, —the pink and
white of the girls and the pink and white of the
flowers! and the car, too, was suddenly filled with
perfume, — the breath of spring loaded the air; but
I thought it a pity to ravish the woods in that way.
The next party was probably equally greedy, and,
because a handful was desirable, thought an armful
proportionately so; till, by and by, the flower will
be driven from those woods.

Another flower that one makes special excursions
for is the pond-lily. The pond-lily is a star, and
easily takes the first place among lilies; and the ex-
peditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where
she rocks upon the dark secluded waters of some
pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the

16 RIVERBY

floral expeditions of summer. It is the expedition
about which more things gather than almost any
other: you want your boat, you want your lunch,
you want your friend or friends with you. You
are going to put in the greater part of the day; you
are going to picnic in the woods, and indulge in a.
“sreen thought in a green shade.”” When my friend
and I go for pond-lilies, we have to traverse a dis-
tance of three miles with our boat in a wagon. The
road is what is called a “back road,” and leads
through woods most of the way. Black Pond,
where the lilies grow, lies about one hundred feet
higher than the Hudson, from which it is separated
by a range of rather bold wooded heights, one of
which might well be called Mount Hymettus, for I
have found a great deal of wild honey in the forest
that covers it. The stream which flows out of
the pond takes a northward course for two or three
miles, till it finds an opening through the rocky
hills, when it makes rapidly for the Hudson. Its
career all the way from the lake is a series of alter-
nating pools and cascades. Now a long, deep, level
stretch, where the perch and the bass and the pick-
erel lurk, and where the willow-herb and the royal
osmunda fern line the shores; then a sudden leap
of eight, ten, or fifteen feet down rocks to another
level stretch, where the water again loiters and suns
itself; and so on through its adventurous course till
the hills are cleared and the river is in sight. Our
road leads us along this stream, across its rude
bridges, through dark hemlock and pine woods, under

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 17

gray, rocky walls, now past a black pool, then within
sight or hearing of a foaming rapid or fall, till we
strike the outlet of the long level that leads to the
lake. In this we launch our boat and paddle slowly
upward over its dark surface, now pushing our way
through half-submerged treetops, then ducking un-
der the trunk of an overturned tree which bridges
the stream and makes a convenient way for the
squirrels and wood-mice, or else forcing the boat
over it when it is sunk a few inches below the sur-
face. We are traversing what was once a continu-
ation of the lake; the forest floor is as level as the
water and but afew inches above it, even in sum-
mer; it sweeps back a half mile or more, densely
covered with black ash, red maple, and other de-
ciduous trees, to the foot of the rocky hills which
shut us in. What glimpses we get, as we steal
along, into the heart of the rank, dense, silent
woods! I carry in my eye yet the vision I had, on
one occasion, of a solitary meadow lily hanging like
a fairy bell there at the end of a chance opening,
where a ray of sunlight fell full upon it, and
brought out its brilliant orange against the dark
green background. It appeared to be the only bit
of bright color in all the woods Then the song of
a single hermit thrush immediately after did even
more for the ear than the lily did forthe eye. Pres-
ently the swamp sparrow, one of the rarest of the
sparrows, was seen and heard; and that nest there
in a small bough a few feet over the water proves
to be hers, —in appearance a ground-bird’s nest in

18 RIVERBY

a bough, with the same four speckled eggs. As
we come in sight of the lilies, where they cover the
water at the outlet of the lake, a brisk gust of
wind, as if it had been waiting to surprise us,
sweeps down and causes every leaf to leap from
the water and show its pink under side. Was it
a fluttering of hundreds of wings, or the clapping
of a multitude of hands? But there rocked the lilies
with their golden hearts open to the sun, and their
tender white petals as fresh as crystals of snow.
What a queenly flower, indeed, the type of unsul-
lied purity and sweetness! Its root, like a black,
corrugated, ugly reptile, clinging to the slime, but
its flower in purity and whiteness like a star. There
is something very pretty in the closed bud making
its way up through the water to meet the sun; and
there is something touching in the flower closing
itself up again after its brief career, and slowly
burying itself beneath the dark wave. One almost
fancies a sad, regretful look in it as the stem draws
it downward to mature its seed on the sunless bot-
tom. The pond-lily is a flower of the morning; it
closes a little after noon; but after you have plucked
it and carried it home, it still feels the call of the
morning sun, and will open to him, if you give it
a good chance. Coil their stems up in the grass
on the lawn, where the sun’s rays can reach them,
and sprinkle them copiously. By the time you are
ready for your morning walk, there they sit upon
the moist grass, almost as charmingly as upon the
wave.

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 19

Our more choice wild flowers, the rarer and finer
spirits among them, please us by their individual
beauty and charm; others, more coarse and com-
mon, delight us by mass and profusion; we regard
not the one, but the many, as did Wordsworth his
golden daffodils: —

“Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

Of such is the marsh marigold, giving a golden
lining to many a dark, marshy place in the leafless
April woods, or marking a little watercourse through
a greening meadow with a broad line of new gold.
One glances up from his walk, and his eye falls upon
something like fixed and heaped-up sunshine there
beneath the alders, or yonder in the freshening
field.

In a measure, the same is true of our wild sun-
flowers, lighting up many a neglected bushy fence-
corner or weedy roadside with their bright, beaming
faces. The evening primrose is a coarse, rankly
growing plant; but, in late summer, how many an
untrimmed bank is painted over by it with the
most fresh and delicate canary yellow!

We have one flower which grows in vast multi-
tudes, yet which is exquisitely delicate and beautiful
in and of itself: I mean the houstonia, or bluets.
In May, in certain parts of the country, I see vast
sheets of it; in old, low meadow bottoms that have
never known the plow, it covers the ground like
a dull bluish or purplish snow which has blown
unevenly about. In the mass it is not especially

20 RIVERBY

pleasing; it has a faded, indefinite sort of look.
Its color is not strong and positive enough to be
effective in the mass, yet each single flower is a gem
of itself. The color of the common violet is much
more firm and pronounced; and how many a grassy
bank is made gay with it in the mid-May days!
We have a great variety of violets, and they are
very capricious as to perfume. The only species
which are uniformly fragrant are the tall Canada
violet, so common in our northern woods, — white,
with a tinge of purple to the under side of its
petals, —and the small white violet of the marshy
places; yet one summer I came upon a host of the
spurred violet in a sunny place in the woods which
filled the air with a delicate perfume. A handful
of them yielded a perceptible fragrance, but a sin-
gle flower none that I could detect. The Canada
violet very frequently blooms in the fall, and is
more fragrant at such times than in its earlier
blooming. I must not forget to mention that deli-
cate and lovely flower of May, the fringed polygala.
You gather it when you go for the fragrant, showy
orchis, — that is, if you are lucky enough to find it.
It is rather a shy flower, and is not found in every
wood. One day we went up and down through
the woods looking for it, — woods of mingled oak,
chestnut, pine, and hemlock, — and were about giv-
ing it up when suddenly we came upon a gay com-
pany of them beside an old wood-road. It was as
if a flock of small rose-purple butterflies had alighted
there on the ground before us. The whole plant

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 21

has a singularly fresh and tender aspect. Its foliage
is of a slightly purple tinge, and of very delicate
texture. Not the least interesting feature about
the plant is the concealed fertile flower which it
bears on a subterranean shoot, keeping, as it were,
one flower for beauty and one for use.

II

In our walks we note the most showy and beauti-
ful flowers, but not always the most interesting.
Who, for instance, pauses to consider that early
species of everlasting, commonly called mouse-ear,
that grows nearly everywhere by the roadside or
about poor fields? It begins to be noticeable in
May, its whitish downy appearance, its groups of
slender stalks crowned with a corymb of paper-like
buds, constrasting it with the fresh green of sur-
rounding grass or weeds. It is a member of a very
large family, the Composite, and does not attract
one by its beauty; but it is interesting because of
its many curious traits and habits. or instance,
it is dicecious, that is, the two sexes are represented
by separate plants; and, what is more curious, these
plants are usually found separated from each other
in well-defined groups, like the men and women
in an old-fashioned country church, —always in
groups; here a group of females, there, a few yards
away, a group of males. The females may be known
by their more slender and graceful appearance, and,
as the season advances, by their outstripping the
males in growth. Indeed, they become real ama-

22 RIVERBY

zons in comparison with their brothers. The stami-
nate or male plants grow but a few inches high; the
heads are round, and have a more dusky or freckled
appearance than do the pistillate; and as soon as
they have shed their pollen their work is done, they
are of no further use, and by the middle of May,
or before, their heads droop, their stalks wither, and
their general collapse sets in. Then the other sex,
or pistillate plants, seem to have taken a new lease
of life; they wax strong, they shoot up with the
growing grass and keep their heads above it; they
are alert and active; they bend in the breeze; their
long, tapering flower-heads take on a tinge of color,
and life seems full of purpose and enjoyment with
them. I have discovered, too, that they are real
sun-worshipers; that they turn their faces to the
east in the morning, and follow the sun in his course
across the sky till they all bend to the west at his
going down. On the other hand, their brothers
have stood stiff and stupid, and unresponsive to any
influence of sky and air, so far as I could see, till
they drooped and died.

Another curious thing is that the females seem
vastly more numerous, — I should say almost ten
times as abundant. You have to hunt for the
males; the others you see far off. One season I
used every day to pass several groups or circles of
females in the grass by the roadside. I noted how
they grew and turned their faces sunward. I
observed how alert and vigorous they were, and
what a purplish tinge came over their mamme-

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 23

shaped flower-heads as June approached. I looked
for the males; to the east, south, west, none could
be found for hundreds of yards. On the north,
about two hundred feet away, I founda small colony
of meek and lowly males. JI wondered by what
agency fertilization would take place, — by insects,
or by the wind? I suspected it would not take place.
No insects seemed to visit the flowers, and the wind
surely could not be relied upon to hit the mark so
far off, and from such an unlikely corner, too. But
by some means the vitalizing dust seemed to have
been conveyed. Early in June, the plants began
to shed their down, or seed-bearing pappus, still
carrying their heads at the top of the grass, so that
the breezes could have free access to them, and sow
the seeds far and wide.

As the seeds are sown broadcast by the wind, I
was at first puzzled to know how the two sexes were
kept separate, and always in little communities, till
I perceived, what I might have read in the botany,
that the plant is perennial and spreads by offsets and
runners, like the strawberry. This would of course
keep the two kinds in groups by themselves.

Another plant which has interesting ways and is
beautiful besides is the adder’s-tongue, or yellow
erythronium, the earliest of the lilies, and one of
the most pleasing. The April sunshine is fairly
reflected in its revolute flowers. The lilies have
bulbs that sit on or near the top of the ground. The
onion is a fair type of the lily in this respect. But
here is a lily with the bulb deep in the ground.

24 RIVERBY

How it gets there is well worth investigating. The
botany says the bulb is deep in the ground, but
offers no explanation. Now it is only the bulbs of
the older or flowering plants that are deep in the
ground. ‘The bulbs of the young plants are near
the top of the ground. The young plants have but
one leaf, the older or flowering ones have two. If
you happen to be in the woods at the right time in
early April, you may see these leaves compactly
rolled together, piercing the matted coating of sear
leaves that covers the ground like some sharp-
pointed instrument. They do not burst their cov--
ering or lift it up, but pierce through it like an
awl.

But how does the old bulb get so deep into the
ground? In digging some of them up one spring in
an old meadow bottom, I had to cleave the tough
fibrous sod to a depth of eight inches. The smaller
ones were barely two inches below the surface. Of
course they all started from the seed at the sur-
face of the soil. The young botanist, or nature-
lover, will find here a field for original research.
If, in late May or early June, after the leaves of
the plant have disappeared, he finds the ground
where they stood showing curious, looping, twisting
growths or roots, of a greenish white color, let him
examine them. ‘They are as smooth and as large
as an angle-worm, and very brittle. Both ends will
be found in the ground, one attached to the old
bulb, the other boring or drilling downward and en-
larged till it suggests the new bulb. I do not know —

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 25

that this mother root in all cases comes to the
surface. Why it should come at all is a mystery,
unless it be in some way to get more power for the
downward thrust. My own observations upon the
subject are not complete, but I think in the fore-
going I have given the clew as to how the bulb each
year sinks deeper and deeper into the ground.

It is a pity that this graceful and abundant flower
has no good and appropriate common name. It is
the earliest of the true lilies, and it has all the grace
and charm that belong to this order of flowers.
Erythronium, its botanical name, is not good, as it
is derived from a Greek word that means red, while
one species of our flower is yellow and the other is
white. How it came to be called adder’s-tongue
I do not know; probably from the spotted character
of the leaf, which might suggest a snake, though it
in no wise resembles a snake’s tongue. A fawn is
spotted, too, and “ fawn-lily ” would be better than
adder’s-tongue. Still better is the name “ trout-
lily,” which has recently been proposed for this
plant. It blooms along the trout streams, and its
leaf is as mottled as a trout’s back. The name
“ dog’s-tooth” may have been suggested by the
shape and color of the bud, but how the “ violet ”
came to be added is a puzzle, as it has not one
feature of the violet. It is only another illustra-
tion of the haphazard way in which our wild flow-
ers, as well as our birds, have been named.

In my spring rambles I have sometimes come
upon a solitary specimen of this yellow lily grow-

26 RIVERBY

ing beside a mossy stone where the sunshine fell full
upon it, and have thought it one of the most beauti-
ful of our wild flowers. Its two leaves stand up
like a fawn’s ears, and this feature, with its re-
curved petals, gives it an alert, wide-awake look.
The white species I have never seen. I am told
they are very abundant on the mountains in Cali-
fornia.

Another of our common wild flowers, which I
always look at with an interrogation-point in my
mind, is the wild ginger. Why should this plant
always hide its flower? Its two fuzzy, heart-shaped
green leaves stand up very conspicuously amid the
rocks or mossy stones; but its one curious, brown,
bell-shaped flower is always hidden beneath the
moss or dry leaves, as if too modest to face the
light of the open woods. As a rule, the one thing
which a plant is anxious to show and to make
much of, and to flaunt before all the world, is its
flower. But the wild ginger reverses the rule, and
blooms in secret. Instead of turning upward to-
ward the light and air, it turns downward toward
the darkness and the silence. It has no corolla,
but what the botanists call a lurid or brown-purple
calyx, which is conspicuous like a corolla. Its root
leaves in the mouth a taste precisely like that of
ginger.

This plant and the closed gentian are apparent
exceptions, in their manner of blooming, to the
general habit of the rest of our flowers. The closed
gentian does not hide its flower, but the corolla

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 27

never opens; it always remains a closed bud. I
used to think that this gentian could never experi-
ence the benefits of insect visits, which Darwin
showed us were of such importance in the vegetable
world. I once plucked one of the flowers into which
a bumblebee had forced his way, but he had never
come out; the flower was his tomb.

I am assured, however, by recent observers, that
the bumblebee does successfully enter the closed
corolla, and thus distribute its pollen.*

There is yet another curious exception which I
will mention, namely, the witch-hazel. All our
trees and plants bloom in the spring, except this
one species; this blooms in the fall. Just as its
leaves are fading and falling, its flowers appear,
giving out an odor along the bushy lanes and mar-
gins of the woods that is to the nose like cool water
to the hand. Why it should bloom in the fall in-
stead of in the spring is a mystery. And it is
probably because of this very curious trait that its
branches are used as divining-rods, by certain cred-
ulous persons, to point out where springs of water
and precious metals are hidden.

1 “A bumblebee came along and lit upon a cluster of asters.
Leaving these, it next visited a head of gentians, and with some
difficulty thrust its tongue through the valves of the nearest
blossom; then it pushed in its head and body until only the hind
legs and the tip of the abdomen were sticking out. In this
position it made the circuit of the blossom, and then emerged,
resting a moment to brush the pollen from its head and thorax
into the pollen-baskets, before flying again to a neighboring aster.
The whole process required about twenty seconds.” Ten New
England Blossoms and their Insect Visitors, CLARENCE MooRES
WEED, pp. 93, 94.

28 RIVERBY

Most young people find botany a dull study. So
it is, as taught from the text-books in the schools;
but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and
you will find it a source of perennial delight. Find
your flower, and then name it by the aid of the bot-
any. There is so much in a name. ‘To find out
what a thing is called is a great help. It is the
beginning of knowledge; it is the first step. When
we see a new person who interests us, we wish
to know his or her name. A bird, a flower, a place,
—the first thing we wish to know about it is its
name. Its name helps us to classify it; it gives
us a handle to grasp it by; it sheds a ray of light
where all before was darkness. As soon as we know
the name of a thing, we seem to have established
some sort of relation with it.

The other day, while the train was delayed by an
accident, I wandered a few yards away from it along
the river margin seeking wild flowers. Should I
find any whose name I did not know? While thus
loitering, a young English girl also left the train
and came in my direction, plucking the flowers right
and left as she came. But they were all unknown
to her; she did not know the name of one of them,
and she wished to send them home to her father,
too. With what satisfaction she heard the names!
The words seemed to be full of meaning to her,
though she had never heard them before in her life.
It was what she wanted: it was an introduction to
the flowers, and her interest in them increased at
once.

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 29

“That orange-colored flower which you just
plucked from the edge of the water, — that is our
jewel-weed,” I said.

“ Tt looks like a jewel,” she replied.

“ You have nothing like it in England, or did
not have till lately; but I hear it is now appearing
along certain English streams, having been brought
from this country.”

“ And what is this?” she inquired, holding up a
blue flower with a very bristly leaf and stalk.

“ That is viper’s bugloss, or blue-weed, a plant
from your side of the water, one that is making
itself thoroughly at home along the Hudson, and
in the valleys of some of its tributaries among the
Catskills. It is a rough, hardy weed, but its flower,
with its long, conspicuous purple stamens and blue
corolla, as you see, is very pretty.”

“ Here is another emigrant from across the At-
lantic,” I said, holding up a cluster of small white
flowers, each mounted upon a little inflated brown
bag or balloon, —the bladder campion. ‘ It also
runs riot in some of our fields, as I am sure you will
not see it at home.” She went on filling her hands
with flowers, and I gave her the names of each,
— sweet clover or melilotus, a foreign plant; ver-
vain (foreign) ; purple loosestrife (foreign) ; toad-flax
(foreign) ; chelone, or turtle-head, a native; and the
purple mimulus, or monkey-fiower, also a native.
It was a likely place for the cardinal-flower, but I
could not find any. I wanted this hearty English
girl to see one of our native wild flowers so intense

380 RIVERBY

in color that it would fairly make her eyes water to
gaze upon it.

Just then the whistle of the engine summoned
us all aboard, and in a moment we were off.

When one is stranded anywhere in the country
in the season of flowers or birds, if he feels any in-
terest in these things he always has something ready
at hand to fall back upon. And if he feels no in-
terest in them he will do well to cultivate an inter-
est. The tedium of an eighty-mile drive which I
lately took (in September), cutting through parts of
three counties, was greatly relieved by noting the
various flowers by the roadside. First my attention
was attracted by wild thyme making purple patches
here and there in the meadows and pastures. I got
out of the wagon and gathered some of it. I found
honey-bees working upon it, and remembered that
it was a famous plant for honey in parts of the Old
World. It had probably escaped from some gar-
den; I had never seen it growing wild in this way
before. Along the Schoharie Kill, I saw acres of
blue-weed, or viper’s bugloss, the hairy stems of
the plants, when looked at toward the sun, having
a frosted appearance.

What is this tall plant by the roadside, thickly
hung with pendent clusters of long purplish buds
or tassels? The stalk is four feet high, the lower
leaves are large and lobed, and the whole effect of
the plant is striking. The clusters of purple pend-
ents have a very decorative effect. This is a spe-
cies of nabalus, of the great composite family, and

AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS 31

is sometimes called lion’s-foot. The flower is cream-
colored, but quite inconspicuous. The noticeable
thing about it is the drooping or pendulous clusters
of what appear to be buds, but which are the in-
volucres, bundles of purple scales, like little staves,
out of which the flower emerges.

In another place I caught sight of something in-
tensely blue in a wet, weedy place, and, on getting
some of it, found it to be the closed gentian, a
flower to which I have already referred as never
opening, but always remaining a bud. Four or
five of these blue buds, each like the end of your
little finger and as long as the first joint, crown the
top of the stalk, set in a rosette of green leaves. It
is one of our rarer flowers, and a very interesting
one, well worth getting out of the wagon to gather.
As I drove through aswampy part of Ulster County,
my attention was attracted by a climbing plant over-
running the low bushes by the sluggish streams, and
covering them thickly with clusters of dull white
flowers. I did not remember ever to have seen it
before, and, on taking it home and examining it,
found it to be climbing boneset. The flowers are so
much like those of boneset that you would suspect
their relationship at once.

Without the name, any flower is still more or less
a stranger to you. The name betrays its family, its
relationship to other flowers, and gives the mind
something tangible to grasp. It is very difficult for
persons who have had no special training to learn the
names of the flowers from the botany. The botany

32 RIVERBY

is a sealed book to them. The descriptions of the
flowers are in a language which they do not under-
stand at all, And the key is no help to them. It
is as much a puzzle as the botany itself. They need
a key to unlock the key.

One of these days some one will give us a hand-
book of our wild flowers, by the aid of which we
shall all be able to name those we gather in our
walks without the trouble of analyzing them. In
this book we shall have a list of all our flowers
arranged according to color, as white flowers, blue
flowers, yellow flowers, pink flowers, etc., with
place of growth and time of blooming; also lists or
sub-lists of fragrant flowers, climbing flowers, marsh
flowers, meadow flowers, wood flowers, etc., so that,
with flower in hand, by running over these lists we
shall be pretty sure to find its name. Having got
its name, we can turn to Gray or Wood and find a
more technical description of it if we choose.

It
THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS

N looking at the southern and more distant
Catskills from the Hudson River on the east,

or on looking at them from the west from some
point of vantage in Delaware County, you see, amid
the-group of mountains, one that looks like the back
and shoulders of a gigantic horse. The horse has
got his head down grazing; the shoulders are high,
and the descent from them down his neck very
steep; if he were to lift up his head, one sees that’
it would be carried far above all other peaks, and
that the noble beast might gaze straight to his peers
in the Adirondacks or the White Mountains. But
the head and neck never come up; some spell or
enchantment keeps it down there amid the mighty
herd; and the high round shoulders and the smooth
strong back of the steed are alone visible. The
peak to which I refer is Slide Mountain, the high-
est of the Catskills by some two hundred feet, and
probably the most inaccessible; certainly the hardest
to get a view of, it is hedged about so completely by
other peaks, — the greatest mountain of them all,
and apparently the least willing to be seen; only
at a distance of thirty or forty miles is it seen to

34 RIVERBY

stand up above all other peaks. It takes its name
from a landslide which occurred many years ago
down its steep northern side, or down the neck of
the grazing steed. The mane of spruce and balsam
fir was stripped away for many hundred feet, leav-
ing a long gray streak visible from afar.

Slide Mountain is the centre and the chief of the
southern Catskills. Streams flow from its base, and
from the base of its subordinates, to all points of the
compass, — the Rondout and the Neversink to the
south; the Beaverkill to the west; the Esopus to
the north; and several lesser streams to the east.
With its summit as the centre, a radius of ten miles
would include within the circle described but very
little cultivated land; only a few poor, wild farms
in some of the numerous valleys. The soil is poor,
a mixture of gravel and clay, and is subject to slides.
It lies in the valleys in ridges and small hillocks,
as if dumped there from a huge cart. The tops of
the southern Catskills are all capped with a kind
of conglomerate, or “ pudden stone,” —a rock of
cemented quartz pebbles which underlies the coal
measures. This rock disintegrates under the action
of the elements, and the sand and gravel which re-
sult are carried into the valleys and make up the
most of the soil. From the northern Catskills, so
far as I know them, this rock has been swept clean.
Low down in the valleys the old red sandstone crops
out, and, as you go west into Delaware County, in
many places it alone remains and makes up most of
the soil, all the superincumbent rock having been
carried away.

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 35

Slide Mountain had been a summons and a chal-
lenge to me for many years. I had fished every
stream that it nourished, and had camped in the
wilderness on all sides of it, and whenever I had
caught a glimpse of its summit I had promised
myself to set foot there before another season had
passed. But the seasons came and went, and my
feet got no nimbler, and Slide Mountain no lower,
until finally, one July, seconded by an energetic
friend, we thought to bring Slide to terms by ap-
proaching him through the mountains on the east.
With a farmer’s son for guide we struck in by way
of Weaver Hollow, and, after a long and desperate
climb, contented ourselves with the Wittenberg, in-
stead of Slide. The view from the Wittenberg is
in many respects more striking, as you are perched
immediately above a broader and more distant sweep
of country, and are only about two hundred feet
lower. You are here on the eastern brink of the
southern Catskills, and the earth falls away at your
feet and curves down through an immense stretch
of forest till it joins the plain of Shokan, and thence
sweeps away to the Hudson and beyond. Slide is
southwest of you, six or seven miles distant, but
is visible only when you climb into a treetop. I
climbed and saluted him, and promised to call next
time.

We passed the night on the Wittenberg, sleeping
on the moss, between two decayed logs, with balsam
boughs thrust into the ground and meeting and form-
ing a canopy over us. In coming off the mountain

36 RIVERBY

in the morning we ran upon a huge porcupine, and
I learned for the first time that the tail of a porcu-
pine goes with a spring like a trap. It seems to be
a set-lock; and you no sooner touch with the weight
of a hair one of the quills, than the tail leaps up in
a most surprising manner, and the laugh is not on
your side. The beast cantered along the path in my
front, and I threw myself upon him, shielded by my
roll of blankets. He submitted quietly to the in-
dignity, and lay very still under my blankets, with
his broad tail pressed close to the ground. This I
proceeded to investigate, but had not fairly made a
beginning when it went off like a trap, and my hand
and wrist were full of quills. This caused me to let
up on the creature, when it lumbered away till it
tumbled down a precipice. The quills were quickly
removed from my hand, when we gave chase. When
we came up to him, he had wedged himself in be-
tween the rocks so that he presented only a back
bristling with quills, with the tail lying in ambush
below. He had chosen his position well, and seemed
to defy us. After amusing ourselves by repeatedly
springing his tail and receiving the quills in a rot-
ten stick, we made a slip-noose out of a spruce root,
and, after much manceuvring, got it over his head
and led him forth. In what a peevish, injured tone
the creature did complain of our unfair tactics! He
protested and protested, and whimpered and scolded
like some infirm old man tormented by boys. His
game after we led him forth was to keep himself as
much as possible in the shape of a ball, but with two

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 37

sticks and the cord we finally threw him over on his
back and exposed his quill-less and vulnerable under
side, when he fairly surrendered and seemed to say,
“ Now you may do with me as you like.” His
great chisel-like teeth, which are quite as formidable
as those of the woodchuck, he does not appear to use
at all in his defense, but relies entirely upon his
quills, and when those fail him he is done for.

After amusing ourselves with him awhile longer,
we released him and went on our way. The trail
to which we had committed ourselves led us down
into Woodland Valley, a retreat which so took my
eye by its fine trout brook, its superb mountain
scenery, and its sweet seclusion, that I marked it
for my own, and promised myself a return to it at no
distant day. This promise I kept, and pitched my
tent there twice during that season. Both occasions
were a sort of laying siege to Slide, but we only skir-
mished with him at a distance; the actual assault
was not undertaken. But the following year, rein-
forced by two other brave climbers, we determined
upon the assault, and upon making it from this the
most difficult side. The regular way is by Big In-
gin Valley, where the climb is comparatively easy,
and where it is often made by women. But from
Woodland Valley only men may essay the ascent.
Larkins is the upper inhabitant, and from our camp-
ing-ground near his clearing we set out early one
June morning.

One would think nothing could be easier to find
than a big mountain, especially when one is en-

38 RIVERBY

camped upon a stream which he knows springs out
of its very loins. But for some reason or other we
had got an idea that Slide Mountain was a very slip-
pery customer and must be approached cautiously.
We had tried from several points in the valley to
get a view of it, but were not quite sure we had seen
its very head. When on the Wittenberg, a neigh-
boring peak, the year before, I had caught a brief
glimpse of it only by climbing a dead tree and cran-
ing up for a moment from its topmost branch. It
would seem as if the mountain had taken every pre-
caution to shut itself off from a near view. It was
a shy mountain, and we were about to stalk it
through six or seven miles of primitive woods, and
we seemed to have some unreasonable fear that it
might elude us. We had been told of parties who
had essayed the ascent from this side, and had re-
turned baffled and bewildered. In a tangle of prim-
itive woods, the very bigness of the mountain baffles
one. It is all mountain; whichever way you turn
—and one turns sometimes in such cases before he
knows it — the foot finds a steep and rugged ascent.

The eye is of little service; one must be sure of
his bearings and push boldly on and up. One is
not unlike a flea upon a great shaggy beast, looking
for the animal’s head; or even like a much smaller
and much less nimble creature, — he may waste his
time and steps, and think he has reached the head
when he is only upon the rump. Hence I ques-
tioned our host, who had several times made the
ascent, closely. Larkins laid his old felt hat upon

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 39

the table, and, placing one hand upon one side and
the other upon the other, said: “‘ There Slide lies,
between the two forks of the stream, just as my hat
lies between my two hands. David will go with you
to the forks, and then you will push right on up.”
But Larkins was not right, though he had traversed
all those mountains many times over. The peak we
were about to set out for did not lie between the
forks, but exactly at the head of one of them; the
beginnings of the stream are in the very path of the
slide, as we afterward found. We broke camp early
in the morning, and with our blankets strapped to
our backs and rations in our pockets for two days,
set out along an ancient and in places an obliterated
bark road that followed and crossed and recrossed
the stream. The morning was bright and warm, but
the wind was fitful and petulant, and I predicted
rain, What a forest solitude our obstructed and
dilapidated wood-road led us through! five miles of
primitive woods before we came to the forks, three
miles before we came to the “ burnt shanty,” a name
merely, —no shanty there now for twenty-five years
past. The ravages of the bark-peelers were still vis-
ible, now in a space thickly strewn with the soft
and decayed trunks of hemlock-trees, and overgrown
with wild cherry, then in huge mossy logs scattered
through the beech and maple woods; some of these
logs were so soft and mossy that one could sit or
recline upon them as upon a sofa.

But the prettiest thing was the stream soliloquiz-
ing in such musical tones there amid the moss-covered

40 RIVERBY

rocks and boulders. How clean it looked, what pu-
rity! Civilization corrupts the streams as it corrupts
the Indian; only in such remote woods can you now
see a brook in all its original freshness and beauty.
Only the sea and the mountain forest brook are pure;
all between is contaminated more or less by the work
of man. An ideal trout brook was this, now hurry-
ing, now loitering, now deepening around a great
boulder, now gliding evenly over a pavement of
green-gray stone and pebbles; no sediment or stain
of any kind, but white and sparkling as snow-water,
and nearly as cool. Indeed, the water of all this
Catskill region is the best in the world. For the
first few days, one feels as if he could almost live on
the water alone; he cannot drink enough of it. In
this particular it is indeed the good Bible land, “a
land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that
spring out of valleys and hills.”

Near the forks we caught, or thought we caught,
through an opening, a glimpse of Slide. Was it
Slide? was it the head, or the rump, or the shoulder
of the shaggy monster we were in quest of? At the
forks there was a bewildering maze of underbrush
and great trees, and the way did not seem at all cer-
tain; nor was David, who was then at the end of his
reckoning, able to reassure us. But in assaulting a
mountain, as in assaulting a fort, boldness is the
watchword. We pressed forward, following a line
of blazed trees for nearly a mile, then, turning to the
left, began the ascent of the mountain. It was steep,
hard climbing. We saw numerous marks of both

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 41

bears and deer; but no birds, save at long intervals
the winter wren flitting here and there, and darting
under logs and rubbish like a mouse. Occasionally
its gushing, lyrical song would break the silence.
After we had climbed an hour or two, the clouds
began to gather, and presently the rain began to
come down. This was discouraging; but we put our
backs up against trees and rocks, and waited for the
shower to pass.

“They were wet with the showers of the moun-
tain, and embraced the rocks for want of shelter,”
as they did in Job’s time. But the shower was
light and brief, and we were soon under way again.
Three hours from the forks brought us out on the
broad level back of the mountain upon which Slide,
considered as an isolated peak, is reared. After a
time we entered a dense growth of spruce which cov-
ered a slight depression in the table of the mountain.
The moss was deep, the ground spongy, the light
dim, the air hushed. The transition from the open,
leafy woods to this dim, silent, weird grove was
very marked. It was like the passage from the
street into the temple. Here we paused awhile and
ate our lunch, and refreshed ourselves with water
gathered from a little well sunk in the moss.

The quiet and repose of this spruce grove proved
to be the calm that goes before the storm. As we
passed out of it, we came plump upon the almost
perpendicular battlements of Slide. The mountain
rose like a huge, rock-bound fortress from this plain-
like expanse. It was ledge upon ledge, precipice

42 RIVERBY

upon precipice, up which and over which we made
our way slowly and with great labor, now pulling
ourselves up by our hands, then cautiously finding
niches for our feet and zigzagging right and left from
shelf to shelf. This northern side of the mountain
was thickly covered with moss and lichens, like the
north side of a tree. This made it soft to the foot,
and broke many a slip and fall. Everywhere a
stunted growth of yellow birch, mountain ash, and
spruce and fir opposed our progress. The ascent at
such an angle with a roll of blankets on your back
is not unlike climbing a tree: every limb resists your
progress and pushes you back; so that when we at
last reached the summit, after twelve or fifteen hun-
dred feet of this sort of work, the fight was about
all out of the best of us. It was then nearly two
o’clock, so that we had been about seven hours in
» coming seven miles.

Here on the top of the mountain we overtook
spring, which had been gone from the valley nearly
a month. Red clover was opening in the valley be-
low, and wild strawberries just ripening; on the
summit the yellow birch was just hanging out its
catkins, and the claytonia, or spring-beauty, was in
bloom. The leaf-buds of the trees were just burst-
ing, making a faint mist of green, which, as the eye
swept downward, gradually deepened until it be-
came a dense, massive cloud in the valleys. At the
foot of the mountain the clintonia, or northern green
lily, and the low shad-bush were showing their ber-
ries, but long before the top was reached they were

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 48

found in bloom. I had never before stood amid
blooming claytonia, a flower of April, and looked
down upon a field that held ripening strawberries.
Every thousand feet elevation seemed to make about
ten days’ difference in the vegetation, so that the
season was a month or more later on the top of the
mountain than at its base. A very pretty flower
which we began to meet with well up on the moun-
tain-side was the painted trillium, the petals white,
veined with pink.

The low, stunted growth of spruce and fir which
clothes the top of Slide has been cut away over a
small space on the highest point, laying open the
view on nearly all sides. Here we sat down and
enjoyed our triumph. We saw the world as the
hawk or the balloonist sees it when he is three thou-
sand feet in the air. How soft and flowing all the
outlines of the hills and mountains beneath us looked!
The forests dropped down and undulated away over
them, covering them like a carpet. To the east we
looked over the near-by Wittenberg range to the
Hudson and beyond; to the south, Peak-o’-Moose,
with its sharp crest, and Table Mountain, with its
long level top, were the two conspicuous objects;
in the west, Mt. Graham and Double Top,- about
three thousand eight hundred feet each, arrested the
eye; while in our front to the north we looked over
the top of Panther Mountain to the multitudinous
peaks of the northern Catskills. All was mountain
and forest on every hand. Civilization seemed to
have done little more than to have scratched this

44 RIVERBY

rough, shaggy surface of the earth here and there.
In any such view, the wild, the aboriginal, the geo-
graphical greatly predominate. The works of man
dwindle, and the original features of the huge globe
come out. Every single object or point is dwarfed ;
the valley of the Hudson is only a wrinkle in the
earth’s surface. You discover with a feeling of
surprise that the great thing is the earth itself, which
stretches away on every hand so far beyond your ken.

The Arabs believe that the mountains steady the
earth and hold it together; but they had only to
get on the top of a high one to see how insignificant
they are, and how adequate the earth looks to get
along without them. To the imaginative Oriental
people, mountains seemed to mean much more than
they do to us. They were sacred; they were the
abodes of their divinities. They offered their sac-
rifices upon them. In the Bible, mountains are used
as a symbol of that which is great and holy. Jeru-
salem is spoken of asa holy mountain. The Syrians
were beaten by the Children of Israel because, said
they, “their gods are gods of the hills; therefore
were they stronger than we.” It was on Mount
Horeb that God appeared to Moses in the burning
bush, and on Sinai that he delivered to him the law.
Josephus says that the Hebrew shepherds never
pasture their flocks on Sinai, believing it to be the
abode of Jehovah. The solitude of mountain-tops
is peculiarly impressive, and it is certainly easier
to believe the Deity appeared in a burning bush
there than in the valley below. When the clouds

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 45

of heaven, too, come down and envelop the top of
the mountain, — how such a circumstance must have
impressed the old God-fearing Hebrews! Moses knew
well how to surround the law with the pomp and
circumstance that would inspire the deepest awe and
reverence. ;

But when the clouds came down and enveloped
us on Slide Mountain, the grandeur, the solemnity,
were gone in a twinkling; the portentous-looking
clouds proved to be nothing but base fog that wet
us and extinguished the world for us. How tame,
and prosy, and humdrum the scene instantly became!
But when the fog lifted, and we looked from under
it as from under a just-raised lid, and the eye
plunged again like an escaped bird into those vast
gulfs of space that opened at our feet, the feeling of
grandeur and solemnity quickly came back.

The first want we felt on the top of Slide, after
we had got some rest, was a want of water. Several
of us cast about, right and left, but no sign of water
was found. But water must be had, so we all
started off deliberately to hunt it up. We had not
gone many hundred yards before we chanced upon
an ice-cave beneath some rocks, — vast masses of ice,
with crystal pools of water near. This was good
luck, indeed, and put a new and brighter face on the
situation.

Slide Mountain enjoys a distinction which no other
mountain in the State, so far as is known, does, —
it has a thrush peculiar to itself. This thrush was
discovered and described by Eugene P. Bicknell, of

46 RIVERBY

New York, in 1880, and has been named Bicknell’s
thrush. A better name would have been Slide Moun-
tain thrush, as the bird so far has only been found
on the mountain.! I did not see or hear it upon the
Wittenberg, which is only a few miles distant, and
only two hundred feet lower. In its appearance to
the eye among the trees, one would not distinguish it
from the gray-cheeked thrush of Baird, or the olive-
backed thrush, but its song is totally different. The
moment I heard it I said, ‘‘ There is a new bird, a
new thrush,” as the quality of all thrush songs is
the same. A moment more, and I knew it was
Bicknell’s thrush. The song is in a minor key, finer,
more attenuated, and more under the breath than
that of any other thrush. It seemed as if the bird
was blowing in a delicate, slender, golden tube, so
fine and yet so flute-like and resonant the song ap-
peared. At times it was like a musical whisper of
great sweetness and power. The birds were numer-
ous about the summit, but we saw them nowhere
else. No other thrush was seen, though a few
times during our stay I caught a mere echo of the
hermit’s song far down the mountain-side. A bird
I was not prepared to see or hear was the black-poll
warbler, a bird usually found much farther north,
but here it was, amid the balsam firs, uttering its
simple, lisping song.

The rocks on the tops of these mountains are quite

1 Bicknell’s thrush turns out to be the more southern form of

the gray-cheeked thrush, and is found on the higher mountains
of New York and New England.

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 47

sure to attract one’s attention, even if he have no
eye for such things. They are masses of light red-
dish conglomerate, composed of round wave-worn
quartz pebbles. Every pebble had been shaped and
polished upon some ancient seacoast, probably the
Devonian. The rock disintegrates where it is most
exposed to the weather, and forms a loose sandy and
pebbly soil. These rocks form the floor of the coal
formation, but in the Catskill region only the floor
remains; the superstructure has never existed, or has
been swept away; hence one would look for a coal
mine here over his head in the air, rather than
under his feet.

This rock did not have to climb up here as we
did; the mountain stooped and took it upon its back
in the bottom of the old seas, and then got lifted up
again. This happened so long ago that the memory
of the oldest inhabitant of these parts yields no clue
to the time.

A pleasant task we had in reflooring and reroofing
the log-hut with balsam boughs against the night.
Plenty of small balsams grew all about, and we soon
had a huge pile of their branches in the old hut.
What a transformation, this fresh green carpet and
our fragrant bed, like the deep-furred robe of some
huge animal wrought in that dingy interior! Two
or three things disturbed our sleep. A cup of strong
beef-tea taken for supper disturbed mine; then the
porcupines kept up such a grunting and chattering
near our heads, just on the other side of the log, that
sleep was difficult. In my wakeful mood I was a

48 RIVERBY

good deal annoyed by a little rabbit that kept whip-
ping in at our dilapidated door and nibbling at our
bread and hardtack. He persisted even after the
gray of the morning appeared. Then about four
o’clock it began gently to rain. I think I heard the
first drop that fell. My companions were all in
sound sleep. The rain increased, and gradually the
sleepers awoke. It was like the tread of an advan-
cing enemy which every ear had been expecting.
The roof over us was of the poorest, and we had
no confidence in it. It was made of the thin bark of
spruce and balsam, and was full of hollows and de-
pressions. Presently these hollows got full of water,
when there was a simultaneous downpour of bigger
and lesser rills upon the sleepers beneath. Said
sleepers, as one man, sprang up, each taking his blan-
ket with him; but by the time some of the party had
got themselves stowed away under the adjacent rock,
the rain ceased. It was little more than the dis-
solving of the nightcap of fog which so often hangs
about these heights. With the first appearance of
the dawn I had heard the new thrush in the scattered
trees near the hut, —a strain as fine as if blown upon
a fairy flute, a suppressed musical whisper from out
the tops of the dark spruces. Probably never did
there go up from the top of a great mountain a
smaller song to greet the day, albeit it was of the
purest harmony. It seemed to have in a more
marked degree the quality of interior reverberation
than any other thrush song I had ever heard. Would
the altitude or the situation account for its minor

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 49

key? Loudness would avail little in such a place.
Sounds are not far heard on a mountain-top; they
are lost in the abyss of vacant air. But amid these
low, dense, dark spruces, which make a sort of can-
opied privacy of every square rod of ground, what
could be more in keeping than this delicate musical
whisper? It was but the soft hum of the balsams,
interpreted and embodied in a bird’s voice.

It was the plan of two of our companions to go
from Slide over into the head of the Rondout, and
thence out to the railroad at the little village of
Shokan, an unknown way to them, involving nearly
an all-day pull the first day through a pathless wil-
derness. We ascended to the topmost floor of the
tower, and from my knowledge of the topography
of the country I pointed out to them their course,
and where the valley of the Rondout must lie. The
vast stretch of woods, when it came into view from
under the foot of Slide, seemed from our point of
view very uniform. It swept away to the southeast,
rising gently toward the ridge that separates Lone
Mountain from Peak-o’-Moose, and presented a com-
paratively easy problem. Asa clue to the course,
the line where the dark belt or saddle-cloth of spruce,
which covered the top of the ridge they were to skirt,
ended, and the deciduous woods began, a sharp, well-
defined line was pointed out as the course to be fol-
lowed. It led straight to the top of the broad level-
backed ridge which connected two higher peaks, and
immediately behind which lay the headwaters of the
Rondout. Having studied the map thoroughly, and

50 RIVERBY

possessed. themselves of the points, they rolled up
their blankets about nine o’clock, and were off, my
friend and myself purposing to spend yet another
day and night on Slide. As our friends plunged
down into that fearful abyss, we shouted to them the
old classic caution, “ Be bold, be bold, be not too
bold.” It required courage to make such a leap into
the unknown, as I knew those young men were mak-
ing, and it required prudence. A. faint heart or a
bewildered head, and serious consequences might
have resulted. The theory of a thing is so much
easier than the practice! The theory is in the air,
the practice is in the woods; the eye, the thought,
travel easily where the foot halts and stumbles,
However, our friends made the theory and the fact
coincide; they kept the dividing line between the
spruce and the birches, and passed over the ridge
into the valley safely ; but they were torn and bruised
and wet by the showers, and made the last few miles
of their journey on will and pluck alone, their last
pound of positive strength having been exhausted in
making the descent through the chaos of rocks and
logs into the head of the valley. In such emergen-
cies one overdraws his account; he travels on the
credit of the strength he expects to gain when he
gets his dinner and some sleep. Unless one has
made such a trip himself (and I have several times
in my life), he can form but a faint idea what it is
like, — what a trial it is tothe body, and what a trial
it is to the mind. You are fighting a battle with
an enemy in ambush. How those miles and leagues

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 51

which your feet must compass lie hidden there in
that wilderness; how they seem to multiply them-
selves; how they are fortified with logs, and rocks,
and fallen trees; how they take refuge in deep gul-
lies, and skulk behind unexpected eminences! Your
body not only feels the fatigue of the battle, your
mind feels the strain of the undertaking; you may
miss your mark; the mountains may outmanceuvre
you. All that day, whenever I looked upon that
treacherous wilderness, I thought with misgivings
of those two friends groping their way there, and
would have given something to have known how
it fared with them. Their concern was probably
less than my own, because they were more ignorant
of what was before them. Then there was just a
slight shadow of a fear in my mind that I might
have been in error about some points of the geogra-
phy I had pointed out to them. But all was well,
and the victory was won according to the campaign
which I had planned. When we saluted our friends
upon their own doorstep a week afterward, the
wounds were nearly all healed and the rents all
mended.

When one is on a mountain-top, he spends most
of the time in looking at the show he has been at
such pains to see. About every hour we would as-
cend the rude lookout to take a fresh observation.
With a glass I could see my native hills forty miles
away to the northwest. I was now upon the back
of the horse, yea, upon the highest point of his
shoulders, which had so many times attracted my

52 RIVERBY

attention as a boy. We could look along his balsam-
covered back to his rump, from which the eye glanced
away down into the forests of the Neversink, and on
the other hand plump down into the gulf where his
head was grazing or drinking. During the day there
was a grand procession of thunder-clouds filing along
over the northern Catskills, and letting down veils
of rain and enveloping them. From such an eleva-
tion one has the same view of the clouds that he does
from the prairie or the ocean. They do not seem to
rest across and to be upborne by the hills, but they
emerge out of the dim west, thin and vague, and
grow and stand up as they get nearer and roll by
him, ona level but invisible highway, huge chariots
of wind and storm.

In the afternoon a thick cloud threatened us, but
it proved to be the condensation of vapor that an-
nounces a cold wave. There was soon a marked fall
in the temperature, and as night drew near it became
pretty certain that we were going to have a cold time
of it. The wind rose, the vapor above us thickened
and came nearer, until it began to drive across the
summit in slender wraiths, which curled over the
brink and shut out the view. We became very dili-
gent in getting in our night wood, and in gathering
more boughs to calk up the openings in the hut.
The wood we scraped together was a sorry lot, roots
and stumps and branches of decayed spruce, such as
we could collect without an axe, and some rags and
tags of birch bark. The fire was built in one corner
of the shanty, the smoke finding easy egress through

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 53

large openings on the east side and in the roof over
it. We doubled up the bed, making it thicker and
more nest-like, and as darkness set in, stowed our-
selves into it beneath our blankets. The searching
wind found out every crevice about our heads and
shoulders, and it was icy cold. Yet we fell asleep,
and had slept about an hour when my companion
sprang up in an unwonted state of excitement for so
placid a man. His excitement was occasioned by the
sudden discovery that what appeared to be a bar of
ice was fast taking the place of his backbone. His
teeth chattered, and he was convulsed with ague. I
advised him to replenish the fire, and to wrap him-
self in his blanket and cut the liveliest capers he was
capable of in so circumscribed a place. This he
promptly did, and the thought of his wild and des-
perate dance there in the dim light, his tall form,
his blanket flapping, his teeth chattering, the por-
cupines outside marking time with their squeals and
grunts, still provokes a smile, though it was a seri-
ous enough matter at the time. After a while, the
warmth came back to him, but he dared not trust
himself again to the boughs; he fought the cold all
night as one might fight a besieging foe. By care-
fully husbanding the fuel, the beleaguering enemy
was kept at bay till morning came; but when morn-
ing did come, even the huge root he had used as a
chair was consumed. Rolled in my blanket beneath
a foot or more of balsam boughs, I had got some
fairly good sleep, and was most of the time oblivi-
ous to the melancholy vigil of my friend. As we

54 RIVERBY

had but a few morsels of food left, and had been on
rather short rations the day before, hunger was added
to his other discomforts. At that time a letter was
on the way to him from his wife, which contained
this prophetic sentence: ‘“ I hope thee is not suffer-
ing with cold and hunger on some lone mountain-
top.”

Mr. Bickuell’s thrush struck up again at the first
signs of dawn, notwithstanding the cold. I could
hear his penetrating and melodious whisper as I lay
buried beneath the boughs. Presently I arose and
invited my friend to turn in for a brief nap, while
I gathered some wood and set the coffee brewing.
With a brisk, roaring fire on, I left for the spring
to fetch some water, and to make my toilet. The
leaves of the mountain goldenrod, which everywhere
covered the ground in the opening, were covered
with frozen particles of vapor, and the scene, shut
in by fog, was chill and dreary enough.

We were now not long in squaring an account with
Slide, and making ready to leave. Round pellets of
snow began to fall, and we came off the mountain
on the 10th of June in a November storm and tem-
perature. Our purpose was to return by the same
valley we had come. A well-defined trail led off
the summit to the north; to this we committed our-
selves. In a few minutes we emerged at the head
of the slide that had given the mountain its name.
This was the path made by visitors to the scene;
when it ended, the track of the avalanche began; no
bigger than your hand, apparently, had it been at

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 55

first, but it rapidly grew, until it became several
rods in width. It dropped down from our feet
straight as an arrow until it was lost in the fog,
and looked perilously steep. The dark forms of the
spruce were clinging to the edge of it, as if reaching
out to their fellows to save them. We hesitated on
the brink, but finally cautiously began the descent.
The rock was quite naked and slippery, and only on
the margin of the slide were there any boulders to
stay the foot, or bushy growths to aid the hand. As
we paused, after some minutes, to select our course,
one of the finest surprises of the trip awaited us:
the fog in our front was swiftly whirled up by the
breeze, like the drop-curtain at the theatre, only
much more rapidly, and in a twinkling the vast gulf
opened before us. It was so sudden as to be almost
bewildering. The world opened like a book, and
there were the pictures; the spaces were without a
film, the forests and mountains looked surprisingly
near; in the heart of the northern Catskills a wild
valley was seen flooded with sunlight. Then the
curtain ran down again, and nothing was left but
the gray strip of rock to which we clung, plunging
down into the obscurity. Down and down we made
our way. Then the fog lifted again. It was Jack
and his beanstalk renewed; new wonders, new views,
awaited us every few moments, till at last the whole
valley below us stood in the clear sunshine. We
passed down a precipice, and there was arill of water,
the beginning of the creek that wound through the
valley below; farther on, in a deep depression, lay

56 RIVERBY

the remains of an old snow-bank; Winter had made
his last stand here, and April flowers were spring-
ing up almost amid his very bones. We did not
find a palace, and a hungry giant, and a princess,
etc., at the end of our beanstalk, but we found a
humble roof and the hospitable heart of Mrs. Lar-
kins, which answered our purpose better. And we
were in the mood, too, to have undertaken an eat-
ing bout with any giant Jack ever discovered.

Of all the retreats I have found amid the Cats-
kills, there is no other that possesses quite so many
charms for me as this valley, wherein stands Lar-
kins’s humble dwelling; it is so wild, so quiet, and
has such superb mountain views. In coming up the
valley, you have apparently reached the head of civ-
ilization a mile or more lower down; here the rude
little houses end, and you turn to the left into the
woods. Presently you emerge into a clearing again,
and before you rises the rugged and indented crest
of Panther Mountain, and near at hand, on a low
plateau, rises the humble roof of Larkins, — you get
a picture of the Panther and of the homestead at one
glance. Above the house hangs a high, bold cliff
covered with forest, with a broad fringe of blackened
and blasted tree-trunks, where the cackling of the
great pileated woodpecker may be heard; on the left
a dense forest sweeps up to the sharp spruce-covered
cone of the Wittenberg, nearly four thousand feet
high, while at the head of the valley rises Slide
over all. From a meadow just back of Larkins’s
barn, a view may be had of all these mountains,

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 57

while the terraced side of Cross Mountain bounds
the view immediately to the east. Running from
the top of Panther toward Slide one sees a gigantic
wall of rock, crowned with a dark line of fir. The
forest abruptly ends, and in its stead rises the face
of this colossal rocky escarpment, like some bar-
tier built by the mountain gods. Eagles might nest
here. It breaks the monotony of the world of woods
very impressively.

I delight in sitting on a rock in one of these upper
fields, and seeing the sun go down behind Panther.
The rapid-flowing brook below me fills all the val-
ley with a soft murmur. There is no breeze, but
the great atmospheric tide flows slowly in toward
the cooling forest; one can see it by the motes in the
air illuminated by the setting sun: presently, as the
air cools a little, the tide turns and flows slowly out.
The long, winding valley up to the foot of Slide,
five miles of primitive woods, how wild and cool it
looks, its one voice the murmur of the creek! On
the Wittenberg the sunshine lingers long; now it
stands up like an island in a sea of shadows, then
slowly sinks beneath the wave. The evening call
of a robin or a thrush at his vespers makes a marked
impression on the silence and the solitude.

The following day my friend and I pitched our
tent in the woods beside the stream where I had
pitched it twice before, and passed several delightful
days, with trout in abundance and wild strawberries
at intervals. Mrs, Larkins’s cream-pot, butter-jar,
and bread-box were within easy reach. Near the

58 RIVERBY

camp was an unusually large spring, of icy coldness,
which served as our refrigerator. Trout or milk im-
mersed in this spring in a tin pail would keep sweet
four or five days. One night some creature, prob-
ably a lynx or a raccoon, came and lifted the stone
from the pail that held the trout and took out a fine
string of them, and ate them up on the spot, leay-
ing only the string and one head. In August bears
come down to an ancient and now brushy bark-
peeling near by for blackberries. But the creature
that most infests these backwoods is the porcupine.
He is as stupid and indifferent as the skunk; his
broad, blunt nose points a witless head. They are
great gnawers, and will gnaw your house down if
you do not look out. Of a summer evening they
will walk coolly into your open door if not prevented.
The most annoying animal to the camper-out in this
region, and the one he needs to be most on the look-
out for, is the cow. Backwoods cows and young
cattle seem always to be famished for salt, and they
will fairly lick the fisherman’s clothes off his back,
and his tent and equipage out of existence, if you
give them a chance. On one occasion some wood-
ranging heifers and steers that had been hovering
around our camp for some days made a raid upon it
when we were absent. The tent was shut and
everything snugged up, but they ran their long
tongues under the tent, and, tasting something sa-
vory, hooked out John Stuart Mill’s “Essays on Re-
ligion,” which one of us had brought along, think-
ing to read in the woods. They mouthed the volume

THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS 59

around a good deal, but its logic was too tough for
them, and they contented themselves with devour-
ing the paper in which it was wrapped. If the cat-
tle had not been surprised at just that point, it is
probable the tent would have gone down before their
eager curiosity and thirst for salt.

The raid which Larkins’s dog made upon our
camp was amusing rather than annoying. He was a
very friendly and intelligent shepherd dog, probably
a collie. Hardly had we sat down to our first lunch
in camp before he called on us. But as he was dis-
posed to be too friendly, and to claim too large a
share of the lunch, we rather gave him the cold
shoulder. He did not come again; but a few even-
ings afterward, as we sauntered over to the house on
some trifling errand, the dog suddenly conceived a
bright little project. He seemed to say to himself,
on seeing us, “ There come both of them now, just
as Ihave been hoping they would; now, while they
are away, I will run quickly over and know what
they have got that a dog can eat.” My companion
saw the dog get up on our arrival, and go quickly in
the direction of our camp, and he said something in
the cur’s manner suggested to him the object of his
hurried departure. He called my attention to the
fact, and we hastened back. On cautiously nearing
camp, the dog was seen amid the pails in the shal-
low water of the creek investigating them. He had
uncovered the butter, and was about to taste it,
when we shouted, and he made quick steps for
home, with a very “ kill-sheep” look. When we

60 RIVERBY

again met him at the house next day he could not
look us in the face, but sneaked off, utterly crest-
fallen. This was a clear case of reasoning on the
part of the dog, and afterward a clear case of a sense
of guilt from wrong-doing. The dog will probably
be a man before any other animal.

TII
BIRDS’ EGGS

DMIRE the bird’s egg and leave it in its

nest” is a wiser forbearance than “Love

the wood-rose and leave it on its stalk.” We will

try to leave these eggs in the nest, and as far as
possible show the bird and the nest with them.

The first egg of spring is undoubtedly a hen’s
egg. The domestic fowls, not being compelled to
shift for themselves, and having artificial shelter,
are not so mindful of the weather and the seasons as
the wild birds. But the hen of the woods and the
hen of the prairie, namely, the ruffed and the pin-
nated grouse, do not usually nest till the season is so
far advanced that danger from frost is past.

The first wild egg, in New York and New Eng-
land, is probably that of an owl, the great horned
owl, it is said, laying as early as March. They
probably shelter their eggs from the frost and the
snow before incubation begins. The little screech
owl waits till April, and seeks the deep snug cavity
of an old tree; the heart of a decayed apple-tree
suits him well. Begin your search by the middle of
April, and before the month is past you will find the
four white, round eggs resting upon a little dry

62 RIVERBY

grass or a few dry leaves in the bottom of a long cay-
ity. Owls’ eggs are inclined to be spherical. You
would expect to see a big, round-headed, round-eyed
creature come out of such an egg.

The passenger pigeon nests before danger from
frost is passed; but as it lays but two eggs, probably
in two successive days, the risks from this source
are not great, though occasionally a heavy April
snow-storm breaks them up.

Which is the earliest song-bird’s egg? One can-
not be quite so certain here, as he can as to which
the first wild flower is, for instance; but I would
take my chances on finding that of the phcebe-bird
first, and finding it before the close of April, unless
the season is very backward. The present season
(1883) a pair built their nest under the eaves of my
house, and deposited their eggs, the last days of the
month. Some English sparrows that had been hang-
ing around, and doubtless watching the pheebes,
threw the eggs out and took possession of the nest.
How shrewd and quick to take the hint these little
feathered John Bulls are! With a handful of rat-
tling pebble-stones I told this couple very plainly
that they were not welcome visitors to my premises.
They fled precipitately. The next morning they
appeared again, but were much shyer. Another dis-
charge of pebbles, and they were off as if bound
for the protection of the British flag, and did not
return. I notice wherever I go that these birds
have got a suspicion in their heads that public opin-
ion has changed with regard to them, and that they
are no longer wanted.

BIRDS’ EGGS 63

The eggs of the phosbe-bird are snow-white, and
when, in threading the gorge of some mountain
trout brook, or prowling about some high, over-
hanging ledge, one’s eye falls upon this mossy struc-
ture planted with such matchless art upon a little
shelf of the rocks, with its complement of five or six
pearl-like eggs, he is ready to declare it the most
pleasing nest in all the range of our bird architecture.
It was such a happy thought for the bird to build
there, just out of the reach of all four-footed beasts
of prey, sheltered from the storms and winds, and,
by the use of moss and lichens, blending its nest so
perfectly with its surroundings that only the most
alert eye can detect it. An egg upon a rock, and
thriving there, — the frailest linked to the strong-
est, as if the geology of the granite mountain had
been bent into the service of the bird. I doubt if
crows, or jays, or owls ever rob these nests. Phoebe
has outwitted them. They never heard of the bird
that builded its house upon a rock. “ Strong is thy
dwelling-place, and thou puttest thy nest in a rock.”

The song sparrow sometimes nests in April, but
not commonly in our latitude. Emerson says, in
“ May-Day: ”—

“The sparrow meek, prophetic-eyed,
Her nest beside the snow-drift weaves,

Secure the osier yet will hide
Her callow brood in mantling leaves.”

But the sparrow usually prefers to wait till the snow-
drift is gone. JI have never found the nest of one
till long after the last drift had disappeared from
the fields, though a late writer upon New England

64 RIVERBY

birds says the sparrow sometimes lays in April, when
snow is yet upon the ground.

The sparrow is not a beautiful bird except in our
affections and associations, and its eggs are not beauti-
ful as eggs go, — four or five little freckled spheres,
that, like the bird itself, blend well with the ground
upon which they are placed.

The eggs of the “chippie,” or social sparrow, are
probably the most beautiful of sparrow eggs, being
of a bright bluish green with a ring of dark purple ©
spots around the larger end.

Generally there is but little relation between the
color of the bird and the color of its egg. For the
most part, the eggs of birds that occupy open, ex-
posed nests are of some tint that harmonizes well
with the surroundings. With the addition of specks
of various hue, they are rendered still less conspicu-
ous. The eggs of the scarlet tanager are greenish
blue, with faint brown or purplish markings. The
blackbird lays a greenish blue egg also, with various
markings. Indeed, the favorite ground tint of the
birds that build open nests is a greenish blue; some-
times the blue predominates, sometimes the green;
while the eggs of birds that build concealed nests,
or lay in dark cavities, are generally white, as the
eggs of the various woodpeckers, chickadees, and
nuthatches. The eggs of the bluebird are bluish
white.

Among the flycatchers, the nest of the pheebe is
most concealed, at least from above, and her eggs
are white, while those of nearly all the other species

BIRDS’ EGGS 65

are more or less tinted and marked. The eggs of
the hummingbird are white, but the diminutiveness
of their receptacle is a sufficient concealment. An-
other white egg is that of the kingfisher, deposited
upon fish-bones at the end of a hole in the bank
eight or nine feet long. The bank swallow also lays
white eggs, as does the chimney swallow, the white-
bellied swallow, and the purple martin, The eggs
of the barn swallow and cliff swallow are more or
less speckled. In England the kingfisher (smaller
and much more brilliantly colored than ours), wood-
peckers, the bank swallow, the swift, the wryneck
(related to the woodpecker), and the dipper also
lay white eggs.

A marked exception to the above rule is furnished
by the eggs of the Baltimore oriole, perhaps the most
fantastically marked of all our birds’ eggs. One
would hardly expect a plainly marked egg in such
a high-swung, elaborately woven, deeply pouched,
aristocratic nest. The threads and strings and horse-
hairs with which the structure is sewed and bound
and stayed are copied in the curious lines and mark-
ings of the treasures it holds. After the oriole is
through with its nest, it is sometimes taken posses-
sion of by the house wren in which to rear its second
brood. The long, graceful cavity, with its fine car-
pet of hair, is filled with coarse twigs, as if one were
to build a log hut in a palace, and the rusty-colored
eggs of the little busybody deposited there. The
wren would perhaps stick to its bundle of small
fagots in the box or pump tree, and rear its second

66 RIVERBY

brood in the cradle of the first, were it not that by
seeking new lodgings time can be saved. The male
bird builds and furnishes the second nest, and the
mother bird has begun to lay in it before the first is
empty.

The chatter of a second brood of nearly fledged
wrens is heard now (August 20) in an oriole’s nest
suspended from the branch of an apple-tree near
where I write. Earlier in the season the parent
birds made long and determined attempts to estab-
lish themselves in a cavity that had been occupied
by a pair of bluebirds. The original proprietor of
the place was the downy woodpecker. He had
excavated it the autumn before, and had passed the
winter there, often to my certain knowledge lying
abed till nine o’clock in the morning. In the spring
he went elsewhere, probably with a female, to begin
the season in new quarters. The bluebirds early
took possession, and in June their first brood had
flown. The wrens had been hanging around, evi-
dently with an eye on the place (such little comedies
may be witnessed anywhere), and now very naturally
thought it was their turn. A day or two after the
young bluebirds had flown, I noticed some fine, dry
grass clinging to the entrance to the cavity; a cir-
cumstance which I understood a few moments later,
when the wren rushed by me into the cover of a
small Norway spruce, hotly pursued by the male
bluebird. It was a brown streak and a blue streak
pretty close together. The wrens had gone to house-
cleaning, and the bluebird had returned to find his

BIRDS’ EGGS 67

bed and bedding being pitched out-of-doors, and had
thereupon given the wrens to understand in the most
emphatic manner that he had no intention of vacat-
ing the premises so early in the season. Day after
day, for more than two weeks, the male bluebird
had to clear his premises of these intruders. It oc-
cupied much of his time and not a little of mine, as
I sat with a book in a summer-house near by, laugh-
ing at his pretty fury and spiteful onset. On two
occasions the wren rushed under the chair in which
I sat, and a streak of blue lightning almost flashed
in my very face. One day, just as I had passed the
tree in which the cavity was placed, I heard the
wren scream desperately; turning, I saw the little
vagabond fall into the grass with the wrathful blue-
bird fairly upon him; the latter had returned just
in time to catch him, and was evidently bent on
punishing him well. But in the squabble in the grass
the wren escaped and took refuge in the friendly
evergreen. The bluebird paused for a moment with
outstretched wings looking for the fugitive, then flew
away. A score of times during the month of June
did I see the wren taxing every energy to get away
from the bluebird. He would dart into the stone
wall, under the floor of the summer-house, into
the weeds, — anywhere to hide his diminished head.
The bluebird, with his bright coat, looked like an
officer in uniform in pursuit of some wicked, rusty
little street gamin. Generally the favorite house of
refuge of the wrens was the little spruce, into which
their pursuer made no attempt to follow them. The

68 RIVERBY

female would sit concealed amid the branches, chat-
tering in a scolding, fretful way, while the male with
his eye upon his tormentor would perch on the top-
most shoot and sing. Why he sang at such times,
whether in triumph and derision, or to keep his
courage up and reassure his mate, I could not make
out. When his song was suddenly cut short, and
I glanced to see him dart down into the spruce, my
eye usually caught a twinkle of blue wings hovering
near. The wrens finally gave up the fight, and their
enemies reared their second brood in peace.

That the wren should use such coarse, refractory
materials, especially since it builds in holes where
twigs are so awkward to carry and adjust, is curious
enough. All its congeners, the marsh wrens, the
Carolina wren, the winter wren, build of soft flexible
materials. The nest of the winter wren and of the
English “Jenny wren” is mainly of moss, and is a
marvel of softness and warmth.

One day a swarm of honey-bees went into my
chimney, and I mounted the stack to see into which
flue they had gone. As I craned my neck above the
sooty vent, with the bees humming about my ears,
the first thing my eye rested upon in the black in-
terior was two long white pearls upon a little shelf
of twigs, the nest of the chimney swallow, or swift,
—honey, soot, and birds’ eggs closely associated.
The bees, though in an unused flue, soon found the
gas of anthracite that hovered about the top of the
chimney too much for them, and they left. But the
swallows are not repelled by smoke. They seem to

BIRDS’ EGGS 69

have entirely abandoned their former nesting-places
in hollow trees and stumps and to frequent only
chimneys. A tireless bird, never perching, all day
upon the wing, and probably capable of flying one
thousand miles in twenty-four hours, they do not
even stop to gather materials for their nests, but snap
off the small dry twigs from the treetops as they fly
by. Confine one of these swallows to a room and
it will not perch, but after flying till it becomes be-
wildered and exhausted, it clings to the side of the
wall till it dies. I once found one in my room on
returning, after several days’ absence, in which life
seemed nearly extinct; its feet grasped my finger
as I removed it from the wall, but its eyes closed,
and it seemed about on the point of joining its com-
panion which lay dead upon the floor. Tossing it
into the air, however, seemed to awaken its won-
derful powers of flight, and away it went straight
toward the clouds. On the wing the chimney swal-
low looks like an athlete stripped for the race. There
is the least appearance of quill and plumage of any
of our birds, and, with all its speed and marvelous
evolutions, the effect of its flight is stiff and wiry.
There appears to be but one joint in the wing, and
that next the body. This peculiar inflexible motion
of the wings, as if they were little sickles of sheet
iron, seems to be owing to the length and develop-
ment of the primary quills and the smallness of the
secondary. The wing appears to hinge only at the
wrist. The barn swallow lines its rude masonry
with feathers, but the swift begins life on bare twigs,

70 RIVERBY

glued together by a glue of home manufacture as ad-
hesive as Spaulding’s.

I have wondered if Emerson referred to any par-
ticular bird in these lines from “ The Problem: ”? —

“Know’st thou what wove yon wood-bird’s nest
Of leaves, and feathers from her breast ?”?

Probably not, but simply availed himself of the
general belief that certain birds or fowls lined their
nests with their own feathers. This is notably true
of the eider duck, and in a measure of our domestic
fowls, but so far as I know is not true of any of our
small birds. The barn swallow and house wren
feather their nests at the expense of the hens and
geese. The winter wren picks up the feathers of
the ruffed grouse. The chickadee, Emerson’s favor-
ite bird, uses a few feathers in its upholstering, but
not its own. In England, I noticed that the little
willow warbler makes a free use of feathers from the
poultry yard. Many of our birds use hair in their
nests, and the kingbird and cedar-bird like wool.
I have found a single feather of the bird’s own in
the nest of the pheebe. Such a circumstance would
perhaps justify the poet.

About the first of June there is a nest in the
woods upon the ground with four creamy white eggs
in it, spotted with brown or lilac, chiefly about the
larger ends, that always gives the walker, who is so
lucky as to find it, a thrill of pleasure. It is like a
ground sparrow’s nest with a roof or canopy to it.
The little brown or olive backed bird starts away
from your feet and runs swiftly and almost silently

BIRDS’ EGGS 71

over the dry leaves, and then turns her speckled
breast to see if you are following. She walks very
prettily, by far the prettiest pedestrian in the woods.
But if she thinks you have discovered her secret,
she feigns lameness and disability of both legs and
wing, to decoy you into the pursuit of her. This is
the golden-crowned thrush, or accentor, a strictly
wood bird, about the size of a song sparrow, with
the dullest of gold upon his crown, but the brightest
of songs in his heart. The last nest of this bird I
found was while in quest of the pink cypripedium.
We suddenly spied a couple of the flowers a few
steps from the path along which we were walking,
and had stooped to admire them, when out sprang
the bird from beside them, doubtless thinking she
was the subject of observation instead of the flowers
that swung their purple bells but a foot or two above
her. But we never should have seen her had she
kept her place. She had found a rent in the matted
carpet of dry leaves and pine needles that covered
the ground, and into this had insinuated her nest,
the leaves and needles forming a canopy above it,
sloping to the south and west, the source of the more
frequent summer rains.

At about the same time one finds the nest above
described, if he were to explore the woods very
thoroughly, he might chance upon two curious eggs
lying upon the leaves as if dropped there by chance.
They are elliptical, both ends of a size, about an inch
and a quarter long, of a creamy white spotted with
lavender. These are the eggs of the whip-poor-

72 RIVERBY

will, a bird that has absolutely no architectural in-
stincts or gifts. Perhaps its wide, awkward mouth
and short beak are ill-adapted to carrying nest ma-
terials. It is awkward upon the ground and awk-
ward upon the tree, being unable to perch upon a
limb, except lengthwise of it.

The song and game birds lay pointed eggs, but the
night birds lay round or elliptical eggs.

The egg-collector sometimes stimulates a bird to
lay an unusual number of eggs. A youth, whose
truthfulness I do not doubt, told me he once induced
a high-hole to lay twenty-nine eggs by robbing her
of an egg each day. The eggs became smaller and
smaller, till the twenty-ninth one was only the size
of a chippie’s egg. At this point the bird gave up
the contest.

There is a last egg of summer as well as a first
egg of spring, but one cannot name either with much
confidence. Both the robin and the chippie some-
times rear a third brood in August; but the birds
that delay their nesting till midsummer are the gold-
finch and the cedar-bird, the former waiting for the
thistle to ripen its seeds, and the latter probably for
the appearance of certain insects which it takes on
the wing. Often the cedar-bird does not build till
August, and will line its nest with wool if it can
get it, even in this sultry month. The eggs are
marked and colored, as if a white egg were to be
spotted with brown, then colored a pale blue, then
again sharply dotted or blotched with blackish or
purplish spots.

BIRDS’ EGGS 73

But the most common August nest with me —
early August —is that of the goldfinch, —a deep,
snug, compact nest, with no loose ends hanging,
placed in the fork of a small limb of an apple-tree,
peach-tree, or ornamental shade-tree. The eggs are
a faint bluish white.

While the female is sitting, the male feeds her
regularly. She calls to him on his approach, or
when she hears his voice passing by, in the most
affectionate, feminine, childlike tones, the only case
I know of where the sitting bird makes any sound
while in the act of incubation. When a rival male
invades the tree, or approaches too near, the male
whose nest it holds pursues and reasons or expostu-
lates with him in the same bright, amicable, confid-
ing tones. Indeed, most birds make use of their
sweetest notes in war. The song of love is the song
of battle, too. The male yellowbirds flit about from
point to point, apparently assuring each other of the
highest sentiments of esteem and consideration, at
the same time that one intimates to the other that
he is carrying his joke a little too far. It has the
effect of saying with mild and good-humored sur-
prise, ‘‘ Why, my dear sir, this is my territory; you
surely do not mean to trespass; permit me to salute
you, and to escort you over the line.” Yet the in-
truder does not always take the hint. Occasionally
the couple have a brief sparring match in the air,
and mount up and up, beak to beak, to a consid-
erable height, but rarely do they actually come to
blows.

74 RIVERBY

The yellowbird becomes active and conspicuous
after the other birds have nearly all withdrawn from
the stage and become silent, their broods reared and
flown. August is his month, his festive season.
It is his turn now. ‘The thistles are ripening their
seeds, and his nest is undisturbed by jay-bird or
crow. He is the first bird I hear in the morning,
circling and swinging through the air in that pecul-
iar undulating flight, and calling out on the down-
ward curve of each stroke, “ Here we go, here we
go!” very hour in the day he indulges in his
circling, billowy flight. It is a part of his musical
performance. His course at such times is a deeply
undulating line, like the long gentle roll of the sum-
mer sea, the distance from crest to crest or from
valley to valley being probably thirty feet; this
distance is made with but one brief beating of the
wings on the downward curve. As he quickly opens
them, they give him a strong upward impulse, and
he describes the long arc with them closely folded.
Thus, falling and recovering, rising and sinking like
dolphins in the sea, he courses through the summer
air. In marked contrast to this feat is his manner
of flying when he indulges in a brief outburst of
song in the air. Now he flies level, with broad ex-
panded wings nearly as round and as concave as two
shells, which beat the air slowly. The song is the
chief matter now, and the wings are used only to
keep him afloat while delivering it. In the other
case, the flight is the main concern, and the voice
merely punctuates it.

BIRDS’ EGGS 75

I know no autumn egg but a hen’s egg, though a
certain old farmer tells me he finds a quail’s nest full
of eggs nearly every September; but fall progeny of
any kind has a belated start in life, and the chances
are against it.

IV
BIRD COURTSHIP

if Besrerten is something about the matchmaking of

birds that is not easily penetrated. The jeal-
ousies and rivalries of the males and of the females
are easily understood, — they are quite human; but
those sudden rushes of several males, some of them
already mated, after one female, with squeals and
screams and a great clatter of wings, — what does it
mean? There is nothing human about that, unless it
be illustrative of a trait that has at times cropped out
in the earlier races, and which is still seen among the
Esquimaux, where the male carries off the female
by force. But in these sudden sallies among the
birds, the female, so far as I have observed, is never
carried off. One may see half a dozen English spar-
rows engaged in what at first glance appears to be a
general mélée in the gutter or on the sidewalk; but
if you look more closely you will see a single female
in the midst of the mass, beating off the males, who,
with plumage puffed out and screaming and chatter-
ing, are all making a set at her. She strikes right
and left, and seems to be equally displeased with
them all. But her anger may be all put on, and she
may be giving the wink all the time to her favorite.

78 RIVERBY

The Esquimaux maiden is said by Doctor Nansen to
resist stoutly being carried off even by the man she
is desperately in love with.

In the latter half of April, we pass through what
T call the “robin racket,” — trains of three or four
birds rushing pell-mell over the lawn and fetching
up in a tree or bush, or occasionally upon the ground,
all piping and screaming at the top of their voices,
but whether in mirth or anger it is hard to tell.
The nucleus of the train is afemale. One cannot
see that the males in pursuit of her are rivals; it
seems rather as if they had united to hustle her
out of the place. But somehow the matches are no
doubt made and sealed during these mad rushes.
Maybe the female shouts out to her suitors, “Who
touches me first wins,” and away she scurries like
an arrow. The males shout out, ‘ Agreed!” and
away they go in pursuit, each trying to outdo the
other. The game is a brief one. Before one can get
the clew to it, the party has dispersed,

Earlier in the season the pretty sparring of the
males is the chief feature. You may see two robins
apparently taking a walk or a run together over the
sward or along the road; only first one bird runs,
and then the other. They keep a few feet apart,
stand very erect, and the course of each describes the
segment of an arc about the other, thus: —

RO OO
—— Nee Ne Neer Ne”

How courtly and deferential their manners toward
each other are! often they pipe a shrill, fine strain,

BIRD COURTSHIP 79

audible only a few yards away. Then, in a twink-
ling, one makes a spring and they are beak to beak,
and claw to claw, as they rise up a few feet into the
air. But usually no blow is delivered; not a feather
is ruffled; each, I suppose, finds the guard of the
other perfect. Then they settle down upon the
ground again, and go through with the same running
challenge as before. How their breasts glow in the
strong April sunlight; how perk and military the
bearing of each! Often they will run about each
other in this way for many rods. After a week or so
the males seem to have fought all their duels, when
the rush and racket I have already described begins.
The bluebird wins his mate by the ardor of his
attentions and the sincerity of his compliments, and
by finding a house ready built which cannot be sur-
passed. The male bluebird is usually here several
days before the female, and he sounds forth his note
as loudly and eloquently as he can till she appears.
On her appearance he flies at once to the box or tree
cavity upon which he has had his eye, and, as he
looks into it, calls and warbles in his most persuasive
tones. The female at such times is always shy and
backward, and the contrast in the manners of the
two birds is as striking as the contrast in their colors.
The male is brilliant and ardent; the female is dim
and retiring, not to say indifferent. She may take a
hasty peep into the hole in the box or tree and then
fly away, uttering a lonesome, homesick note. Only
by a wooing of many days is she to be fully won.
The past April I was witness one Sunday morning

80 RIVERBY

to the jealousies that may rage in these little brown
breasts. A pair of bluebirds had apparently mated
and decided to occupy a woodpecker’s lodge in the
limb of an old apple-tree near my study. But that
morning another male appeared on the scene, and
was bent on cutting the first male out, and carry-
ing off his bride. I happened to be near by when
the two birds came into collision. They fell to the
grass, and kept their grip upon each other for half
a minute. Then they separated, and the first up flew
to the hole and called fondly to the female. This
was too much for the other male, and they clinched
again and fell to the ground as before. There they
lay upon the grass, blue and brown intermingled.
But not a feather was tweaked out, or even disturbed,
that Icould see. They simply held each other down.
Then they separated again, and again rushed upon
each other. The battle raged for about fifteen min-
utes, when one of the males — which one, of course,
I could not tell — withdrew and flew to a box under
the eaves of the study, and exerted all the eloquence
he possessed to induce the female to come to him
there. How he warbled and called, and lifted his
wings and flew to the entrance to the box and called
again! The female was evidently strongly attracted ;
she would respond and fly about half way to an apple-
tree, and look toward him. The other male, in the
mean time, did his best to persuade her to cast her
lot with him. He followed her to the tree toward
his rival, and then flew back to the nest and spread
his plumage and called and warbled, oh, so confi-

BIRD COURTSHIP 81

dently, so fondly, so reassuringly! When the fe-
male would return and peep into the hole in the tree,
what fine, joyous notes he would utter! then he
would look in and twinkle his wings, and say some-
thing his rival could not hear. This vocal and pan-
tomimic contest went on for a long time. The fe-
male was evidently greatly shaken in her allegiance
to the male in the old apple-tree. In less than an
hour another female responded to the male who had
sought the eaves of the study, and flew with him to
the box. Whether this was their first meeting or
not I do not know, but it was clear enough that the
heart of the male was fixed upon the bride of his
rival. He would devote himself a moment to the
new-comer, and then turn toward the old apple-tree
and call and lift his wings; then, apparently ad-
monished by the bird near him, would turn again to
her and induce her to look into the box and warble
fondly; then up on a higher branch again, with
his attention directed toward his first love, between
whom and himself salutations seemed constantly
passing. This little play went on for some time,
when the two females came into collision, and fell to
the ground tweaking each other spitefully. Then
the four birds drifted away from me down into the
vineyard, where the males closed with each other
again and fell to the plowed ground and lay there
a surprisingly long time, nearly two minutes, as we
calculated. Their wings were outspread, and their
forms were indistinguishable. They tugged at each
other most doggedly; one or the other brown breast

82 RIVERBY

was generally turned up, partly overlaid by a blue
coat. They were determined to make a finish of
it this time, but which got the better of the fight
I could not tell. But it was the last battle; they
finally separated, neither, apparently, any the worse
for the encounter. The females fought two more
rounds, the males looking on and warbling approv-
ingly when they separated, and the two pairs drifted
away in different directions. The next day they
were about the box and tree again, and seemed to
have definitely settled matters. Who won and who
lost I do not know, but two pairs of bluebirds have
since been very busy and very happy about the two
nesting-places. One of the males I recognize as a
bird that appeared early in March; I recognize him
from one peculiar note in the midst of his warble,
a note that suggests a whistle.

The matchmaking of the high-holes, which often
comes under my observation, is in marked contrast
to that of the robins and bluebirds. There does not
appear to be any anger or any blows. The male
or two males will alight on a limb in front of the
female, and go through with a series of bowings and
scrapings that are truly comical. He spreads his
tail, he puffs out his breast, he throws back his
head, and then bends his body to the right and to
the left, uttering all the while a curious musical hic-
cough. The female confronts him unmoved, but
whether her attitude is critical or defensive I can-
not tell. Presently she flies away, followed by her
suitor or suitors, and the little comedy is enacted on

BIRD COURTSHIP 83

another stump or tree. Among all the woodpeckers
the drum plays an important part in the match-
making. The male takes up his stand on a dry,
resonant limb, or on the ridgeboard of a building,
and beats the loudest call he is capable of. The
downy woodpecker usually has a particular branch
to which he resorts for advertising his matrimonial
wants. A favorite drum of the high-holes about me
is a hollow wooden tube, a section of a pump, which
stands as a bird-box upon my summer-house. It is
a good instrument; its tone is sharp and clear. A
high-hole alights upon it, and sends forth a rattle
that can be heard a long way off. Then he lifts up
his head and utters that long April call, Wick, wick,
wick, wick. Then he drums again. If the female
does not find him, it is not because he does not make
noise enough. But his sounds are all welcome to
the ear. They are simple and primitive and voice
well a certain sentiment of the April days. As I
write these lines I hear through the half-open door
his call come up from a distant field. Then I hear
the steady hammering of one that has been for three
days trying to penetrate the weather boarding of
the big icehouse by the river, and reach the sawdust
filling for a nesting-place.

Among our familiar birds the matchmaking of
none other is quite so pretty as that of the goldfinch.
The goldfinches stay with us in lorn flocks and clad
in a dull-olive suit throughout the winter. In May
the males begin to put on their bright summer
plumage. This is the result of a kind of super-

84 RIVERBY

ficial moulting. Their feathers are not shed, but
their dusky covering or overalls are cast off. When
the process is only partly completed, the bird has a
smutty, unpresentable appearance. But we seldom
see them at such times. They seem to retire from
society. When the change is complete, and the males
have got their bright uniforms of yellow and black,
the courting begins. All the goldfinches of a neigh-
borhood collect together and hold a sort of musical
festival. To the number of many dozens they may
be seen in some large tree, all singing and calling
in the most joyous and vivacious manner. The
males sing, and the females chirp and call. Whether
there is actual competition on a trial of musical abil-
ities of the males before the females or not I do not
know. The best of feeling seems to pervade the
company; there is no sign of quarreling or fight-
ing; “all goes merry as a marriage bell,” and the
matches seem actually to be made during these musi-
cal picnics. Before May is passed the birds are seen
in couples, and in June housekeeping usually be-
gins. This I call the ideal of love-making among
birds, and is in striking contrast to the squabbles
and jealousies of most of our songsters.

I have known the goldfinches to keep up this
musical and love-making festival through three con-
secutive days of a cold northeast rain-storm. Be-
draggled, but ardent and happy, the birds were not
to be dispersed by wind or weather.

All the woodpeckers, so far as I have observed,
drum up their mates; the male advertises his wants

BIRD COURTSHIP 85

by hammering upon a dry, resonant limb, when in
due time the female approaches and is duly courted
and won. The drumming of the ruffed grouse is
for the same purpose; the female hears, concludes
to take a walk that way, approaches timidly, is seen
and admired, and the match is made. That the
male accepts the first female that offers herself is
probable. Among all the birds the choice, the se-
lection, seems to belong to the female. The males
‘court promiscuously; the females choose discreetly.
The grouse, unlike the woodpecker, always carries
his drum with him, which is his own proud breast;
yet, if undisturbed, he selects some particular log or
rock in the woods from which to sound forth his
willingness to wed. What determines the choice of
the female it would be hard to say. Among song-
birds, it is probably the best songster, or the one
whose voice suits her taste best. Among birds
of bright plumage, it is probably the gayest dress;
among the drummers, she is doubtless drawn by some
quality of the sound. Our ears and eyes are too coarse
to note any differences in these things, but doubtless
the birds themselves note differences.

Birds show many more human traits than do quad-
rupeds. That they actually fall in love admits of
no doubt; that there is a period of courtship, during
which the male uses all the arts he is capable of to
win his mate, is equally certain; that there are jeal-
ousies and rivalries, and that the peace of families is
often rudely disturbed by outside males or females
is a common observation, The females, when they

86 RIVERBY

come to blows, fight much more spitefully and reck-
lessly than do the males. One species of bird has
been known to care for the young of another species
which had been made orphans. The male turkey
will sometimes cover the eggs of his mate and hatch
and rear the brood alone. Altogether, birds often
present some marked resemblances in their actions
to men, when love is the motive.

Mrs. Martin, in her ‘ Home Life on an Ostrich
Farm,” relates this curious incident: —

“One undutiful hen — having apparently imbibed
advanced notions— absolutely refused to sit at all,
and the poor husband, determined not to be disap-
pointed of his little family, did all the work himself,
sitting bravely and patiently day and night, though
nearly dead with exhaustion, till the chicks were
hatched out. The next time this pair of birds had
a nest, the cock’s mind was firmly made up that he
would stand no more nonsense. He fought the hen
[kicked her], giving her so severe a thrashing that
she was all but killed, and this Petruchio-like treat-
ment had the desired effect, for the wife never again
rebelled, but sat submissively.”

In the case of another pair of ostriches of which
Mrs. Martin tells, the female was accidentally killed,
when the male mourned her loss for over two years,
and would not look at another female. He wan-
dered up and down, up and down, the length of his
camp, utterly disconsolate. At last he mated again
with a most magnificent hen, who ruled him tyran-
nically; he became the most hen-pecked, or rather
hen-kicked of husbands.

Vv
NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE

pee best lesson I have had for a long time in

the benefits of contentment, and of the value of
one’s own nook or corner of the world, however cir-
cumscribed it may be, as a point from which to ob-
serve nature and life, comes to me from a prairie cor-
respondent, an invalid lady, confined to her room
year in and year out, and yet who sees more and ap-
preciates more than many of us who have the free-
dom of a whole continent. Having her permission,
why should I not share these letters with my read-
ers, especially since there are other house-bound or
bed-bound invalids whom they may reach, and who
may derive some cheer or suggestion from them?
Words uttered in a popular magazine like “ The
Century ” are like the vapors that go up from the
ground and the streams: they are sure to be carried
far and wide, and to fall again as rain or dew, and
one little knows what thirsty plant or flower they
may reach and nourish. Iam thinking of another
fine spirit, couch-bound in one of the northern New
England States, who lives in a town that bears the
same name as that in which my Western correspond-
ent resides, and into whose chamber my slight and

88 RIVERBY

desultory papers have also brought something of the
breath of the fields and woods, and who in return
has given me many glimpses of nature through eyes
purified by suffering.

Women are about the best lovers of nature, after
all; at least of nature in her milder and more fa-
miliar forms. The feminine character, the feminine
perceptions, intuitions, delicacy, sympathy, quick-
ness, etc., are more responsive to natural forms and
influences than is the masculine mind.

My Western correspondent sees existence as from
an altitude, and sees where the complements and
compensations come in. She lives upon the prairie,
and she says it is as the ocean to her, upon which
she is adrift, and always expects to be, until she
reaches the other shore. Her house is the ship
which she never leaves. ‘‘ What is visible from my
window is the sea, changing only from winter to
summer, as the sea changes from storm to sunshine.
But there is one advantage, — messages can come to
me continually from all the wide world.”

One summer she wrote she had been hoping to
be well enough to renew her acquaintance with the
birds, the flowers, the woods, but instead was con-
fined to her room more closely than ever.

“Tt is a disappointment to me, but I decided
long ago that the wisest plan is to make the best of
things; to take what is given you, and make the
most of it. To gather up the fragments, that no-
thing may be lost, applies to one’s life as well as to
other things. Though I cannot walk, I can think

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 89

and read and write; probably I get my share of
pleasure from sources that well people are apt to neg-
lect. JI have learned that the way to be happy is
to keep so busy that thoughts of self are forced out
of sight; and to live for others, not for ourselves.

‘* Sometimes, when I think over the matter, I am
half sorry for well people, because, you see, I have
so much better company than they can have, for I
have so much more time to go all over the world and
meet all the best and wisest people in it. Some of
them died long ago to the most of people, but to me
they are just as much alive as they ever were; they
give me their best and wisest thoughts, without
the disagreeable accompaniments others must endure.
Other people use their eyes and ears and pens for
me; all I have to do is to sit still and enjoy the
results. Dear friends I have everywhere, though
I am unknown to them; what right have I to wish
for more privileges than I have?”

There is philosophy for you, — philosophy which
looks fate out of countenance. It seems that if we
only have the fortitude to take the ills of life cheer-
fully and say to fortune, “Thy worst is good enough
for me,” behold the worst is already repentant and
fast changing to the best. Love softens the heart
of the inevitable. The magic phrase which turns
the evil spirits into good angels is, “I am con-
tented.” Happiness is always at one’s elbow, it
seems, in one disguise or another; all one has to do
is to stop seeking it afar, or stop seeking it at all,
and say to this unwelcome attendant, “ Be thou my

90 RIVERBY

friend,” when, lo! the mask falls, and the angel is
disclosed. Certain rare spirits in this world have
accepted poverty with such love and pride that
riches at once became contemptible.

My correspondent has the gift of observation. In
renouncing self, she has opened the door for many
other things to enter. In cultivating the present
moment, she cultivates the present incident. The
power to see things comes of that mental attitude
which is directed to the now and the here: keen,
alert perceptions, those faculties that lead the mind
and take the incident as it flies. Most people fail
to see things, because the print is too small for their
vision; they read only the large-lettered events like
the newspaper headings, and are apt to miss a part
of these, unless they see in some way their own
initials there.

The small type of the lives of bird and beast
about her is easily read by this cheerful invalid.
“To understand that the sky is everywhere blue,”
says Goethe, “we need not go around the world;”
and it would seem that this woman has got all the
good and pleasure there is in natural history from
the pets in her room, and the birds that build before
her window. I had been for a long time trying to
determine whether or not the blue jay boarded up
nuts for winter use, but had not been able to settle
the point. I applied to her, and, sitting by her win-
dow, she discovered that jays do indeed hoard food in
a tentative, childish kind of way, but not with the
cunning and provident foresight of the squirrels and

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 91

native mice. She saw a jay fly to the ground with
what proved to be a peanut in its beak, and care-
fully cover it up with leaves and grass. “The next
fall, looking out of my own window, I saw two jays
hiding chestnuts with the same blind instinct. They
brought them from a near tree, and covered them up
in the grass, putting but one in a place. Subse-
quently, in another locality, I saw jays similarly em-
ployed. It appears to be simply the crow instinct
to steal, or to carry away and hide any superfluous
morsel of food.” The jays were really planting
chestnuts instead of hoarding them. There was no
possibility of such supplies being available in winter,
and in spring a young tree might spring from each
nut. This fact doubtless furnishes a key to the
problem why a forest of pine is usually succeeded by
a forest of oak. The acorns are planted by the jays.
Their instinct for hiding things prompts them to
seek the more dark and secluded pine woods with
their booty, and the thick layer of needles furnishes
an admirable material with which to cover the nut.
The germ sprouts and remains a low slender shoot
for years, or until the pine woods are cut away, when
it rapidly becomes a tree.

My correspondent thinks the birds possess some
of the frailties of human beings; among other things,
ficklemindedness. “I believe they build nests just
for the fun of it, to pass away the time, to have
something to chatter about and dispute over.” (I
myself have seen a robin play at nest-building late
in October, and have seen two young bluebirds en-

92 RIVERBY

sconce themselves in an old thrush’s nest in the fall
and appear to amuse themselves like children, while
the wind made the branch sway to and fro.) “Now
my wrens’ nest is so situated that nothing can dis-
turb them, and where I can see it at any time. They
have often made a nest and left it. A year ago,
during the latter part of May, they built a nest, and
in a few days they kicked everything out of the box
and did the work all over again, repeating the opera-
tion all July, then left the country without accom-
plishing anything further. This season they reared
one brood, built another nest, and, I think, laid one
or more eggs, idled around a few weeks, and then
wentaway.” (This last was probably a “cock-nest,”
built by the male as a roosting-place.) ‘TI have
noticed, too, that blue jays build their apology for a
nest, and abandon it for another place in the same
tree.” Her jays and wrens do not live together on
the most amicable terms. “I had much amusement
while the jay was on the nest, watching the actions
of the wrens, whose nest was under the porch close
by the oak. Perched on a limb over the jay, the
male wren sat flirting his tail and scolding, evi-
dently saying all the insulting things he could think
of; for, after enduring it for some time, the jay
would fly off its nest in a rage, and, with the evi-
dent intention of impaling Mr. Wren with his bill,
strike down vengefully and —find his bill fast in
the bark, while his enemy was somewhere else,
squeaking in derision. They kept that up day after
day; but the wren is too lively to be caught by a
large bird.

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 93

“T have never had the opportunity to discover
whether there was any difference in the dispositions
of birds of the same species; it would take a very
close and extended observation to determine that;
but I do know there is as much difference between
animals as between human beings in that respect.
Horses, cats, dogs, squirrels, all have their own in-
dividuality. I have had five gray squirrels for pets,
and even their features were unlike. Fred and
Sally were mates, who were kept shut up in their
cages all the time. Fred was wonderfully brave,
would strut and scold until there was something to
be afraid of, then would crouch down behind Sally
and let her defend him, the sneak! He abused her
shamefully, but she never resented it. Being the
larger, she could have whipped him and not half
tried; but she probably labored under the impres-
sion, which is shared by some people, that it is a
wife’s duty to submit to whatever abuse the husband
chooses to inflict. Their characters reminded me
so strongly of some people I have seen that I used
to take Fred out and whip him regularly, as a sort
of vicarious punishment of those who deserved it.
Chip was a gentle, pretty squirrel, fond of being
petted, spent most of her time in my pocket or
around my neck, but she died young; probably she
was too good to live.

“Dick, lazy and a glutton, also died young, from
over-eating. Chuck, the present pet, has Satan’s
own temper —very ugly — but so intelligent that
she is the plague of our lives, though at the same

94 RIVERBY

time she is a constant source of amusement. It is
impossible to remain long angry with her, however
atrocious her crimes are. We are obliged to let
her run loose through the house, for, when shut up,
she squeals and chatters and rattles her cage so we
can’t endure it. From one piece of mischief to an-
other as fast as she can go, she requires constant
watching. She knows what is forbidden very well,
for, if I chance to look at her after she has been up
to mischief, she quickly drops down flat, spreads her
tail over her back, looking all the time so very inno-
cent that she betrays herself. If I go towards her,
she springs on my back, where I cannot reach her
to whip her. She never bites me, but if others
tease her she is very vicious. When I tease her,
she relieves her feelings by biting any one else who
happens to be in the room; and it is no slight mat-
ter being bitten by a squirrel’s sharp teeth. Know-
ing that the other members of the family are afraid
of her, she amuses herself by putting nuts in their
shoes, down their necks, or in their hair, then stand-
ing guard, so that if they remove the nuts she flies
at them.

“Chuck will remember an injury for months,
and take revenge whenever opportunity offers. She
claims all the nuts and candy that come into the
house, searching Mr. B ’s pockets on Sundays,
never on other days. JI don’t see how she distin-
guishes, unless from the fact that he comes home
early on that day. Once, when she caught one of
the girls eating some of her nuts, she flew at her, bit

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 95

her, and began carrying off the nuts to hide as fast
as she could. For months afterward she would slip
slyly up and bite the girl. She particularly despises
my brother, he teases her so, and gives her no chance
to bite; so she gets even with him by tearing up
everything of his she can find, —his books, his
gloves, etc. ; and if she can get into the closet where
I keep the soiled clothing, she will select such arti-
cles as belong to him, and tear them up! And she
has a wonderful memory; never forgets where she
puts things; people whom she has not seen for sev-
eral years she remembers.

** She had the misfortune to have about two inches
of her tail cut off, by being caught in the door,
which made it too short to be used for wiping her
face; it would slip out of her hands, making her
stamp her feet and chatter her teeth with anger. By
experimenting, she found by backing up in a corner
it was prevented from slipping out of her reach.
Have had her five years; wonder how long their
lives usually are? One of my neighbors got a young
squirrel, so young that it required milk; so they
got a small nursing-bottle for it. Until that squir-
rel was over a year old, whenever he got hungry he
would get his bottle and sit and hold it up as if he
thought that quite the proper way for a squirrel to
obtain his nourishment. It was utterly comical to see
him. We have no black squirrels; a few red ones,
and a great many gray ones of different kinds.”

I was much interested in her pet squirrel, and
made frequent inquiries about it. A year later she

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writes: ‘‘ My squirrel still lives and rules the house.
She has an enemy that causes her much trouble, —
a rat that comes into the wood-shed. I had noticed
that, whenever she went out there, she investigated
the dark corners with care before she ventured to
play, but did not understand it till I chanced to
be sitting in the kitchen door once, as she was dig-
ging up a nut she had buried. Just as she got it
up, a great rat sprung on her back; there ensued a
trial of agility and strength to see which should have
that nut. Neither seemed to be angry, for they did
not attempt to bite, but raced around the shed, cuff-
ing each other at every opportunity; sometimes one
had the nut, sometimes the other. I regret to say
my squirrel, whenever she grew tired, took a base
advantage of the rat by coming and sitting at my
feet, gnawing the nut, and plainly showing by her
motions her exultation over her foe. Finally the
rat became so exasperated that he forgot prudence,
and forced her to climb up on my shoulder.

“Tn an extract from a London paper I see it as-
serted that birds and snakes cannot taste. As to the
snakes I cannot say, but I know birds can taste,
from observing my canary when I give him some-
thing new to eat. He will edge up to it carefully,
take a bit, back off to meditate; then, if he decides
he likes it, he walks up boldly and eats his fill.
But if there is anything disagreeable in what I offer
him, acid, for instance, there is such a fuss! He
scrapes his bill, raises and lowers the feathers on the
top of his head, giving one the impression that he is

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 97

making a wry face. He cannot be induced to touch
it a second time.

“T have taught him to think I am afraid of him,
and how he tyrannizes over me, chasing me from
place to place, pecking and squeaking! He delights
in pulling out my hair. When knitting or crochet-
ing, he tries to prevent my pulling the yarn by stand-
ing on it; when that fails, he takes hold with his
bill and pulls with all his little might.”

Some persons have a special gift or quality that
enables them to sustain more intimate relations with
wild creatures than others. Women, as a rule, are
ridiculously afraid of cattle and horses turned loose
in a field, but my correspondent, when a young girl,
had many a lark with the prairie colts. “Is it not
strange,” she says, “that a horse will rarely hurt a
child, or any person that is fond of them? ‘To see
a drove of a hundred or even a hundred and fifty
unbroken colts branded and turned out to grow up
was a common occurrence then [in her childhood].
I could go among them, catch them, climb on their
backs, and they never offered to hurt me; they
seemed to consider it fun. They would come up
and touch me with their noses, and prance off around
and around me; but just let a man come near them,
and they were off like the wind.”

All her reminiscences of her early life in Iowa,
thirty years ago, are deeply interesting to me. Her
parents, a Boston family, moved to that part of the
State in advance of the railroads, making the jour-
ney from the Mississippi in a wagon. ‘‘My father

98 ‘ RIVERBY

had been fortunate enough to find a farm with a
frame house upon it (the houses were mostly log
ones) built by an Englishman whose homesickness
had driven him back to England. It stood upon a
slight elevation in the midst of a prairie, though not
avery level one. To the east and to the west of
us, about four miles away, were the woods along the
banks of the streams. It was in the month of June
when we came, and the prairie was tinted pink with
wild roses. From early spring till late in the fall
the ground used to be so covered with some kinds of
flowers that it had almost as decided a color as the
sky itself, and the air would be fragrant with their
perfume. First it is white with ‘ dog-toes’ [prob-
ably an orchid], then a cold blue from being covered
with some kind of light-blue flower; next come the
roses; in July and August it is pink with the ‘ prai-
rie pink,’ dotted with scarlet lilies; as autumn comes
on, it is vivid with orange-colored flowers. I never
knew their names; they have woody stalks; one
kind that grows about a foot high has a feathery
spray of little blossoms [goldenrod?]. There are
several kinds of tall ones; the blossom has yellow
leaves and brown velvety centres [cone-flower, or
rudbeckia, probably, now common in the East].
We youngsters used to gather the gum that exuded
from the stalk. Every one was poor in those days,
and no one was ashamed of it. Plenty to eat, such
as it was. We introduced some innovations in that
line that shocked the people here. We used corn
meal; they said it was only fit for hogs. Worse

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 99

than that, we ate ‘greens,’ — weeds, they called
them. It does not seem possible, but it is a fact,
that with all those fertile acres around them waiting
for cultivation, and to be had almost for the asking,
those people (they were mainly Hoosiers) lived on
fried salt pork swimming in fat, and hot biscuit, all
the year round; no variety, no vegetables, no butter
saved. for winter use, no milk after cold weather be-
gan, for it was too much trouble to milk the cows
— such a shiftless set! And the hogs they raised,
—you should have seen them! ‘ Prairie sharks’
and ‘ razor-backs’ were the local names for them,
and either name fitted them; long noses, long legs,
bodies about five inches thick, and no amount of food
would make them fat. They were allowed to run
' wild to save the trouble of caring for them, and when
the pork-barrel was empty they shot one.
“Everybody drove oxen and used lumber-wagons
with a board across the box for a seat. How did
we ever endure it, riding over the roadless prairies!
Then, any one who owned a horse was considered
an aristocrat and despised accordingly One yoke of
oxen that we had were not to be sneezed at as a fast
team. They were trained to trot, and would make
good time, too. [1 love to hear oxen praised. An
old Michigan farmer, an early settler, told me of
a famous pair of oxen he once had; he spoke of
them with great affection. They would draw any
log he hitched them to. When they had felt of the
log and found they had their match, he said they
would nudge each other, give their tails a kink, lift

100 RIVERBY

up their heads, and say eh-h-h-h! then something
had to come. |

“One phrase you used in your last letter — ‘ the
start from the stump’ — shows how locality governs
the illustrations we use. The start was not from
the stwmp here, quite the reverse. Nature made
the land ready for man’s hand, and there were no
obstacles in the shape of stumps and stones to over-
come. Probably in the East a pine-stump fence is
not regarded as either particularly attractive or odd;
but to me, when I first saw one in York State, it
was both. I had never even heard of the stumps
being utilized in that way. Seen for the first time,
there is something grotesque in the appearance of
those long arms forever reaching out after something
they never find, like a petrified octopus. Those
fences are an evidence of Eastern thrift, — making
an enemy serve as a friend. J think they would
frighten our horses and cattle, used as they are to the
almost invisible wire fence. ‘ Worm’ fences were the
fashion at first. But they soon learned the necessity
of economizing wood. The people were extravagant,
too, in the outlay of power in tilling the soil, six-
teen yoke of oxen being thought absolutely necessary
to run a breaking-plow; and I have seen twenty
yoke used, requiring three men to drive and attend
the great clumsy plow. Every summer you might
see them in any direction, looking like ‘ thousand-
legged worms.’ They found out after a while that
two yoke answered quite as well. There is some-
thing very queer about the bowlders that are sup-

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 101

posed to have been brought down from northern re-
gions during the glacial period; like Banquo’s ghost,
they refuse to stay down. Other stones beside them
gradually become buried, but the bowlders are al-
ways on top of the ground. Is there something re-
pellent about them, that the earth refuses to cover
them? They seem to be of no use, for they cannot
be worked as other stone; they have to be broken
open with heat in some way, though I did see a
building made of them once. The bowlders had
been broken and put in big squares and little squares,
oblong pieces and triangles. The effect was curious,
if not fine.

“In those days there were such quantities of
game-birds, it was the sportsman’s paradise, and
during the summer a great many gunners from the
cities came there. Prairie-chickens without num-
ber, as great a nuisance as the crows in the East,
only we could eat them to pay for the grain they
ate; also geese, turkeys, ducks, quail, and pigeons.
Did you ever hear the prairie-chickens during the
spring? I never felt sure spring had come to stay
till, in the early morning, there came the boom of
the chickens, Poor old booff. It is an indescrib-
able sound, as if there were a thousand saying the
same thing and keeping perfect time. No trouble
then getting a child up early in the morning, for it
is time for hunting prairie-chickens’ nests. In the
most unexpected places in the wild grass the nests
would be found, with about sixteen eggs in them,
looking somewhat like a guinea-hen’s egg. Of

102 RIVERBY

course, an omelet made out of them tasted ever so
much better than if made out of home-laid eggs;
now I: should not like the taste so well, probably,
for there is a wild flavor to the egg, as there is to
the flesh of the bird. Many a time I’ve stepped
right into the nest, so well was it hidden. After a
prairie fire is a good time to go egging, the nests be-
ing in plain sight and the eggs already roasted. I
have tried again and again to raise the chickens by
setting the eggs under the tame hens, but it cannot
be done; they seem to inherit a shyness that makes
them refuse to eat, and at the first opportunity they
slip off in the grass and are gone. Every kind of
food, even to live insects, they will refuse, and will
starve to death rather than eat in captivity. There
are but few chickens here now; they have taken
Horace Greeley’s advice and gone west. As to
four-footed game, there were any number of the little
prairie-wolves and some big gray ones. Could see
the little wolves running across the prairie any time
o’ day, and at night their continual yap, yap was
almost unendurable. They developed a taste for
barn-yard fowl that made it necessary for hens to
roost high. They are cowards in the daytime, but
brave enough to come close to the house at night.
If people had only had foxhounds, they would have
afforded an opportunity for some sport. I have
seen people try to run them down on horseback, but
never knew them to succeed.

“ One of my standard amusements was to go every
little while to a den the wolves had, where the rocks

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 103

cropped out of the ground, and poke in there with
a stick, to see a wolf pop out scared almost to death.
As to the big wolves, it was dangerous sport to
meddle with them. I had an experience with them
one winter that would have begotten a desire to keep
a proper distance from them, had I not felt it before.
An intensely cold night three of us were riding in
an open wagon on one seat. The road ran for about
a mile through the woods, and as we entered it
four or five gray wolves sprang out at us; the horse
needed no urging, you may be sure, but to me it
seemed an age before we got out into the moonlight
on the prairie; then the wolves slunk back into the
woods. very leap they made it seemed as if they
would jump into the wagon. I could hear them
strike against the back of it, and hear their teeth
click together as they barely missed my hand where
I held on to the seat to keep from being thrown out.
My most prominent desire about that time was to
sit in the middle, and let some one else have the
outside seat.

“ Grandfather was very fond of trapping, and
used to catch a great many wolves for their skins
and the bounty; also minks and muskrats. [I al-
ways had to help skin them, which I considered
dreadful, especially skinning the muskrats; but as
that was the only condition under which I was
allowed to go along, of course I submitted, for I
would n’t miss the excitement of seeing whether we
had succeeded in outwitting and catching the sly
~~ ereatures for any consideration. The beautiful

104 RIVERBY

minks, with their slender satiny bodies, it seemed
a pity to catch them. Muskrats I had no sympathy
for, they looked so ratty, and had so unpleasant a
smell. The gophers were one of the greatest plagues
the farmers had. The ground would be dotted with
their mounds, so round and regular, the black dirt
pulverized so finely. JI always wondered how they
could make them of such a perfect shape, and wished
I could see way down into their houses. They have
more than one entrance to them, because I’ve tried
to drown them out, and soon I would see what I
took to be my gopher, that I thought I had covered
so nicely, skipping off. They took so much corn
out of the hills after it was planted that it was cus-
tomary to mix corn soaked with strychnine with the
seed corn. Do they have pocket gophers in the
East? [No.] They are the cutest little animals,
with their pockets on each side of their necks, lined
with fur; when they get them stuffed full they
look as broad as they are long, and so saucy. I
have met them, and had them show fight because I
would n’t turn out of their path, — the little impu-
dent things!

** One nuisance that goes along with civilization
we escaped until the railroad was built, and that was
rats. The railroads brought other nuisances, too,
the weeds; they soon crowded out the native plants.
I don’t want to be understood as calling all weeds
nuisances; the beautiful flowers some of them bear
save their reputations, — the dandelion, for instance ;
I approve of the dandelion, whatever others may

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 105

think. I shall never forget the first one I found in
the West; it was like meeting an old friend. It
grew alongside of an emigrant road, about five miles
from my home; here I spied the golden treasure in
the grass. Some of the many ‘ prairie schooners’
that had passed that way had probably dropped the
one seed. Mother dug it up and planted it in our
flower-bed, and in two years the neighborhood was
yellow with them, —all from that one root. The
prairies are gone now, and the wild flowers, those
that have not been civilized to death like the Indians,
have taken refuge in the fence-corners.”

I had asked her what she knew about cranes, and
she replied as follows: —

“ During the first few years after we came West,
cranes, especially the sand-hill variety, were very
plentiful. Any day in the summer you might see
a triangle of them flying over, with their long legs
dragging behind them; or, if you had sharp eyes,
could see them stalking along the sloughs sometimes
found on the prairie. In the books I see them de-
scribed as being brown in color. Now I should not
call them brown, for they are more of a yellow.
They are just the color of a gosling, should it get its
down somewhat soiled, and they look much like
overgrown goslings set up on stilts. I have often
found their nests, and always in the shallow water
in the slough, built out of sticks, — much as the
children build cob-houses, — about a foot high, with
two large flat eggs in them. I have often tried to
catch them on their nests, so as to see how they

106 RIVERBY

disposed of their long legs, but never quite suc-
ceeded. They are very shy, and their nests are al-
ways so situated as to enable them to see in every
direction. I had a great desire to possess a pet
crane, but every attempt to raise one resulted in
failure, all on account of those same slender legs,

“The egg I placed under a ‘ sitting hen’ (one was
as much as a hen could conveniently manage); it
would hatch out all right, and I had no difficulty in
feeding the young crane, for it would eat anything,
and showed no shyness, — quite different from a
young prairie-chicken; in fact, their tameness was
the cause of their death, for, like Mary’s little lamb,
they insisted on going everywhere I went. When
they followed me into the house, and stepped upon
the smooth floor, one leg would go in one direction
and the other in the opposite, breaking one or both
of them. They seemed to be unable to walk upon
any smooth surface. Such ridiculous-looking things
they were! I have seen a few pure white ones, but
only on the wing. They seem more shy than the
yellow ones.

“Once I saw a curious sight; I saw seven or
eight cranes dance a cotillon, or something very
much like it. I have since read of wild fowl per-
forming in that way, but then I had never heard of
it. They were in a meadow about half a mile from
the house; I did not at all understand what they
were doing, and proceeded to investigate. After
walking as near as I could without frightening
them, I crept through the tall grass until I was

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 107

within a rod of the cranes, and then lay and watched
them. Jt was the most comical sight to see them
waltz around, sidle up to each other and back again,
their long necks and legs making the most clumsy
motions. With a little stretch of the imagination
one might see a smirk on their faces, and suspect
them of caricaturing human beings. There seemed
to be a regular method in their movements, for the
changes were repeated. How long they kept it up
I do not know, for I tired of it, and went back to
the house, but they had danced until the grass was
trampled down hard and smooth. I always had a
mania for trying experiments, so I coaxed my mo-
ther to cook one the men had shot, though I had
never heard of any one’s eating crane. It was not
very good, tasted somewhat peculiar, and the thought
that maybe it was poison struck me with horror.
I was badly scared, for I reflected that I had no
proof that it was not poison, and I had been told
so many times that I was bound to come to grief,
sooner or later, from trying to find out things.”

I am always glad to have the views of a sensible
person, outside of the literary circles, upon my fa-
vorite authors, especially when the views are spon-
taneous. “Speaking of Thoreau,” says my corre-
spondent, “I am willing to allow most that is said
in his praise, but I do not like him, all the same.
Do you know I feel that he was not altogether hu-
man. ‘There is something uncanny about him. I
guess that, instead of having a human soul, his body
was inhabited by some sylvan deity that flourished

108 RIVERBY

in Grecian times; he seemed out of place among
human beings.”

Of Carlyle, too, she has an independent opinion,
“Tt is a mystery to me why men so universally ad-
mire Carlyle; women do not, or, if there is occasion-
ally one who does, she does not ke him. A wo-
man’s first thought about him would be, ‘I pity his
wife!’ Do you remember what he said in answer
to Mrs. Welsh’s proposal to come and live with
them and help support them? He said they could
only live pleasantly together on the condition that
she looked up to him, not he to her. Here is what
he says: ‘Now, think, Liebchen, whether your
mother will consent to forget her riches and our
poverty, and uncertain, more probably scanty, in-
come, and consent in the spirit of Christian meek-
ness to make me her guardian and director, and be
a second wife to her daughter’s husband?’ Now,
isn’t that insufferable conceit for you? To expect
that a woman old enough to be his mother would
lay aside her self-respect and individuality to accept
him, a comparatively young and inexperienced man,
as her master? The cheekiness of it! Here you
have the key-note of his character, — ‘ great I and
little u.’

“T have tried faithfully to like him, for it seemed
as if the fault must be in me because I did not; I
have labored wearily through nearly all his works,
stumbling over his superlatives (why, he is an ad-
jective factory; his pages look like the alphabet
struck by a cyclone. You call it picturesqueness;

NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE 109

I call it grotesqueness). But it was of no use; it
makes me tired all over to think of it. All the
time I said to myself, ‘Oh, do stop your scolding;
you are not so much better than the rest of us.’
One is willing to be led to a higher life, but who
wants to be pushed and cuffed along? How can
people place him and our own Emerson, the dear
guide and friend of so many of us, on the same
level? It may be that the world had need of him,
just as it needs lightning and rain and cold and pain,
but must we like these things?” 4

1 My correspondent was Mrs. Beardslee of Manchester, Iowa.
She died in October, 1885.

VI
EYE-BEAMS

I

A WEASEL AND HIS DEN

M* most interesting note of the season of 1893

relates to a weasel. One day in early No-
vember, my boy and I were sitting on a rock at the
edge of a tamarack swamp in the woods, hoping to
get a glimpse of some grouse which we knew were
in the habit of feeding in the swamp. We had not
sat there very long before we heard a slight rustling
in the leaves below us, which we at once fancied
was made by the cautious tread of a grouse. (We
had no gun.) Presently, through the thick brushy
growth, we caught sight of a small animal running
along, that we at first took for a red squirrel A
moment more, and it came into full view but a few
yards from us, and we saw that it was a weasel. A
second glance showed that it carried something in
its mouth which, as it drew near, we saw was a
mouse or a mole of some sort. The weasel ran
nimbly along, now the length of a decayed log, then
over stones and branches, pausing a moment every
three or four yards, and passed within twenty feet
of us, and disappeared behind some rocks on the

112 RIVERBY

bank at the edge of the swamp. “He is carrying
food into his den,” I said; ‘“ let us watch him.”
In four or five minutes he reappeared, coming back
over the course along which he had just passed,
running over and under the same stones and down
the same decayed log, and was soon out of sight in
the swamp. We had not moved, and evidently he
had not noticed us. After about six minutes we
heard the same rustle as at first, and in a moment
saw the weasel coming back with another mouse in
his mouth. He kept to his former route as if chained
to it, making the same pauses and gestures, and
repeating exactly his former movements. He dis-
appeared on our left as before, and, after a few mo-
ments’ delay, reémerged and took his course down
into the swamp again. We waited about the same
length of time as before, when back he came with
another mouse. He evidently had a big crop of
mice down there amid the bogs and bushes, and he
was gathering his harvest in very industriously. We
became curious to see exactly where his den was,
and so walked around where he had seemed to dis-
appear each time, and waited. He was as punctual
as usual, and was back with his game exactly on
time. It happened that we had stopped within two
paces of his hole, so that, as he approached it, he
evidently discovered us. He paused, looked stead-
ily at us, and then, without any sign of fear, entered
his den. The entrance was not under the rocks as
we had expected, but was in the bank a few feet be-
yond them. We remained motionless for some time,

EYE—BEAMS 113

but he did not reappear. Our presence had made
him suspicious, and he was going to wait awhile.
Then I removed some dry leaves and exposed his
doorway, a small, round hole, hardly as large as
the chipmunk makes, going straight down into the
ground. We had a lively curiosity to get a peep
into his larder. If he had been carrying in mice at
this rate very long, his cellars must be packed with
them. With a sharp stick I began digging into the
red clayey soil, but soon encountered so many roots
from near trees that I gave it up, deciding to return
next day with a mattock. So I repaired the dam-
ages I had done as well as I could, replaced the
leaves, and we moved off.

The next day, which was mild and still as usual,
I came back armed, as I thought, to unearth the
weasel and his treasures. I sat down where we had
sat the day before and awaited developments. I
was curious to know if the weasel was still carrying
in his harvest. I had sat but a few minutes when
I heard again the rustle in the dry leaves, and saw
the weasel coming home with another mouse. I ob-
served him till he had made three trips; about every
six or seven minutes, I calculated, he brought in a
mouse. Then I went and stood near his hole. This
time he had a fat meadow-mouse. He laid it down
near the entrance, went in and turned around, and
reached out and drew the mouse in after him. That
store of mice I am bound to see, I thought, and then
fell to with the heavy mattock. I followed the hole
down about two feet, when it turned to the north.

114 RIVERBY

I kept the clew by thrusting into the passage slender
twigs; these it was easy to follow. Two or three feet
more and the hole branched, one part going west,
the other northeast. I followed the west one a few
feet till it branched. Then I turned to the easterly
tunnel, and pursued it till it branched. I followed
one of these ways till it divided. I began to be
embarrassed and hindered by the accumulations of
loose soil. Evidently this weasel had foreseen just
such an assault upon his castle as I was making, and
had planned it accordingly. He was not to be caught
napping. I found several enlargements in the vari-
ous tunnels, breathing spaces, or spaces to turn
around in, or to meet and chat with a companion,
but nothing that looked like a terminus, a permanent
living-room. I tried removing the soil a couple of
paces away with the mattock, but found it slow
work. JI was getting warm and tired, and my task
was apparently only just begun. The farther I dug
the more numerous and intricate became the pas-
sages. I concluded to stop, and come again the next
day, armed with a shovel in addition to the mattock.

Accordingly, I came back on the morrow, and fell
to work vigorously. I soon had quite a large exca-
vation; I found the bank a labyrinth of passages,
with here and there a large chamber. One of the
latter I struck only six inches under the surface, by
making a fresh breach a few feet away.

While I was leaning upon my shovel-handle and
recovering my breath, I heard some light-footed
creature tripping over the leaves above me just out

EYE-BEAMS 115

of view, which I fancied might be a squirrel.
Presently I heard the bay of a hound and the yelp
of a cur, and then knew that a rabbit had passed
near me. The dogs came hurrying after, with a
great rumpus, and then presently the hunters fol-
lowed. The dogs remained barking not many rods
south of me on the edge of the swamp, and I knew
the rabbit had run to hole. For half an hour or
more I heard the hunters at work there, digging
their game out; then they came along and discov-
ered me at my work. (An old trapper and woods-
man and his son.) I told them what I was in
quest of. ‘A mountain weasel,” said the old man.
“Seven or eight years ago I used to set deadfalls
for rabbits just over there, and the game was always
partly eaten up. It must have been this weasel
that visited my traps.” So my game was evidently
an old resident of the place. This swamp, maybe,
had been his hunting-ground for many years, and
he had added another hall to his dwelling each year.
After further digging, I struck at least one of his
banqueting halls, a cavity about the size of one’s
hat, arched over by a network of fine tree-roots.
The occupant evidently lodged or rested here also.
There was a warm, dry nest, made of leaves and the
fur of mice and moles. I took out two or three
handfuls. In finding this chamber I had followed
one of the tunnels around till it brought me within
a foot of the original entrance. A few inches to one
side of this cavity there was what I took to be a
back alley where the weasel threw his waste; there

116 RIVERBY

were large masses of wet, decaying fur here, and fur
pellets such as are regurgitated by hawks and owls.
In the nest there was the tail of a flying squirrel,
showing that the weasel sometimes had a flying squir-
rel for supper or dinner.

I continued my digging with renewed energy; I
should yet find the grand depot where all these pas-
sages centred; but the farther I excavated, the more
complex and baffling the problem became; the ground
was honeycombed with passages. What enemy has
this weasel, I said to myself, that he should provide
so many ways of escape, that he should have a back
door at every turn? To corner him would be im-
possible; to be lost in his fortress were like being
lost in Mammoth Cave. How he could bewilder
his pursuer by appearing now at this door, now at
that; now mocking him from the attic, now defying
him from the cellar! So far, I had discovered but
one entrance; but some of the chambers were so near
the surface that it looked as if the planner had caleu-
lated upon an emergency when he might want to
reach daylight quickly in a new place.

Finally I paused, rested upon my shovel a while,
eased my aching back upon the ground, and then
gave it up, feeling as I never had before the force of
the old saying, that you cannot catch a weasel asleep.
I had made an ugly hole in the bank, had handled
over two or three times a ton or more of earth, and
was apparently no nearer the weasel and his store
of mice than when I began.

Then I regretted that I had broken into his castle

EYE-—BEAMS 117

at all; that I had not contented myself with coming
day after day and counting his mice as he carried
them in, and continued my observation upon him
each succeeding year. Now the rent in his fortress
could not be repaired, and he would doubtless move
away, as he most certainly did, for his doors, which
IT had closed with soil, remained unopened after win-
ter had set in.

But little seems known about the intimate private
lives of any of our lesser wild creatures. It was
news to me that any of the weasels lived in dens in
this way, and that they stored up provision against
a day of need. This species was probably the little
ermine, eight or nine inches long, with tail about
five inches. It was still in its summer dress of dark
chestnut-brown above and whitish below.

It was a mystery where the creature had put the
earth which it must have removed in digging its
den; not a grain was to be seen anywhere, and
yet a bushel or more must have been taken out.
Externally, there was not the slightest sign of that
curious habitation there under the ground. The
entrance was hidden beneath dry leaves, and was
surrounded by little passages and flourishes between
the leaves and the ground. If any of my readers
find a weasel’s den, I hope they will be wiser than
T was, and observe his goings and comings without
disturbing his habitation.

118 RIVERBY

II

KEEN PERCEPTIONS

Success in observing nature, as in so many other
things, depends upon alertness of mind and quick-
ness to take a hint. One’s perceptive faculties must
be like a trap lightly and delicately set; a touch
must suffice to spring it. But how many people
have I walked with, whose perceptions were rusty
and unpracticed, — nothing less than a bear would
spring their trap! All the finer play of nature, all
the small deer, they miss. The little dramas and
tragedies that are being enacted by the wild crea-
tures in the fields and woods are more or less veiled
and withdrawn; and the actors all stop when a spec-
tator appears upon the scene. One must be able to
interpret the signs, to penetrate the scenes, to put
this and that together.

Then nature speaks a different language from our
own; the successful observer translates this language
into human speech. He knows the meaning of every
sound, movement, gesture, and gives the human
equivalent. Careless or hasty observers, on the
other hand, make the mistake of reading their own
thoughts or mental and emotional processes into na-
ture; plans and purposes are attributed to the wild
creatures which are quite beyond them. Some peo-
ple in town saw an English sparrow tangled up in a
horsehair, and suspended from a tree, with other
sparrows fluttering and chattering about it. They
concluded at once that the sparrows had executed

EYE-BEAMS 119

one of their number, doubtless for some crime. I
have several times seen sparrows suspended in this
way about their nesting and roosting places. Acci-
dents happen to birds as well as to other folks. But
they do not yet imitate us in the matter of capital
punishment.

One day I saw a little bush sparrow fluttering
along in the grass, disabled in some way, and a large
number of its mates flitting and calling about it. I
captured the bird, and, in doing so, its struggles in
my hand broke the bond that held it —some kind
of web or silken insect thread that tied together the
quills of one wing. When I let it fly away, all its
mates followed it as if wondering at the miracle that
had been wrought. They no doubt experienced
some sort of emotion. Birds sympathize with each
other in their distress, and will make common cause
against an enemy. Crows will pursue and fight a
tame crow. They seem to look upon him as an
alien and an enemy. He is never so shapely and
bright and polished as his wild brother. He is
more or less demoralized, and has lost caste. Prob-
ably a pack of wolves would in the same way de-
stroy a tame wolf, should such an one appear in their
midst. The wild creatures are human, — with a
difference, a wide difference. They have the keen-
est powers of perception, — what observers they are!
how quickly they take a hint — but they have little
or no powers of reflection. The crows do not meet
in parliaments and caucuses, as has been fancied,
and try offenders, and discuss the tariff, or consider

120 RIVERBY

ways and means. They are gregarious and social,
and probably in the fall have something like a re-
union of the tribe. At least their vast assemblages
upon the hills at this season have a decidedly festive
appearance.

The crow has fine manners. He always has the
walk and air of a lord of the soil. One morning I
put out some fresh meat upon the snow near my
study window. Presently a crow came and carried
it off, and alighted with it upon the ground in the
vineyard. While he was eating of it, another crow
came, and, alighting a few yards away, slowly
walked up to within a few feet of this fellow and
stopped. I expected to see a struggle over the food,
as would have been the case with domestic fowls or
animals. Nothing of the kind. The feeding crow
stopped eating, regarded the other for a moment,
made a gesture or two, and flew away. Then the
second crow went up to the food, and proceeded to
take his share. Presently the first crow came back,
when each seized a portion of the food and flew
away with it. Their mutual respect and good-will
seemed perfect. Whether it really was so in our
human sense, or whether it was simply an illustration
of the instinct of mutual support which seems to
prevail among gregarious birds, I know not. Birds
that are solitary in their habits, like hawks or wood-
peckers, behave quite differently toward each other
in the presence of their food.

The lives of the wild creatures revolve about two
facts or emotions, appetite and fear. Their keenness

EYE-BEAMS 121

in discovering food and in discovering danger are
alike remarkable. But man can nearly always out-
wit them, because, while his perceptions are not as
sharp, his power of reflection is so much greater.
His cunning carries a great deal farther. The crow
will quickly discover anything that looks like a trap
or snare set to catch him, but it takes him a long
time to see through the simplest contrivance. As
T have above stated, I sometimes place meat on the
snow in front of my study window to attract him.
On one occasion, after a couple of crows had come
to expect something there daily, I suspended a piece’
of meat by a string from a branch of the tree just
over the spot where I usually placed the food. A
crow soon discovered it, and came into the tree to
see what it meant. His suspicions were aroused.
There was some design in that suspended meat evi-
dently. It was a trap to catch him. He surveyed
it from every near branch. He peeked and pried,
and was bent on penetrating the mystery. He flew
to the ground, and walked about and surveyed it
from all sides. Then he took a long walk down
about the vineyard as if in hope of hitting upon
some clew. Then he came to the tree again, and
tried first one eye, then the other, upon it; then to
the ground beneath; then he went away and came
back; then his fellow came, and they both squinted
and investigated, and then disappeared. Chicka-
dees and woodpeckers would alight upon the meat
and peck it swinging in the wind, but the crows
were fearful. Does this show reflection? Perhaps

122 RIVERBY

it does, but I look upon it rather as that instinct of
fear and cunning so characteristic of the crow. Two
days passed thus: every morning the crows came
and surveyed the suspended meat from all points
in the tree, and then went away. The third day
I placed a large bone on the snow beneath the sus-
pended morsel. Presently one of the crows appeared
in the tree, and bent his eye upon the tempting
bone. ‘‘The mystery deepens,” he seemed to say
to himself. But after half an hour’s investigation,
and after approaching several times within a few
feet of the food upon the ground, he seemed to
conclude there was no connection between it and the
piece hanging by the string. So he finally walked
up to it and fell to pecking it, flickering his wings
all the time, as a sign of his watchfulness. He also
turned up his eye, momentarily, to the piece in the
air above, as if it might be some disguised sword of
Damocles ready to fall upon him. Soon his mate
came and alighted on a low branch of the tree. The
feeding crow regarded him a moment, and then
flew up to his side, as if to give him a turn at the
meat. But he refused to run the risk. He evidently
looked upon the whole thing as a delusion and a
snare, and presently went away, and his mate fol-
lowed him. Then I placed the bone in one of the
main forks of the tree, but the crows kept at a safe
distance from it. Then I put it back to the ground,
but they grew more and more suspicious; some evil
intent in it all, they thought. Finally a dog carried
off the bone, and the crows ceased to visit the tree.

EYE-BEAMS 123

III
A SPARROW’S MISTAKE

Tf one has always built one’s nest upon the ground,
and if one comes of a race of ground-builders, it is
a tisky experiment to build in a tree. The con-
ditions are vastly different. One of my near neigh-
bors, a little song sparrow, learned this lesson the
past season. She grew ambitious; she departed from
the traditions of her race, and placed her nest in
a tree. Such a pretty spot she chose, too — the
pendent cradle formed by the interlaced sprays of
two. parallel branches of a Norway spruce. These
branches shoot out almost horizontally ; indeed, the
lower ones become quite so in spring, and the side
shoots with which they are clothed droop down,
forming the slopes of miniature ridges; where the
slopes of two branches join, a little valley is formed
which often looks more stable than it really is. My
sparrow selected one of these little valleys about
six feet from the ground, and quite near the walls of
the house. Here, she has thought, I will build my
nest, and pass the heat of June in a miniature Nor-
way. This tree is the fir-clad mountain, and this
little vale on its side I select for my own. She
carried up a great quantity of coarse grass and straws
for the foundation, just as she would have done
upon the ground. On the top of this mass there
gradually came into shape the delicate structure of
her nest, compacting and refining till its delicate
carpet of hairs and threads was reached. So sly as

124 RIVERBY

the little bird was about it, too, — every moment on
her guard lest you discover her secret! Jive eggs
were laid, and incubation was far advanced, when
the storms and winds came. ‘The cradle indeed did
rock. The boughs did not break, but they swayed
and separated as you would part your two inter-
locked hands. The ground of the little valley fairly
gave way, the nest tilted over till its contents fell
into the chasm. It was like an earthquake that de-
stroys a hamlet.

No born tree-builder would have placed its nest
in such a situation. Birds that build at the end of
the branch, like the oriole, tie the nest fast; others,
like the robin, build against the main trunk; still
others build securely in the fork. The sparrow, in
her ignorance, rested her house upon the spray of
two branches, and when the tempest came the
branches parted company and the nest was engulfed.

Another sparrow friend of mine met with a curi-
ous mishap the past season. It was the little social
sparrow, or chippie. She built her nest on the arm
of a grapevine in the vineyard, a favorite place with
chippie. It had a fine canopy of leaves, and was
firmly and securely placed. Just above it hung a
bunch of young grapes, which in the warm July
days grew very rapidly. The little bird had not
foreseen the calamity that threatened her. The
grapes grew down into her nest and completely filled
it, so that, when I put my hand in, there were the
eggs sat upon by the grapes. The bird was crowded
out, and had perforce abandoned her nest, ejected

EYE—BEAMS 125

by a bunch of grapes. How long she held her ground
I do not know; probably till the fruit began to press
heavily upon her.

Iv

A POOR FOUNDATION

It is a curious habit the wood thrush has of start-
ing its nest with a fragment of newspaper or other
paper. Except in remote woods, I think it nearly
always puts a piece of paper in the foundation of its
nest. Last spring I chanced to be sitting near a
tree in which a wood thrush had concluded to build.
She came with a piece of paper nearly as large as my
hand, placed it upon the branch, stood upon it a
moment, and then flew down to the ground. A
little puff of wind caused the paper to leave the
branch a moment afterward. The thrush watched
it eddy slowly down to the ground, when she seized
it and carried it back. She placed it in position as
before, stood upon it again for a moment, and then
flew away. Again the paper left the branch, and
sailed away slowly to the ground. The bird seized
it again, jerking it about rather spitefully, I thought;
she turned it around two or three times, then labored
back to the branch with it, upon which she shifted
it about as if to hit upon some position in which it
would lie more securely. This time she sat down
upon it for a moment, and then went away, doubt-
less with the thought in her head that she would
bring something to hold it down. The perverse
paper followed her in a few seconds. She seized it

126 RIVERBY

again, and hustled it about more than before. As
she rose with it toward the nest, it in some way im-
peded her flight, and she was compelled to return to
the ground with it. But she kept her temper re-
markably well. She turned the paper over and took
it wp in her beak several times before she was satis-
fied with her hold, and then carried it back to the
branch, where, however, it would not stay. I saw
her make six trials of it, when I was called away. I
think she finally abandoned the restless fragment,
probably a scrap that held some “ breezy” piece of
writing, for later in the season I examined the nest
and found no paper in it.

Vv

A FRIGHTENED MINK

In walking through the woods one day in early
winter, we read upon the newly fallen snow the rec-
ord of a mink’s fright the night before. The mink
had been traveling through the woods post-haste,
not along the watercourses where one sees them by
day, but over ridges and across valleys. We fol-
lowed his track some distance to see what adventures
he had met with. We tracked him through a bushy
swamp, saw where he had left it to explore a pile of
rocks, then where he had taken to the swamp again,
then to the more open woods. Presently the track
turned sharply about, and doubled upon itself in
long hurried strides. What had caused the mink to
change its mind so suddenly? ‘We explored a few
paces ahead, and came upon a fox track. The mink

EYE—BEAMS 127

had seen the fox stalking stealthily through the
woods, and the sight had probably brought his heart
into his mouth. I think he climbed a tree, and
waited till the fox passed. His track disappeared
amid a clump of hemlocks, and then reappeared again
alittle beyond them. It described a big loop around,
and then crossed the fox track only a few yards from
the point where its course was interrupted. Then
it followed a little watercourse, went under a rude
bridge in a wood-road, then mingled with squirrel
tracks in a denser part of the thicket. If the mink
met a muskrat or a rabbit in his travels, or came
upon a grouse, or quail, or a farmer’s hen-roost, he
had the supper he was in quest of.

vI
A LEGLESS CLIMBER

The eye always sees what it wants to see, and
the ear hears what it wants to hear. If I am in-
tent upon birds’-nests in my walk, I find birds’-
nests everywhere. Some people see four-leaved
clovers wherever they look in the grass. A friend
of mine picks up Indian relics all about the fields;
he has Indian relics in his eye. I have seen him
turn out of the path at right angles, as a dog will
when he scents something, and walk straight away
several rods, and pick up an Indian pounding-stone.
He saw it out of the corner of his eye. I find that
without conscious effort I see and hear birds with

like ease. Eye and ear are always on the alert.
One day in early June I was walking with some

128 RIVERBY

friends along a secluded wood-road. Above the
hum of the conversation I caught the distressed cry
of a pair of blue jays. My companions heard it also,
but did not heed it.

But to my ear the cry was peculiar. It was ut-
tered in a tone of anguish and alarm. I said, ‘Let
us see what is the trouble with these jays.” I pres-
ently saw a nest twenty-five or thirty feet from the
ground in a small hemlock which I at once con-
cluded belonged to the jays. The birds were but a
few yards away, hopping about amid the neighbor-
ing branches, uttering now and then their despair-
ing note. Looking more intently at the nest, I be-
came aware in the dim light of the tree of something
looped about it, or else there was a dark, very crooked
limb that partly held it. Suspecting the true na-
ture of the case, I threw a stone up through the
branches, and then another and another, when the
dark loops and folds upon one side of the nest began
to disappear, and the head and neck of a black snake
to slowly slide out on a horizontal branch on the
other; in a moment the snake had cleared the nest,
and stretched himself along the branch.

Another rock-fragment jarred his perch, when he
slid cautiously along toward the branch of a large
pine-tree which came out and mingled its spray with
that of the hemlock. It was soon apparent that the
snake was going to take refuge in the pine. As he
made the passage from one tree to the other, we
sought to dislodge him by a shower of sticks and
stones, but without success; he was soon upon a

EYE-BEAMS 129

large branch of the pine, and, stretched out on top
of the limb, thought himself quite hidden. And
so he was; but we knew his hiding-place, and the
stones and clubs we hurled soon made him uneasy.
Presently a club struck the branch with such force
that he was fairly dislodged, but saved himself by
quickly wrapping his tail about the limb. In this
position he hung for some moments, but the inter-
vening branches shielded him pretty well from our
missiles, and he soon recovered himself and gained
a still higher branch that reached out over the road
and nearly made a bridge to the trees on the other
side.

Seeing the monster was likely to escape us, unless
we assailed him at closer quarters, I determined to
climb the tree. A smaller tree growing near helped
me up to the first branches, where the ascent was —
not very difficult. I finally reached the branch
upon which the snake was carefully poised, and be-
gan shaking it. But he did not come down;.he
wrapped his tail about it, and defied me. My own
position was precarious, and I was obliged to move
with great circumspection.

After much manceuvring I succeeded in arming
myself with a dry branch eight or ten feet long,
where I had the serpent at a disadvantage. He
kept his hold well. I clubbed him about from
branch to branch, while my friends, with cautions
and directions, looked on from beneath. Neither
man nor snake will indulge in very lively antics in
a treetop thirty or forty feet from the ground. But

130 RIVERBY

at last I dislodged him, and, swinging and looping
like a piece of rubber hose, he went to the ground,
where my friends pounced upon him savagely and
quickly made an end of him.

I worked my way carefully down the tree, and
was about to drop upon the ground from the lower
branches, when I saw another black snake coiled up
at the foot of the tree, as if lying in wait for me.
Had he started to his mate’s rescue, and, seeing the
battle over, was he now waiting to avenge himself
upon the victor? But the odds were against him;
my friends soon had him stretched beside his com-
rade.

The first snake killed had swallowed two young
jays just beginning to feather out.

How the serpent discovered the nest would be very
interesting to know. What led him to search in
this particular tree amid all these hundreds of trees
that surrounded it? It is probable that the snake
watches like a cat, or, having seen the parent birds
about this tree, explored it. Nests upon the ground
and in low boughs are frequently rifled by black
snakes, but I have never before known one to climb
to such a height in a forest tree.

It would also be interesting to know if the other
snake was in the secret of this nest, and was waiting
near to share in its contents. One rarely has the
patience to let these little dramas or tragedies be
played to the end; one cannot look quietly on, and
see a snake devour anything. Not even when it is
snake eat snake. Only a few days later my little

EYE-BEAMS 131

boy called me to the garden to see a black snake in
the act of swallowing a garter snake. The little
snake was holding back with all his might and main,
‘hooking his tail about the blackberry bushes, and
pulling desperately ; still his black enemy was slowly
engulfing him, and had accomplished about eight or
ten inches of him, when he suddenly grew alarmed
at some motion of ours, and ejected the little snake
from him with unexpected ease and quickness, and
tried to escape. The little snake’s head was bleed-
ing, but he did not seem otherwise to have suffered
from the adventure.

Still a few days later, the man who was mowing
the lawn called to me to come and witness a similar
tragedy, but on a smaller scale, — a garter snake swal-
lowing a little green snake. Half the length of the
green snake had disappeared from sight, and it was
quite dead. The process had been a slow one, as
the garter snake was only two or three inches longer
than his victim. There seems to be a sort of poetic
justice in snake swallowing snake, shark eating shark,
and one can look on with more composure than when
a bird or frog is the victim. It is said that in the
deep sea there is a fish that will swallow another fish
eight or ten times its own size. It seizes its victim
by the tail and slowly sucks it in, stretching and
expanding itself at the same time, and probably di-
gesting the big fish by inches, till, after many days,
it is completely engulfed. Would it be hard to find
something analogous to this in life, especially in
American politics?

VII
A YOUNG MARSH HAWK

Mo country boys, I fancy, know the marsh

: hawk. Itis he you see flying low over the
fields, beating about bushes and marshes and dipping
over the fences, with his attention directed to the
ground beneath him. He is acat on wings. He
keeps so low that the birds and mice do not see him
till he is fairly upon them. The hen-hawk swoops
down upon the meadow-mouse from his position high
in air, or from the top of a dead tree; but the marsh
hawk stalks him and comes suddenly upon him from
over the fence, or from behind a low bush or tuft of
grass. He is nearly as large as the hen-hawk, but
has a much longer tail. When I was a boy I used
to call him the long-tailed hawk. The male is a
bluish slate color; the female a reddish brown, like
the hen-hawk, with a white rump.

Unlike the other hawks, they nest on the ground
in low, thick marshy places. or several seasons a
pair have nested in a bushy marsh a few miles back
of me, near the house of a farmer friend of mine,
who has a keen eye for the wild life about him.
Two years ago he found the nest, but when I got
over to see it the next week, it had been robbed,

134 RIVERBY

probably by some boys in the neighborhood. The
past season, in April or May, by watching the mo-
ther bird, he found the nest again. It was in a
marshy place, several acres in extent, in the bot-
tom of a valley, and thickly grown with hardhack,
prickly ash, smilax, and other low thorny bushes.
My friend brought me to the brink of a low hill, and
pointed out to me in the marsh below us, as nearly
as he could, just where the nest was located. Then
we crossed the pasture, entered upon the marsh,
and made our way cautiously toward it. The wild
thorny growths, waist high, had to be carefully dealt
with. As we neared the spot I used my eyes the
best I could, but I did not see the hawk till she
sprang into the air not ten yards away from us. She
went screaming upward, and was soon sailing in a
circle far above us. There, on a coarse matting of
twigs and weeds, lay five snow-white eggs, a little
more than half as large as hens’ eggs. My compan-
ion said the male hawk would probably soon appear
and join the female, but he did not. She kept
drifting away to the east, and was soon gone from
our sight.

We soon withdrew and secreted ourselves behind
the stone wall, in hopes of seeing the mother hawk
return. She appeared in the distance, but seemed
to know she was being watched, and kept away.
About ten days later we made another visit to the
nest. An adventurous young Chicago lady also
wanted to see a hawk’s nest, and so accompanied
us. This time three of the eggs were hatched, and

A YOUNG MARSH HAWK 135

as the mother hawk sprang up, either by accident
or intentionally, she threw two of the young hawks
some feet from the nest. She rose up and screamed
angrily. Then, turning toward us, she came like
an arrow straight at the young lady, a bright plume
in whose hat probably drew her fire. The damsel
gathered up her skirts about her and beat a hasty
retreat. Hawks were not so pretty as she thought
they were. <A large hawk launched at one’s face
from high in the air is calculated to make one a little
nervous. It is such a fearful incline down which
the bird comes, and she is aiming exactly toward
your eye. When within about. thirty feet of you,
she turns upward with a rushing sound, and, mount-
ing higher falls toward you again. She is only fir-
ing blank cartridges, as it were; but it usually has
the desired effect, and beats the enemy off.

After we had inspected the young hawks, a neigh-
bor of my friend offered to conduct us to a quail’s
nest. Anything in the shape of a nest is always
welcome, it is such a mystery, such a centre of in-
terest and affection, and, if upon the ground, is usu-
ally something so dainty and exquisite amid the natu-
ral wreckage and confusion. A ground-nest seems
so exposed, too, that it always gives a little thrill of
pleasurable surprise to see the group of frail eggs
resting there behind so slight a barrier. I will walk
a long distance any day just to see a song sparrow’s
nest amid the stubble or under a tuft of grass. It
is a jewel in a rosette of jewels, with a frill of weeds
or turf. A quail’s nest I had never seen, and to be

136 RIVERBY

shown one within the hunting-ground of this mur-
derous hawk would be a double pleasure. Sucha
quiet, secluded, grass-grown highway as we moved
along was itself a rare treat. Sequestered was the
word that the little valley suggested, and peace the
feeling the road evoked. The farmer, whose fields
lay about us, half grown with weeds and bushes,
evidently did not make stir or noise enough to dis-
turb anything. Beside this rustic highway, bounded
by old mossy stone walls, and within a stone’s throw
of the farmer’s barn, the quail had made her nest.
It was just under the edge of a prostrate thorn-bush.

“ The nest is right there,” said the farmer, paus-
ing within ten feet of it, and pointing to the spot
with his stick.

In a moment or two we could make out the mot-
tled brown plumage of the sitting bird. Then we
approached her cautiously till we bent above her.

She never moved a feather.

Then I put my cane down in the brush behind
her. We wanted to see the eggs, yet did not want
rudely to disturb the sitting hen.

She would not move.

Then I put down my hand within a few inches of
her; still she kept her place. Should we have to
lift her off bodily ?

Then the young lady put down her hand, probably
the prettiest and the whitest hand the quail had ever
seen. At least it started her, and off she sprang,
uncovering such a crowded nest of eggs as- I had
never before beheld. Twenty-one of them! a ring

A YOUNG MARSH HAWK 137

or disk of white like a china tea-saucer. You could
not help saying how pretty, how cunning, like baby
hens’ eggs, as if the bird was playing at sitting as
children play at housekeeping.

If I had known how crowded her nest was, I
should not have dared disturb her, for fear she would
break some of them. But not an egg suffered harm
by her sudden flight; and no harm came to the nest
afterward. Every egg hatched, I was told, and the
little chicks, hardly bigger than bumblebees, were
led away by the mother into the fields.

In about a week I paid another visit to the hawk’s
nest. The eggs were all hatched, and the mother
bird was hovering near. I shall never forget the
curious expression of those young hawks sitting there
on the ground. The expression was not one of
youth, but of extreme age. Such an ancient, infirm
look as they had, —the sharp, dark, and shrunken
look about the face and eyes, and their feeble, tot-
tering motions! They sat upon their elbows and the
hind part of their bodies, and their pale, withered
legs and feet extended before them in the most help-
less fashion. Their angular bodies were covered
with a pale yellowish down, like that of a chicken;
their heads had a plucked, seedy appearance; and
their long, strong, naked wings hung down by their
sides till they touched the ground: power and fero-
city in the first rude draught, shorn of everything
but its sinister ugliness. Another curious thing was
the gradation of the young in size; they tapered
down regularly from the first to the fifth, as if there

138 RIVERBY

had been, as probably there was, an interval of a
day or two between the hatching of each.

The two older ones showed some signs of fear on
our approach, and one of them threw himself upon
his back, and put up his impotent legs, and glared
at us with open beak. The two smaller ones re-
garded us not at all. Neither of the parent birds
appeared during our stay.

When I visited the nest again, eight or ten days
later, the birds were much grown, but of as marked
a difference in size as before, and with the same look
of extreme old age, — old age in men of the aquiline
type, nose and chin coming together, and eyes large
and sunken. They now glared upon us with a wild,
savage look, and opened their beaks threateningly.

The next week, when my friend visited the nest,
the larger of the hawks fought him savagely. But
one of the brood, probably the last to hatch, had
made but little growth. It appeared to be on the
point of starvation. The mother hawk (for the
male seemed to have disappeared) had doubtless
found her family too large for her, and was deliber-
ately allowing one of the number to perish; or did
the larger and stronger young devour all the food
before the weaker member could obtain any? Prob-
ably this was the case.

Arthur brought the feeble nestling away, and the
same day my little boy got it and brought it home,
wrapped in a woolen rag. It was clearly a starved
bantling. It cried feebly, but would not lift up its
head.

A YOUNG MARSH HAWK 139

We first poured some warm milk down its throat,
which soon revived it, so that it would swallow
small bits of flesh. In a day or two we had it eat-
ing ravenously, and its growth became noticeable.
Its voice had the sharp whistling character of that
of its parents, and was stilled only when the bird
was asleep. We made a pen for it, about a yard
square, in one end of the study, covering the floor
with several thicknesses of newspapers; and here,
upon a bit of brown woolen blanket for a nest, the
hawk waxed strong day by day. An uglier-looking
pet, tested by all the rules we usually apply to such
things, would have been hard to find. There he
would sit upon his elbows, his helpless feet out in
front of him, his great featherless wings touching
the floor, and shrilly cry for morefood. For a time
we gave him water daily from a stylograph-pen filler,
but the water he evidently did not need or relish.
Fresh meat, and plenty of it, was his demand. And
we soon discovered that he liked game, such as mice,
squirrels, birds, much better than butcher’s meat.

Then began a lively campaign on the part of my
little boy against all the vermin and small game in
the neighborhood to keep the hawk supplied. He
trapped and he hunted, he enlisted his mates in his
service, he even robbed the cats to feed the hawk.
His usefulness as a boy of all work was seriously
impaired. ‘Where is J- 1” “Gone after a
squirrel for his hawk.” And often the day would
be half gone before his hunt was successful. The
premises were very soon cleared of mice, and the

140 RIVERBY

vicinity of chipmunks and squirrels. Farther and
farther he was compelled to hunt the surrounding
farms and woods to keep up with the demands of
the hawk. By the time the hawk was ready to fly
he had consumed twenty-one chipmunks, fourteen
red squirrels, sixteen mice, and twelve English spar-
rows, besides a lot of butcher’s meat.

His plumage very soon began to show itself,
crowding off tufts of the down. ‘The quills on his
great wings sprouted and grew apace. What a
ragged, uncanny appearance he presented! but his
look of extreme age gradually became modified.
What a lover of the sunlight he was! We would
put him out upon the grass in the full blaze of the
morning sun, and he would spread his wings and
bask in it with the most intense enjoyment. In
the nest the young must be exposed to the full power
of the midday sun during our first heated terms in
June and July, the thermometer often going up to
ninety-three or ninety-five degrees, so that sunshine
seemed to be a need of his nature. He liked the
rain equally well, and when put out in a shower
would sit down and take it as if every drop did him
good.

His legs developed nearly as slowly as his wings.
He could not stand steadily upon them till about ten
days before he was ready to fly. The talons were
limp and feeble. When we came with food he
would hobble along toward us like the worst kind
of a cripple, dropping and moving his wings, and
treading upon his legs from the foot back to the

A YOUNG MARSH HAWK 141

elbow, the foot remaining closed and useless. Like
a baby learning to stand, he made many trials before
he succeeded. He would rise up on his trembling
legs only to fall back again.

One day, in the summer-house, I saw him for the
first time stand for a moment squarely upon his legs
with the feet fully spread beneath them. He looked
about him as if the world suddenly wore a new
aspect.

His plumage now grew quite rapidly. One red
squirrel per day, chopped fine with an axe, was his
ration. He began to hold his game with his foot
while he tore it. The study was full of his shed
down. His dark brown mottled plumage began to
grow beautiful. The wings drooped a little, but
gradually he got control of them, and held them in
place.

It was now the 20th of July, and the hawk was
about five weeks old. Ina day or two he was walk-
ing or jumping about the ground. He chose a posi-
tion under the edge of a Norway spruce, where he
would sit for hours dozing, or looking out upon the
landscape. When we brought him game he would
advance to meet us with wings slightly lifted, and
uttering a shrill cry. Toss him a mouse or sparrow,
and he would seize it with one foot and hop off to
his cover, where he would bend above it, spread his
plumage, look this way and that, uttering all the
time the most exultant and satisfied chuckle.

About this time he began to practice striking with
his talons, as an Indian boy might begin practicing

142 RIVERBY

with his bow and arrow. He would strike at a dry
leaf in the grass, or at a fallen apple, or at some
imaginary object. He was learning the use of his
weapons. His wings also, —he seemed to feel them
sprouting from his shoulder. He would lift them
straight up and hold them expanded, and they would
seem to quiver with excitement. Every hour in the
day he would do this. The pressure was beginning
to centre there. Then he would strike playfully at
a leaf or a bit of wood, and keep his wings lifted.

The next step was to spring into the air and beat
his wings. He seemed now to be thinking entirely
of his wings. They itched to be put to use.

A day or two later he would leap and fly several
feet. A pile of brush ten or twelve feet below the
bank was easily reached. Here he would perch in
true hawk fashion, to the bewilderment and scandal
of all the robins and catbirds in the vicinity. Here
he would dart his eye in all directions, turning his
head over and glancing it up into the sky.

He was now a lovely creature, fully fledged, and
as tame as a kitten. But he was not a bit like a
kitten in one respect, —he could not bear to have
you stroke or even touch his plumage. He had a
horror of your hand, as if it would hopelessly defile
him. But he would perch upon it, and allow you
to carry him about. If a dog or cat appeared, he
was ready to give battle instantly. He rushed up
to a little dog one day, and struck him with his foot
savagely. He was afraid of strangers, and of any
unusual object.

A YOUNG MARSH HAWK 1438

The last week in July he began to fly quite freely,
and it was necessary to clip one of his wings. As
the clipping embraced only the ends of his primaries,
he soon overcame the difficulty, and by carrying his
broad, long tail more on that side, flew with consid-
erable ease. He made longer and longer excursions
into the surrounding fields and vineyards, and did
not always return. On such occasions we would
go find him and fetch him back.

Late one rainy afternoon he flew away into the
vineyard, and when, an hour later, I went after him,
he could not be found, and we never saw him again.
We hoped hunger would soon drive him back, but
we have had no clew to him from that day to this.

Vil
THE CHIPMUNK

[He first chipmunk in March is as sure a token
of the spring as the first bluebird or the first
robin; and it is quite as welcome. Some genial in-
fluence has found him out there in his burrow, deep
under the ground, and waked him up, and enticed
him forth into the light of day. The red squirrel
has been more or less active all winter; his track
has dotted the surface of every new-fallen snow
throughout the season. But the chipmunk retired
from view early in December, and has passed the
rigorous months in his nest, beside his hoard of
nuts, some feet underground, and hence, when he
emerges in March, and is seen upon his little jour-
neys along the fences, or perched upon a log or rock
near his hole in the woods, it is another sign that
spring is at hand. His store of nuts may or may
not be all consumed; it is certain that he is no
sluggard, to sleep away these first bright warm days.
Before the first crocus is out of the ground, you
may look for the first chipmunk. When I hear the
little downy woodpecker begin his spring drumming,
then I know the chipmunk is due. He cannot sleep
after that challenge of the woodpecker reaches his ear.

146 RIVERBY

Apparently the first thing he does on coming forth,
as soon as he is sure of himself, is to go courting.
So far as I have observed, the love-making of the
chipmunk occurs in March. A single female will
attract all the males in the vicinity. One early
March day I was at work for several hours near a
stone fence, where a female had apparently taken up
her quarters. What a train of suitors she had that
day! how they hurried up and down, often giving
each other a spiteful slap or bite as they passed.
The young are born in May, four or five at a birth,

The chipmunk is quite a solitary creature; I have
never known more than one to occupy the same den.
Apparently no two can agree to live together. What
a clean, pert, dapper, nervous little fellow he is!
How fast his heart beats, as he stands up on the
wall by the roadside, and, with hands spread out
upon his breast, regards you intently! A movement
of your arm, and he darts into the wall with a saucy
chip-r-r, which has the effect of slamming the door
behind him. ,

On some still day in autumn, the nutty days, the
woods will often be pervaded by an undertone of
sound, produced by their multitudinous clucking,
as they sit near their dens. It is one of the charac-
teristic sounds of fall.

The chipmunk has many enemies, such as cats,
weasels, black snakes, hawks, and owls. One season
one had his den in the side of the bank near my
study. As I stood regarding his goings and com-
ings, one October morning, I saw him, when a few

THE CHIPMUNK 147

yards away from his hole, turn and retreat with all
speed. As he darted beneath the sod, a shrike
swooped down and hovered a moment on the wing
just over the hole where he had disappeared. I
doubt if the shrike could have killed him, but it
certainly gave him a good fright.

It was amusing to watch this chipmunk carry nuts
and other food into his den. He had made a well-
defined path from his door out through the weeds
and dry leaves into the territory where his feeding-
ground lay. The path was a crooked one; it dipped
under weeds, under some large, loosely piled stones,
under a pile of chestnut posts, and then followed
the remains of an old wall. Going and coming, his
motions were like clockwork. He always went by
spurts and sudden sallies. He was never for one
moment off his guard. He would appear at the
mouth of his den, look quickly about, take a few
leaps to a tussock of grass, pause a breath with one
foot raised, slip quickly a few yards over some dry
leaves, pause again by a stump beside a path, rush
across the path to the pile of loose stones, go under
the first and over the second, gain the pile of posts,
make his way through that, survey his course a half
moment from the other side of it, and then dart on
to some other cover, and presently beyond my range,
where I think he gathered acorns, as there were no
other nut-bearing trees than oaks near. In four or
five minutes I would see him coming back, always
keeping rigidly to the-course he took going out,
pausing at the same spots, darting over or under the

148 RIVERBY

same objects, clearing at a bound the same pile of
leaves. There was no variation in his manner of
proceeding all the time I observed him.

He was alert, cautious, and exceedingly methodi-
cal. He had found safety in a certain course, and
he did not at any time deviate a hair’s breadth from
it. Something seemed to say to him all the time,
“Beware, beware!” The nervous, impetuous ways
of these creatures are no doubt the result of the life
of fear which they lead.

My chipmunk had no companion. He lived all
by himself in true hermit fashion, as is usually the
case with this squirrel. Provident creature that he
is, one would think that he would long ago have
discovered that heat, and therefore food, is econo-
mized by two or three nesting together.

One day in early spring, a chipmunk that lived
near me met with a terrible adventure, the memory
of which will probably be handed down through
many generations of its family. I was sitting in
the summer-house with Nig the cat upon my knee,
when the chipmunk came out of its den a few feet
away, and ran quickly to a pile of chestnut posts
about twenty yards from where I sat. Nig saw it,
and was off my lap upon the floor in an instant. I
spoke sharply to the cat, when she sat down and
folded her paws under her, and regarded the squir-
rel, as I thought, with only a dreamy kind of inter-
est. I fancied she thought it a hopeless case there
amid that pile of posts. “That is not your game,
Nig,” I said, “so spare yourself any anxiety.”

THE CHIPMUNK 149

Just then I was called to the house, where I was
detained about five minutes. As I returned I met
Nig coming to the house with the chipmunk in her
mouth. She had the air of one who had won a
wager. She carried the chipmunk by the throat,
and its body hung limp from her mouth. I quickly
took the squirrel from her, and reproved her sharply.
It lay in my hand asif dead, though I saw no marks
of the cat’s teeth upon it. Presently it gasped for
its breath, then again and again. I saw that the
cat had simply choked it. Quickly the film passed
off its eyes, its heart began visibly to beat, and
slowly the breathing became regular. [I carried it
back, and laid it down in the door of its den. In
a moment it crawled or kicked itself in. In the
afternoon I placed a handful of corn there, to ex-
press my sympathy, and as far as possible make
amends for Nig’s cruel treatment.

Not till four or five days had passed did my little
neighbor emerge again from its den, and then only
for a moment. That terrible black monster with
the large green-yellow eyes, —it might be still lurk-
ing near. How the black monster had captured the
alert and restless squirrel so quickly, under the cir-
cumstances, was a great mystery to me. Was not
its eye as sharp as the cat’s, and its movements as
quick? Yet cats do have the secret of catching squir-
rels, and birds, and mice, but I have never yet had
the luck to see it done.

It was not very long before the chipmunk was
going to and from her den as usual, though the dread

150 RIVERBY

of the black monster seemed ever before her, and
gave speed and extra alertness to all her movements.
In early summer four young chipmunks emerged
from the den, and ran freely about. There was no-
thing to disturb them, for, alas! Nig herself was
now dead.

One summer day I watched a cat for nearly a half
hour trying her arts upon a chipmunk that sat upon
a pile of stone. Evidently her game was to stalk
him. She had cleared half the distance, or about
twelve feet, that separated the chipmunk from a
dense Norway spruce, when I chanced to become
a spectator of the little drama. There sat the cat
crouched low on the grass, her big, yellow eyes fixed
upon the chipmunk, and there sat the chipmunk
at the mouth of his den, motionless, with his eye
fixed upon the cat. For a long time neither moved.
“Will the cat bind him with her fatal spell?” I
thought. Sometimes her head slowly lowered and
her eyes seemed to dilate, and I fancied she was
about to spring. But she did not. The distance
was too great to be successfully cleared in one bound.
Then the squirrel moved nervously, but kept his eye
upon the enemy. Then the cat evidently grew tired
and relaxed a little and looked behind her. Then
she crouched again and riveted her gaze upon the
squirrel. But the latter would not be hypnotized;
it shifted its position a few times and finally quickly
entered its den, when the cat soon slunk away.

In digging his hole it is evident that the chip-
munk carries away the loose soil. Never a grain of

THE CHIPMUNK 151

itis seen in front of his door. Those pockets of
his probably stand him in good stead on such occa-
sions. Only in one instance have I seen a pile of
earth before the entrance to a chipmunk’s den, and
that was where the builder had begun his house late
in November, and was probably too much hurried
to remove this ugly mark from before his door. I
used to pass his place every morning in my walk,
and my eye always fell upon that little pile of red,
freshly dug soil. A little later I used frequently
to surprise the squirrel furnishing his house, carry-
ing in dry leaves of the maple and plane tree. He
would seize a large leaf and with both hands stuff it
into his cheek pockets, and then carry it into his
den. I saw him on several different days occupied
in this way. I trust he had secured his winter
stores, though I am a little doubtful. He was hur-
riedly making himself a new home, and the cold of
December was upon us while he was yet at work.
It may be that he had moved the stores from his
old quarters, wherever they were, and again it may
be that he had been dispossessed of both his house
and provender by some other chipmunk.

When nuts or grain are not to be had, these
thrifty little creatures will find some substitute to
help them over the winter. Two chipmunks near
my study were occupied many days in carrying in
cherry pits which they gathered beneath a large
cherry-tree that stood ten or twelve rods away. As
Nig was no longer about to molest them, they grew
very fearless, and used to spin up and down the gar-

152 RIVERBY

den path to and from their source of supplies in a
way quite unusual with these timid creatures. After
they had got enough cherry pits, they gathered the
seed of a sugar maple that stood near. Many of the
keys remained upon the tree after the leaves had
fallen, and these the squirrels harvested. They
would run swiftly out upon the ends of the small
branches, reach out for the maple keys, snip off the
wings, and deftly slip the nut or samara into their
cheek pockets. Day after day in late autumn, I
used. to see them thus occupied.

As I have said, I have no evidence that more
than one chipmunk occupy the same den. One
March morning after a light fall of snow I saw where
one had come up out of his hole, which was in the
side of our path to the vineyard, and after a mo-
ment’s survey of the surroundings had started off
on his travels. I followed the track to see where
he had gone. He had passed through my woodpile,
then under the beehives, then around the study and
under some spruces and along the slope to the hole
of a friend of his, about sixty yards from his own.
Apparently he had gone in here, and then his friend
had come forth with him, for there were two tracks
leading from this doorway. I followed them to a
third humble entrance, not far off, where the tracks
were so numerous that I lost the trail, It was
pleasing to see the evidence of their morning socia-
bility written there upon the new snow.

One of the enemies of the chipmunk, as I discov-
ered lately, is the weasel. I was sitting in the woods
one autumn day when I heard a small cry, and a

THE CHIPMUNK 153

rustling amid the branches of a tree a few rods be-
yond me. Looking thither I saw a chipmunk fall
through the air, and catch on a limb twenty or more
feet from the ground. He appeared to have dropped
from near the top of the tree.

He secured his hold upon the small branch that
had luckily intercepted his fall, and sat perfectly
still, In a moment more I saw a weasel — one of
the smaller red varieties — come down the trunk of
the tree, and begin exploring the branches on a level
with the chipmunk.

I saw in a moment what had happened. The
weasel had driven the squirrel from his retreat in
the rocks and stones beneath, and had pressed him
so closely that he had taken refuge in the top of a
tree. But weasels can climb trees, too, and this
one had tracked the frightened chipmunk to the top-
most branch, where he had tried to seize him. Then
the squirrel had, in horror, let go his hold, screamed,
and fallen through the air, till he struck the branch
as just described. Now his bloodthirsty enemy was
looking for him again, apparently relying entirely
upon his sense of smell to guide him to the game.

How did the weasel know the squirrel had not
fallen clear to the ground? He certainly did know,
for when he reached the same tier of branches he
began exploring them. The chipmunk sat trans-
fixed with fear, frozen with terror, not twelve feet
away, and yet the weasel saw him not.

Round and round, up and down, he went on the
branches, exploring them over and over. How he
hurried, lest the trail get cold! How subtle and

154 RIVERBY

cruel and fiendish he looked! His snakelike move-
ments, his tenacity, his speed!

He seemed baffled; he knew his game was near,
but he could not strike the spot. The branch, upon
the extreme end of which the squirrel sat, ran out
and up from the tree seven or eight feet, and then,
turning a sharp elbow, swept down and out at right
angles with its first course.

The weasel would pause each time at this elbow
and turn back. It seemed as if he knew that par-
ticular branch held his prey, and yet its crookedness
each time threw him out. He would not give it
up, but went over his course again and again.

One can fancy the feelings of the chipmunk, sit-
ting there in plain view a few feet away, watching
its deadly enemy hunting for the clew. How its
little heart must have fairly stood still each time the
fatal branch was struck! Probably as a last resort
it would again have let go its hold and fallen to the
ground, where it might have eluded its enemy a
while longer.

In the course of five or six minutes the weasel
gave over the search, and ran hurriedly down the
tree to the ground. The chipmunk remained mo-
tionless for a long time; then he stirred a little as
if hope was reviving. Then he looked nervously
about him; then he had recovered himself so far as
to change his position. Presently he began to move
cautiously along the branch to the bole of the tree;
then, after a few moments’ delay, he plucked up
courage to descend to the ground, where I hope no
weasel has disturbed him since.

Ix
SPRING JOTTINGS

ee ten or more years past I have been in the

habit of jotting down, among other things in
my note-book, observations upon the seasons as they
passed, — the complexion of the day, the aspects of
nature, the arrival of the birds, the opening of the
flowers, or any characteristic feature of the passing
moment or hour which the great open-air panorama
presented. Some of these notes and observations
touching the opening and the progress of the spring
season follow herewith.

T need hardly say they are off-hand and informal;
what they have to recommend them to the general
reader is mainly their fidelity to actual fact. The
sun always crosses the line on time, but the seasons
which he makes are by no means so punctual; they
loiter or they hasten, and the spring tokens are three
or four weeks earlier or later some seasons than
others. The ice often breaks up on the river early
in March, but I have crossed upon it as late as the
10th of April. My journal presents many samples
of both early and late springs.

But before I give these extracts let me say a word
or two in favor of the habit of keeping a journal of

156 RIVERBY

one’s thoughts and days. To a countryman, espe-
cially of a meditative turn, who likes to preserve the
flavor of the passing moment, or to a person of lei-
sure anywhere, who wants to make the most of life,
a journal will be found a great help. It is a sort
of deposit account wherein one saves up bits and
fragments of his life that would otherwise be lost to
him.

What seemed so insignificant in the passing, or as
it lay in embryo in his mind, becomes a valuable
part of his experiences when it is fully unfolded and
recorded in black and white. The process of writ-
ing develops it; the bud becomes the leaf or flower;
the one is disentangled from the many and takes
definite form and hue. I remember that Thoreau
says in a letter to a friend, after his return from a
climb to the top of Monadnock, that it is not till he
gets home that he really goes over the mountain;
that is, I suppose, sees what the climb meant to him
when he comes to write an account of it to his friend.
Every one’s experience is probably much the same;
when we try to tell what we saw and felt, even to
our journals, we discover more and deeper meanings
in things than we had suspected.

The pleasure and value of every walk or journey
we take may be doubled to us by carefully noting
down the impressions it makes upon us. How much
of the flavor of Maine birch I should have missed
had I not compelled that vague, unconscious being
within me, who absorbs so much and says so little,
to unbosom himself at the point of the pen! It was

SPRING JOTTINGS 157

not till after I got home that I really went to Maine,
or to the Adirondacks, or to Canada. Out of the
chaotic and nebulous impressions which these ex-
peditions gave me, I evolved the real experience.
There is hardly anything that does not become much
more in the telling than in the thinking or in the
feeling.

I see the fishermen floating up and down the river
above their nets, which are suspended far out of
sight in the water beneath them. They do not
know what fish they have got, if any, till after a
while they lift the nets up and examine them. In
all of us there is a region of sub-consciousness above
which our ostensible lives go forward, and in which
much comes to us, or is slowly developed, of which
we are quite ignorant until we lift up our nets and
inspect them.

Then the charm and significance of a day are so
subtle and fleeting! Before we know it, it is gone
past all recovery. I find that each spring, that each
summer and fall and winter of my life, has a hue
and quality of its own, given by some prevailing
mood, a train of thought, an event, an experience,
—a color or quality of which I am quite uncon-
scious at the time, being too near to it, and too com-
pletely enveloped by it. But afterward some mood
or circumstance, an odor, or fragment of a tune,
brings it back as by a flash; for one brief second
the adamantine door of the past swings open and
gives me a glimpse of my former life. One’s jour-
nal, dashed off without any secondary motive, may

158 RIVERBY

often preserve and renew the past for him in this
way.

These leaves from my own journal are not very
good samples of this sort of thing, but they preserve
for me the image of many a day which memory alone
could never have kept.

March 3, 1879. The sun is getting strong, but
winter still holds his own. No hint of spring in the
earth or air. No sparrow or sparrow song yet. But
on the 5th there was a hint of spring. The day
warm and the snow melting. The first bluebird
note this morning. How sweetly it dropped down
from the blue overhead!

March 10. A real spring day at last, anda rouser!
Thermometer between fifty and sixty degrees in the
coolest spot; bees very lively about the hive, and
working on the sawdust in the wood-yard; how
they dig and wallow in the woody meal, apparently
squeezing it as if forging it to yield up something to
them! Here they their first substitute for pol-
len. The sawdust of hickory and maple is preferred.
The inner milky substance between the bark and
the wood, called the cambium layer, is probably the
source of their supplies.

In the growing tree it is in this layer or secretion
that the vital processes are the most active and po-
tent. Jt has been found by experiment that this
tender, milky substance is capable of exerting a very
great force; a growing tree exerts a lifting and push-
ing force of more than thirty pounds to the square
inch, and the force is thought to reside in the soft

SPRING JOTTINGS 159

fragile cells that make up the cambium layer. It
is like the strength of Samson residing in his hair.
Saw one bee enter the hive with pollen on his back,
which he must have got from some open greenhouse ;
or had he found the skunk cabbage in bloom ahead
of me?

The bluebirds! It seemed as if they must have
been waiting somewhere close by for the first warm
day, like actors behind the scenes, for they were
here in numbers early in the morning; they rushed
upon the stage very promptly when their parts were
called. No robins yet. Sap runs, but not briskly.
It is too warm and still; it wants a brisk day for
sap, with a. certain sharpness in the air, a certain
crispness and tension.

March 12. A change to more crispness and cool-
ness, but a delicious spring morning. Hundreds of
snowbirds with a sprinkling of song and Canada
sparrows are all about the house, chirping and lisp-
ing and chattering in a very animated manner. The
air is full of bird voices: through this maze of fine
sounds comes the strong note and warble of the
robin, and the soft call of the bluebird. A few days
ago not a bird, not a sound; everything rigid and
severe; then in a day the barriers of winter give
way, and spring comes like an inundation. In a
twinkling all is changed.

Under date of February 27, 1881, I find this
note: “ Warm; saw the male bluebirc warbling
and calling cheerily. The male bluebird spreads
his tail as he flits about at this season, in a way to

160 RIVERBY

make him look very gay and dressy. It adds to his
expression considerably, and makes him look alert
and beau-like, and every inch a male. The grass
is green under the snow, and has grown perceptibly.
The warmth of the air seems to go readily through
a covering of ice and snow. Note how quickly the
ice lets go of the door-stones, though completely
covered, when the day becomes warm.”

The farmers say a deep snow draws the frost out
of the ground. It is certain that the frost goes out
when the ground is deeply covered for some time,
though it is of course the warmth rising up from the
depths of the ground that does it. A winter of deep
snows is apt to prove fatal to the peach buds. The
frost leaves the ground, the soil often becomes so
warm that angle-worms rise to near the surface, the
sap in the trees probably stirs a little; then there
comes a cold wave, the mercury goes down to ten
or fifteen below zero, and the peach buds are killed.
Itis not the cold alone that does it; it is the warmth
at one end and the extreme cold at the other.
‘When the snow is removed so that the frost can get
at the roots also, peach buds will stand fourteen or
fifteen degrees below zero.

March 7, 1881. A perfect spring day at last, —
still, warm, and without a cloud. Tapped two trees;
the sap runs, the snow runs, everything runs.
Bluebirds the only birds yet. Thermometer forty-
two degrees in the shade. <A perfect sap day. A
perfect sap day is a crystalline day; the night must
have a keen edge of frost, and the da, a keen edge

SPRING JOTTINGS 161

of air and sun, with wind north or northwest. The
least film, the least breath from the south, the least
suggestion of growth, and the day is marred as a sap
day. Maple sap is maple frost melted by the sun.
(9p. u.) A soft, large-starred night; the moon in
her second quarter; perfectly still and freezing;
Venus throbbing low in the west. A crystalline
night.

March 21, 1884. The top of a high barometric
wave, a day like a crest, lifted up, sightly, spark-
ling. A cold snap without storm issuing in this
clear, dazzling, sharp, northern day. How light, as
if illuminated by more than the sun; the sky is full
of light; light seems to be streaming up all around
the horizon. The leafless trees make no shadows;
the woods are flooded with light; everything shines;
a day large and imposing, breathing strong mascu-
line breaths out of the north; a day without a speck
or film, winnowed through and through, all the
windows and doors of the sky open. Day of crum-
pled rivers and lakes, of crested waves, of bellying
sails, high-domed and lustrous day. The only typi-
cal March day of the bright heroic sort we have yet
had,

March 24, 1884. Damp, still morning, much fog
on the river. All the branches and twigs of the
trees strung with drops of water. The grass and
weeds beaded with fog drops. Two lines of ducks
go up the river, one a few feet beneath the other.
On second glance the under line proves to be the
reflection of the other in the still water. As the

162 RIVERBY

ducks cross a large field of ice, the lower line is
suddenly blotted out, as if the birds had dived be-
neath the ice. A train of cars across the river, —
the train sunk beneath a solid stratum of fog, its
plume of smoke and vapor unrolling above it and
slanting away in the distance; a liquid morning;
the turf buzzes as you walk over it.

Skunk cabbage on Saturday the 22d, probably in
bloom several days. This plant always gets ahead
of me. It seems to come up like a mushroom in a
single night. Water newts just out, and probably
piping before the frogs, though not certain about
this.

March 25. One of the rare days that go before
a storm; the flower of a series of days increasingly
fair. To-morrow, probably, the flower falls, and
days of rain and cold prepare the way for another
fair day or days. The barometer must be high to-
day; the birds fly high. I feed my bees on a rock,
and sit long and watch them covering the combs,
and rejoice in the multitudinous humming. The
river is a great mirror dotted here and there by small
cakes of ice. The first sloop comes lazily up on the
flood tide, like the first butterfly of spring; the
little steamer, our river omnibus, makes her first
trip, and wakes the echoes with her salutatory
whistle, her flags dancing in the sun.

April 1. Welcome to April, my natal month;
the month of the swelling buds, the springing grass,
the first nests, the first plantings, the first flowers,
and, last but not least, the first shad! The door of

SPRING JOTTINGS 163

the seasons first stands ajar this month, and gives us
a peep beyond. The month in which to begin the
world, in which to begin your house, in which to
begin your courtship, in which to enter upon any
new enterprise. The bees usually get their first
pollen this month and their first honey. All hiber-
nating creatures are out before April is past. The
coon, the chipmunk, the bear, the turtles, the frogs,
the snakes, come forth beneath April skies.

April 8. A day of great brightness and clearness,
—a crystalline April day that precedes snow. In
this sharp crisp air the flakes are forming. As in
a warm streaming south wind one can almost smell
the swelling buds, so a wind from the opposite quar-
ter at this season as often suggests the crystalline
snow. I go up in the sugar bush [this was up
among the Catskills], and linger for an hour among
the old trees. The air is still, and has the property
of being “hollow,” as the farmers say; that is, it
is heavy, motionless, and transmits sounds well.
Every warble of a bluebird or robin, or caw of crow,
or bark of dog, or bleat of sheep, or cackle of geese,
or call of boy or man, within the landscape, comes
distinctly to the ear. The smoke from the chimney
goes straight up.

I walk through the bare fields; the shore larks
run or flit before me; I hear their shuffling, gur-
gling, lisping, half-inarticulate song. Only of late
years have I noticed the shore larks in this section.
Now they breed and pass the summer on these hills,
and I am told that they are gradually becoming per-

164 RIVERBY

manent residents in other parts of the State. They
are nearly as large as the English skylark, with con-
spicuous black markings about the head and throat;
shy birds squatting in the sear grass, and probably
taken by most country people who see them to be
sparrows.

Their flight and manner in song is much like that
of the skylark. The bird mounts up and up on
ecstatic wing, till it becomes a mere speck against
the sky, where it drifts to and fro, and utters at in-
tervals its crude song, a mere fraction or rudiment
of the skylark’s song, a few sharp, lisping, unmelo-
dious notes, as if the bird had a bad cold, and could
only now and then make any sound, — heard a long
distance, but insignificant, a mere germ of the true
lark’s song; as it were the first rude attempt of na-
ture in this direction. After due trial and waiting,
she develops the lark’s song itself. But if the law
of evolution applies to bird-songs as well as to other
things, the shore lark should in time become a fine
songster. JI know of no bird-song that seems so
obviously struggling to free itself and reach a fuller
expression. As the bird seems more and more in-
clined to abide permanently amid cultivated fields,
and to forsake the wild and savage north, let me
hope that its song is also undergoing a favorable
change.

How conspicuous the crows in the brown fields,
or against the lingering snowbanks, or in the clear
sky! How still the air! One could carry a lighted
candle over the hills. The light is very strong,

SPRING JOTTINGS 165

and the effect of the wall of white mountains rising
up all around from the checkered landscape, and
holding up the blue dome of the sky, is strange in-
deed.

April 14. <A delicious day, warm as May. This
to me is the most bewitching part of the whole year.
One’s relish is so keen, and the morsels are so few
and so tender. How the fields of winter rye stand
out! They call up visions of England. A perfect
day in April far excels a perfect day in June, be-
cause it provokes and stimulates while the latter
sates and cloys. Such days have all the peace and
geniality of summer without any of its satiety or
enervating heat.

April 15. Not much cloud this morning, but
much vapor in the air. A cool south wind with
streaks of a pungent vegetable odor, probably from
the willows. When I make too dead a set at it I
miss it; but when I let my nose have its own way,
and take in the air slowly, I get it, an odor as of a
myriad swelling buds. The long-drawn call of the
high-hole comes up from the fields, then the tender
rapid trill of the bush or russet sparrow, then the
piercing note of the meadowlark, a flying shaft of
sound.

April 21. The enchanting days continue without
a break. One’s senses are not large enough to take
them all in. Maple buds just bursting, apple-trees
full of infantile leaves. How the poplars and wil-
lows stand out! A moist, warm, brooding haze over
all the earth. All day my little russet sparrow sings

166 RIVERBY

and trills divinely. The most prominent bird music
in April is from the sparrows.

The yellowbirds (goldfinches) are just getting on
their yellow coats. I saw some yesterday that had
a smutty, unwashed look, because of the new yellow
shining through the old drab-colored webs of the
feathers. These birds do not shed their feathers in
the spring, as careless observers are apt to think they
do, but merely shed the outer webs of their feathers
and quills, which peel off like a glove from the hand.

All the groves and woods lightly touched with new
foliage. Looks like May; violets and dandelions
in bloom. Sparrow’s nest with two eggs. Maples
hanging out their delicate fringe-like bloom. First
barn swallows may be looked for any day after
April 20.

This period may be called the vernal equipoise,
and corresponds to the October calm called the Indian
summer.

April 2, 1890. The second of the April days,
clear as a bell. The eye of the heavens wide open
at last. A sparrow day; how they sang! And the
robins, too, before I was up in the morning. Now
and then I could hear the rat-tat-tat of the downy
at his drum. How many times I paused at my work
to drink in the beauty of the day!

How I like to walk out after supper these days!
I stroll over the lawn and stand on the brink of the
hill. The sun is down, the robins pipe and call,
and as the dusk comes on they indulge in that loud
chiding note or scream, whether in anger or in fun

SPRING JOTTINGS 167

I never can tell. Up the road in the distance the
multitudinous voice of the little peepers, — a thicket
or screen of sound. An April twilight is unlike any
other.

April 12. Lovely, bright day. We plow the
ground under the hill for the new vineyard. In
opening the furrow for the young vines I guide the
team by walking in their front. How I soaked up
the sunshine to-day! At night I glowed all over;
my whole being had had an earth-bath; such a feel-
ing of freshly plowed land in every cell of my
brain. The furrow had struck in; the sunshine had
photographed it upon my soul.

April 13. A warm, even hot April day. The
air full of haze; the sunshine golden. In the after-
noon J. and I walk out over the country north of
town. Everybody is out, all the paths and byways
are full of boys and young fellows. We sit on a
wall a long time by a meadow and orchard, and
drink in the scene. April to perfection, such a sen-
timent of spring everywhere. The sky is partly
overcast, the air moist, just enough so to bring out
the odors, —a sweet perfume of bursting, growing
things. One could almost eat the turf like a horse.
All about the robins sang. In the trees the crow
blackbird cackled and jingled. Athwart these sounds
came every half minute the clear, strong note of the
meadowlark. The larks were very numerous and
were lovemaking. Then the high-hole called and
the bush sparrow trilled. Arbutus days these,
everybody wants to go to the woods for arbutus; it

168 RIVERBY

fairly calls one. The soil calls for the plow, too,
the garden calls for the spade, the vineyard calls for
the hoe. From all about the farm voices call, Come
and do this, or do that. At night how the “peep-
ers” pile up the sound!

How I delight to see the plow at work such
mornings! the earth is ripe for it, fairly lusts for it,
and the freshly turned soil looks good enough to eat.
Plucked my first blood-root this morning, —a full-
blown flower with a young one folded up in a leaf
beneath it, only just the bud emerging, like the head
of a pappoose protruding from its mother’s blanket,
—a very pretty sight. The blood-root always comes
up with the leaf shielding the flower-bud, as one
shields the flame of the candle in the open air with
his hand half closed about it.

These days the song of the toad — tr-r-r-r-r-r-r-
r-r-r-r-r-r-7-7-r-7-y —is heard in the land. At
nearly all hours I hear it, and it is as welcome to
me as the song of any bird. It is a kind of gossa-
mer of sound drifting in the air. Mother toad is in
the pools and puddles now depositing that long chain
or raveling of eggs, while her dapper little mate rides
upon her back and fertilizes them as they are laid.
As I look toward the fields where the first brown
thrasher is singing, I see emerald patches of rye.
The unctuous confident strain of the bird seems to
make the fields grow greener hour by hour.

May 4. The perfection of early May weather.
How green the grass, how happy the birds, how
placid the river, how busy the bees, how soft the

SPRING JOTTINGS 169

air!—that kind of weather when there seems to be
dew in the air all day, —the day a kind of pro-
longed morning, — so fresh, so wooing, so caressing!
The baby leaves on the apple-trees have doubled in
size since last night.

March 12, 1891. Had positive proof this morn-
ing that at least one song sparrow has come back to
his haunts of a year ago. One year ago to-day my
attention was attracted, while walking over to the
post-office, by an unfamiliar bird-song. It caught
my ear while I was a long way off. I followed it
up and found that it proceeded from a song sparrow.
Its chief feature was one long, clear high note, very
strong, sweet, and plaintive. It sprang out of the
trills and quavers of the first part of the bird-song,
like a long arc or parabola of sound. To my men-
tal vision it rose far up against the blue, and turned
sharply downward again and finished in more trills
and quavers. I had never before heard anything
like it. It was the usual long, silvery note in the
sparrow’s song greatly increased; indeed, the whole
breath and force of the bird put in this note, so that
you caught little else than this silver loop of sound.
The bird remained in one locality — the bushy cor-
ner of a field — the whole season. He indulged in
the ordinary sparrow song, also. I had repeatedly
had my eye upon him when he changed from one
to the other.

And now here he is again a few days earlier, in
the same place, singing the same remarkable song,
capturing my ear with the same exquisite lasso of

170 RIVERBY

sound, What would I not give to know just where
he passed the winter, and what adventures by flood
and field befell him!

(I will add that the bird continued in song the
whole season, apparently confining his wanderings
to a few acres of ground. But the following spring
he did not return, and I have never heard him
since, and if any of his progeny inherited this pe-
culiar song I have not heard them.)

x
GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE

I

A® glimpse of the wild and savage in nature,

especially after long confinement indoors or in
town, always gives a little fillip to my mind. Thus,
when, in my walk from the city the other day, I
paused, after a half hour, in a thick clump of red
cedars crowning a little hill that arose amid a marshy
and bushy bit of landscape, and found myself in the
banqueting-hall of a hawk, something more than my
natural history tastes stirred within me.

No hawk was there then, but the marks of his
nightly presence were very obvious. The branch of
a cedar about fifteen feet from the ground was his
perch. It was worn smooth, with a feather or two
adhering to it. The ground beneath was covered
with large pellets and wads of mouse-hair; the
leaves were white with his droppings, while the
dried entrails of his victims clung here and there to
the bushes. The bird evidently came here nightly
to devour and digest its prey. This was its den, its
retreat; all about lay its feeding-grounds. It re-
vealed to me a new trait in the hawk, — its local

172 RIVERBY

attachments and habits; that it, too, had a home,
and did not wander about like a vagabond. It had
its domain, which it no doubt assiduously cultivated.
Here it came to dine and meditate, and a most at-
tractive spot it had chosen, a kind of pillared cave
amid the cedars. It was such a spot as the pedes-
trian would be sure to direct his steps to, and, hav-
ing reached it, would be equally sure to tarry and
eat his own lunch there.

The winged creatures are probably quite as local
as the four-footed. Sitting one night on a broad,
gently rising hill, to see the darkness close in upon
the landscape, my attention was attracted by a marsh
hawk industriously working the fields about me.
Time after time he made the circuit, varying but
little in his course each time ; dropping into the grass
here and there, beating low over the bogs and bushes,
and then disappearing in the distance. This was
his domain, his preserve, and doubtless he had his
favorite perch not far off.

All our permanent residents among the birds, both
large and small, are comparatively limited in their
ranges. The crow is nearly as local as the wood-
chuck. He goes farther from home in quest of food,
but his territory is well defined, both winter and
summer. His place of roosting remains the same
year after year. Once, while spending a few days
at a mountain lake nearly surrounded by deep woods,
my attention was attracted each night, just at sun-
down, by an osprey that always came from the same
direction, dipped into the lake as he passed over it

GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE 173

for a sip of its pure water, and disappeared in the
woods beyond. The routine’of his life was probably
as marked as that of any of ours. He fished the
waters of the Delaware all day, probably never go-
ing beyond a certain limit, and returned each night
at sundown, as punctual as a day-laborer, to his re-
treat in the forest. The sip of water, too, from the
lake he never failed to take.

All the facts we possess in regard to the habits
of the song-birds in this respect point to the conclu-
sion that the same individuals return to the same
localities year after year, to nest and to rear their
young. I am convinced that the same woodpecker
occupies the same cavity in a tree winter after win-
ter, and drums upon the same dry limb spring after
spring. I like to think of all these creatures as
capable of local attachments, and not insensible to
the sentiment of home.

But I set out to give some glimpses of the wild
life which one gets about the farm. Not of a start-
ling nature are they, certainly, but very welcome for
all that. The domestic animals require their lick
of salt every week or so, and the farmer, I think,
is equally glad to get a taste now and then of the
wild life that has so nearly disappeared from the
older and more thickly settled parts of the country.

Last winter a couple of bears, an old one and
a young one, passed through our neighborhood.
Their tracks were seen upon the snow in the woods,
and the news created great excitement among the
Nimrods. It was like the commotion in the water

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along shore after a steamer had passed. The bears
were probably safely in the Catskills by the time the
hunters got dogs and guns ready and set forth.
Country people are as eager to accept any rumor of
a strange and dangerous creature in the woods as
they are to believe in a ghost story. They want it
to be true; it gives them something to think about
and talk about. It is to their minds like strong
drink to their palates. It gives a new interest to
the woods, as the ghost story gives a new interest
to the old house.

A few years ago the belief became current in our
neighborhood that a dangerous wild animal lurked
in the woods about, now here, now there. It had
been seen in the dusk. Some big dogs had encoun-
tered it in the night, and one of them was nearly
killed. Then a calf and a sheep were reported killed
and partly devoured. Women and children became
afraid to go through the woods, and men avoided
them after sundown. One day, as I passed an Irish-
man’s shanty that stood in an opening in the woods,
his wife came out with a pail, and begged leave to
accompany me as far as the spring, which lay beside
the road some distance into the woods. She was
afraid to go alone for water on account of the “wild
baste.” Then, to cap the climax of wild rumors,
a horse was killed. One of my neighbors, an in-
telligent man and a good observer, went up to see
the horse. He reported that a great gash had been
eaten in the top of the horse’s neck; that its back
was bitten and scratched; and that he was convinced

GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE 175

it was the work of some wild animal like a panther
which had landed upon the horse’s back, and fairly
devoured it alive. The horse had run up and down
the field trying to escape, and finally, in its des-
peration, had plunged headlong off a high stone wall
by the barn and been killed. J was compelled to
accept his story, but I pooh-poohed the conclusions.
It was impossible that we should have a panther in
the midst of us, or, if we had, that it would attack
and kill a horse. But how eagerly the people be-
lieved it! It tasted good. It tasted good to me,
too, but I could not believe it. It soon turned out
that the horse was killed by another horse, a vi-
cious beast that had fits of murderous hatred toward
its kind. The sheep and calf were probably not
killed at all, and the big dogs had had a fight among
themselves. So the panther legend faded out, and
our woods became as tame and humdrum as before.
We cannot get up anything exciting that will hold,
and have to make the most of such small deer as
coons, foxes, and woodchucks. Glimpses of these
and of the birds are all I have to report.

II

The day on which I have any adventure with a
wild creature, no matter how trivial, has a little
different flavor from the rest; as when, one morn-
ing in early summer, I put my head out of the back
window and returned the challenge of a quail that
sent forth his clear call from a fence-rail one hun-
dred yards away. Instantly he came sailing over

176 RIVERBY

the field of raspberries straight toward me. When
about fifteen yards away he dropped into the cover
and repeated his challenge. I responded, when in
an instant he was almost within reach of me. He
alighted under the window, and looked quickly
around for his rival. How his eyes shone, how his
form dilated, how dapper and polished and brisk he
looked! He turned his eye up to me and seemed
to say, “Is it you, then, who are mocking me?”
and ran quickly around the corner of the house.
Here he lingered some time amid the rosebushes,
half persuaded that the call, which I still repeated,
came from his rival. Ah, I thought, if with his
mate and young he would only make my field his
home! The call of the quail is a country sound that
is becoming all too infrequent.

So fond am I of seeing Nature reassert herself that
I even found some compensation in the loss of my
chickens that bright November night when some
wild creature, coon or fox, swept two of them out of
the evergreens, and their squawking as they were
hurried across the lawn called me from my bed to
shout good-by after them. It gave a new interest
to the hen-roost, this sudden incursion of wild na-
ture. I feel bound to caution the boys about dis-
turbing the wild rabbits that in summer breed in my
currant-patch, and in autumn seek refuge under my
study floor. The occasional glimpses I get of them
about the lawn in the dusk, their cotton tails twink-
ling in the dimness, afford me a genuine pleasure.
I have seen the time when I would go a good way

GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE 177

to shoot a partridge, but I would not have killed,
if I could, the one that started out of the vines that
cover my rustic porch, as I approached that side of
the house one autumn morning. How much of the
woods, and of the untamable spirit of wild nature,
she brought to my very door! It was tonic and ex-
hilarating to see her whirl away toward the vine-
yard. I also owe a moment’s pleasure to the gray
squirrel that, finding my summer-house in the line
of his travels one summer day, ran through it and
almost over my feet as I sat idling with a book.

I am sure my power of digestion was improved
that cold winter morning when, just as we were sit-
ting down to breakfast about sunrise, a red fox loped
along in front of the window, looking neither to the
right nor to the left, and disappeared amid the cur-
rant-bushes. What of the wild and the cunning did
he not bring! His graceful form and motion were
in my mind’s eye all day. When you have seen a
fox loping along in that way, you have seen the po-
etry there is in the canine tribe. It is to the eye
what a flowing measure is to the mind, so easy, so
buoyant; the furry creature drifting along like a
large red thistledown, or like a plume borne by the
wind. It is something to remember with pleasure,
that a muskrat sought my door one December night
when a cold wave was swooping down upon us.
Was he seeking shelter, or had he lost his reckon-
ing? The dogs cornered him in the very doorway,
and set up a great hubbub. In the darkness, think-
ing it was a cat, I put my hand down to feel it.

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The creature skipped to the other corner of the door-
way, hitting my hand with its cold, rope-like tail.
Lighting a match, I had a glimpse of him sitting
up on his haunches like a woodchuck, confronting
his enemies. J rushed in for the lantern, with the
hope of capturing him alive, but before I returned
the dogs, growing bold, had finished him.

I have had but one call from a coon, that I am
aware of, and I fear we did not treat him with due
hospitality. He took up his quarters for the day
in a Norway spruce, the branches of which nearly
brushed the house. I had noticed that the dog was
very curious about that tree all the forenoon. After
dinner his curiosity culminated in repeated loud and
confident barking. Then I began an investigation,
expecting to find a strange cat, or at most a red
squirrel. But a moment’s scrutiny revealed his
coonship. Then how to capture him became the
problem. A long pole was procured, and I sought
to dislodge him from his hold. The skill with
which he maintained himself amid the branches ex-
cited our admiration. But after a time he dropped
lightly to the ground, not in the least disconcerted,
and at once on his guard against both man and
beast. The dog was a coward, and dared not face
him. When the coon’s attention was diverted, the
dog would rush in; then one of us would attempt
to seize the coon’s tail, but he faced about so quickly,
his black eyes gleaming, that the hand was timid
about seizing him. But finally in his skirmishing
with the dog I caught him by the tail, and bore him

GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE 179

safely to an open flour barrel, and he was our pris-
oner. Much amusement my little boy and I antici-
pated with him. He partook of food that same day,
and on the second day would eat the chestnuts in
our presence. Never did he show the slightest fear
of us or of anything, but he was unwearied in his
efforts to regain his freedom. After a few days we
put a strap upon his neck and kept him tethered by
achain. But in the night, by dint of some hocus-
pocus, he got the chain unsnapped and made off, and
is now, I trust, a patriarch of his tribe, wearing a
leather necktie.

The skunk visits every farm sooner or later. One
night I came near shaking hands with one on my
very door-stone. I thought it was the cat, and put
down my hand to stroke it, when the creature, prob-
ably appreciating my mistake, moved off up the
bank, revealing to me the white stripe on its body
and the kind of cat I had saluted. The skunk is
not easily ruffled, and seems to employ excellent
judgment in the use of its terrible weapon.

Several times I have had calls from woodchucks.
One looked in at the open door of my study one day,
and, after sniffing a while, and not liking the smell
of such clover as I was compelled to nibble there,
moved on to better pastures. Another one invaded
the kitchen door while we were at dinner. The
dogs promptly challenged him, and there was a lively
scrimmage upon the door-stone. I thought the dogs
were fighting, and rushed to part them. The inci-
dent broke in upon the drowsy summer noon, as did

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the appearance of the muskrat upon the frigid De-
cember night. The woodchuck episode that afforded
us the most amusement occurred last summer. We
were at work in a newly-planted vineyard, when the
man with the cultivator saw, a few yards in front of
him, some large gray object that at first puzzled
him. He approached it, and found it to be an old
woodchuck with a young one in its mouth. She
was carrying her kitten as does a cat, by the nape of
the neck. Evidently she was moving her family to
pastures new. As the man was in the line of her
march, she stopped and considered what was to be
done. He called to me, and I approached slowly.
As the mother saw me closing in on her flank, she
was suddenly seized with a panic, and, dropping her
young, fled precipitately for the cover of a large pile
of grape-posts some ten or twelve rods distant. We
pursued hotly, and overhauled her as she was within
one jump of the house of refuge. Taking her by
the tail, I carried her back to her baby; but she
heeded it not. It was only her own bacon now
that she was solicitous about. The young one re-
mained where it had been dropped, keeping up a
brave, reassuring whistle that was in ludicrous con-
trast to its exposed and helpless condition. It was
the smallest woodchuck I had ever seen, not much
larger than a large rat. Its head and shoulders were
so large in proportion to the body as to give ita
comical look. It could not walk about yet, and had
never before been above ground. Every moment
or two it would whistle cheerily, as the old one does

GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE 181

when safe in its den, and the farm-dog is fiercely
baying outside. We took the youngster home, and
my little boy was delighted over the prospect of a
tame woodchuck. Not till the next day would it
eat. Then, getting a taste of the milk, it clutched
the spoon that held it with great eagerness, and
sucked away like a little pig. We were all im-
mensely diverted by it. It ate eagerly, grew rapidly,
and was soon able torun about. As the old one had
been killed, we became curious as to the fate of the
rest of her family, for no doubt there were more.
Had she moved them, or had we intercepted her on
her first trip? We knew where the old den was,
but not the new. So we would keep a lookout.
Near the end of the week, on passing by the old
den, there were three young ones creeping about a
few feet from its mouth. They were starved out,
and had come forth to see what could be found.
We captured them all, and the young family was
again united. How these poor, half-famished crea-
tures did lay hold of the spoon when they got a taste
of the milk! One could not help laughing. Their
little shining black paws were so handy and so
smooth; they seemed as if encased in kid gloves.
They throve well upon milk, and then upon milk
and clover. But after the novelty of the thing had
worn off, the boy found he had incumbered himself
with serious duties in assuming the position of fos-
ter-mother to this large family; so he gave them all
away but one, the first one captured, which had out-
stripped all the others in growth. This soon be-

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came a very amusing pet, but it always protested
when handled, and always objected to confinement.
I should mention that the cat had a kitten about the
age of the chuck, and as she had more milk than
the kitten could dispose of, the chuck, when we
first got him, was often placed in the nest with the
kitten, and was regarded by the cat as tenderly as
her own, and allowed to nurse freely. Thus a friend-
ship sprang up between the kitten and the wood-
chuck, which lasted as long as the latter lived.
They would play together precisely like two kittens:
clinch and tumble about and roll upon the grass in
avery amusing way. Finally the woodchuck took
up his abode under the floor of the kitchen, and
gradually relapsed into a half-wild state. He would
permit no familiarities from any one save the kitten,
but each day they would have a turn or two at their
old games of rough-and-tumble. The chuck was now
over half grown, and procured his own living. One
day the dog, who had all along looked upon him
with a jealous eye, encountered him too far from
cover, and his career ended then and there.

In July the woodchuck was forgotten in our in-
terest in a little gray rabbit which we found nearly
famished. It was so small that it could sit in the
hollow of one’s hand. Some accident had probably
befallen itsmother. The tiny creature looked spir-
itless and forlorn. We had to force the milk into
its mouth, But in a day or two it began to revive,
and would lap the milk eagerly. Soon it took to
grass and clover, and then to nibbling sweet apples

GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE 183

and early pears. It grew rapidly, and was one of
the softest and most harmless-looking pets I had
ever seen. For a month or more the little rabbit
was the only company I had, and it helped to be-
guile the time immensely. In coming in from the
field or from my work, I seldom failed to bring it
a handful of red clover blossoms, of which it became
very fond. One day it fell slyly to licking my
hand, and I discovered it wanted salt. Iwould then
moisten my fingers, dip them into the salt, and offer
them to the rabbit. How rapidly the delicate little
tongue would play upon them, darting out to the
right and left of the large front incisors, the slender
paws being pressed against my hand as if to detain
it! But the rabbit proved really untamable; its wild
nature could not be overcome. In its large box-
cage or prison, where it could see nothing but the
tree above it, it was tame, and would at times
frisk playfully about my hand and strike it gently
with its forefeet; but the moment it was liberated
in a room or let down in the grass with a string
about its neck, all its wild nature came forth. In
the room it would run and hide; in the open it
would make desperate efforts to escape, and leap and
bound as you drew in the string that held it. At
night, too, it never failed to try to make its escape
from the cage, and finally, when two thirds grown,
succeeded, and we saw it no more.

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III

How completely the life of a bird revolves about
its nest, its home! Inthe case of the wood thrush,
its life and joy seem to mount higher and higher as
the nest prospers. The male becomes a fountain
of melody; his happiness waxes day by day; he
makes little triumphal tours about the neighborhood,
and pours out his pride and gladness in the ears of
all. How sweet, how well-bred, is his demonstra-
tion! But let any accident befall that precious nest,
and what a sudden silence falls upon him! Last
summer a pair of wood thrushes built their nest
within a few rods of my house, and when the enter-
prise was fairly launched and the mother bird was
sitting upon her four blue eggs, the male was in the
height of his song. How he poured forth his rich
melody, never in the immediate vicinity of the nest,
but always within easy hearing distance! Every
morning, as promptly as the morning came, between
five and six, he would sing for half an hour from the
top of a locust-tree that shaded my roof. I came
to expect him as much as I expected my breakfast,
and I was not disappointed till one morning J seemed
to miss something. What was it? Oh, the thrush
has not sung this morning. Something is the mat-
ter; and recollecting that yesterday I had seen a red
squirrel in the trees not far from the nest, I at once
inferred that the nest had been harried. Going to
the spot, I found my fears were well grounded;
every egg was gone. The joy of the thrush was

GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE 185

laid low. No more songs from the treetop, and no
more songs from any point, till nearly a week had
elapsed, when I heard him again under the hill,
where the pair had started a new nest, cautiously
tuning up, and apparently with his recent bitter
experience still weighing upon him.

After a pair of birds have been broken up once or
twice during the season, they become almost des-
perate, and will make great efforts to outwit their ene-
mies. The past season my attention was attracted
by a pair of brown thrashers. They first built their
nest in a pasture-field under a low, scrubby apple-
tree which the cattle had browsed down till it
spread a thick, wide mass of thorny twigs only a few
inches above the ground. Some blackberry briers
had also grown there, so that the screen was per-
fect. My dog first started the bird, as I was passing
by. By stooping low and peering intently, I could
make out the nest and eggs. Two or three times a
week, as I passed by, I would pause to see how the
nest was prospering. The mother bird would keep
her place, her yellow eyes never blinking. One
morning as I looked into her tent I found the nest
empty. Some night-prowler, probably a skunk or
fox, or maybe a black snake or red squirrel by day,
had plundered it. It would seem as if it was too
well screened: it was in such a spot as any depreda-
tor would be apt to explore. ‘“ Surely,” he would
say, “‘ this is a likely place for a nest.” The birds
then moved over the hill a hundred rods or more,
much nearer the house, and in some rather open

186 RIVERBY

bushes tried again. But again they came to grief.
Then, after some delay, the mother bird made a bold
stroke. She seemed to reason with herself thus:
“Since I have fared so disastrously in seeking seclu-
sion for my nest, I will now adopt the opposite tac-
tics, and come out fairly in the open. What hides
me hides my enemies: let us try greater publicity.”
So she came out and built her nest by a few small
shoots that grew beside the path that divides the two
vineyards, and where we passed to and fro many
times daily. I discovered her by chance early in
the morning as I proceeded to my work. She started
up at my feet and flitted quickly along above the
plowed ground, almost as red as the soil. I ad-
mired her audacity. Surely no prowler by night
or day would suspect a nest in this open and ex-
posed place. There was no cover by which they
could approach, and no concealment anywhere.
The nest was a hasty affair, as if the birds’ patience
at nest-building had been about exhausted. Pres-
ently an egg appeared, and then the next day an-
other, and on the fourth day a third. No doubt the
bird would have succeeded this time had not man
interfered. In cultivating the vineyards the horse
and cultivator had to pass over this very spot.
Upon this the bird had not calculated. I determined
to assist her. I called my man, and told him there
was one spot in that vineyard, no bigger than his
hand, where the horse’s foot must not be allowed
to fall, nor tooth of cultivator to touch. Then I
showed him the nest, and charged him to avoid it.

GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE 187

Probably if I had kept the secret to myself, and let
the bird run her own risk, the nest would have es-
caped. But the result was that the man, in elabo-
rately trying to avoid the nest, overdid the matter;
the horse plunged, and set his foot squarely upon
it. Such a little spot, the chances were few that the
horse’s foot would fall exactly there; and yet it did,
and the birds’ hopes were again dashed. The pair
then disappeared from my vicinity, and I saw them
no more.

The summer just gone I passed at a farmhouse on
the skirts of the Northern Catskills. How could
I help but see what no one else of all the people
about seemed to notice, —a little bob-tailed song
sparrow building her nest in a pile of dry brush very
near the kitchen door. It was late in July, and she
had doubtless reared one brood in the earlier sea-
son. Her toilet was decidedly the worse for wear. I
noted her day after day very busy about the fence
and quince bushes between the house and milk house
with her beak full of coarse straw and hay. Toa
casual observer she seemed flitting about aimlessly,
carrying straws from place to place just to amuse
herself. When I came to watch her closely to learn
the place of her nest, she seemed to suspect my in-
tention and made many little feints and movements
calculated to put me off the track. But I would
not be misled, and presently had her secret. The
male did not assist her at all, but sang much of the
time in an apple-tree or upon the fence, on the other
side of the house. Those artists who paint pictures

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of devoted male birds singing from the branch that
holds the nest, or in its immediate vicinity, do not
give the birds credit for all the wit they possess.
They do not advertise the place where their treasures
are hid in this way. See yonder indigo-bird shak-
ing out its happy song from the topmost twig of the
maple or oak; its nest is many yards away in a low
bush not more than three feet from the ground.

And so with nearly all the birds. The one thing
to which they bend all their wits is the conceal-
ment of their nests. When you come upon the sit-
ting bird, she will almost let you touch her rather
than to start up before you, and thus betray her
secret. The bobolink begins to scold and to circle
about you as soon as you enter the meadow where
his nest is so well hidden. He does not wait to
show his anxiety till you are almost upon it. By
no action of his can you get a clew as to its exact
whereabouts.

The song sparrow nearly always builds upon the
ground, but my little neighbor of last July laid the
foundations of her domicile a foot or more above the
soil, And what a mass of straws and twigs she did
collect together! How coarse and careless and aim-
less at first — a mere lot of rubbish dropped upon the
tangle of dry limbs; but presently how it began to
refine and come into shape in the centre! till there
was the most exquisite hair-lined cup set about by
a chaos of coarse straws and branches. What a pro-
cess of evolution! The completed nest was foreshad-
owed by the first stiff straw; but how far off is

GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE 189

yet that dainty casket with its complement of
speckled eggs! The nest was so placed that it had
for canopy a large, broad, drooping leaf of yellow
dock. This formed a perfect shield against both sun
and rain, while it served to conceal it from any curi-
ous eyes from above, — from the cat, for instance,
prowling along the top of the wall. Before the
eggs had hatched the docken leaf wilted and dried
and fell down upon the nest. But the mother bird
managed to insinuate herself beneath it, and went on
with her brooding all the same.

Then I arranged an artificial cover of leaves and
branches which shielded her charge till they had
flown away. A mere trifle was this little bob-tailed
bird with her arts and her secrets, and the male with
his song, and yet the pair gave a touch of something
to those days and to that place which I would not
willingly have missed.

I have spoken of nature as a stage whereon the
play, more or less interrupted and indirect, con-
stantly goes on. One amusing actor upon that stage
one season, upon my own premises, was a certain
male bluebird. To the spectator it was a comedy,
but to the actor himself I imagine it was quite seri-
ous business. The bird and his mate had a nest in
a box upon an outhouse. In this outhouse was a
window with one pane broken out. At almost any
hour in the day from spring to early summer, the
male bird could be seen fluttering and pecking against
this window from the outside. Did he want to get
within? Apparently so, and yet he would now and

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then pause in his demonstrations, alight in the frame
of the broken pane, look intently within, and after
a moment resume his assault upon the window. The
people who saw the actions of the bird were at a loss
how to interpret them. But I could see at once
what was the matter. The bird saw its image in
the mirror of the glass (the dark interior helped the

reflection) and was making war, as he supposed,

upon a rival. Only the unyielding glass kept him

from tweaking out every saucy blue feather upon the

spot! Then he would peep in through the vacant

pane and try to determine where his rival had so

suddenly disappeared. How it must have puzzled
his little poll! And he learned nothing from expe-

rience. Hundreds of times did he perch in the bro-

ken pane and sharply eye the interior. And for two

months there did not seem to be an hour when he

was not assaulting the window. He never lost faith

in the reality of the bird within, and he never abated

one jot his enmity toward him. If the glass had

been a rough surface he would certainly have worn

his beak and claws and wings to mere stubs. The

incident shows the pugnacious disposition of the

bluebird, and it shows how shallow a bird’s wit

is when new problems or conditions confront it. I

have known a cock-robin to assault an imaginary

rival in a garret window, in the same manner, and

keep up the warfare for weeks.

On still another occasion similar antics of a male
bluebird greatly disturbed the sleep of my hired man
in the early morning. The bird with its mate had

GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE 191

a nest in a box near by the house, and after the
manner of the bluebirds was very inquisitive and
saucy about windows; one morning it chanced to
discover its reflected image in the windows of the
hired man’s room. The shade, of some dark stuff,
was down on the inside, which aided in making a
kind of looking-glass of the window. Instantly the
bird began an assault upon his supposed rival in the
window, and made such a clattering that there was
no more sleep inside that room. Morning after
morning the bird kept this up till the tired plow-
man complained bitterly and declared his intention
to kill the bird. In an unlucky moment — unlucky
for me, who had morning work to be done —I sug-
gested that he leave the shade up and try the effect.
He did so, and his morning sleep was thenceforth
undisturbed.

A Western correspondent writes me that she once
put a looking-glass down on the floor in front of the
canary bird’s cage. The poor canary had not had
any communion with his own kind for years. ‘He
used often to watch the ugly sparrows — the little
plebeians — from his aristocratic gilded palace. I
opened his cage and he walked up to the looking-
glass, and it was not long before he made up his
mind. He collected dead leaves, twigs, bits of pa-
per, and all sorts of stray bits, and began a nest
right off. Several days after in his lonely cage he
would take bits of straw and arrange them when
they were given him.”

XI
A LIFE OF FEAR

S I sat looking from my window the other
morning upon a red squirrel gathering hickory
nuts from a small hickory, and storing them up in
his den in the bank, I was forcibly reminded of the
state of constant fear and apprehension in which the
wild creatures live, and I tried to picture to myself
what life would be to me, or to any of us, hedged
about by so many dangers, real or imaginary.
The squirrel would shoot up the tree, making only
a brown streak from the bottom to the top; would
seize his nut and rush down again in the most pre-
cipitate manner. Half way to his den, which was
not over three rods distant, he would rush up the
trunk of another tree for a few yards to make an ob-
servation, No danger being near, he would dive
into his den and reappear again in a twinkling.
Returning for another nut, he would mount the
second tree again for another observation. Satisfied
that the coast was clear, he would spin along the
top of the ground to the tree that bore the nuts,
shoot up it as before, seize the fruit, and then back
again to his retreat.
Never did he fail during the half hour or more

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that I watched him to take an observation on his
way both to and from his nest. It was “ snatch
and run” with him. Something seemed to say to
him all the time: “ Look out! look out!” ‘ The
cat!” “The hawk!” “The owl!” ‘The boy with
the gun!”

It was a bleak December morning; the first fine
flakes of a cold, driving snowstorm were just begin-
ning to sift down, and the squirrel was eager to fin-
ish harvesting his nuts in time. It was quite touch-
ing to see how hurried and anxious and nervous he
was. I felt like going out and lending a hand. The
nuts were small, poor pig-nuts, and I thought of all
the gnawing he would have to do to get at the scanty
meat they held. My little boy once took pity on a
squirrel that lived in the wall near the gate, and
cracked the nuts for him, and put them upon a small
board shelf in the tree where he could sit and eat
them at his ease.

The red squirrel is not so provident as the chip-
munk. He lays up stores irregularly, by fits and
starts; he never has enough put up to carry him over
the winter; hence he is more or less active all the
season. Long before the December snow the chip-
munk has for days been making hourly trips to his
den with full pockets of nuts or corn or buckwheat,
till his bin holds enough to carry him through to
April. He need not, and I believe does not, set
foot out of doors during the whole winter. But the
red squirrel trusts more to luck.

As alert and watchful as the red squirrel is, he is

A LIFE OF FEAR 195

frequently caught by the cat. My Nig, as black as
ebony, knows well the taste of his flesh. I have
known him to be caught by the black snake and suc-
cessfully swallowed. The snake, no doubt, lay in
ambush for him.

This fear, this ever present source of danger of
the wild creatures, we know little about. Probably
the only person in the civilized countries who is no
better off than the animals in this respect is the Czar
of Russia. He would not even dare gather nuts as
openly as my squirrel. A blacker and more terrible
cat than Nig would be lying in wait for him and
would make a meal of him. The early settlers in
this country must have experienced something of
this dread of apprehension from the Indians. Many
African tribes now live in the same state of constant
fear of the slave-catchers or of other hostile tribes.
Our ancestors, back in prehistoric times, or back of
that in geologic times, must have known fear as a
constant feeling. Hence the prominence of fear in
infants and children when compared with the youth
or the grown person. Babies are nearly always afraid
of strangers.

In the domestic animals also, fear is much more
active in the young than in the old. Nearly every
farm boy has seen a calf but a day or two old, which
its mother has secreted in the woods or in a remote
field, charge upon him furiously with a wild bleat,
when first discovered. After this first ebullition of
fear, it usually settles down into the tame humdrum
of its bovine elders.

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Eternal vigilance is the price of life with most of
the wild creatures. There is only one among them
whose wildness I cannot understand, and that is
the common water turtle. Why is this creature so
fearful? What are its enemies? I know of nothing
that preys upon it. Yet see how watchful and sus-
picious these turtles are as they sun themselves upon
a log or a rock. Before you are fairly in gunshot of
them, they slide down into the water and are gone.

The land turtle, or terrapin, on the other hand,
shows scarcely a trace of fear. He will indeed
pause in this walk when you are very near him, but
he will not retreat into his shell till you have poked
him with your foot or your cane. He appears to
have no enemies; but the little spotted water turtle
is as shy as if he were the delicate tidbit that every
creature was searching for. I did once find one
which a fox had dug out of the mud in winter, and
carried a few rods and dropped on the snow, as if
he had found he had no use for it.

One can understand the fearlessness of the skunk.
Nearly every creature but the farm-dog yields to him
the right of way. All dread his terrible weapon.
If you meet one in your walk in the twilight fields,
the chances are that you will turn out for him, not
he for you. He may even pursue you, just for the
fun of seeing yourun. He comes waltzing toward
you, apparently in the most hilarious spirits.

The coon is probably the most courageous creature
among our familiar wild animals. Who ever saw
a coon show the white feather? He will face any

A LIFE OF FEAR 197

odds with perfect composure. I have seen a coon
upon the ground, beset by four men and two dogs,
and never for a moment losing his presence of mind,
or showing a sign of fear. The raccoon is clear grit,

The fox is a very wild and suspicious creature,
but curiously enough, when you suddenly come face
to face with him, when he is held by a trap, or
driven by the hound, his expression is not that of
fear, but of shame and guilt. He seems to diminish
in size and to be overwhelmed with humiliation.
Does he know himself to be an old thief, and is that
the reason of his embarrassment? The fox has no
enemies but man, and when he is fairly outwitted,
he looks the shame he evidently feels.

In the heart of the rabbit fear constantly abides.
How her eyes protrude! She can see back and front
and on all sides as well as a bird. The fox is after
her, the owls are after her, the gunners are after
her, and she has no defense but her speed. She al-
ways keeps well to cover. The northern hare keeps
in the thickest brush. If the hare or rabbit crosses
a broad open exposure it does so hurriedly, like a
mouse when it crosses the road. The mouse is in
danger of being pounced upon by a hawk, and the
hare or rabbit by the snowy owl, or else the great
horned owl.

A friend of mine was following one morning a
fresh rabbit track through an open field. Suddenly
the track came to an end, as if the creature had
taken wings —as it had after an unpleasant fashion.
There, on either side of its last foot imprint, were

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several parallel lines in the snow, made by the wings
of the great owl that had swooped down and carried
it off. What a little tragedy was seen written there
upon the white, even surface of the field!

The rabbit has not much wit. I once, when a
boy, saw one that had been recently caught, liber-
ated in an open field in the presence of a dog that
was being held a few yards away. But the poor
thing lost all presence of mind and was quickly
caught by the clumsy dog.

A hunter once saw a hare running upon the ice
along the shore of one of the Rangeley lakes. Pres-
ently a lynx appeared in hot pursuit; as soon as the
hare found it was being pursued, it began to circle,
foolish thing. This gave the lynx greatly the ad-
vantage, as it could follow in a much smaller circle.
Soon the hare was run down and seized.

I saw the same experiment tried with a red squir-
rel with quite opposite results. The boy who had
caught the squirrel in his wire trap had a very bright
and nimble dog about the size of a fox, that seemed
to be very sure he could catch a red squirrel under
any circumstances if only the trees were out of the
way. So the boy went to the middle of an open
field with his caged squirrel, the dog, who seemed to
know what was up, dancing and jumping about him.
It was in midwinter; the snow had a firm crust that
held boy and dog alike. The dog was drawn back a
few yards and the squirrel liberated. Then began
one of the most exciting races I have witnessed for
along time. It was impossible for the lookers-on

A LIFE OF FEAR 199

not to be convulsed with laughter, though neither
dog nor squirrel seemed to regard the matter as much
of a joke. The squirrel had all his wits about him,
and kept them ready for instant use. He did not
show the slightest confusion. He was no match for
the dog in fair running, and he discovered this fact
in less than three seconds; he must win, if at all,
by strategy. Not a straight course for the nearest
tree, but a zigzag course; yea, a double or treble
zigzag course. Livery instant the dog was sure the
squirrel was his, and every instant he was disap-
pointed. It was incredible and bewildering to him.
The squirrel dodged this way and that. The dog
looked astonished and vexed.

Then the squirrel issued from between his hind
legs and made three jumps toward the woods before
he was discovered. Our sides ached with laughter,
cruel as it may seem.

It was evident the squirrel would win. The dog
seemed to redouble his efforts. He would overshoot
the game, or shoot by it to the right or left. The
squirrel was the smaller craft and could out-tack him
easily. One more leap and the squirrel was up a
tree, and the dog was overwhelmed with confusion
and disgust.

He could not believe his senses. ‘‘ Not catch a
squirrel in such a field as that? Go to, I will have
him yet!” and he bounds up the tree as high as
one’s head, and then bites the bark of it in his an-
ger and chagrin.

The boy says his dog has never bragged since

200 RIVERBY

about catching red squirrels “if only the trees were
out of reach!”

When any of the winged creatures are engaged in
a life and death race in that way, or in any other
race, the tactics of the squirrel do not work; the
pursuer never overshoots nor shoots by his mark.
The flight of the two is timed as if they were parts
of one whole. A hawk will pursue a sparrow or a
robin through a zigzag course and not lose a stroke
or half a stroke of the wing by reason of any dart-
ing to the right or left. The clew is held with fatal
precision. No matter how quickly nor how often
the sparrow or the finch changes its course, its enemy
changes, simultaneously, as if every move was known
to it from the first.

The same thing may be noticed among the birds
in their love chasings; the pursuer seems to know
perfectly the mind of the pursued. This concert of
action among birds is very curious. When they are
on the alert a flock of sparrows, or pigeons, or cedar-
birds, or snow buntings, or blackbirds, will all take
flight as if there was but one bird, instead of a hun-
dred. The same impulse seizes every individual
bird at the same instant, as if they were sprung by
electricity.

Or when a flock of birds is in flight, it is still one
body, one will; it will rise, or circle, or swoop with
a unity that is truly astonishing.

A flock of snow buntings will perform their aerial
evolutions with a precision that the best-trained sol-
diery cannot equal. Have the birds an extra sense

A LIFE OF FEAR 201

which we have not? A brood of young partridges
in the woods will start up like an explosion, every
brown particle and fragment hurled into the air at

the same instant. Without word or signal, how is
it done?

XII
LOVERS OF NATURE

I

E love nature with a different love at differ-
ent periods of our lives. In youth our love
is sensuous. It is not so much a conscious love as
it is an irresistible attraction. The senses are keen
and fresh, and they crave a field for their exercise.
We delight in the color of flowers, the perfume of
meadows and orchards, the moist, fresh smell of the
woods. We eat the pungent roots and barks, we
devour the wild fruits, we slay the small deer.
Then nature also offers a field of adventure; it chal-
lenges and excites our animal spirits. The woods
are full of game, the waters of fish; the river invites
the oar, the breeze, the sail, the mountain-top prom-
ises a wide prospect. Hence the rod, the gun, the
boat, the tent, the pedestrian club. In youth we
are nearer the savage state, the primitive condition
of mankind, and wild nature is our proper home.
The transient color of the young bird points its
remote ancestry, and the taste of youth for rude
nature in like manner is the survival of an earlier
race instinct.

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Later in life we go to nature as an escape from
the tension and turmoil of business, or for rest and
recreation from study, or seeking solace from grief
and disappointment, or as a refuge from the frivol-
ity and hypocrisies of society. We lie under trees,
we stroll through lanes, or in meadows and pastures,
or muse on the shore. Nature “salves” our worst
wounds; she heals and restores us.

Or we cultivate an intellectual pleasure in nature,
and follow up some branch of natural science, as
botany, or ornithology, or mineralogy.

Then there is the countryman’s love of nature,
the pleasure in cattle, horses, bees, growing crops,
manual labor, sugar-making, gardening, harvesting,
and the rural quietness and repose.

Lastly, we go to nature for solitude and for com-
munion with our own souls. Nature attunes us to
a higher and finer mood. This love springs from
our religious needs and instincts. This was the love
of Thoreau, of Wordsworth, and has been the in-
spiration of much modern poetry and art.

Dr. Johnson said he had lived in London so long
that he had ceased to note the changes of the seasons.
But Dr. Johnson was not a lover of Nature. Of that
feeling for the country of which Wordsworth’s po-
etry, for instance, is so full, he probably had not a
vestige. Think of Wordsworth shut up year in and
year out —in the city! That lover of shepherds, of
mountains, of lonely tarns, of sounding waterfalls,

“Who looked upon the hills with tenderness,
And made dear friendships with the streams and groves.”®

LOVERS OF NATURE 205

Dr. Johnson’s delight was in men and in verbal
fisticuffs with them, but Wordsworth seems to have
loved Nature more than men; at least he was drawn
most to those men who lived closest to Nature and
were more a part of her. Thus he says he loved
shepherds, “dwellers in the valleys,”

“Not verily
For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills
Where was their occupation and abode.”

Your real lover of nature does not love merely the
beautiful things which he culls here and there; he
loves the earth itself, the faces of the hills and
mountains, the rocks, the streams, the naked trees
no less than the leafy trees, —a plowed field no
less than a green meadow. He does not know what
it is that draws him. It is not beauty, any more
than it is beauty in his father and mother that
makes him love them. It is “ something far more
deeply interfused,” — something native and kindred
that calls to him. In certain moods how good the
earth, the soil, seems! One wants to feel it with
his hands and smell it — almost taste it. Indeed,
I never see a horse eat soil and sods without a feel-
ing that I would like to taste it too. The rind of
the earth, of this “ round and delicious globe ” which
has hung so long upon the great Newtonian tree,
ripening in the sun, must be sweet.

I recall an Irish girl lately come to this country,
who worked for us, and who, when I dug and
brought to the kitchen the first early potatoes, felt
them, and stroked them with her hand, and smelled

206 RIVERBY

them, and was loath to Jay them down, they were so
full of suggestion of the dear land and home she had
so lately left. I suppose it was a happy surprise to
her to find that the earth had the same fresh, moist
smell here that it had in Ireland, and yielded the
same crisp tubers. The canny creature had always
worked in the fields, and the love of the soil and
of homely country things was deep in her heart.
Another emigrant from over the seas, a laboring man,
confined to the town, said to me in his last illness,
that he believed he would get well if he could again
walk in the fields. A Frenchman who fled the city
and came to the country said, with an impressive
gesture, that he wanted to be where he could see
the blue sky over his head.

These little incidents are but glints or faint
gleams of that love of Nature to which I would
point, — an affection for the country itself, and not
a mere passing admiration for its beauties. A great
many people admire Nature; they write admiring
things about her; they apostrophize her beauties;
they describe minutely pretty scenes here and there;
they climb mountains to see the sun set, or the sun
rise, or make long journeys to find waterfalls, but
Nature’s real lover listens to their enthusiasm with
coolness and indifference. Nature is not to be
praised or patronized. You cannot go to her and
describe her; she must speak through your heart.
The woods and fields must melt into your mind,
dissolved by your love for them. Did they not
melt into Wordsworth’s mind? They colored all

LOVERS OF NATURE 207

his thoughts; the solitude of those green, rocky
Westmoreland fells broods over every page. He
does not tell us how beautiful he finds Nature, and
how much he enjoys her; he makes us share his
enjoyment.

Richard Jefferies was probably as genuine a lover
of Nature as was Wordsworth, but he had not the
same power to make us share his enjoyment. His
page is sometimes wearisome from mere description
and enumeration. He is rarely interpretative; the
mood, the frame of mind, which Nature herself be-
gets, he seldom imparts to us. What we finally
love in Nature is ourselves, some suggestion of the
human spirit, and no labored description or careful
enumeration of details will bring us to this.

“Nor do words
Which practiced talent readily affords,
Prove that her hand has touched responsive chords.”

It has been aptly said that Jefferies was a re-
porter of genius, but that he never (in his nature
books) got beyond reporting. His “ Wild Life”
reads like a kind of field newspaper; he puts in
everything, he is diligent and untiring, but for
mugh of it one cares very little after he is through.
For selecting and combining the things of perma-
nent interest so as to excite curiosity and impart
charm, he has but little power.

The passion for Nature is by no means a mere
curiosity about her, or an itching to portray certain
of her features; it lies deeper and is probably a form
of, or closely related to, our religious instincts,

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When you go to Nature, bring us good science or
else good literature, and not a mere inventory of
what you have seen. One demonstrates, the other
interprets.

Observation is selective and detective. A real
observation begets warmth and joy in the mind.
To see things in detail as they lie about you and
enumerate them is not observation; but to see the
significant things, to seize the quick movement and
gesture, to disentangle the threads of relation, to
know the nerves that thrill from the cords that bind,
or the typical and vital from the commonplace and
mechanical — that is to be an observer. In Tho-
reau’s ‘Walden ”’ there is observation; in the Jour-
nals published since his death there is close and
patient scrutiny, but only now and then anything
that we care to know. Considering that Thoreau
spent half of each day for upward of twenty years
in the open air, bent upon spying out Nature’s ways
and doings, it is remarkable that he made so few
real observations.

Yet how closely he looked! He even saw that
mysterious waving line which one may sometimes
note in little running brooks. “I see stretched from
side to side of this smooth brook where it is three or
four feet wide what seems to indicate an invisible
waving line, like a cobweb against which the water
is heaped up a very little. This line is constantly
swayed to and fro, as if by the current or wind,
bellying forward here and there. I try repeatedly
to catch and break it with my hand and let the

LOVERS OF NATURE 209

water run free, but still to my surprise I clutch
nothing but fluid, and the imaginary line keeps its
place.”

A little closer scrutiny would have shown him
that this waving water line was probably caused in
some way by the meeting of two volumes or currents
of water.

The most novel and interesting observation I can
now recall is his discovery of how the wild apple-
tree in the pastures triumphs over the browsing cat-
tle, namely, by hedging itself about by a dense thorny
growth, keeping the cows at arm’s length as it were,
and then sending up a central shoot beyond their
reach.

One of the most acute observations Thoreau’s
Journals contain is not upon nature at all, but upon
the difference between men and women “ in respect
to the adornment of their heads:” “ Do you ever
see an old or jammed bonnet on the head of a woman
at a public meeting? But look at any assembly of
men with their hats on; how large a proportion of
the hats will be old, weather-beaten, and indented;
but, I think, so much more picturesque and interest-
ing. One farmer rides by my door in a hat which
it does me good to see, there is so much character in
it, so much independence, to begin with, and then
affection for his old friends, etc., ete. I should not
wonder if there were lichens on it. . . . Men wear
their hats for use, women theirs for ornament, I
have seen the greatest philosopher in the town with
what the traders would call a ‘ shocking bad hat’ on,

210 RIVERBY

but the woman whose bonnet does not come up to
the mark is at best a blue-stocking.”

So clever an observation upon anything in nature
as that is hard to find in the Journals.

To observe is to discriminate and take note of all
the factors.

One day while walking in my vineyard, lamenting
the damage the storm of yesterday had wrought in
it, my ear caught, amid the medley of other sounds
and songs, an unfamiliar bird-note from the air over-
head. Gradually it dawned upon my consciousness
that this was not the call of any of our native birds,
but of a stranger. Looking steadily in the direction
the sound came, after some moments I made out the
form of a bird flying round and round in a large
circle high in air, and momentarily uttering its loud
sharp call. The size, the shape, the manner, and
the voice of the bird were all strange. In a moment
I knew it to be an English skylark, apparently
adrift and undecided which way to go. Finally it
seemed to make up its mind, and then bore away
to the north. My ear had been true to its charge.

The man who told me that some of our birds took
an earth bath, and some of them a water bath, and
a few of them took both, had looked closer into this
matter than I had. The sparrows usually earth
their plumage, but the English sparrow does both.
The farm boy who told a naturalist a piece of news
about the turtles, namely, that the reason why we
never see any small turtles about the fields is because
for two or three years the young turtles bury them-

LOVERS OF NATURE 211

selves in the ground and keep quite hidden from
sight, had used his eyes to some purpose. This was
a real observation.

Just as a skilled physician, in diagnosing a case,
picks out the significant symptoms and separates
them from the rest, so the real observer, with eye
and ear, seizes what is novel and characteristic in the
scenes about him. His attention goes through the
play at the surface and reaches the rarer incidents
beneath or beyond.

Richard Jefferies was not strictly an observer; he
was a living and sympathetic spectator of the na-
ture about him, a poet, if you please, but he tells
us little that is memorable or suggestive. His best
books are such as the “Gamekeeper at Home,” and
the “ Amateur Poacher,” where the human element
is brought in, and the descriptions of nature are re-
lieved by racy bits of character drawing. By far
the best thing of all is a paper which he wrote
shortly before his death, called “‘ My Old Village.”
It is very beautiful and pathetic, and reveals the
heart and soul of the man as nothing else he has
written does. I must permit myself to transcribe
one paragraph of it. It shows how he, too, was
under the spell of the past, and such a recent past,
too: —

“T think I have heard that the oaks are down.
They may be standing or down, it matters nothing
to me; the leaves I last saw upon them are gone for
evermore, nor shall I ever see them come there
again, ruddy in spring. I would not see them

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again, even if I could; they could never look again
as they used to do. There are too many memories
there. The happiest days become the saddest after-
ward; let us never go back, lest we, too, die. There
are no such oaks anywhere else, none so tall and
straight, and with such massive heads, on which the
sun used to shine as if on the globe of the earth,
one side in shadow, the other in bright light. How
often I have looked at oaks since, and yet have never
been able to get the same effect from them! Like
an old author printed in another type, the words are
the same, but the sentiment is different. The brooks
have ceased to run. ‘There is no music now at the
old hatch where we used to sit, in danger of our
lives, happy as kings, on the narrow bar over the
deep water. The barred pike that used to come up
in such numbers are no more among the flags. The
perch used to drift down the stream and then bring
up again. The sun shone there for a very long
time, and the water rippled and sang, and it always
seemed to me that I could feel the rippling and the
singing and the sparkling back through the centu-
ries. The brook is dead, for where man goes, na-
ture ends. I dare say there is water there still, but
it is not the brook; the brook is gone, like John
Brown’s soul [not our John Brown]. There used
to be clouds over the fields, white clouds in blue
summer skies. I have lived a good deal on clouds;
they have been meat to me often; they bring some-
thing to the spirit which even the trees do not. I
see clouds now sometimes when the iron gripe of hell

LOVERS OF NATURE 213

permits for a minute or two; they are very different
clouds and speak differently. I long for some of
the old clouds that had no memories. There were
nights in those times over those fields, not darkness,
but Night, full of glowing suns and glowing rich-
ness of life that sprang up to meet them. The nights
are there still; they are everywhere, nothing local
in the night; but it is not the Night to me seen
through the window.”

In the literature of nature I know of no page so
pathetic and human.

Moralizing about nature or through nature is
tedious enough, and yet, unless the piece has some
moral or emotional background, it does not touch us.
In other words, to describe a thing for the mere sake
of describing it, to make a dead set at it like a re-
porter, whatever may be the case in painting, it will
not do in literature. The object must be informed
with meaning, and to do this the creative touch of
the imagination is required. Take this passage from
Whitman on the night, and see if there is not more
than mere description there: —

“A large part of the sky seemed just laid in great
splashes of phosphorus. You could look deeper in,
farther through, than usual; the orbs thick as heads
of wheat in a field. Not that there was any special
brilliancy either — nothing near as sharp as I have
seen of keen winter nights, but a curious general
luminousness throughout to sight, sense, and soul.
The latter had much to do with it. . . . Now, in-
deed, if never before, the heavens declared the

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glory of God. It was to the full the sky of the
Bible, of Arabia, of the prophets, and of the oldest
poems.”

Or this touch of a January night on the Delaware
River: —

“* Overhead, the splendor indescribable; yet some-
thing haughty, almost supercilious, in the night;
never did I realize more latent sentiment, almost
passion, in the silent interminable stars up there.
One can understand on such a night why, from the
days of the Pharaohs or Job, the dome of heaven,
sprinkled with planets, has supplied the subtlest,
deepest criticism on human pride, glory, ambition.”

Matthew Arnold quotes this passage from Ober-
mann as showing a rare feeling for nature: —

“My path lay beside the green waters of the
Thiele. Feeling inclined to muse, and finding the
night so warm that there was no hardship in being all
night out of doors, I took the road to Saint Blaise.
I descended a steep bank, and got upon the shore of
the lake where its ripple came up and expired. The
air was calm; every one was at rest; I remained
there for hours. Toward morning the moon shed
over the earth and waters the ineffable melancholy
of her last gleams. Nature seems unspeakably grand,
when, plunged, in a long reverie, one hears the rip-
pling of the waters upon a solitary strand, in the
calm of a night still enkindled and luminous with
the setting moon.

“ Sensibility beyond utterance, charm and tor-
ment of our vain years; vast consciousness of a na-

LOVERS OF NATURE 215

ture everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere
impenetrable; all-embracing passion, ripened wis-
dom, delicious self-abandonment — everything that a
mortal heart can contain of life-weariness and yearn-
ing, I felt it all. I experienced it all, in this mem-
orable night. I have made a grave step toward the
age of decline. I have swallowed up ten years of
life at once. Happy the simple whose heart is al-
ways young!”

The moral element is behind this also, and is the
source of its value and charm. In literature never
nature for her own sake, but for the sake ait the soul
which is over and above all.

II

One of the most desirable things in life is a fresh
impression of an old fact or scene. One’s love of
nature may be a constant factor, yet it is only now
and then that he gets a fresh impression of the
charm and meaning of nature; only now and then
that the objects without and the mood within so fit
together that we have a vivid and original sense of
the beauty and significance that surround us. How
often do we really see the stars? Probably a great
many people never see them at all —that is, never
look upon them with any thrill of emotion. If I see
them a few times a year, I think myself in luck.
If I deliberately go out to see them, I am quite sure
to miss them; but occasionally, as one glances up to
them in his lonely night walk, the mind opens, or
the heaven opens — which is it? — and he has a mo-

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mentary glimpse of their ineffable splendor and sig-
nificance. How overwhelming, how awe-inspiring!
His thought goes like a lightning flash into that se-
rene abyss, and then the veil is drawn again. One’s
science, one’s understanding, tells him he is a voy-
ager on the celestial deep, that the earth beneath his
feet is a star among stars, that we can never be any
more in the heavens than we are now, or any more
within reach of the celestial laws and forces; but
how rare the mood in which we can realize this as-
tounding fact, in which we can get a fresh and vivid
impression of it! To have it ever present with one
in all its naked grandeur would perhaps be more
than we could bear.

The common and the familiar —how soon they
cease to impress us! The great service of genius,
speaking through art and literature, is to pierce
through our callousness and indifference and give us
fresh impressions of things as they really are; to
present things in new combinations, or from new
points of view, so that they shall surprise and de-
light us like a new revelation. When poetry does
this, or when art does it, or when science does it, it
recreates the world for us, and for the moment we
are again Adam in paradise.

Herein lies one compensation to the lover of na-
ture who is an enforced dweller in the town: the
indifference which familiarity breeds is not his. His
weekly or monthly sallies into the country yield him
a rare delight. To his fresh, eager senses the charm
of novelty is over all, Country people look with a

LOVERS OF NATURE 217

kind of pitying amusement upon the delight of their
newly arrived city friends; but would we not, after
all, give something if we could exchange eyes with
them for a little while?

We who write about nature pick out, I suspect,
only the rare moments when we have had glimpses
of her, and make much of them. Our lives are dull,
and our minds crusted over with rubbish like those
of other people. Then writing about nature, as
about most other subjects, is an expansive process;
we are under the law of evolution; we grow the
germ into the tree; a little original observation goes
agood way. Life is a compendium. The record
in our minds and hearts is in shorthand. When we
come to write it out, we are surprised at its length
and significance. What we feel in a twinkling it
takes a long time to tell to another.

When I pass along by a meadow in June, where
the bobolinks are singing and the daisies dancing in
the wind, and the scent of the clover is in the air,
and where the boys and girls are looking for wild
strawberries in the grass, I take it all in in a glance,
it enters swiftly through all my senses; but if I set
about writing an account of my experience for my
reader, how long and tedious the process, how I
must beat about the bush! And then, if I would
have him see and feel it, J must avoid a point-blank
description and bring it to him, or him to it, by a
kind of indirection, so as to surprise him and give
him more than I at first seemed to promise.

To a countryman like myself the presence of nat-

218 RIVERBY

ural objects, the open face of the country, sheds a
cheering and soothing influence at all times; but it
is only at rare intervals that he experiences the thrill
of a fresh impression. I find that a kind of pre-
occupation, as the farmer with his work, the angler
with his rod, the sportsman with his gun, the walker
with his friend, the lounger with his book, affords
conditions that are not to be neglected. So much
will steal in at the corners of your eyes; the unpre-
meditated glance, when the mind is passive and re-
ceptive, often stirs the soul. Upon whom does the
brook make such an impression as upon the angler?
How he comes to know its character! how he studies
its every phase! how he feels it through that rod
and line as if they were a part of himself! I pity
the person who does not get at least one or two fresh
impressions of the charm and sweetness of nature in
the spring. Later in the season it gets to be more
of an old story; but in March, when the season is
early, and in April, when the season is late, there
occasionally come days which awaken a new joy in
the heart. Every recurring spring one experiences
this fresh delight. There is nothing very tangible
yet in awakening nature, but there is something in
the air, some sentiment in the sunshine and in the
look of things, a prophecy of life and renewal, that
sends a thrill through the frame. The first spar-
row’s song, the first robin’s call, the first bluebird’s
warble, the first phoebe’s note — who can hear it
without emotion? Or the first flock of migrating
geese or ducks — how much they bring north with

LOVERS OF NATURE 219

them! When the red-shouldered starlings begin to
gurgle in the elms or golden willows along the
marshes and watercourses, you will feel spring then;
and if you look closely upon the ground beneath
them, you will find that sturdy advanced guard of
our floral army, the skunk cabbage, thrusting his
spear-point up through the ooze, and spring will
again quicken your pulse.

One seems to get nearer to nature in the early
spring days: all screens are removed, the earth
everywhere speaks directly to you; she is not hidden
by verdure and foliage; there is a peculiar delight
in walking over the brown turf of the fields that one
cannot feel later on. How welcome the smell of it,
warmed by the sun; the first breath of the reviving
earth. How welcome the full, sparkling water-
courses, too, everywhere drawing the eye; by and by
they will be veiled by the verdure and shrunken by
the heat. When March is kind, for how much her
slightest favors count! The other evening, as I
stood on the slope of a hill in the twilight, I heard
a whistling of approaching wings, and presently a
woodcock flying low passed near me. I could see
his form and his long curved wings dimly against the
horizon; his whistling slowly vanished in the gather-
ing night, but his passage made something stir and
respond within me. March was on the wing, she
was abroad in the soft still twilight searching out
the moist, springy places where the worms first come
to the surface and where the grass first starts; and
her course was up the valley from the south, A

220 RIVERBY

day or two later I sat on a hillside in the woods late
in the day, amid the pines and hemlocks, and heard
the soft, elusive spring call of the little owl — a curi-
ous musical undertone hardly separable from the
silence; a bell, muffled in feathers, tolling in the twi-
light of the woods and discernible only to the most
alert ear. But it was the voice of spring, the voice
of the same impulse that sent the woodeock winging
his way through the dusk, that was just beginning
to make the pussy-willows swell and the grass to
freshen in the spring runs.

Occasionally, of a bright, warm, still day in
March, such as we have had the present season, the
little flying spider is abroad. It is the most delicate
of all March tokens, but very suggestive. Its long,
waving threads of gossamer, invisible except when
the sunlight falls upon them at a particular angle,
stream out here and there upon the air, a filament
of life, reaching and reaching as if to catch and
detain the most subtle of the skyey influences.

Nature is always new in the spring, and lucky are
we if it finds us new also.

XIII
A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS

Ho” beautiful is fertility! A landscape of

fruitful and well-cultivated fields; an un-
broken expanse of grass; a thick, uniform growth of
grain — how each of these fills and satisfies the eye!
And it is not because we are essentially utilitarian
and see the rich loaf and the fat beef as the outcome
of it all, but because we read in it an expression of
the beneficence and good-will of the earth. We love
to see harmony between man and nature; we love
peace and not war; we love the adequate, the com-
plete. A perfect issue of grass or grain is a satis-
faction to look upon, because it is a success. These
things have the beauty of an end exactly fulfilled,
the beauty of perfect fitness and proportion. The
barren in nature is ugly and repels us, unless it be
on such a scale and convey such a suggestion of
power as to awaken the emotion of the sublime.
What can be less inviting than a neglected and
exhausted Virginia farm, the thin red soil showing
here and there through the ragged and scanty turf?
and what, on the other hand, can please the eye of
a countryman more than the unbroken verdancy and
fertility of a Kentucky blue-grass farm? I find I

222 RIVERBY

am very apt to take a farmer’s view of a country.
That long line of toiling and thrifty yeomen back
of me seems to have bequeathed something to my
blood that makes me respond very quickly to a fer-
tile and well-kept landscape, and that, on the other
hand, makes me equally discontented in a poor,
shabby one. All the way from Washington till I
struck the heart of Kentucky, the farmer in me was
unhappy; he saw hardly a rood of land that he
would like to call his own. But that remnant of
the wild man of the woods, which most of us still
carry, saw much that delighted him, especially down
the New River, where the rocks and the waters, and
the steep forest-clad mountains were as wild and as
savage as anything he had known in his early Dar-
winian ages. But when we emerged upon the banks
of the Great Kanawha, the man of the woods lost
his interest and the man of the fields saw little that
was comforting.

When we cross the line into Kentucky, I said,
we shall see a change. But no, we did not. The
farmer still groaned in spirit; no thrifty farms, no
substantial homes, no neat villages, no good roads
anywhere, but squalor and sterility on every hand.
Nearly all the afternoon we rode through a country
like the poorer parts of New England, unredeemed
by anything like New England thrift. It was a
country of coal, a very new country, geologically
speaking, and the top-soil did not seem to have had
time to become deepened and enriched by vegetable
mould. Near sundown, as I glanced out of the win-

A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 223

dow, I thought I began to see a change. Presently
I was very sure I did. It began to appear in the
more grassy character of the woods. Then I caught
sight of peculiarly soft and uniform grassy patches
here and there in the open. Then in a few mo-
ments more the train had shot us fairly into the edge
of the blu’-grass region, and the farmer in me began
to be on the alert. We had passed in a twinkling
from a portion of the earth’s surface which is new,
which is of yesterday, to a portion which is of the
oldest, from the carboniferous to the lower silurian.
Here, upon this lower silurian, the earth that saw
and nourished the great monsters and dragons was
growing the delicate blue-grass. It had taken all
these millions upon millions of years to prepare the
way for this little plant to grow to perfection. I
thought I had never seen fields and low hills look so
soft in the twilight; they seemed clad in greenish
gray fur. As we neared Mount Sterling, how fat
and smooth the land looked; what long, even, gently
flowing lines against the fading western sky, broken
here and there by herds of slowly grazing or else
reposing and ruminating cattle! What peace and
plenty it suggested! From a land raw and crude
and bitter like unripe fruit, we had suddenly been
transported into the midst of one ripe and mellow
with the fullness of time. It was sweet to look upon.
I was seized with a strong desire to go forth and
taste it by a stroll through it in the twilight.

In the course of the ten days that followed, the
last ten days of May, I had an opportunity to taste it

224 RIVERBY

pretty well, and my mind has had a grassy flavor
ever since. J had an opportunity to see this restless
and fitful American nature of ours in a more equable
and beneficent mood than I had ever before seen it
in; all its savageness and acridness gone, no thought
now but submission to the hand and wants of man,
I afterward saw the prairies of Illinois, and the vast
level stretches of farming country of northern Ohio
and Indiana, but these lands were nowhere quite so
human, quite so beautiful, or quite so productive as
the blue-grass region. One likes to see the earth’s
surface lifted up and undulating a little, as if it
heaved and swelled with emotion; it suggests more
life, and at the same time that the sense of repose is
greater. There is no repose in a prairie; it is stag-
nation, it isa dead level. Those immense stretches
of flat land pain the eye, as if all life and expression
had gone from the face of the earth. There is just
unevenness enough in the blue-grass region to give
mobility and variety to the landscape. From almost
any given point one commands broad and extensive
views — of immense fields of wheat or barley, or corn
or hemp, or grass or clover, or of woodland pastures.

With Professor Proctor I drove a hundred miles
or more about the country ina buggy. First from
Frankfort to Versailles, the capital of Woodford
County; then to Lexington, where we passed a
couple of days with Major McDowell at Ashland,
the old Henry Clay place; then to Georgetown in
Scott County; thence back to Frankfort again. The
following week I passed three days on the great

A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 225

stock farm of Colonel Alexander, where I saw more
and finer blooded stock in the way of horses, cattle,
and sheep than I had ever seen before. From thence
we went south to Colonel Shelby’s, where we passed
a couple of days on the extreme edge of the blue-
grass circle in Boyle County. Here we strike the
rim of sharp low hills that run quite around this
garden of the State, from the Ohio River on the
west to the Ohio again on the north and east. Ken-
tucky is a great country for licks; there are any
number of streams and springs that bear the names
of licks. Probably the soil of no other State in the
Union has been so much licked and smacked over as
that of Kentucky. Colonel Shelby’s farm is near a
stream called Knob Lick, and within a few miles of
a place called Blue Lick. I expected to see some
sort of salt spring where the buffalo and deer used
to come to lick; but instead of that saw a raw, naked
spot of earth, an acre or two in extent, which had
apparently been licked into the shape of a clay model
of some scene in Colorado or the Rocky Mountains.
There were gullies and chasms and sharp knobs and
peaks as blue and barren as could be, and no sign of
a spring or of water visible. The buffalo had licked
the clay for the saline matter it held, and had cer-
tainly made a deep and lasting impression.

From Shelby City we went west sixty or more
miles, skirting the blue-grass region, to Lebanon
Junction, where I took the train for Cave City.
The blue-grass region is as large as the State of
Massachusetts, and is, on the whole, the finest bit

226 RIVERBY

of the earth’s surface, with the exception of parts
of England, I have yet seen. In one way it is more
pleasing than anything one sees in England, on ac-
count of the greater sense of freedom and roominess
which it gives one. Everything is on a large, gen-
erous scale. The fields are not so cut up, nor the
roadways so narrow, nor the fences so prohibitory.
Indeed, the distinguishing feature of this country is
its breadth: one sees fields of corn or wheat or clover
of from fifty to one hundred acres each. At Colonel
Alexander’s I saw three fields of clover lying side
by side which contained three hundred acres: as the
clover was just in full bloom, the sight was a very
pleasing one. The farms are larger, ranging from
several hundred to several thousand acres. The
farmhouses are larger, with wide doors, broad halls,
high ceilings, ample grounds, and hospitality to
match. There is nothing niggardly or small in the
people or in their country. One sees none of the
New York or New England primness and trimness,
but the ample, flowing Southern way of life. It is
common to see horses and cattle grazing in the
grounds immediately about the house; there is no-
thing but grass, and the great forest trees, which
they cannot hurt. The farmhouses rarely stand near
the highway, but are set after the English fashion
from a third to half a mile distant, amid a grove of
primitive forest trees, and flanked or backed up by
the many lesser buildings that the times of slavery
made necessary. Educated gentlemen farmers are
probably the rule more than in the North, There

A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 227

are not so many small or so many leased farms. The
proprietors are men of means, and come the nearest
to forming a landed gentry of any class of men we
have in this country. They are not city men run-
ning a brief and rapid career on a fancy farm, but
genuine countrymen, who love the land and mean
to keep it. I remember with pleasure one rosy-faced
young farmer, whose place we casually invaded in
Lincoln County. He was a graduate of Harvard
University and of the Law School, but here he was
with his trousers tucked into his boot-legs, helping
to cultivate his corn, or looking after his herds upon
his broad acres. He was nearly the ideal of a sim-
ple, hearty, educated country farmer and gentleman.

But the feature of this part of Kentucky which
struck me the most forcibly, and which is perhaps
the most unique, is the immense sylvan or wood-
land pastures. The forests are simply vast grassy
orchards of maple and oak, or other trees, where
the herds graze and repose. They everywhere give
a look to the land as of royal parks and commons.
They are as clean as a meadow and as inviting as
long, grassy vistas and circles of cool shade can make
them. All the saplings and bushy undergrowths
common to forests have been removed, leaving only
the large trees scattered here and there, which seem
to protect rather than occupy the ground. Such a
look of leisure, of freedom, of amplitude, as these
forest groves give to the landscape!

What vistas, what aisles, what retreats, what
depths of sunshine and shadow! The grass is as

228 RIVERBY

uniform as a carpet, and grows quite up to the boles
of the trees. One peculiarity of the blue-grass is
that it takes complete possession of the soil; it suf-
fers no rival; it is as uniform as a fall of snow.
Only one weed seems to hold its own against it, and
that is ironweed, a plant like a robust purple aster
five or six feet high. This is Kentucky’s one weed,
so far as I saw. It was low and inconspicuous while
I was there, but before fall it gets tall and rank,
and its masses of purple flowers make a very strik-
ing spectacle. Through these forest glades roam the
herds of cattle or horses. I know no prettier sight
than a troop of blooded mares with their colts slowly
grazing through these stately aisles, some of them
in sunshine, and some in shadow. In riding along
the highway there was hardly an hour when such a
scene was not in view. Very often the great farm-
house stands in one of these open forests and is
approached by a graveled road that winds amid the
trees. At Colonel Alexander’s the cottage of his
foreman, as well as many of the farm buildings and
stables, stands in a grassy forest, and the mares with
their colts roam far and wide. Sometimes when
they were going for water, or were being started in
for the night, they would come charging along like
the wind, and what a pleasing sight it was to see
their glossy coats glancing adown the long sun-
flecked vistas! Sometimes the more open of these
forest lands are tilled; I saw fine crops of hemp
growing on them, and in one of two cases corn. But
where the land has never been under cultivation it is

A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 229

remarkably smooth —one can drive with a buggy
with perfect ease and freedom anywhere through
these woods. The ground is as smooth as if it had
been rolled. In Kentucky we are beyond the south-
ern limit of the glacial drift; there are no surface
bowlders and no abrupt knolls or gravel banks. An-
other feature which shows how gentle and uniform
the forces which have moulded this land have been
are the beautiful depressions which go by the ugly
name of “sink-holes.” They are broad turf-lined
bowls sunk in the surface here and there, and as
smooth and symmetrical as if they had been turned
out by a lathe. Those about the woodlands of Colo-
nel Alexander were from one to two hundred feet
across and fifteen or twenty feet deep. The green
turf sweeps down into them without a break, and
the great trees grow from their sides and bottoms
the same as elsewhere. They look as if they might
have been carved out by the action of whirling wa-
ter, but are probably the result of the surface water
seeking a hidden channel in the underlying rock,
and thus slowly carrying away the soil with it.
They all still have underground drainage through
the bottom. By reason of these depressions this
part of the State has been called “goose-nest land,”
their shape suggesting the nests of immense geese.
On my way southward to the Mammoth Cave, over
the formation known as the subcarboniferous, they
formed the most noticeable feature of the landscape.
An immense flock of geese had nested here, so that
in places the rims of their nests touched one another.

230 RIVERBY

As you near the great cave you see a mammoth de-
pression, nothing less than a broad, oval valley
which holds entire farms, and which has no outlet
save through the bottom. In England these depres-
sions would be called punch-bowls; and though they
know well in Kentucky what punch is made of, and
can furnish the main ingredient of superb quality,
and in quantity that would quite fill some of these
grassy basins, yet I do not know that they apply
this term to them. But in the good old times be-
fore the war, when the spirit of politics ran much
higher than now, these punch-bowls and the forests
about them were the frequent scenes of happy and
convivial gatherings. Under the great trees the po-
litical orators held forth; a whole ox would be roasted
to feed the hungry crowd, and something stronger
than punch flowed freely. One farmer showed us
in our walk where Crittenden and Breckinridge
had frequently held forth, but the grass had long
been growing over the ashes where the ox had been
roasted.

What a land for picnics and open-air meetings!
The look of it suggested something more large and
leisurely than the stress and hurry of our American
life. What was there about it that made me think
of Walter Scott and the age of romance and chiv-
alry? and of Robin Hood and his adventurous band
under the greenwood tree? Probably it was those
stately, open forests, with their clear, grassy vistas
where a tournament might be held, and those superb
breeds of horses wandering through them upon which

A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 231

it was so easy to fancy knights and ladies riding.
The land has not the mellow, time-enriched look of
England; it could not have it’ under our harder,
fiercer climate; but it has a sense of breadth and a
roominess which one never sees in England except
in the great royal parks.

The fences are mainly posts and rails, which fall a
little short of giving the look of permanence which
a hedge or a wall and dike afford.

The Kentuckians have an unhandsome way of
treating their forests when they want to get rid of
them; they girdle the trees and let them die, in-
stead of cutting them down at once. A girdled tree
dies hard; the struggle is painful to look upon; inch
by inch, leaf by leaf, it yields, and the agony is pro-
tracted nearly through the whole season. The land
looked accursed when its noble trees were all dying
or had died, as if smitten by a plague. One hardly.
expected to see grass or grain growing upon it. The
girdled trees stand for years, their gaunt skeletons
blistering in the sun or blackening in the rain.
Through southern Indiana and Illinois I noticed this
same lazy, ugly custom of getting rid of the trees.

The most noticeable want of the blue-grass region
is water. The streams bore underground through
the limestone rock so readily that they rarely come
to the surface. With plenty of sparkling streams
and rivers like New England, it would indeed be
a land of infinite attractions. The most unsightly
feature the country afforded was the numerous shal-
low basins, scooped out of the soil and filled with

232 RIVERBY

stagnant water, where the flocks and herds drank.
These, with the girdled trees, were about the only
things the landscape presented to which the eye did
not turn with pleasure. Yet when one does chance
upon a spring, it is apt to be a strikingly beautiful
one. The limestone rock, draped with dark, drip-
ping moss, opens a cavernous mouth from which in
most instances a considerable stream flows. I saw
three or four such springs, about which one wanted
to linger long. The largest was at Georgetown,
where a stream ten or twelve feet broad and three
or four feet deep came gliding from a cavernous cliff
without a ripple. It is situated in the very edge
of the town, and could easily be made a feature sin-
gularly attractive. As we approached its head, a lit-
tle colored girl rose up from its brink with a pail of
water. lLasked her name. “ Venus, sir; Venus.”
It was the nearest I had ever come to seeing Venus
rising from the foam.

There are three hard things in Kentucky, only
one of which is to my taste; namely, hard bread,
hard beds, and hard roads. The roads are excel-
lent, macadamized as in England, and nearly as well
kept; but that “ beat-biscuit,” a sort of domestic
hardtack, in the making of which the flour or dough
is beaten long and hard with the rolling-pin, is, in
my opinion, a poor substitute for Yankee bread;
and those mercilessly hard beds — the macadamizing
principle is out of place there, too. It would not
be exact to call Kentucky butter bad; but with all
their fine grass and fancy stock, they do not succeed

A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 233

well in this article of domestic manufacture. But
Kentucky whiskey is soft, seductively so, and I cau-
tion all travelers to beware how they suck any iced
preparation of it through a straw of a hot day; it is
not half so innocent as it tastes.

The blue-grass region has sent out, and continues
to send out, the most famous trotting horses in the
world. Within a small circle not half a dozen miles
across were produced all the more celebrated horses
of the past ten years; but it has as yet done nothing
of equal excellence in the way of men. I could
but ask myself why this ripe and mellow geology,
this stately and bountiful landscape, these large and
substantial homesteads, have not yet produced a crop
of men to match. Cold and sterile Massachusetts
is far in the lead in this respect. Granite seems
a better nurse of genius than the lime-rock. The
one great man born in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln,
was not a product of this fertile region. Henry
Clay was a Virginian. The two most eminent native
blue-grass men were John C. Breckinridge and John
J. Crittenden. It seems that it takes something
more than a fertile soil to produce great men; a deep
and rich human soil is much more important. Ken-
tucky has been too far to one side of the main cur-
rent of our national life; she has felt the influence
of New England but very little; neither has she been
aroused by the stir and enterprise of the great West.
Her schoolhouses are too far apart, even in this rich
section, and she values a fast trotter or racer more
than she does a fine scholar.

234 RIVERBY

What gives the great fertility to the blue-grass
region is the old limestone rock, laid down in the
ancient Silurian seas, which comes to the surface
over all this part of the State and makes the soil by
its disintegration. The earth surface seems once to
have bulged up here like a great bubble, and then
have been planed or ground off by the elements.
This wearing away process removed all the more re-
cent formations, the coal beds and the conglomerate
or other rocks beneath them, and left this ancient
limestone exposed. Its continued decay keeps up
the fertility of the soil. Wheat and corn and clover
are rotated for fifty years upon the same fields with-
out manure, and without any falling off in their pro-
ductiveness. Where the soil is removed, the rock
presents that rough, honeycombed appearance which
surfaces do that have been worm-eaten instead of
worn. The tooth which has gnawed, and is still
gnawing it, is the carbonic acid carried into the earth
by rain-water. Hence, unlike the prairies of the
West, the fertility of this soil perpetually renews
itself. The blue-grass seems native to this region;
any field left to itself will presently be covered with
blue-grass. It is not cut for hay, but is for grazing
alone. Fields which have been protected during
the fall yield good pasturage even in winter. And a
Kentucky winter is no light affair, the mercury often
falling fifteen or twenty degrees below zero.

I saw but one new bird in Kentucky, namely, the
lark finch, and but one pair of those. This is a
Western bird of the sparrow kind which is slowly

A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 235

making its way eastward, having been found as far
east as Long Island. I was daily on the lookout
for it, but saw none till I was about leaving this part
of the State. Near old Governor Shelby’s place in
Boyle County, as we were driving along the road, my
eye caught a grayish brown bird like the skylark,
but with a much more broad and beautifully marked
tail. It suggested both a lark and a sparrow, and
I knew at once it was the lark finch I had been
looking for. It alighted on some low object ina
plowed field, and with a glass I had a good view
of it —a very elegant, distinguished-appearing bird
for one clad in the sparrow suit, the tail large and
dark, with white markings on the outer web of the
quills. Much as I wanted to hear his voice, he
would not sing, and it was not till I reached Adams
County, Illinois, that I saw another one and heard
the song. Driving about the country here — which,
by the way, reminded me more of the blue-grass
region than anything I saw outside of Kentucky —

_ with a friend, I was again on the lookout for the
new bird, but had begun to think it was not a resi-
dent, when I espied one on the fence by the road-
side. It failed to sing, but farther on we saw an-
other one which alighted upon a fruit-tree near us.
We paused to look and to listen, when instantly it
struck up and gave us a good sample of its musical
ability. It was both a lark and a sparrow song; or,
rather, the notes of a sparrow uttered in the contin-
uous and rapid manner of the skylark, —a pleasing
performance, but not meriting the praise I had heard
bestowed. upon it,

236 RIVERBY

In Kentucky and Illinois, and probably through-
out the West and Southwest, certain birds come to
the front and are conspicuous which we see much
less of in the East. The blue jay seems to be a gar-
den and orchard bird, and to build about dwellings
as familiarly as the robin does with us. There must
be dozens of these birds in this part of the country
where there is but one in New England. And the
brown thrashers —in Illinois they were as common
along the highways as song sparrows or chippies are
with us, and nearly as familiar. So also were the
turtle doves and meadowlarks. That the Western
birds should be more tame and familiar than the
same species in the East is curious enough. From
the semi-domestication of so many of the English
birds, when compared with our own, we infer that
the older the country, the more the birds are changed
in this respect; yet the birds of the Mississippi Val-
ley are less afraid of man than those of the valley of
the Hudson or the Connecticut. Is it because the
homestead, with its trees and buildings, affords the
birds on the great treeless prairies their first and
almost only covert? Where could the perchers perch
till trees and fences and buildings offered? For this
reason they would at once seek the vicinity of man
and become familiar with him.

In Kentucky the summer red-bird everywhere at-
tracted my attention. Its song is much like that
of its relative the tanager, and its general habits and
manners are nearly the same.

The oriole is as common in Kentucky as in New

A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 237

York or New England. One day we saw one weave
into her nest unusual material. As we sat upon the
lawn in front of the cottage, we had noticed the
bird just beginning her structure, suspending it from
along, low branch of the Kentucky coffee-tree that
grew but a few feet away. I suggested to my host
that if he would take some brilliant yarn and scat-
ter it about upon the shrubbery, the fence, and the
walks, the bird would probably avail herself of it,
and weave a novel nest. J[ had heard of it being
done, but had never tried it myself. The sugges-
tion was at once acted upon, and in a few moments a
handful of zephyr yarn, crimson, orange, green, yel-
low, and blue, was distributed about the grounds.
As we sat at dinner a few moments later I saw the
eager bird flying up toward her nest with one of
these brilliant yarns streaming behind her. They
had caught her eye at once, and she fell to work
upon them with a will; not a bit daunted by their
brilliant color, she soon had a crimson spot there
amid the green leaves. She afforded us rare amuse-
ment all the afternoon and thenext morning. How
she seemed to congratulate herself over her rare find!
How vigorously she knotted those strings to her
branch and gathered the ends in and sewed them
through and through the structure, jerking them
spitefully like a housewife burdened with many cares!
How savagely she would fly at her neighbor, an oriole
that had a nest just over the fence a few yards away,
when she invaded her territory! The male looked
on approvingly, but did not offer to lend a hand.

238 RIVERBY

There is something in the manner of the female on
such occasions, something so decisive and emphatic,
that one entirely approves of the course of the male
in not meddling or offering any suggestions. It is
the wife’s enterprise, and she evidently knows her
own mind so well that the husband keeps aloof, or
plays the part of an approving spectator.

The woolen yarn was ill-suited to the Kentucky
climate. This fact the bird seemed to appreciate,
for she used it only in the upper part of her nest,
in attaching it to the branch and in binding and
compacting the rim, making the sides and bottom of
hemp, leaving it thin and airy, much more so than
are the same nests with us. No other bird would,
perhaps, have used such brilliant material; their in-
stincts of concealment would have revolted, but the
oriole aims more to make its nest inaccessible than
to hide it. Its position and depth insure its safety.

The red-headed woodpecker was about the only
bird of this class I saw, and it was very common.
Almost any moment, in riding along, their conspic-
uous white markings as they flew from tree to tree
were to be seen festooning the woods. Yet I was
told that they were far less numerous than formerly.
Governor Knott said he believed there were ten
. times as many when he was a boy as now. But
what beautiful thing is there in this world that was
not ten times more abundant when one was a boy
than he finds it on becoming a man? Youth is the
principal factor in the problem. If one could only
have the leisure, the alertness, and the freedom from

A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 239

care that he had when a boy, he would probably find
that the world had not deteriorated so much as he
is apt to suspect.

The field or meadow bird, everywhere heard in
Kentucky and Illinois, is the black-throated bunt-
ing, a heavy-beaked bird the size and color of an
English sparrow, with a harsh, rasping song, which
it indulges in incessantly. Among bird-songs it is
like a rather coarse weed among our wild flowers.

I could not find the mockingbird in song, though
it breeds in the blue-grass counties. I saw only two
specimens of the bird in all my wanderings. The
Virginia cardinal was common, and in places the yel-
low-breasted chat was heard. Once I heard from
across a broad field a burst of bobolink melody from
a score or more of throats—a flock of the birds
probably pausing on their way north. In Chicago
I was told that the Illinois bobolink had a different
song from the New England species, but I could
detect no essential difference. The song of certain
birds, notably that of the bobolink, seems to vary
slightly in different localities, and also to change
during a series of years. I no longer hear the exact
bobolink song which I heard in my boyhood, in the
localities where I then heard it. Notaseason passes
but I hear marked departures in the songs of our
birds from what appears to be the standard song of
a given species. .

XIV
IN MAMMOTH CAVE

OME idea of the impression which Mammoth
Cave makes upon the senses, irrespective even

of sight, may be had from the fact that blind people
go there to see it, and are greatly struck with it.
I was assured that this is a fact. The blind seem as
much impressed by it as those who have their sight.
When the guide pauses at the more interesting point,
or lights the scene up with a great torch or with Ben-
gal lights, and points out the more striking features,
the blind exclaim, ‘‘ How wonderful! how beauti-
ful!” They can feel it if they cannot see it. They
get some idea of the spaciousness when words are
uttered. The voice goes forth in these colossal cham-
bers like a bird. When no word is spoken, the si-
lence is of a kind never experienced on the surface
of the earth, it is so profound and abysmal. This,
and the absolute darkness, to a person with eyes
makes him feel as if he was face to face with the
primordial nothingness. The objective universe is
gone; only the subjective remains; the sense of
hearing is inverted, and reports only the murmurs
from within. The blind miss much, but much re-
mains to them. The great cave is not merely a

242 RIVERBY

spectacle to the eye; it is a wonder to the ear, a
strangeness to the smell and to the touch. The body
feels the presence of unusual conditions through
every pore.

For my part, my thoughts took a decidedly sepul-
chral turn; I thought of my dead and of all the
dead of the earth, and said to myself, the darkness
and the silence of their last resting-place is like this;
to this we must all come at last. No vicissitudes of
earth, no changes of seasons, no sound of storm or
thunder penetrate here; winter and summer, day
and night, peace or .war, it is all one; a world be-
yond the reach of change, because beyond the reach
of life. What peace, what repose, what desolation!
The marks and relics of the Indian, which disappear
so quickly from the light of day above, are here be-
yond the reach of natural change. The imprint of
his moccasin in the dust might remain undisturbed
for a thousand years. At one point the guide reaches
his arm beneath the rocks that strew the floor and
pulls out the burnt ends of canes, which were used,
probably, when filled with oil or grease, by the na-
tives to light their way into the cave doubtless cen-
turies ago.

Here in the loose soil are ruts worn by cart-
wheels in 1812, when, during the war with Great
Britain, the earth was searched to make saltpetre.
The guide kicks corn-cobs out of the dust where the
oxen. were fed at noon, and they look nearly as fresh
as ever they did. In those frail corn-cobs and in
those wheel-tracks as if the carts had but just gone

IN MAMMOTH CAVE 243

along, one seemed to come very near to the youth
of the century, almost to overtake it.

Ata point in one of the great avenues, if you stop
and listen, you hear a slow, solemn ticking like a
great clock in a deserted hall; you hear the slight
echo as it fathoms and sets off the silence. It is
called the clock, and is caused by a single large drop
of water falling every second into a little pool. A
ghostly kind of clock there in the darkness, that is
never wound up and that never runs down. It
seemed like a mockery where time is not, and change
does not come — the clock of the dead. This som-
bre and mortuary cast of one’s thoughts seems so
natural in the great cave, that I could well under-
stand the emotions of a lady who visited the cave
with a party a few days before I was there. She
went forward very reluctantly from the first; the
silence and the darkness of the huge mausoleum
evidently impressed her imagination, so that when
she got to the spot where the guide points out the
“ Giant’s Coffin,” a huge, fallen rock, which in the
dim light takes exactly the form of an enormous
coffin, her fear quite overcame her, and she begged
piteously to be taken back. Timid, highly imagi-
native people, especially women, are quite sure to
have a sense of fear in this strange underground
world. The guide told me of a lady in one of the
parties he was conducting through, who wanted to
linger behind a little all alone; he suffered her to
do so, but presently heard a piercing scream. Rush-
ing back, he found her lying prone upon the ground

244 RIVERBY

in a dead faint. She had accidentally put out her
lamp, and was so appalled by the darkness that in-
stantly closed around her that she swooned at once.

Sometimes it seemed to me as if I were threading
the streets of some buried city of the fore-world.
With your little lantern in your hand, you follow
your guide through those endless and silent avenues,
catching glimpses on either hand of what appears to
be some strange antique architecture, the hoary and
crumbling walls rising high up into the darkness.
Now we turn a sharp corner, or turn down a street
which crosses our course at right angles; now we
come out into a great circle, or spacious court, which
the guide lights up with a quick-paper torch, or a
colored chemical light. There are streets above you
and streets below you. As this was a city where
day never entered, no provision for light needed to
be made, and it is built one layer above another to
the number of four or five, or on the plan of an
enormous ant-hill, the lowest avenues being several
hundred feet beneath the uppermost. The main
avenue leading in from the entrance is called the
Broadway, and if Broadway, New York, were arched
over and reduced to utter darkness and silence, and
its roadway blocked with mounds of earth and frag-
ments of rock, it would, perhaps, only lack that gray,
cosmic, elemental look, to make it resemble this.
A mile or so from the entrance we pass a couple of
rude stone houses, built forty or more years ago by
some consumptives, who hoped to prolong their lives
by a residence in this pure, antiseptic air. Five

IN MAMMOTH CAVE 245

months they lived here, poor creatures, a half dozen
of them, without ever going forth into the world of
light. But the long entombment did not arrest the
disease; the mountain did not draw the virus out,
but seemed to draw the strength and vitality out,
so that when the victims did go forth into the light
and air, bleached as white as chalk, they succumbed
at once, and nearly all died before they could reach
the hotel, a few hundred yards away.

Probably the prettiest thing they have to show
you in Mammoth Cave is the Star Chamber. This
seems to have made an impression upon Emerson
when he visited the cave, for he mentions it in one
of his essays, “ Illusions.” The guide takes your
lantern from you and leaves you seated upon a bench
by the wayside, in the profound cosmic darkness.
He retreats along a side alley that seems to go down
to a lower level, and at a certain point shades his
lamp with his hat, so that the light falls upon the
ceiling over your head. You look up, and the first
thought is that there is an opening just there that
permits you to look forth upon the midnight skies.
You see the darker horizon line where the sky ends
and the mountains begin. The sky is blue-black
and is thickly studded with stars, rather small stars,
but apparently genuine. At one point a long, lumi-
nous streak simulates exactly the form and effect of
acomet. As you gaze, the guide slowly moves his
hat, and a black cloud gradually creeps over the sky,
and all is blackness again. Then you hear footsteps
retreating and dying away in the distance. Pres-

246 RIVERBY

ently all is still, save the ringing in your own ears.
Then after a few moments, during which you have
sat in a silence like that of the interstellar spaces,
you hear over your left shoulder a distant flapping
of wings, followed by the crowing of a cock. You
turn your head in that direction and behold a faint
dawn breaking on the horizon. It slowly increases
till you hear footsteps approaching, and your dusky
companion, playing the part of Apollo, with lamp
in hand ushers in the light of day. It is rather
theatrical, but a very pleasant diversion nevertheless.

Another surprise was when we paused at a cer-
tain point, and the guide asked me to shout or call
in a loud voice. I did so without any unusual ef-
fect following. Then he spoke in a very deep bass,
and instantly the rocks all about and beneath us
became like the strings of an Afolian harp. They
seemed transformed as if by enchantment. Then I
tried, but did not strike the right key; the rocks
were dumb; I tried again, but got no response; flat
and dead the sounds came back as if in mockery;
then I struck a deeper bass, the chord was hit, and
the solid walls seemed to become as thin and frail
as a drum-head or as the frame of a violin. They
fairly seemed to dance about us, and to recede away
from us. Such wild, sweet music I had never be-
fore heard rocks discourse. Ah, the magic of the
right key! ‘‘ Why leap ye, ye high hills?” why,
but that they had been spoken to in the right voice?
Is not the whole secret of life to pitch our voices in
the right key? Responses come from the very rocks

IN MAMMOTH CAVE 247

when we do so. I thought of the lines of our poet

of Democracy : —

“Surely, whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I
shall follow,

As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps, any-
where around the globe.”

Where we were standing was upon an arch over
an avenue which crossed our course beneath us.
The reverberations on Echo River, a point I did not
reach, can hardly be more surprising, though they
are described as wonderful.

There are four or five levels in the cave, and a
series of avenues upon each. The lowest is some
two hundred and fifty feet below the entrance.
Here the stream which has done all this carving and
tunneling has got to the end of its tether. It is
here on a level with Green River in the valley below
and flows directly into it. I say the end of its
tether, though if Green River cuts its valley deeper,
the stream will, of course, follow suit. The bed of
the river has probably, at successive periods, been on
a level with each series of avenues of the cave. The
stream is now doubtless but a mere fraction of its
former self. Indeed, every feature of the cave at-
tests the greater volume and activity of the forces
which carved it, in the earlier geologic ages. The
waters have worn the rock as if it were but ice. The
domes and pits are carved and fluted in precisely the
way dripping water flutes snow or ice. The rainfall
must have been enormous in those early days, and
it must have had a much stronger and sharper tooth

248 RIVERBY

of carbonic acid gas than now. It has carved out
enormous pits with perpendicular sides, two or three
hundred feet deep. Goring Dome I remember par-
ticularly. You put your head through an irregularly
shaped window in the wall at the side of one of the
avenues, and there is this huge shaft or well, start-
ing from some higher level and going down two
hundred feet below you. There must have been
such wells in the old glaciers, worn by a rill of water
slowly eating its way down. It was probably ten feet
across, still moist and dripping. The guide threw
down a lighted torch, and it fell and fell, till I had
to crane my neck far out to see it finally reach the
bottom. Some of these pits are simply appalling,
and where the way is narrow have been covered over
to prevent accidents.

No part of Mammoth Cave was to me more im-
pressive than its entrance, probably because here its
gigantic proportions are first revealed to you, and
can be clearly seen. ‘That strange colossal under-
world here looks out into the light of day, and comes
in contrast with familiar scenes and objects. When
you are fairly in the cave, you cannot see it; that
is, with your aboveground eyes; you walk along
by the dim light of your lamp as in a huge wood at
night; when the guide lights up the more interest-
ing portions with his torches and colored lights, the
effect is weird and spectral; it seems like a dream;
it is an unfamiliar world; you hardly know whether
this is the emotion of grandeur which you experi-
ence, or of mere strangeness. If you could have

IN MAMMOTH CAVE 249

the light of day in there, you would come to your
senses, and could test the reality of your impressions.
At the entrance you have the light of day, and you
look fairly in the face of this underground monster,
yea, into his open mouth, which has a span of fifty
feet or more, and down into his contracting throat,
where a man can barely stand upright, and where
the light fades and darkness begins. As you come
down the hill through the woods from the hotel, you
see no sign of the cave till you emerge into a small
opening where the grass grows and the sunshine
falls, when you turn slightly to the right, and there
at your feet yawns this terrible pit; and you feel
indeed as if the mountain had opened its mouth and
was lying in wait to swallow you down, as a whale
might swallow a shrimp. I never grew tired of sit-
ting or standing here by this entrance and gazing
into it. It had for me something of the same fasci-
nation that the display of the huge elemental forces
of nature have, as seen in thunder-storms, or in
a roaring ocean surf. Two phebe-birds had their
nests in little niches of the rocks, and delicate ferns
and wild flowers fringed the edges.

Another very interesting feature to me was the
behavior of the cool air which welled up out of the
mouth of the cave. It simulated exactly a fountain
of water. It rose up to a certain level, or until it
filled the depression immediately about the mouth of
the cave, and then flowing over at the lowest point,
ran down the hill towards Green River, along a
little watercourse, exactly as if it had been a liquid.

250 RIVERBY

I amused myself by wading down into it as into
afountain. The air above was muggy and hot, the
thermometer standing at about eighty-six degrees,
and this cooler air of the cave, which was at a
temperature of about fifty-two degrees, was sep-
arated in the little pool or lakelet which is formed
from the hotter air above it by a perfectly horizon-
tal line. As I stepped down into it I could feel it
close over my feet, then it was at my knees, then I
was immersed to my hips, then to my waist, then
I stood neck deep in it, my body almost chilled,
while my face and head were bathed by a sultry,
oppressive air. Where the two bodies of air came
into contact, a slight film of vapor was formed by
condensation; I waded in till I could look under
this as under a ceiling. It was as level and as well
defined as a sheet of ice on a pond. A few mo-
ments’ immersion into this aerial fountain made one
turn to the warmer air again. At the depression in
the rim of the basin one had but to put his hand
down to feel the cold air flowing over like water.
Fifty yards below you could still wade into it as
into a creek, and at a hundred yards it was still
quickly perceptible, but broader and higher; it had
begun to lose some of its coldness, and to mingle
with the general air; all the plants growing on the
margin of the watercourse were in motion, as well
as the leaves on the low branches of the trees near
by. Gradually this cool current was dissipated and
lost in the warmth of the day.

xV
HASTY OBSERVATION

HEN Boswell told Dr. Johnson that while
in Italy he had several times seen the ex-
periment tried of placing a scorpion within a circle
of burning coals, and that in every instance the scor-
pion, after trying to break through the fiery circle,
retired to the centre and committed suicide by dart-
ing its sting into its head, the doctor showed the true
scientific spirit by demanding further proof of the
fact. The mere testimony of the eye under such
circumstances was not enough; appearances are often
deceptive. “If the great anatomist Morgagni,” said
the doctor, “after dissecting a scorpion on which the
experiment had been tried, should certify that its
sting had penetrated its head, that would be convin-
cing.” For almost the only time in his life the
superstitious doctor showed himself, I say, a true
scientist, a man refusing to accept the truth of ap-
pearances.

But this frame of mind was not habitual to him,
for the next moment he said that swallows sleep all
winter in the bed of a river or pond, “conglobu-
lated” into a ball. The scientific spirit would have
required him to insist upon the proof of the alleged

252 RIVERBY

fact in this case the same as in the other. Has any
competent observer verified this statement? Have
swallows been taken out of the mud, or been seen
to throw themselves into the water?

Albertus Magnus in his book upon animals, in
1545, says that the eel leaves the water in the night-
time, and invades the fields and gardens to feed upon
peas and lentils. A scientific man makes this state-
ment, and probably upon no stronger proof than that
some eels dropped by poachers in their hasty retreat
had been found in a pea patch. If peas had been
found, and found in many cases, in the stomachs of
eels, that would have been pretty conclusive proof
that eels eat peas.

The great thing in observation is not to be in-
fluenced by our preconceived notions, or by what we
want to be true, or by our fears, hopes, or any per-
sonal element, and to see the thing just as itis. A
person who believes in ghosts and apparitions cannot
be depended upon to investigate an alleged phenom-
enon of this sort, because he will not press his in-
quiry far enough, and will take for granted the very
fact we want proof of.

The eye does not always see what isin front of it,
Indeed it might almost be said, it sees only what is
back of it, in the mind. Whenever I have any par-
ticular subject in mind, every walk gives me new
material. If I am thinking about tree-toads, I find
tree-toads. If 1 am dwelling upon birds’ nests, I
find plenty of nests which otherwise I should have
passed by. If bird-songs occupy me, I am bound to
hear some new or peculiar note.

HASTY OBSERVATION 2538

Every one has observed how, after he has made
the acquaintance of a new word, that word is perpet-
ually turning up in his reading, as if it had suddenly
become the fashion. When you have a thing in
mind, it is not long till you have it in hand. Tor-
rey and Drummond, the botanists, were one day
walking in the woods near West Point. “TI have
never yet found so and so,” said Drummond, nam-
ing a rare kind of moss. ‘Find it anywhere,” said
Torrey, and stooped and picked it up at their feet.
Thoreau could pick up arrow-heads with the same
ease. Many people have the same quick eye for a
four-leafed clover. I may say of myself without
vanity, that I see birds with like ease. It is no
effort, I cannot help it. Hither my eye or my ear
is on duty quite unbeknown to me. When I visit
my friends, I leave a trail of birds behind me, as
old Amphion left a plantation of trees wherever he
sat down and played.

The scientific habit of mind leads a man to take
into account all possible sources of error in such ob-
servations. The senses are all so easily deceived.
People of undoubted veracity tell you of the strange
things they have known to rain down, or of some
strange bird or beast they have seen. But if you
question them closely, you are pretty sure to find
some flaw in the observation, or some link of evi-
dence wanting. We are so apt to jump to conclu-
sions; we take one or two steps in following up the
evidence, and then leap to the result that seems to be
indicated. If you find a trout in the milk, you may

254 RIVERBY

be justified in jumping to a conclusion not flattering
to your milkman, but if you find angle-worms in the
barrel of rain-water after a shower, you are not to
conclude that therefore they rained down, as many
people think they do.

Or if after a shower in summer you find the ground
swarming with little toads, you are not to infer that
the shower brought them down. I have frequently
seen large numbers of little toads hopping about af-
ter a shower, but only in particular localities. Upon
a small, gravelly hill in the highway along which I
was in the habit of walking, I have seen them sev-
eral seasons, but in no other place upon that road.
Just why they come out on such occasions is a ques-
tion; probably to get their jackets wet. There was
a pond and marshy ground not far off where they
doubtless hatched. Because the frogs are heard in
the marshes in spring as soon as the ice and snow
are gone, it is a popular belief that they hibernate
in these places. But the two earliest frogs, I am
convinced, pass the winter in the ground in the
woods, and seek the marshes as soon as the frost and
ice are gone. I have heard the hyla pipe in a fee-
ble tentative manner in localities where the ground
was free from frost, while the marshes near by were
yet covered with solid ice; and in spring I have dug
out another species from beneath the leaf mould in
the woods. Both these species are properly land-
frogs, and only take to the water to breed, returning
again to the woods later in the season. The same
is true of the tree-frog, which passes the winter in

HASTY OBSERVATION 255

the ground or in hollow trees, and takes to the
marshes in May to deposit its eggs. The common
bullfrog and the pickerel frog doubtless pass the
winter in the bed of ponds and streams. I think
it is quite certain that hibernating animals in the
ground do not freeze, though by no means beyond
the reach of frost. The frogs, ants, and crickets are
probably protected by some sort of acid which their
bodies secrete, though this is only a guess of my
own. The frog I dug out of the leaves one spring
day, while the ground above and below him was
frozen hard, was entirely free from frost, though his
joints were apparently very stiff. A friend of mine
in falling some trees in winter cut through a den
of field crickets; the ground was frozen about their
galleries, but the crickets themselves, though motion-
less, were free from frost. Cut the large, black tree
ants out of a pine log in winter, and though appar-
ently lifeless, they are not frozen.

There is something in most of us that welcomes
a departure from the ordinary routine of natural
causes; we like to believe that the impossible hap-
pens; we like to see the marvelous and mysterious
crop out of ordinary occurrences. We like to be-
lieve, for instance, that snakes can charm their prey;
can exert some mysterious influence over bird or
beast at a distance of many feet, which deprives it
of power to escape. But there is probably little
truth in this popular notion. Fear often paralyzes,
and doubtless this is the whole secret of the power
of snakes and cats to charm their prey. It is what

256 RIVERBY

is called a subjective phenomenon; the victim is
fascinated or spellbound by the sudden and near ap-
pearance of its enemy. A sportsman, in whose vera-
city I have full confidence, told me that his pointer
dog had several times worked up to a woodcock or
partridge and seized it in his mouth. Of course the
dog brought no mysterious power to bear upon the
bird. He could hardly have seen the bird till he
came plump upon it; he was wholly intent upon un-
raveling its trail, The bird, in watching the eager
motions and the gradual approach of the dog, must
have been thrown into such a state of fear or con-
sternation as to quite paralyze its powers, and suf-
fered the dog to pick it up. In the case of snakes,
they doubtless in most instances approach and seize
their prey unawares. I have seen a little snake
in the woods pursue and overtake a lizard that was
trying to escape from it. There was no attempt at
charming; superior speed alone gave the victory to
the snake. I have known a red squirrel to be caught
and swallowed by a black snake, but I have no belief
that the squirrel was charmed; it was more probably
seized from some ambush.

One can hardly understand how a mouse can be
caught by a hawk except upon the theory that the
mouse is suddenly paralyzed by fear. The meadow
mouse when exposed to view is very wary and quick
in its movements; it is nibbling grass in the meadow
bottom, or clearing its runway, or shaping its nest,
when the hawk poises on wing high in the air above
it. When the hawk discovers its victim, it descends

HASTY OBSERVATION 257

with extended talons to the earth and seizes it. It
does not drop like a bolt from heaven; its descent,
on the contrary, is quite deliberate, and must be at-
tended by a sound of rushing wings that ought to
reach the mouse’s ear, if the form escapes its eye.

There is doubtless just as much “charming” in
this case as in any other, or when a fish hawk falls
through the air and seizes a fish near the surface
in perfectly clear water — what hinders the fish
from seeing and avoiding its enemy? Apparently
nothing; apparently it allows itself to be seized.
Every fisherman knows how alert most fish are, how
quickly they discover him and dart away, even
when he is immediately above them. All I contend
for is that the snake, the cat, the hawk, does not
exert some mysterious power over its prey, but that
its prey in many cases loses its power to escape
through fear. It is said that a stuffed snake’s skin
will charm a bird as well as the live snake.

I came near reaching a hasty conclusion the other
day with regard to a chickadee’s nest. The nest is
in a small cavity in the limb of a pear-tree near my
study, and the birds and I are on very friendly
terms. As the nest of a pair of chickadees had been
broken up here a few seasons ago by a mouse or
squirrel, I was apprehensive lest this nest share the
same fate. Hence when, one morning, the birds
were missing, and I found on inspection what ap-
peared to be the hair of some small animal adhering
to the edges of the hole that leads to the nest, I con-
cluded that the birds had been cleaned out again.

258 RIVERBY

Later in the day I examined the supposed hair with
my pocket glass, and found it was not hair, but some
vegetable fibre. My next conclusion was that the
birds had not been molested, but that they were
furnishing their apartment, and some of the material
had stuck to the door jambs. This proved to be the
correct inference. The chickadee makes a little felt-
like mat or carpet with which it covers the bottom
of the nest-cavity. A day or two later, in my vine-
yard near by, I found where a piece of heavy twine
that held a young grapevine to a stake had been
pulled down to the ground and picked and beaten,
and parts of it reduced to its original tow. Here,
doubtless, the birds had got some of their carpeting
material.

I recently read in a work on ornithology that the
rings of small holes which we see in the trunks and
limbs of perfectly sound apple-trees are made by
woodpeckers in search of grubs and insects. This
is a hasty inference. These holes are made by wood-
peckers, but the food they obtain at the bottom of
them is not the flesh of worm or insect, but the
flesh of the apple-tree — the soft, milky inner bark.
The same writer says these holes are not hurtful to
the tree, but conducive to its health. Yet I have
seen the limbs of large apple-trees nearly killed by
being encompassed by numerous rings of large, deep
holes made by the yellow-bellied woodpecker. This
bird drills holes in the sugar maple in the spring for
the sap. I have known him to spend the greater
part of a bright March day on the sunny side of a

HASTY OBSERVATION 259

maple, indulging in a tipple of maple sap every four
or five minutes. As fast as his well holes filled up
he would sip them dry.

A lady told me that a woodpecker drilled holes in
the boards that form the eaves of her house, for the
grubs of the carpenter bumblebee. This also seemed
to me a hasty conclusion, because the woodpeckers
made holes so large that the next season the blue-
birds nested there. The woodpeckers were probably
drilling for a place to nest. A large ice-house stands
on the river bank near me, and every season the man
in charge has to shoot or drive away the high-holes
that cut numerous openings through the outer sheath-
ing of hemlock boards into the spaces filled with
sawdust, where they find the digging easy and a
nesting-place safe and snug.

My neighbor caught a small hawk in his shad-net,
and therefore concluded the hawk ate fish. He put
him in a cage, and offered him fragments of shad.
The little hawk was probably in pursuit of a bird
which took refuge under the net as it hung upon
the drying-poles; or he may have swooped down
upon the net in the spirit of pure bluster and bra-
vado, and thus come to grief in a hurry. The fine,
strong threads of the net defied his murderous beak
and talons. He was engulfed as completely as is
a fly in a spider’s web, and the more he struggled
the more hopeless his case became. It was a pigeon
hawk, and these little marauders are very saucy.

My neighbor says that in the city of Brooklyn he
has known kingbirds to nest in boxes like martins

260 RIVERBY

and bluebirds. I question this observation, though
it may be true. The cousin of the kingbird, the
great crested flycatcher, builds in cavities in trees,
and its relative, the phoebe-bird, nests under bridges
and hay-sheds. Hence there is this fact to start
with in favor of my neighbor’s observation.

But when a lady from Pennslyvania writes me
that she has seen “swallows rolling and dabbling in
the mud in early spring, their breasts so covered
with it that it would take but little stretch of imagi-
nation to believe they had just emerged from the
bottom of the pond beside which they were play-
ing,” I am more than skeptical, The lady has not
seen straight. The swallows were not rolling in the
mud; there was probably not a speck of mud upon
their plumage, but alittle upon their beaks and feet.
The red of their breasts was their own proper color.
They were building their nests, as my correspondent
knew, but they did not carefully mix and knead the
mud, as she thought they did; they had selected
mortar already of the proper sort.

The careful observer is not long in learning that
there is truth in the poet’s remark, that ‘ things are
not what they seem.” Everywhere on the surface
of nature things seem one thing, and mean quite
another. The hasty observer is misled by the seem-
ing, and thus misses the real truth,

The little green snake that I saw among the
“‘live-for-evers ” the other day, how nearly it escaped
detection by the close resemblance of its color to that
of the plant! And when, afew days later, I saw

HASTY OBSERVATION 261

one carelessly disposed across the top of the bending
grass and daisies, but a few feet from where I sat,
my eye again came near being baffled.

The little snake was probably lying in wait for
some insect. Presently it slid gently down into the
grass, moving so slowly as to escape any but the
most watchful eye. After its head and a part of
its body were upon the ground, its tail still pointed
straight up and exactly resembled some fresh vege-
table growth. The safeguard of this little snake is
in his protective coloring; hence his movements are
slower and more deliberate than those of the other
snakes.

This simulation is very common in nature. Every
creature has its enemy, and pretends to be that
which it is not, in order to escape detection. The
tree-frog pretends to be a piece of bark, or a lichen
upon a tree; the wood frog is the color of the dry
leaves upon which it hops, though when spawning
in the little black pools and tarns in spring its color
is very dark, like the element it inhabits.

One day, in my walk in the woods, I disturbed a
whip-poor-will where she sat upon her eggs on the
ground. When TI returned to the spot some hours
afterward, and tried to make out the bird upon her
nest, my eye was bafiled for some moments, so suc-
cessful was she in pretending to be only a mottled
stick or piece of fallen bark.

Only the most practiced eye can detect the par-
tridge (ruffed grouse) when she sits or stands in full
view upon the ground in the woods. How well she

262 RIVERBY

plays her part, rarely moving, till she suddenly bursts
up before you, and is gone ina twinkling! How
well her young are disciplined always to take their
cue from her! Not one will stir till she gives the
signal.

One day in my walk, as I paused on the side of a
steep hill in the edge of the woods, my eye chanced
to fall upon a partridge, sitting upon the leaves be-
side a stump scarcely three paces from me. “Can
she have a nest there?” was my first thought.
Then I remembered it was late in the summer, and
she certainly could not be incubating. Then why
is she sitting there in that exposed manner? Keep-
ing my eye upon her, I took a step forward, when,
quick as a flash, she sprang into the air and went
humming away. At the same moment, all about
me, almost from under my feet, her nearly grown
young sprang up and went booming through the
woods after her. Not one of them had moved or
showed fear till their mother gave the word.

To observe Nature and know her secrets, one
needs not only a sharp eye, but a steady and patient
eye. You must look again and again, and not be
misled by appearances. All the misinformation
about the objects and phenomena of nature afloat
among country people is the result of hasty and in-
complete observation.

In parts of the country where wheat is grown
there is quite a prevalent belief among the farmers
that if the land is poor or neglected the wheat will
turn into chess or cheat grass. Have they not seen

HASTY OBSERVATION 263

it, have they not known the wheat to disappear en-
tirely, and the chess to be there in its place?

But like so many strange notions that are current
in the rural districts, this notion is the result of
incomplete observation. The cheat grass was there
all the while, feebler and inconspicuous, but biding
its time; when the wheat failed and gave up posses-
sion of the soil, the grass sprang forward and took
its place.

Nature always has a card to play in that way.
There is no miracle nor case of spontaneous genera-
tion about the curious succession of forest trees —
oak succeeding pine, or poplar succeeding birch or
maple —if we could get at the facts. Nature only
lets loose germs which the winds or the birds and
animals have long since stored there, and which have
only been waiting their opportunity to grow.

A great many people are sure there is such a crea-
ture as a glass snake, a snake which breaks up into
pieces to escape its enemies, and then when danger
is past gets itself together again and goes its way.

Not long since a man published an account in
a scientific journal of a glass snake which he had
encountered in a hay-field, and which, when he at-
tempted to break its head, had broken itself up into
five or six pieces. He carefully examined the pieces
and found them of regular lengths of three or four
inches, and that they dovetailed together by a nice
and regular process. He left the fragments in the
grass, and when he returned from dinner they were
all gone. He therefore inferred the snake had re-

264 RIVERBY

constructed itself and traveled on. If he had waited
to see this process, his observation would have been
complete. On another occasion he cut one in two
with his scythe, when the snake again made small
change of itself. Again he went to his dinner just
at the critical time, and when he returned the frag-
ments of the reptile had disappeared.

This will not do. We must see the play out be-
fore we can report upon the last act.

There is, of course, a small basis of fact in the
superstition of the glass snake. The creature is no
snake at all, but a species of limbless lizard quite
common in the West. And it has the curious
power of voluntarily breaking itself up into regular
pieces when disturbed, but it is only the tail which
is so broken up; the body part remains intact:
Break this up and the snake is dead. The tail is
disproportionately long, and is severed at certain
points, evidently to mislead its enemies. It is the
old trick of throwing a tub to a whale. The crea-
ture sacrifices its tail to secure the safety of its body.
These fragments have no power to unite themselves
again, but a new tail is grown in place of the part
lost. When a real observer encountered the glass or
joint snake, these facts were settled.

The superstition of the hair-snake is founded upon
a like incomplete observation. Everywhere may be
found intelligent people who will tell you they know
that a horsehair, if put into the spring, will turn
into a snake, and that all hair-snakes have this ori-
gin. But a hair never turns into a snake any more

HASTY OBSERVATION 265

than wheat is transformed into chess. The so-called
hair-snake is a parasitical worm which lives in the
bodies of various insects, and which at maturity
takes to the water to lay its eggs.

What boy, while trout-fishing in July and August,
and using grasshoppers for bait, has not been vexed
to find the body of the insect, when snapped at by
the trout, yielding a long, white, brittle thread,
which clogged his hook, and spoiled the attractive-
ness of the bait? This thread is the hair-worm.
How the germ first gets into the body of the grass-
hopper I do not know. After the creature leaves
the insect, it becomes darker in color, and harder
and firmer in texture, and more closely resembles a
large hair.

See what pains the trapper will take to outwit the
fox; see what art the angler will practice to deceive
the wary trout. One must pursue the truth with the
like patience and diligence.

The farmers all think, or used to think, that the
hen-hawk was their enemy, but one spring the Agri-
cultural Department procured three hundred hen-
hawks, and examined the craw of each of them, and
made the valuable discovery that this hawk subsisted
almost entirely upon meadow mice, thus proving it
to be one of the farmer’s best friends. The crow,
also, when our observations upon his food habits are
complete, is found to be a friend, and not an enemy.
The smaller hawks do prey upon birds and chickens,
though the pretty little sparrow hawk lives largely
upon insects,

266 RIVERBY

Gilbert White quotes the great Linnzus as saying
that “hawks make a truce with other birds as long
as the cuckoo is heard.” This is also a superstition.
Watch closely, and you will see the small hawks in
pursuit of birds at all seasons; and when a hawk
pursues a bird, or when one bird pursues another,
it has the power to tack and turn, and to time its
movements to that of the bird pursued, which is
quite marvelous. The sparrow might as well dodge
its own shadow as to dodge the sharp-shinned hawk.
It escapes, if at all, by rushing into a bush or tree,
where the movements of its enemy are impeded by
the leaves and branches.

Speaking of hawks, reminds me that I read the
other day in one of the magazines a very pretty poem,
in which a hawk was represented poised in mid-air,
on motionless wing, during the calm of a midsum-
mer day. Now of a still day this is an impossible
feat for a hawk or any other bird. The poet had not
observed quite closely enough. She had noted (as
who has not?) the hawk stationary in the air on
motionless wing, but she failed to note, or she had
forgotten, that the wind was blowing. He cannot
do it on acalm day; the blowing wind furnishes the
power necessary to buoy him up. He so adjusts his
wings to the moving currents that he hangs station-
ary upon them. When the hawk hovers in the air
of a still day, he is compelled to beat his wings rap-
idly. He must expend upon the air the power
which, in the former case, is expended upon him.
Thus does hasty and incomplete observation mislead
one.

HASTY OBSERVATION 267

One day in early April as I was riding along the
road I heard the song of the brown thrasher. The
thrasher is not due yet, I said to myself, but there
was its song, and no mistake, with all its quibs and
quirks and interludes, being chanted from some
treetop a few yards in advance of me. Let us have
a view of the bird, I said, as I approached the tree
upon which I fancied he was perched. The song
ceased and no thrasher was visible, but there sat
arobin, which, as I paused, flew to a lower tree in a
field at some distance from the road. Then I moved
on, thinking the songster had eluded me. On look-
ing back I chanced to see the robin fly back to the
top of the tree where I had first disturbed it, and in
a moment or two more forth came the thrasher’s
song again. Then I went cautiously back and caught
the robin in the very act of reproducing perfectly
the song of the brown thrasher. A bolder plagiarist
I had never seen; not only had he got the words, as
it were correctly, but he delivered them in the same
self-conscious manner. His performance would prob-
ably have deceived the brown thrasher himself. How
did the robin come by this song? I can suggest no
other explanation than that he must have learned it
from the brown thrasher. Probably the latter bird
sang near the nest of the robin, so that the young
heard this song and not that of their own kind. If
so it would be interesting to know if all the young
males learned the song.

Close attention is the secret of learning from na-
ture’s book, as from every other. Most persons only

268 RIVERBY

look at the pictures, but the real student studies the
text; he alone knows what the pictures really mean.
There is a great deal of by-play going on in the life
of nature about us, a great deal of variation and
out-cropping of individual traits, that we entirely
miss unless we have our eyes and ears open.

It is not like the play at the theatre, where every-
thing is made conspicuous and aims to catch the
eye, and where the story clearly and fully unfolds
itself. On nature’s stage many dramas are being
played at once, and without any reference to the
lookers-on, unless it be to escape their notice. The
actors rush or strut across the stage, the curtain
rises or falls, the significant thing happens, and we
heed it not, because our wits are dull, or else our
minds are preoccupied. We do not pay strict atten-
tion. Nature will not come to you; you must go to
her; that is, you must put yourself in communica-
tion with her; you must open the correspondence;
you must train your eye to pick out the significant
things. A quick open sense, and a lively curiosity
like that of a boy are necessary. Indeed, the sen-
sitiveness and alertness of youth and the care and
patience of later years are what make the successful
observer.

The other morning my little boy and I set out
to find the horse, who had got out of the pasture
and gone off. Had he gone up the road or down?
We did not know, but we imagined we could dis-
tinguish his track going down the road, so we began
our search in that direction. The road presently led

HASTY OBSERVATION 269

through a piece of woods. Suddenly my little boy
stopped me.

“ Papa, see that spider’s web stretched across the
road. our horse has not gone this way.”

My face had nearly touched the web or cable of
the little spider, which stretched completely across
the road, and which certainly would have been swept
away had the horse or any other creature passed
along there in the early morning. The boy’s eye
was sharper than my own. He had been paying
stricter attention to the signs and objects about him.
We turned back and soon found the horse in the
opposite direction.

This same little boy, by looking closely, has dis-
covered that there are certain stingless wasps. When
he sees one which bears the marks he boldly catches
him in his hand. The wasp goes through the mo-
tions of stinging so perfectly, so works and thrusts
with its flexible body, that nearly every hand to
which it is offered draws back. The mark by which
the boy is guided is the light color of the wasp’s
face. Most country boys know that white-faced
bumblebees are stingless, but I have not before
known a boy bold enough to follow the principle out
and apply it to wasps as well. These white-faces
are the males, and answer to the drones in the bee-
hive; though the drones have not a white face.

We cannot all find the same things in Nature.
She is all things to all men. She is like the manna
that came down from heaven. ‘“ He made manna
to descend for them, in which were all manner of

270 RIVERBY

tastes; and every Israelite found in it what his pal-
ate was chiefly pleased with. If he desired fat in
it, he had it. In it the young men tasted bread;
the old men, honey; and the children, oil.” But
all found in it substance and strength. So with
Nature. In her are “‘all manner of tastes,” science,
art, poetry, utility, and good in all. The botanist
has one pleasure in her, the ornithologist another,
the explorer another, the walker and sportsman an-
other; what all may have is the refreshment and the
exhilaration which come from a loving and intelli-
gent scrutiny of her manifold works.

XVI
BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE

Ne my study there used to stand several old
apple-trees that bore fair crops of apples, but
better crops of birds. Every year these old trees
were the scenes of bird incidents and bird histories
that were a source of much interest and amusement.
Young trees may be the best for apples, but old
trees are sure to bear the most birds. If they are
very decrepit, and full of dead and hollow branches,
they will bear birds in winter as well as summer.
The downy woodpecker wants no better place than
the brittle, dozy trunk of an apple-tree in which
to excavate his winter home. My old apple-trees
are all down but one, and this one is probably an
octogenarian, and I am afraid cannot stand another
winter. Its body is a mere shell not much over one
inch thick, the heart and main interior structure
having turned to black mould long ago. An old
tree, unlike an old person, as long as it lives at all,
always has a young streak, or rather ring, in it. It
wears a girdle of perpetual youth.
My old tree has never yet failed to yield me a
bushel or niore of gillyflowers, and it has turned out
at least a dozen broods of the great crested flycatcher,

272 RIVERBY

and robins and bluebirds in proportion. It carries
up one large decayed trunk which some one sawed
off at the top before my time, and in this a downy
woodpecker is now, January 12, making a home.
Several years ago a downy woodpecker excavated a
retreat in this branch, which the following season
was appropriated by the bluebirds, and has been oc-
cupied by them nearly every season since. When
the bluebirds first examined the cavity in the spring,
I suppose they did not find the woodpecker at home,
as he is a pretty early riser.

I happened to be passing near the tree when, on
again surveying the premises one afternoon, they
found him in. The male bluebird was very angry,
and I suppose looked upon the innocent downy as
an intruder. He seized on him, and the two fell
to the ground, the speckled woodpecker quite cov-
ered by the blue coat of his antagonist. Downy
screamed vigorously, and got away as soon as he
could, but not till the bluebird had tweaked out a
feather or two. He is evidently no fighter, though
one would think that a bird that had an instrument
with which it could drill a hole into a tree could
defend itself against the soft-billed bluebird.

Two seasons the English sparrows ejected the
bluebirds and established themselves in it, but were
in turn ejected by myself, their furniture of hens’
feathers and straws pitched out, and the bluebirds in-
vited to return, which later in the season they did.

The new cavity which downy is now drilling is
just above the old one and near the top of the stub.

BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE 273

Its wells are usually sunk to a depth of six or eight
inches, but in the present case it cannot be sunk
more than four inches without breaking through into
the old cavity. Downy seems to have considered
the situation, and is proceeding cautiously. As she
passed last night in her new quarters I am inclined
to think it is about finished, and there must be at
least one inch of wood beneath her. She worked
vigorously the greater part of the day, her yellow
chips strewing the snow beneath. I paused several
times to observe her proceedings. After her chips
accumulate she stops her drilling and throws them
out. This she does with her beak, shaking them
out very rapidly with a flirt of her head. She did
not disappear from sight each time to load her beak,
but withdrew her head and appeared to seize the
fragments as if from her feet. If she had had a
companion I should have thought he was hand-
ing them up to her from the bottom of the cavity.
Maybe she had them piled up near the doorway.

The woodpeckers, both the hairy and the downy,
usually excavate these winter retreats in the fall.
They pass the nights and the stormy days in them.
So far as I have observed, they do not use them as
nesting-places the following season. Last night
when I rapped on the trunk of the old apple-tree
near sundown, downy put out her head with a sur-
prised and inquiring look, and then withdrew it
again as I passed on.

I have spoken of the broods of the great crested
flycatchers that have been reared in the old apple-

274 RIVERBY

tree. This is by no means a common bird, and as
it destroys many noxious insects I look upon it with
a friendly eye, though it is the most uncouth and
unmusical of the flycatchers. Indeed, among the
other birds of the garden and orchard it seems quite
like a barbarian. It has a harsh, froglike scream,
form and manners to suit, and is clad in a suit of
butternut brown. It seeks a cast-off snakeskin to
weave into its nest, and not finding one, will take
an onion skin, a piece of oiled paper, or large fish
scales. It builds in a cavity in a tree, rears one
brood, and is off early in the season. I never see
or hear it after August 1st.

A pair have built in a large, hollow limb in my
old apple-tree for many years. Whether it is the
same pair or not I do not know. Probably it is,
or else some of their descendants. I looked into the
cavity one day while the mother bird was upon the
nest, but before she had laid any eggs. A sudden
explosive sound came up out of the dark depths of
the limb, much like that made by an alarmed cat.
It made me jerk my head back, when out came the
bird and hurried off. For several days I saw no
more of the pair, and feared they had deserted the
spot. But they had not; they were only more sly
than usual. I soon discovered an egg in the nest,
and then another and another.

One day, as I stood near by, a male bluebird came
along with his mate, prospecting for a spot for a
second nest. He alighted at the entrance of this
hole and peeped in. Instantly the flycatcher was

BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE 275

upon him. The blue was enveloped by the butter-
nut brown. The two fell to the ground, where the
bluebird got away, and in a moment more came back
and looked in the hole again, as much as to say,
“T will look into that hole now at all hazards.”
The barbarian made a dash for him again, but he
was now on his guard and avoided her.

Not long after, the bluebirds decided to occupy
the old cavity of the downy woodpecker from which
I had earlier in the season expelled the English
sparrows. After they had established themselves
here a kind of border war broke out between the
male bluebird and the flycatchers, and was kept up
for weeks. The bluebird is very jealous and very
bold. He will not even tolerate a house wren in
the vicinity of his nest. Every bird that builds in
a cavity he looks upon as his natural rival and en-
emy. The flycatchers did not seek any quarrel with
him as long as he kept to his own domicile, but he
could not tolerate them in the same tree. It was a
pretty sight to see this little blue-coat charging the
butternut through the trees. The beak of the latter
would click like a gunlock, and its harsh, savage
voice was full of anger, but the bluebird never
flinched, and was always ready to renew the fight.

The English sparrow will sometimes worst the
bluebird by getting possession of the box or cavity
ahead of him. Once inside, the sparrow can hold
the fort, and the bluebird will soon give up the siege;
but in a fair field and no favor, the native bird will
quickly rout the foreigner.

276 RIVERBY

Speaking of birds that build in cavities reminds
me of a curious trait the high-hole has developed in
my vicinity, one which I have never noticed or heard
of elsewhere. It drills into buildings and steeples
and telegraph poles, and in some instances makes
itself a serious nuisance. One season the large imi-
tation Greek columns of an unoccupied old-fashioned
summer residence near me were badly marred by
them. The bird bored into one column, and find-
ing the cavity —a foot or more across —not just
what it was looking for, cut into another one, and
still into another. Then he bored into the ice-house
on the premises, and in the sawdust filling between
the outer and inner sheathing found a place to his
liking. One bird seemed like a monomaniac, and
drilled holes up and down and right and left as if
possessed of an evil spirit. It is quite probable that
if a high-hole or other woodpecker should go crazy,
it would take to just this sort of thing, drilling into
seasoned timber till it used its strength up. The
one I refer to would cut through adry hemlock board
in a very short time, making the slivers fly. The
sound was like that of a carpenter’s hammer. It
may have been that he was an unmated bird, a bach-
elor whose suit had not prospered that season, and
who was giving vent to his outraged instincts in
drilling these mock nesting-places.

XVII
THE WAYS OF SPORTSMEN

HAVE often had occasion to notice how much

more intelligence the bird carries in its eye than
does the animal or quadruped. The animal will see
you, too, if you are moving, but if you stand quite
still even the wary fox will pass within a few yards
of you and not know you from a stump, unless the
wind brings him your scent. But a crow or a hawk
will discern you when you think yourself quite
hidden. His eye is as keen as the fox’s sense of
smell, and seems fairly to penetrate veils and screens.
Most of the water-fowl are equally sharp-eyed. The
chief reliance of the animals for their safety, as well
as for their food, is upon the keenness of their scent,
while the fowls of the air depend mainly upon the
eye.

A hunter out in Missouri relates how closely a
deer approached him one day in the woods. The
hunter was standing on the top of a log, about four
feet from the ground, when the deer bounded play-
fully into a glade in the forest, a couple of hundred
yards away. The animal began to feed and to move
slowly toward the hunter. He was on the alert,
but did not see or scent his enemy. He never took

278 RIVERBY

a bite of grass, says the sportsman, without first put-
ting his nose to it, and then instantly raising his
head and looking about.

In about ten minutes the deer had approached
within fifty yards of the gunner; then the murder-
ous instinct of the latter began to assert itself. His
gun was loaded with fine shot, but he dared not
make a move to change his shells lest the deer see
him. He had one shell loaded with No. 4 shot in
his pocket. Oh! if he could only get that shell into
his gun.

The unsuspecting deer kept approaching ; presently
he passed behind a big tree, and his head was for
a moment hidden. The hunter sprang to his work;
he took one of the No. 8 shells out of his gun, got
his hand into his pocket, and grasped the No. 4.
Then the shining eyes of the deer were in view again.
The hunter stood in this attitude five minutes. How
we wish he had been compelled to stand for five
hundred!

Then another tree shut off the buck’s gaze for a
moment; in went the No. 4 shell into the barrel and
the gun was closed quickly, but there was no time to
bring it to the shoulder. The animal was now only
thirty yards away. His hair was smooth and glossy,
and every movement was full of grace and beauty.
Time after time he seemed to look straight at the
hunter, and once or twice a look of suspicion seemed
to cross his face.

The man began to realize how painful it was to
stand perfectly still on the top of a log for fifteen

THE WAYS OF SPORTSMEN 279

minutes. Every muscle ached and seemed about
to rebel against his will. If the buck held to his
course he would pass not more than fifteen feet to
one side of the gun, and the man that held it thought
he might almost blow his heart out.

There was one more tree for him to pass behind,
when the gun could be raised. He approached the
tree, rubbed his nose against it, and for a moment
was half hidden behind it. When his head appeared
on the other side the gun was pointed straight at his
eye —and with only No. 4 shot, which could only
wound him, but could not kill him.

The deer stops; he does not expose his body back
of the fore leg, as the hunter had wished. The lat-
ter begins to be ashamed of himself, and has about
made up his mind to let the beautiful creature pass
unharmed, when the buck suddenly gets his scent,
his head goes up, his nostrils expand, and a look
of terror comes over his face. This is too much
for the good resolutions of the hunter. Bang! goes
the gun, the deer leaps into the air, wheels around
a couple of times, recovers himself and is off ina
twinkling, no doubt carrying, the narrator says, a
hundred No. 4 shot in his face and neck. The man
says: “I’ve always regretted shooting at him.”

I should think he would. But a man in the
woods, with a gun in his hand, is no longer a man
—he isa brute. The devil is in the gun to make
brutes of us all.

If the game on this occasion had been, say a wild
turkey or a grouse, its discriminating eye would have

280 RIVERBY

figured out the hunter there on that log very quickly.
This manly exploit of the Western hunter reminds
me of an exploit of a Brooklyn man, who last win-
ter killed a bull moose in Maine. It was a more
sportsmanlike proceeding, but my sympathies were
entirely with the moose. The hero tells his story
in a New York paper. With his guides, all armed
with Winchester rifles, he penetrated far into the
wilderness till he found a moose yard. It was near
the top of a mountain. They started one of the
animals and then took up its trail. As soon as
the moose found it was being followed, it led right
off in hopes of outwalking its enemies. But they
had snow-shoes and he did not; they had food and
he did not. On they went, pursued and pursuers,
through the snow-clogged wilderness, day after day.
The moose led them the most difficult route he could
find.

At night the men would make camp, build a fire,
eat and smoke, and roll themselves in their blankets
and sleep. In the morning they would soon come
up to the camping-place of the poor moose, where
the imprint of his great body showed in the snow,
and where he had passed a cold, supperless night.

On the fifth day the moose began to show signs of
fatigue; he rested often, he also tried to get around
and behind his pursuers and let them pass on.
Think how inadequate his wit was to cope with the
problem — he thought they would pass by him if he
went to one side.

On the morning of the sixth day he had made up

THE WAYS OF SPORTSMEN 281

his mind to travel no farther, but to face his ene-
mies and have it out with them. As he heard them
approach, he rose up from his couch of snow, mane
erect, his look fierce and determined. Poor crea-
ture, he did not know how unequal the contest was.
How I wish he could at that moment have had a
Winchester rifle, too, and had known how to use it.
There would have been fair play then. With such
weapons as God had given him he had determined
to meet the foe, and if they had had only such wea-
pons as God had given them, he would have been
safe. But they had weapons which the devil had
given them, and their deadly bullets soon cut him
down, and now probably his noble antlers decorate
the hall of his murderer.

XVIII
TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS

I

re teach young people or old people how to ob-

serve nature is a good deal like trying to teach
them how to eat their dinner. The first thing
necessary in the latter case is a good appetite; this
given, the rest follows very easily. And in observ-
ing nature, unless you have the appetite, the love,
the spontaneous desire, you will get little satisfac-
tion. It is the heart that sees more than the mind.
To love Nature is the first step in observing her.
If a boy had to learn fishing as a task, what slow
progress he would make; but as his heart is in it,
how soon he becomes an adept.

The eye sees quickly and easily those things in
which we are interested. A man interested in horses
sees every fine horse in the country he passes through ;
the dairyman notes the cattle; the bee culturist
counts the skips of bees; the sheep-grower notes the
flocks, etc. Is it any effort for the ladies to note
the new bonnets and the new cloaks upon the street ?
We all see and observe easily in the line of our busi-
ness, our tasks, our desires.

If one is a lover of the birds, he sees birds every-

284 RIVERBY

‘where, plenty of them. I think I seldom miss a
bird in my walk if he is within eye or ear shot, even
though my mind be not intent upon that subject.
Walking along the road this very day, feeling a cold,
driving snow-storm, I saw some large birds in the
top of a maple as I passed by. I do not know how
I came to see them, for I was not in an ornithologi-
cal frame of mind. But I did. There were three
of them feeding upon the buds of the maple. They
were nearly as large as robins, of a dark ash-color,
very plump, with tails much forked. What were
they? My neighbor did not know; had never seen
such birds before. I instantly knew them to be
pine grosbeaks from the far north. I had not seen
them before for ten years. A few days previously
I had heard one call from the air as it passed over;
I recognized the note, and hence knew that the birds
were about. They come down from the north at
irregular intervals, and are seen in flocks in various
parts of the States. They seem just as likely to
come mild winters as severe ones. Later in the day
the birds came about my study. I sat reading with
my back to the window when I was advised of their
presence by catching a glimpse of one reflected in my
eye-glasses as it flew up from the ground to the
branch of an apple-tree only a few feet away. I
only mention the circumstance to show how quick
an observer is to take the hint. I was absorbed in
my reading, but the moment that little shadow flit-
ted athwart that luminous reflection of the window
in the corner of my glasses, something said “ that

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 285

was a bird.” Approaching the window, I saw several
of them sitting not five feet away. I could inspect
them perfectly. They were a slate-color, with a
tinge of bronze upon the head and rump. In full
plumage the old males are a dusky red. Hence
these were all either young males or females. Oc-
casionally among these flocks an old male may be
seen. It would seem as if only a very few of the
older and wiser birds accompanied these younger
birds in their excursions into more southern climes.

Presently the birds left the apple-bough that
nearly brushed my window, and, with a dozen or
more of their fellows that I had not seen, settled in
a Norway spruce a few yards away, and began to
feed upon the buds. They looked very pretty there
amid the driving snow. I was flattered that these
visitants from the far north should find entertain-
ment on my premises. How plump, contented, and
entirely at home they looked. But they made such
havoc with the spruce buds that after a while I be-
gan to fear not a bud would be left upon the trees;
the spruces would be checked in their growth the
next year. So I presently went out to remonstrate
with them and ask them to move on. I approached
them very slowly, and when beside the tree within
a few feet of several of them, they heeded me not.
One bird kept its position and went on snipping off
the buds till I raised my hand ready to seize it, be-
fore it moved a yard or two higher up. I think it
was only my white, uncovered hand that disturbed
it. Indeed,

286 RIVERBY

“They were so unacquainted with man,
Their tameness was shocking to me.”

The snow was covered with the yellow chaffy
scales of the buds and still the birds sifted them
down, till I was compelled to “ shoo” them away,
when they moved to a tree nearer the house beneath
which they left more yellow chaff upon the snow.

The mind of an observer is like a gun with a hair
trigger — it goes at a touch, while the minds of most
persons require very vigorous nudging. You must
take the hint and take it quickly if you would get
up any profitable intimacy with nature. Above all,
don’t jump to conclusions; look again and again;
verify your observations. Be sure the crow is pull-
ing corn, and not probing for grubs, before you kill
him. Be sure it is the oriole purloining your grapes,
and not the sparrows, before you declare them your
enemies. J one day saw hummingbirds apparently
probing the ripe yellow cheeks of my finest peaches,
but I was not certain till I saw a bird hovering over
a particular peach, and then mounting upon a ladder
I examined it, when sure enough, the golden cheek
was full of pin-holes. The orioles destroy many
of my earliest pears, but it required much watching
to catch them in the very act. I once saw a phebe-
bird swoop down upon a raspberry bush and carry a
berry to a rail on a near fence, but I did not there-
fore jump to the conclusion that the phoebe was a
berry-eater. What it wanted was the worm in the
berry. How doI know? Because I saw it extract
something from the berry and fly away.

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 287

A French missionary, said to have been a good
naturalist, writing in this country in 1634, makes
this curious statement about our hummingbird:
“This bird, as one might say, dies, or, to speak
more correctly, puts itself to sleep in the month of
October, living fastened to some little branchlet
of a tree by the feet, and wakes up in the month of
April when the flowers are in abundance, and some-
times later, and for that cause is called in the Mexi-
can: tongue the ‘ Revived.’” How could the good
missionary ever have been led to make such a state-
ment? The actual finding of the bird wintering in
that way would have been the proof science demands,
and nothing short of that.

A boy in the interior of the State wrote to me the
other day that while in the field looking after Indian
arrow-heads he had seen a brown and gray bird with
a black mark running through the eye, and that the
bird walked instead of hopped. He said it hada
high, shrill whistle and flew like a meadowlark.
This boy is a natural observer; he noted that the
bird was a walker. Most of the birds hop or jump,
keeping both feet together. This boy heard his
bird afterward in the edge of the evening, and “‘fol-
lowed it quite a ways, but could not get a glimpse
of it.” He had failed to note the crest on its head
and the black spot on its breast, for doubtless his
strange bird was the shore lark, a northern bird, that
comes to us in flocks in the late fall or early winter,
and in recent years has become a permanent resident
of certain parts of New York State. I have heard it

288 RIVERBY

in full song above the hills in Delaware County, af-
ter the manner of the English skylark, but its song
was a crude, feeble, broken affair compared with that
of the skylark. These birds thrive well in confine-
ment. I had one seven months in a cage while liv-
ing in Washington. It was disabled in the wing by
a gunner, who brought it to me. Its wound soon
healed; it took food readily; it soon became tame,
and was an object of much interest and amusement.
The cage in which I had hastily put it was formerly
a case filled with stuffed birds. Its front was glass.
As it was left out upon the porch over night, a
strange cat discovered the bird through this glass,
and through the glass she plunged and captured the
bird. In the morning there was the large hole in
this glass, and the pretty lark was gone. I have
always indulged a faint hope that the glass was such
a surprise to the cat, and made such a racket about
her eyes and ears as she sprang against it, that she
beat a hasty retreat, and that the bird escaped
through the break.

II

In May two boys in town wrote to me to explain
to them the meaning of the egg-shells, mostly those
of robins, that were to be seen lying about on the
ground here and there. I supposed every boy knew
where most of these egg-shells came from. As soon
as the young birds are out, the mother bird removes
the fragments of shells from the nest, carrying them
in her beak some distance, and dropping them here

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 289

and there. All our song-birds, so far as I know,
do this.

Sometimes, however, these shells are dropped by
blue jays after their contents have been swallowed.
The jay will seize a robin’s egg by thrusting his beak
into it, and hurry off lest he be caught in the act by
the owner. At a safe distance he will devour the
contents at his leisure, and drop the shell.

The robins, however, have more than once caught
the jay in the act. He has the reputation among
them of being a sneak thief. Many and many a
time during the nesting season you may see a lot of
robins mob a jay. The jay comes slyly prowling
through the trees, looking for his favorite morsel,
when he is discovered by a vigilant robin, who in-
stantly rushes at him crying, “Thief! thief!” at
the top of his voice. All the robins that have nests
within hearing gather to the spot and join in the
pursuit of the jay, screaming and scolding.

The jay is hustled out of the tree in a hurry, and
goes sneaking away with the robins at his heels. He
is usually silent, like other thieves, but sometimes
the birds make it so hot for him that he screams in
anger and disgust.

Of the smaller birds, like the vireos and warblers,
the jay will devour the young. My little boy one
day saw a jay sitting beside a nest in a tree, prob-
ably that of the red-eyed vireo, and coolly swallow-
ing the just hatched young, while the parent birds
were powerless to prevent him. They flew at him
and snapped their beaks in his face, but he heeded

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them not. A robin would have knocked him off
his feet at her first dive.

One is sometimes puzzled by seeing a punctured
egg lying upon the ground. One day I came near
stepping upon one that was lying in the path that
leads to the spring —a fresh egg with a little hole
in it carefully placed upon the gravel. I suspected
it to be the work of the cowbird, and a few days
later I had convincing proof that the cowbird is up
to this sort of thing. I was sitting in my summer
house with a book, when J had a glimpse of a bird
darting quickly down from the branches of the maple
just above me toward the vineyard, with something
in its beak. Following up my first glance with
more deliberate scrutiny, I saw a female cowbird
alight upon the ground and carefully deposit some
small object there, and then, moving a few inches
away, remain quite motionless. Without taking my
eyes from the spot, I walked straight down there.
The bird flew away, and I found the object she had
dropped to be a little speckled bird’s egg still warm.
I saw that it was the egg of the red-eyed vireo. It
was punctured with two holes where the bird had
seized it; otherwise it had been very carefully
handled. For some days I had been convinced that
a pair of vireos had a nest in my maple, but much
scrutiny had failed to reveal it to me.

Only a few moments before the cowbird appeared
I had seen the happy pair leave the tree together,
flying to a clump of trees lower down the slope of
the hill. The female had evidently just deposited

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 291

her egg, the cowbird had probably been watching
near by, and had seized it the moment the nest was
vacated. Her plan was of course to deposit one of
her own in its place.

I now made a more thorough search for the nest,
and soon found it, but it was beyond my reach on
an outer branch, and whether or not the cowbird
dropped one of her own eggs in place of the one she
had removed I do not know. Certain am I that
the vireos soon abandoned the nest, though they do
not always do this when hoodwinked in this way.

I once met a gentleman on the train who told me
about a brood of quails that had hatched out under
his observation. He was convinced that the mother
quail had broken the shells for the young birds. He
sent me one of the shells to convince me that it had
been broken from the outside. At first glance it did
appear so. It had been cut around near the large
end, with the exception of a small space, as if by
regular thrusts or taps from a bird’s beak, so that
this end opened like the lid of a box on a hinge, and
let the imprisoned bird escape. What convinced the
gentleman that the force had been applied from the
outside was that the edges of the cut or break were
bent in.

If we wish rightly to interpret nature, to get at
the exact truth of her ways and doings, we must cul-
tivate what is called the critical habit of mind; that
is, the habit of mind that does not rest with mere
appearances. One must sift the evidence, must cross-
question the facts. This gentleman was a lawyer,

292 RIVERBY

but he laid aside the cunning of his craft in deal-
ing with this question of these egg-shells.

The bending in, or the indented appearance of the
edge of the shells was owing to the fact that the thin
paper-like skin that lines the interior of the shell
had dried and shrunken, and had thus drawn the
edges of the shell inward. The cut was made by
the beak of the young bird, probably by turning its
head from right to left; one little point it could not
reach, and this formed the hinge of the lid I have
spoken of. Is it at all probable that if the mother
bird had done this work she would have left this
hinge, and left it upon every egg, since the hinge
was of nouse? The complete removal of the cap
would have been just as well.

Neither is it true that the parent bird shoves its
young from the nest when they are ready to fly,
unless it be in the case of doves and pigeons. Our
small birds certainly do not do this. The young
birds will launch out of their own motion as sodn as
their wings will sustain them, and sometimes before.
There is usually one of the brood a little more
forward than its mates, and this one is the first to
venture forth. In the case of the bluebird, chick-
adee, high-hole, nuthatch, and others, the young
are usually a day or two in leaving the nest.

The past season I was much interested in seeing
a brood of chickadees, reared on my premises, ven-
ture upon their first flight. Their heads had been
seen at the door of their dwelling —a cavity in the
limb of a pear-tree—at intervals for two or three

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 293

days. Evidently they liked the looks of the great
outside world; and one evening, just before sun-
down, one of them came forth. His first flight was
of several yards to a locust, where he alighted upon
an inner branch, and after some chirping and call-
ing proceeded to arrange his plumage and compose
himself for the night. I watched him till it was
nearly dark. He did not appear at all afraid there
alone in the tree, but put his head under his wing
and settled down for the night as if it was just what
he had always been doing. There was a heavy
shower a few hours later, but in the morning he was
there upon his perch in good spirits.

I happened to be passing in the morning when
another one came out. He hopped out upon a limb,
shook himself, and chirped and called loudly. Af-
ter some moments an idea seemed to strike him.
His attitude changed, his form straightened up, and
a thrill of excitement seemed to run through him.
I knew what it all meant; something had whispered
to the bird, “Fly!” With a spring and a cry he was
in the air, and made good headway to a near hem-
lock. Others left in a similar manner during that
day and the next, till all were out.

Some birds seem to scatter as soon as they are out
of the nest. With others the family keeps together
the greater part of the season. Among birds that
have this latter trait may be named the chickadee,
the bluebird, the blue jay, the nuthatch, the king-
bird, the phcebe-bird, and others of the true fly-
catchers.

294 RIVERBY

One frequently sees the young of the phose sit-
ting in a row upon a limb, while the parents feed
them in regular order. Twice I have come upon a
brood of young but fully fledged screech owls in
a dense hemlock wood, sitting close together upon a
low branch. They stood there like a row of mum-
mies, the yellow curtains of their eyes drawn together
to a mere crack, till they saw themselves discovered.
Then they all changed their attitudes as if an elec-
tric current had passed through the branch upon
which they sat. Leaning this way and that, they
stared at me like frightened cats till the mother took
flight, when the young followed.

The family of chickadees above referred to kept
in the trees about my place for two or three weeks.
They hunted the same feeding-ground over and over,
and always seemed to find an abundance. The par-
ent birds did the hunting, the young did the calling
and the eating. At any hour in the day you could
find the troop slowly making their way over some
part of their territory.

Later in the season one of the parent birds seemed
smitten with some fatal malady. If birds have lep-
rosy, this must have been leprosy. The poor thing
dropped down through a maple-tree close by the
house, barely able to flit a few feet at atime. Its
plumage appeared greasy and filthy, and its strength
was about gone. JI placed it in the branches of a
spruce-tree, and never saw it afterward.

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 295

III

A boy brought me a dead bird the other morning
which his father had picked up on the railroad. It
had probably been killed by striking the telegraph
wires. As it wasa bird the like of which he had
never seen before, he wanted to know its name. It
was a wee bird, mottled gray and brown like nearly
all our ground birds, as the sparrows, the meadow-
lark, the quail: a color that makes the bird prac-
tically invisible to its enemies in the air above.
Unlike the common sparrows, its little round wings
were edged with yellow, with a tinge of yellow on
its shoulders; hence its name, the yellow-winged
sparrow. It has also a yellowish line over the eye.
It is by no means a common bird, though there are
probably few farms in the Middle and Eastern States
upon which one could not be found. It is one of the
birds to be looked for. Ordinary observers do not
see it or hear it.

It is small, shy, in every way inconspicuous. Its
song is more like that of an insect than that of any
other of our birds. If you hear in the fields in May
and June a fine, stridulous song like that of a big
grasshopper, it probably proceeds from this bird.
Move in the direction of it and you will see the little
brown bird flit a few yards before you. For several
mornings lately I have heard and seen one on a dry,
gravelly hillock in a field. Each time he has been
near the path where I walk. Unless your ear is on
the alert you will miss his song. Amid the other

296 RIVERBY

bird songs of May heard afield it is like a tiny,
obscure plant amid tall, rank growths. The bird
affords a capital subject for the country boy, or town
boy, either, when he goes to the country, to ex-
ercise his powers of observation upon. If he finds
this bird he will find a good many other interesting
things. He may find the savanna sparrow also,
which closely resembles the bird he is looking for.
It is a trifle larger, has more bay about the wings,
and is more common toward the coast. Its yellow
markings are nearly the same. ‘There is also a va-
riety of the yellow-winged sparrow called Henslow’s
yellow-winged sparrow, but it bears so close a re-
semblance to the first-named that it requires a pro-
fessional ornithologist to distinguish them. I confess
Ihave never identified it.

I never see the yellow-wing without being re-
minded of a miniature meadowlark. Its short tail,
its round wings, its long and strong legs and feet,
its short beak, its mottled coat, the touch of yellow,
asif he had just rubbed against a newly-opened dan-
delion, but in this case on the wings instead of on
the breast, the quality of its voice, and its general
shape and habits, all suggest a tiny edition of this
large emphatic walker of our meadows.

The song of this little sparrow is like the words
“chick, chick-a-su-su,” uttered with a peculiar buzz-
ing sound. Its nest is placed upon the ground in
the open field, with four or five speckled eggs. The
eggs are rounder and their ground color whiter than
the eggs of other sparrows.

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 297

I do not know whether this kind walks or hops.
This would be an interesting point for the young ob-
server to determine. All the other sparrows known
to me are hoppers, but from the unusually long and
strong legs of this species, its short tail and erect
manner, I more than half suspect it is a walker. If
so, this adds another meadowlark feature.

Let the young observer follow up and identify
any one bird, and he will be surprised to find how
his love and enthusiasm for birds will kindle. He
will not stop with the one bird. Carlyle wrote in
a letter to his brother, “Attempt to explain what
you do know, and you already know something
more.” Bring what powers of observation you al-
ready have to bear upon animate nature, and already
your powers are increased. You can double your
capital and more in a single season.

The first among the less common birds which I
identified when I began the study of ornithology
was the red-eyed vireo, the little gray bird with a
line over its eye that moves about with its inces-
sant cheerful warble all day, rain or shine, among
the trees, and it so fired my enthusiasm that before
the end of the season I had added a dozen or more
(to me) new birds to my list. After a while the
eye and ear become so sensitive and alert that they
seem to see and hear of themselves, and like sleep-
less sentinels report to you whatever comes within
their range. Driving briskly along the road the
other day, I saw a phoebe-bird building her nest un-
der a cliff of rocks. I had but a glimpse, probably

298 RIVERBY

two seconds, through an opening in the trees, but
it was long enough for my eye to take in the whole
situation: the gray wall of rock, the flitting form
of the bird and the half-finished nest into which
the builder settled. Yesterday, May 7, I went out
for an hour’s walk looking for birds’ nests. I made
a tour of some orchards, pastures, and meadows, but
found nothing, and then came home and found a
blue jay’s nest by my very door. How did I find
it? In the first place my mind was intent upon
nest finding: I was ripe for a bird’s nest. In the
second place I had for some time suspected that a
pair of jays were nesting or intending to nest in
some of the evergreens about my house; a pair had
been quite familiar about the premises for some
weeks, and I had seen the male feed the female, al-
ways a sure sign that the birds are mated, and are
building or ready to build. Many birds do this.
I have even seen the crow feed its mate in April.
Just at this writing, a pair of chickadees attracted
my attention in a spruce-tree in front of my win-
dow. One of them, of course the male, is industri-
ously feeding the other. The female hops about,
imitating the voice and manner of a young bird, her
wings quivering, her cry plaintive, while the male
is very busy collecting some sort of fine food out of
the just bursting buds of the tree. Every half min-
ute or so he approaches her and delivers his morsel
into her beak. I should know from this fact alone
that the birds have a nest near by. The truth is,
it is just on the other side of the study in a small

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 299

cavity in a limb of a pear-tree. The female is lay-
ing her eggs, one each day, probably, and the male
is making life as easy for her as possible, by collect-
ing all her food for her.

Hence, when as I came down the drive and a blue
jay alighted in a maple near me, I paused to observe
him. He wiped his beak on a limb, changed his
position a couple of times, then uttered a low mel-
low note. The voice as of a young jay, tender and
appealing, came out of a Norway spruce near by.
The cry was continued, when the bird I was watch-
ing flew in amid the top branches, and the cry be-
came still more urgent and plaintive. I stepped
along a few paces and saw the birds, the female
standing up in her nest and the male feeding her.
The nest was placed in a sort of basket formed by
the whorl of up-curving branches at the top of the
tree, the central shaft being gone.

It contained four eggs of a dirty brownish green-
ish color. As I was climbing up to it, a turtle dove
threw herself out of the tree and fluttered to the
ground as if mortally wounded. My little boy was
looking on, and seeing the dove apparently so help-
less and in such distress, ran to see “what in the
world ailed it.” It fluttered along before him for
afew yards, and then its mate appearing upon the
scene, the two flew away, much to the surprise of
the boy. We soon found the doves’ nest, a shelf
of twigs on a branch about midway of the tree. It
held two young birds nearly fledged. How they
seemed to pant as they crouched there, a shapeless

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mass of down and feathers, regarding us! The doves
had been so sly about their nesting that I had never
suspected them fora moment. The next tree held a
robin’s nest, and the nest of a purple finch is prob-
ably near by. One usually makes a mistake in going
away from home to look for birds’ nests. Search the
trees about your door.

The blue jay is a cruel nest-robber, but this pair
had spared the doves in the same tree, and I think
they have made their peace with the robins, as I do
not see the latter hustling them about any more.
Probably they want to stand well with their neigh-
bors, and so go away from home to commit their
robberies.

Iv

If anew bird appears in my neighborhood, my
eye or ear reports it at once. One April several of
those rare thrushes — Bicknell’s or Slide Mountain
thrush — stopped for two days in my currant-patch.
How did I know? I heard their song as I went
about the place, a fine elusive strain unlike that of
any other thrush. To locate it exactly I found very
difficult. It always seemed to be much farther off
than it actually was. There is a hush and privacy
about its song that makes it unique. It has a mild,
fluty quality, very sweet, but in a subdued key. It
is a bird of remote northern mountain-tops, and its
song seems adjusted to the low, thick growths of
such localities.

The past season a solitary great Carolina wren
took up its abode in a bushy land near one corner of

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 301

my vineyard. It came late in the season, near the
end of August, the only one I had ever heard north
of the District of Columbia. During my Washing-
ton days, many years ago, this bird was one of the
most notable songsters observed in my walks. His
loud, rolling whistle and warble, his jocund calls and
salutations — how closely they were blended with
all my associations with nature on the Potomac.
When, therefore, one morning my ear caught the
same blithe, ringing voice on the Hudson, be assured
I was quickly on the alert. How it brought up the
past. How it reopened a chapter of my life that
had long been closed. It stood out amid other bird
songs and calls with a distinctness that attracted the
dullest ears. Such a southern Virginia air as it gave
to that nook by the river’s side!

T left my work amid the grapes and went down to
interview the bird. He peeped at me inquisitively
and suspiciously for a few moments from a little
clump of weeds and bushes, then came out in fuller
view, and finally hopped to the top of a grape-post,
drooped his wings and tail, lifted up his head, and
sang and warbled his best. If he had known ex-
actly what I came for and had been intent upon doing
his best to please me, he could not have succeeded
better.

The great Carolina wren is a performer like the
mockingbird, and is sometimes called the mocking
wren. He sings and acts as well. He seems bent
on attracting the attention of somebody or something.
A Southern poet has felicitously interpreted cer-

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tain notes by the words, “‘Sweetheart, sweetheart,
sweet.”

Day after day and week after week, till the frosts
of the late October came, the bird tarried in that
spot, confining his wanderings to a very small area
and calling and warbling at all hours. From my
summer-house I could often hear his voice rise up
from under the hill, seeming to fill all the space
down there with sound. What brought this soli-
tary bird there, so far from the haunts of his kind,
I know not. Maybe he was simply spying out the
land, and will next season return with his mate.
Mockingbirds have wandered north as far as Con-
necticut, and were found breeding there by a collec-
tor, who robbed them of their eggs. The mocking
wren would be a great acquisition to our northern
river banks and bushy streams. It is the largest
of our wrens, aud in the volume and variety of its
notes and the length of its song season surpasses all
others.

A lover of nature never takes a walk without
perceiving something new and interesting. All life
in the winter woods or fields as revealed upon the
snow, how interesting it is. I recently met a busi-
ness man who regularly goes camping to the Maine
woods every winter from the delight he has in vari-
ous signs of wild life written upon the snow. His
morning paper, he says, is the sheet of snow which
he reads in his walk. Every event is chronicled,
every new arrival registers his name, if you have
eyes to read it!

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 303

In December my little boy and I took our skates
and went a mile distant from home into the woods
to a series of long, still pools in a wild, rocky stream
for an hour’s skating. There was a light skim of
snow upon the ice, but not enough to interfere seri-
ously with our sport, while it was ample to reveal
the course of every wild creature that had passed the
night before. Here a fox had crossed, there a rab-
bit or a squirrel or a muskrat.

Presently we saw a different track and a strange
one. The creature that made it had come out of a
hole in the ground about a yard from the edge of
the long, narrow pool upon which we were skating,
and had gone up the stream, leaving a track upon
the snow as large as that of an ordinary-sized dog,
but of an entirely different character.

We had struck the track of an otter, a rare animal
in the Hudson River Valley; in fact, rare in any
part of the State. We followed it with deep inter-
est; it threw over the familiar stream the air of some
remote pool or current in the depths of the Adiron-
dacks or the Maine woods. Every few rods the otter
had apparently dropped upon his belly and drawn
himself along a few feet by his fore paws, leaving
a track as if a log or bag of meal had been drawn
along there. He did this about every three rods.

At the head of the pool where the creek was open
and the water came brawling down over rocks and
stones, the track ended on the edge of the ice; the
otter had taken to the water. A cold bath, one
would say, in mid-December, but probably no colder

304 RIVERBY

to him than the air, as his coat is perfectly water-
proof.

On another pool farther up the track reappeared,
and was rubbed out here and there by the same
heavy dragging in the snow, like a chain with a long
solid bar at regular distances in place of links. At
one point the otter had gone ashore and scratched a
little upon the ground. He had gone from pool to
pool, taking the open rapids wherever they appeared.

The otter is a large mink or weasel, three feet
or more long and very savage. It feeds upon fish,
which it seems to capture with ease. It is said that
it will track them through the water as a hound
tracks a fox on land. It will travel a long distance
under the ice, on a single breath of air. Every now
and then it will exhale this air, which will form a
large bubble next the ice, where in a few moments
it becomes purified and ready to be taken into the
creature’s lungs again. If by any accident the bub-
ble were to be broken up and scattered, the otter
might drown before he could collect it together again.
A man who lived near the creek said the presence of
the otter accounted for the scarcity of the fish there.

Vv

The other day one of my farmer neighbors asked
me if I had seen the new bird that was about. This
man was an old hunter, and had a sharp eye for all
kinds of game, but he had never before seen the
bird, which was nearly as large as a robin, of a dull
blue or slate color marked with white.

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 305

Another neighbor, who was standing by, said the
bird had appeared at his house the day before. <A
cage with two canaries was hanging against the win-
dow, when suddenly a large bird swooped down as
if to dash himself against it; but arresting himself
when near the glass, he hovered a moment, eying
the birds, and then flew to a near tree.

The poor canaries were so frightened that they fell
from their perches and lay panting upon the floor of
their cage.

No one had ever seen the bird before; what was
it? It was the shrike, who thought he was sure of
a dinner when he saw those canaries.

If you see, in late autumn or winter, a slim, ashen-
gray bird, in size a little less than the robin, having
white markings, flying heavily from point to point,
and always alighting on the topmost branch of a tree,
you may know it is the shrike.

He is very nearly the size and color of the mock-
ingbird, but with flight and manners entirely differ-
ent. There is some music in his soul, though his
murderous beak nearly spoils it in giving it forth.

One winter morning, just at sunrise, as I was
walking along the streets of a city, I heard the
shrike’s harsh warble. Looking about me, I soon
saw the bird perched upon the topmost twig of a
near tree, saluting the sunrise. It was what the
robin might have done, but the strain had none of
the robin’s melody.

Some have compared the shrike’s song to the
creaking of a rusty gate-hinge, but it is not quite so

306 RIVERBY

bad as that, Still it is unmistakably the voice of a
savage. None of the birds of prey have musical
voices.

The shrike had probably come to town to try his
luck with English sparrows. I do not know that he
caught any, but in a neighboring city I heard of a
shrike that made great havoc with the sparrows.

VI

When Nature made the flying squirrel she seems
to have whispered a hint or promise of the same gift
to the red squirrel. At least there is a distinct sug-
gestion of the same power in the latter. When hard
pressed the red squirrel will trust himself to the air
with the same faith that the flying squirrel does,
but, it must be admitted, with only a fraction of the
success of the latter. He makes himself into a rude
sort of parachute, which breaks the force of his fall
very much. ‘The other day my dog ran one up the
side of the house, through the woodbine, upon the
roof. As I opened fire upon him with handfuls of
gravel, to give him to understand he was not wel-
come there, he boldly launched out into the air and
came down upon the gravel walk, thirty feet below,
with surprising lightness and apparently without the
least shock or injury, and was off in an instant be-
yond the reach of the dog. On another occasion I
saw one leap from the top of a hickory-tree and fall
through the air at least forty feet and alight without
injury. During their descent upon such occasions
their legs are widely extended, their bodies are

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 307

broadened and flattened, the tail stiffened and slightly
curved, and a curious tremulous motion runs through
all. It is very obvious that a deliberate attempt
is made to present the broadest surface possible to
the air, and I think a red squirrel might leap from
almost any height to the ground without serious
injury. Our flying squirrel is in no proper sense
a flyer. On the ground he is more helpless than a
chipmunk, because less agile. He can only sail or
slide down a steep incline from the top of one tree
to the foot of another. The flying squirrel is active
only at night; hence its large, soft eyes, its soft fur,
and its gentle, shrinking ways. It is the gentlest
and most harmless of our rodents. A pair of them
for two or three successive years had their nest
behind the blinds of an upper window of a large, un-
occupied country house near me. You could stand
in the room inside and observe the happy family
through the window pane against which their nest
pressed. There on the window sill lay a pile of
large, shining chestnuts, which they were evidently
holding against a time of scarcity, as the pile did
not diminish while I observed them. The nest was
composed of cotton and wool which they filched from
a bed in one of the chambers, and it was always a
mystery how they got into the room to obtain it.
There seemed to be no other avenue but the chimney
flue.

There are always gradations in nature, or in nat-
ural life; no very abrupt departures. If you find
any marked trait or gift in a species you will find

308 RIVERBY

hints and suggestions of it, or, as it were, prelimi-
nary studies of it, in other allied species. JI am not
thinking of the law of evolution which binds together
the animal life of the globe, but of a kind of over-
flow in nature which carries any marked endowment
or characteristic of a species in lessened force or com-
pletion to other surrounding species. Or if looked
at from the other way, a progressive series, the idea
being more and more fully carried out in each suc-
ceeding type —a kind of lateral and secondary evolu-
tion. Thus there are progressive series among our
song-birds. The brown thrasher is an advance upon
the catbird, and the mockingbird is an advance upon
the brown thrasher in the same direction. Each one
carries the special gift of song or mimicking some
stages forward. The same among the larks, through
the so-called meadowlark and the shore lark, up to
the crowning triumph of the skylark. The night-
ingale also finishes a series which starts with the
hedge warbler and includes the robin redbreast.
Our ground-sparrow songs probably reach their
highest perfection in the song of the fox sparrow;
our finches in that of the purple finch, ete.

The same thing may be observed in other fields.
The idea of the flying fish, the fish that leaves the
water and takes for a moment to the air, does not
seem to have exhausted itself till we reach the walk-
ing fish of tropical America, or the tree-climbing fish
of India. From the protective coloring of certain
insects, animals, and birds, the step is not far to
actual mimicry of certain special forms and colors.

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 309

The naturalists find in Java a spider that exactly
copies upon a leaf the form and colors of bird drop-
pings. How many studies of honey-gathering bees
did nature make before she achieved her masterpiece
in this line in the honey-bee of our hives? The
. skunk’s peculiar weapon of defense is suggested by
the mink and the weasel. Is not the beaver the
head of the series of gnawers, the loon of divers, the
condor of soarers? Always one species that goes be-
yond any other. Look over a collection of African
animals and see how high shouldered they are, how
many hints or prophecies of the giraffe there are be-
fore the giraffe is reached. After nature had made
the common turtle, of course she would not stop till
she had made the box tortoise. In him the idea is
fully realized. On the body of the porcupine the
quills are detached and stuck into the flesh of its
enemy on being touched; but nature has not stopped
here. With the tail the animal strikes its quills
into its assailant. Now if some animal could be
found that actually threw its quills, at a distance of
several feet, the idea would be still further carried
out.

The rattlesnake is not the only rattler. I have
seen the black snake and the harmless little garter
snake vibrate their tails when disturbed in precisely
the same manner. The black snake’s tail was in
contact with a dry leaf, and it gave forth a loud
humming sound which at once put me on the alert.

I met a little mouse in my travels the other day
that interested me. He was on his travels also, and

310 RIVERBY

we met in the middle of a mountain lake. I was
casting my fly there when I saw just sketched or
etched upon the glassy surface a delicate V-shaped
figure, the point of which reached about the middle
of the lake, while the two sides as they diverged
faded out toward the shore. I saw the point of this
V was being slowly pushed toward the opposite
shore. I drew near in my boat, and beheld a little
mouse swimming vigorously for the opposite shore.
His little legs appeared like swiftly revolving wheels
beneath him. As I came near he dived under the
water to escape me, but came up again like a cork
and just as quickly. It was laughable to see him
repeatedly duck beneath the surface and pop back
again in a twinkling. He could not keep under
water more than a second or two. Presently I
reached him my oar, when he ran up it and into the
palm of my hand, where he sat for some time and
arranged his fur and warmed himself. He did not
show the slightest fear. It was probably the first
time he had ever shaken hands with a human being.
He was what we call a meadow mouse, but he had
doubtless lived all his life in the woods, and was
strangely unsophisticated. How his little round eyes
did shine, and how he sniffed me to find out if I
was more dangerous than I appeared to his sight.
After a while I put him down in the bottom of
the boat and resumed my fishing. But it was not
long before he became very restless and evidently
wanted to go about his business. He would climb
up to the edge of the boat and peer down into the

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 811

water. Finally he could brook the delay no longer
and plunged boldly overboard, but he had either
changed his mind or lost his reckoning, for he started
back in the direction he had come, and the last I
saw of him he was a mere speck vanishing in the
shadows near the other shore.

Later on I saw another mouse while we were at
work in the fields that interested me also. This one
was our native white-footed mouse. We disturbed
the mother with her young in her nest, and she
rushed out with her little ones clinging to her teats.
A curious spectacle she presented as she rushed
along, as if slit and torn into rags. Her pace was
so precipitate that two of the young could not keep
their hold and were left in the weeds. We remained
quiet and presently the mother came back looking
for them. When she had found one she seized it
as a cat seizes her kitten and made off with it. In
a moment or two she came back and found the other
one and carried it away. I was curious to see if the
young would take hold of her teats again as at first
and be dragged away in that manner, but they did
not. It would be interesting to know if they seize
hold of their mother by instinct when danger threat-
ens, or if they simply retain the hold which they
already have. I believe the flight of the family
always takes place in this manner, with this species
of mouse.

312 RIVERBY

VII

The other day I was walking in the silent, naked
April woods when I said to myself, ‘There is no-
thing in the woods.”

I sat down upon a rock. Then [I lifted up my
eyes and beheld a newly constructed crow’s nest in
a hemlock tree near by. The nest was but little
above the level of the top of a ledge of rocks only a
few yards away that crowned the rim of the valley.
But it was placed behind the stem of the tree from
the rocks, so as to be secure from observation on that
side. The crow evidently knew what she was about.
Presently I heard what appeared to be the voice of
a young crow in the treetops not far off. This I
knew to be the voice of the female, and that she was
being fed by the male. She was probably laying,
or about beginning to lay, eggs in the nest. Crows,
as well as most of our smaller birds, always go through
the rehearsal of this act of the parent feeding the
young many times while the young are yet a long
way in the future. The mother bird seems timid
and babyish, and both in voice and manner assumes
the character of a young fledging. The male brings
the food and seems more than usually solicitous
about her welfare. Is it to conserve her strength
or to make an impression on the developing eggs?
The same thing may be observed among the domes-
tic pigeons, and is always a sign that a new brood is
not far off.

When the young do come the female is usually

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 313

more active in feeding them than the male. Among
the birds of prey, like hawks and eagles, the female
is the larger and more powerful, and therefore better
able to defend and to care for her young. Among
all animals, the affection of the mother for her off-
spring seems to be greater than that of her mate,
though among the birds the male sometimes shows
a superabundance of paternal regard that takes in the
young of other species. Thus a correspondent sends
me this curious incident of a male bluebird and some
young vireos. A pair of bluebirds were rearing
their second brood in a box on the porch of my cor-
respondent, and a pair of vireos had a nest with
young in some lilac bushes but a few feet away.
The writer had observed the male bluebird perch in
the lilacs near the young vireos, and, he feared, with
murderous intent. On such occasions the mother
vireo would move among the upper branches much
agitated. If she grew demonstrative the bluebird
would drive her away. One afternoon the observer
pulled away the leaves so as to have a full view of
the vireo’s nest from the seat where he sat not ten
feet away. Presently he saw the male bluebird come
to the nest with a worm in its beak, and, as the
young vireos stretched up their gaping mouths, he
dropped the worm into one of them. Then he
reached over and waited upon one of the young birds
as its own mother would have done. A few mo-
ments after he came to his own brood, with a worm
or insect, and then the next trip he visited the nest
of the neighbor again, greatly to the displeasure of

314 RIVERBY

the vireo, who scolded him sharply as she watched
his movements from a near branch. My correspond-
ent says: ‘I watched them for several days; some-
times the bluebird would visit his own nest several
times before lending a hand to the vireos. Some-
times he resented the vireos’ plaintive fault-finding
and drove them away. I never saw the female blue-
bird near the vireos’ nest.”

That the male bird should be broader in his sym-
pathies and affections will not, to most men at least,
seem strange.

Another correspondent relates an equally curious
incident about a wren and some young robins,
“One day last summer,” he says, “while watching
a robin feeding her young, I was surprised to see a
wren alight on the edge of the nest in the absence
of the robin, and deposit a little worm in the throat
of one of the young robins, It then flew off about
ten feet, and it seemed as if it would almost burst
with excessive volubility. It then disappeared, and
the robin came and went, just as the wren returned
with another worm for the young robins. This was
kept up for an hour. Once they arrived simultane-
ously, when the wren was apparently much agitated,
but waited impatiently on its previous perch, some
ten feet off, until the robin had left, when it visited
the nest as before. JI climbed the tree for a closer
inspection, and found only a well-regulated robin
household, but nowhere a wren’s nest. After com-
ing down I walked around the tree and discovered
a hole, and upon looking in saw a nest of sleeping

TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 315

featherless wrens. At no time while I was in the
vicinity had the wren visited these little ones.”

Of all our birds, the wren seems the most over-
flowing with life and activity. Probably in this in-
stance it had stuffed its own young to repletion,
when its own activity bubbled over into the nest of
its neighbor. It is well known that the male wren
frequently builds what are called “cock-nests.” It
is simply so full of life and joy and of the propa-
gating instinct, that after the real nest is completed,
and while the eggs are being laid, it gives vent to
itself in constructing these sham, or cock-nests. I
have found the nest of the long-billed marsh wren
surrounded by half a dozen or more of these make-
believers. The gushing ecstatic nature of the bird
expresses itself in this way.

I have myself known but one instance of a bird
lending a hand in feeding young not its own. This
instance is to be set down to the credit of a female
English sparrow. A little “chippie” had on her
hands the task of supplying the wants of that
horseleech, young cow-bunting. The sparrow looked
on from its perch a few yards away, and when the
“chippie ” was off looking up food, it would now and
then bring something and place it in the beak of
the clamorous bunting. I think the “chippie” ap-
preciated its good offices. Certainly its dusky foster-
child did. This bird, when young, seems the most
greedy of all fledgelings. It cries ‘‘ More,” “ More,”
incessantly. When its foster parent is a small bird
like “ chippie” or one of the warblers, one would

316 RIVERBY

think it would swallow its parent when food is
brought it. I suppose a similar spectacle is wit-
nessed in England when the cuckoo is brought up
by a smaller bird, as is always the case. Sings the
fool in “Lear: ” —

“The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,
That it had it head bit off by it young.”

Last season I saw a cow-bunting fully grown fol-
lowing a “‘chippie” sparrow about, clamoring for
food, and really looking large enough to bite off and
swallow the head of its parent, and apparently hun-
gry enough to do it. The “chippie” was evidently
trying to shake it off and let it shift for itself, for
it avoided it and flew from point to point to escape
it. Its life was probably made wretched by the
greedy monster it had unwittingly reared.

INDEX

Accentor, golden-crowned. See
Thrush, golden-crowned.

Adder’s-tongue, 07 yellow erythro-
nium, or dog’s-tooth violet, 23-26.

Albertus Magnus, 252.

Alexander, Colonel, his stock farm,
225, 226, 228, 229.

Ants, 255.

Apple-trees, 165, 169, 209; old trees
bear the most birds, 27 1; bird life
in an old tree, 271- 376.

April, a natal month, 162, 163; a
perfect day in, 165.

Arbutus, trailing, 14, 15, 167.

Arethusa, 3, 4.

Arnold, Matthew, 214.

Ash, black, 6, 17.

Azalea, white, 6.

Balsam. See Fir.

Bass, 16.

Bear, black (Ursus americanus), 41,
58, 163, 173, 174.

Beardslee, Mrs., 109 n.

Beaver (Castor fiber), 309.

Beaverkill, the, 34.

Bee. See Bumblebee and Honey-

bee.

Bee-balm. See Monarda.

Big Ingin Valley, 37.

Birch, yellow, 42.

Birds, colors of eggs, 64, 65 ; lining
materials for nests, 70; shapes of
eggs, 72; courtship, 1, 85; hu-
man traits of, 85, 86; fickle-mind-
edness of, 91; sense of taste, 96 ;
their sympathy with each other,
119; gregarious and solitary, 120 ;
local attachments of, 172, 173;
sing at a distance from their nests,
188 ; concert of action among, 260,
201, 266; earth baths and water
baths, 210; variations in songs
according to localities and during
a series of years, 239; their keen-
ness of sight, 277; removal of
egg-shells from the nest, 288, 289 ;

the young leaving the nest, 292;
continuation of the family life
after the nest is left, 293, 294;
the male feeding his mate, 298 ;
the females more active than the
male in caring for the young, 312,
313; the male broader in his sym-
pathies and affections than the
female, 313-315.

Blackbird, crow, or purple grackle,
(Quisealus quiscula), notes of,

Blackbird, red-winged. See Starling,
red-shouldered.

Black Pond, gathering pond-lilies
in, 16-18.

Blood-root, 5, 13, 14, 168.

Bluebird (Sialia sialis), war with a
wren, 66-68; courtship of, 79;
jealousy and a duel, 80-82: 91;
arrival of, 158, 159; 160; imagi-
nary rivals, 189-191 ; and downy
woodpecker, 272; war with a
great crested flycatcher, 274, 275 ;
jealousy and courage of, 275; and
English sparrow, 275, 292, 293;
feeding a family of vireos, 313,
314; notes of, 79-82, 158, 159,
163; nest and eggs of, 15, 64, 66,
68, 79-82, 189, 191, 275.

Blue-grass, 223, 227, 228, 234.

Blue-grass region, the, 223-234.

Bluets. See Houstonia.

Blue-weed. Sve Bugloss, viper’s.

Bobolink (Dolichonyzx oryzivorus),
188, 239; song of, 239; nest of,
188.

Bob-white. See Quail.

Boneset, climbing, 31.

Boswell, James, 251.

Botany, the piney of, 27,28; aneed-
ed aid in, 31, 32.

Bowlders, refusing to stay down,
100, 101.

Brooks. See Trout streams.

sas hams viper’s, or blue-weed, 29,

318

Bullfrog, 255.

Bumblebee, 14; visiting the closed
gentian, 27 and note ; drones, 269.

Bunting, black- throated, or dick-
cissel (Spiza americana), 239;
song of, 239,

Bunting, indigo. See Indigo-bird.

Bunting, snow, or snowflake (Plec-
trophenax nivalis), 200.

Calf, fear in the young, 195.

Calypso, the orchid, 1, 2.

Cambium layer, the, 158.

Camp, repairing, 47, 52; rain in,
48; acold night in, 52-54.

Camping, i in the southern Catskills,
33-60

Campion, bladder, 29.

Canary, 96, 97, 191, 305.

Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis),
23:

9.
Cardinal-flower, 11, 29.
Carlyle, Thomas, a woman’s opinion
of, 108, 109; quotation from,
297,

Catbird (Galeoscoptes carolinenis),
142; song of, 308.

Catsyghipmunis, and, 148-150; red
squirrels and, 1

Catskills, Peat acai in the
southern, 33-60; the rocks of,
34, 46, 47; the water of, 40.

Cattle, backwoods, 58, 59.

Cedar-bird, or cedar waxwing (Am-
pelis cedrorum), 72, 200; nest and
eggs of, 70, 72.

Charming, the power of, 255-257.

Chat, yellow-breasted (Icteria vi-
rens), 239,

Chelone, or turtle-head, 29.

Cherry pits, 151, 152.

Chewink, or towhee (Pipilo ery-
throphthalmus), 14.

Chickadee (Parus atricapillus), 121;
young leaving the nest, 292, 293;
family life continued after the
nest is left, 293, 294; a fatal mal-
ady, 294; a male feeding his mate,
298; notes of, 293, 294; nest of,
70, 257, 258, 292, 293, 298, 299.

Chipmunk (Lamias striatus), 140;
spring awakening of, 145, 163;
breeding habits of, 146; manners
and conversation of, 146; enemies

INDEX

fee pursued by 9 weasel, 1&2-

Chintie, or social sparrow (Spizella
socialis), 72; a curious mishap,
124, 125; and young cowbird, 315,
316; nest and eggs of, 64, 124,

Claytonia, or spring beauty, 42, 43.

Clintonia, 42.

Clover, red, 42.

Clover, sweet, or melilotus, 29.

Columbine, 13

Condor, 309.

Cone-flower, or rudbeckia, 98.

Contentment, 87-90.

Coon. See Raccoon.

Corydalis, 13.

Cowbird, or cow-bunting (Molo-
thrus ater), desecrating a vireo’s
nest, 290, 291 ; the young bird and
its foster-parent, 315-316.

Crane, sandhill (Grus mexicana),
105-107; nest and eggs of, 105, 106.

Crickets, field, hibernating of, 255.

Crow, American (Corvus america-
nus), their fellow-feeling and cour-
tesy towards each other, 119, 120;
suspiciousness of, 121, 122, 164,
171, 265, 298; the male feeding
his mate, 312; notes of, 163;
nest of, 312.

Cuckoo, European, 316.

Cypripedium. See Lady’s-slipper.

Daffodil, 19.

Dandelion, 104, 105.

David, a guide in the Catskills, 39,
40.

Deer, Virginia (Cariacus virgini-
anus), 41, 277-279.

Dicentra. See Dutchman’s breeches
and Squirrel corn.

Dickcissel. See Bunting, black-
throated, 239,

Dipper, European, eggs of, 65.

Dog, a, detected in stealing, 58, 59 ;
ared squirrel’s race with a, 198,
199, 256.

Dog-toes, 98.

Double-Top, 43.

Dove, turtle or mourning (Zenai-
dura macroura), 236, 299; nest
and young of, 299, 300.

Duck, eider, 70.

Ducks, wild, 101, 161.

of, 146, 147; nervous, impet

ways of, 147, 148; a hermit, 148,
152; adventures with cats, 148-
150; the digging and furnishing
of the den, 150, 151 ; food for the
winter, 115, 152, 194; sociability,

Dutch *s breecl

(Dicenira cu-
cullaria), 4.

Eel, 252.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 109, 245;
quotations from, 14, 63.

INDEX

Erythronium. See Adder’s-tongue.
Evening primrose, 19.
Esopus Creek, 34.

Farmers, Kentucky, 226, 227.

Fear, in wild animals, 193-197; in
man, 195; in domestic animals,
195 ; paralysis from, 255-257.

Fences, 100.

Fern. See Osmunda.

Fertility, the beauty of, 221, 222.

Finch, lark, or lark sparrow (Chon-
destes grammacus), 234, 235 ; song
of, 235. ke

Finch, purple (Carpodacus pur-
pureus), song of, 308; nest of,
300.

Fir, balsam, 42, 43, 47.

Fish, a small, swallowing a large
fish, 131.

Fishes, flying, walking, and tree-
climbing, 308

Flicker. See High-hole.

Flowers, wild, the identification of,
31, 32.

Flycatcher, great crested (Myiar-
chus crinitus), 274; war with a
bluebird, 274, 275; notes of, 274;
nest of, 260, 272-275.

Fox, red (Vulpes vulpes, var. ful-
vus), tracks of, 126, 127, 303 ; 177,
196, 197, 277.

Frog, pickerel, 255.

Frog, wood, 261.

Frogs, spring awakening of, 163;
hibernating of, 254, 255. See
Bullfrog, Hyla, and Tree-frog.

Fumitory, climbing, 4, 5.

Game, on the prairie, 101, 102.

Gentian, closed, 26, 27, 30.

Georgetown, Ky., 232.

Gerardia, rose, 11.

Ginger, wild, 26.

Girl, a young English, 28, 29,

Goethe, quotation from, 90.

Goldenrod, 98.

Goldenrod, mountain, 54.

Goldfinch, American, or yellowbird
(Spinus tristis), 72; habits of,
78, 74; love-making festivals of,
83, 84; change of plumage, 83, 84,
166; notes of, 73, 74, 84; nest and
eggs of, 72, 73.

Goose, Canada (Branta canadensis),

101.
Gopher, pocket (Spermophilus sp.),
104.

Grackle, purple. See Blackbird,

crow.

319

Grass, See Blue-grass.

Grass, chess or cheat, 262, 263.

Green River, 243, 249.

Grosbeak, pine (Pinicola enucleator)
3 aye from, 284-286 ; notes of,

Grouse, pinnated, or prairie hen
(Tympanuchus americanus), 101,
102, 106 ; notes of, 101; nest and
eggs of, 61, 101, 102.

Grouse, ruffed, or partridge (Bo-
nasa umbellus), courtship of, 85;
177, 201; protective coloring of,
261; her well-trained young,
262; drumming of, 85; nest of,

Hair-snake, 264, 265.

Hardhack. See Steeple-bush.

Hare, northern (Lepus americanus,
var. virginianus), 197, 198.

Hate. and bonnets, Thoreau on, 209,

Hawk, banqueting-hall of a, 171,
172; quickness of a, 200; and
mouse, 256, 257; the smaller spe-
cies as enemies of birds and chick-
ens, 265, 266; poised in mid-air,
266. See Hen-hawk.

Hawk, American sparrow (Falco
sparverius), 265.

Hawk, fish. See Osprey.

Hawk, marsh (Circus hudsonius),
habits and appearance of, 133;
defending her nest, 134, 135;
young of, 135, 137, 138; a tame
young one, 138-143; 172; notes
of, 134, 135, 138, 139; nest and
eggs of, 133-138.

Hawk, pigeon (Falco columbarius),
caught in a shad-net, 259.

Hawk, sharp-shinned (Accipiter ve-
lox), 266.

Hawkweed (Hieracium aurantia-
cum), 8, 9, 10 and note.

Hen-hawk, 133 ; one of the farmer’s
best friends, 265.

Hepatica. See Liver-leaf.

High-hole, or flicker (Colaptes au-
ratus), matchmaking of, 82, 83;
drumming of, 83; unbridled bor-
ing propensities, 276 ; 292; notes
of, 82, 83, 165, 167; nest and eggs
of, 72, 83, 259.

Hogs of the prairie, 99.

Honey-bee, 14, 30; in a chimney,
68; working on sawdust, 158;
159, 162, 163.

Horses, gentleness towards chil-
dren, 97; in Kentucky, 228, 233.

320

Houstonia, or bluets, 19, 20.
Hummingbird, ruby-throated (Tro-
chilus colubris), probing peaches,
286; a curious statement about,
287 ; nest and eggs of, 65.
Hunters and their victims, 277-281.
Hyla, ge pein es or peeper, 166,

Illinois, birds observed in, 235, 236.
Indian cucumber root, or medeola,

2, 3.

Indigo-bird, or indigo bunting (Pas-
serina cyanea), song of, 188; nest
of, 188.

Invalid, observations of an, 87-109.

Tronweed, 228.

Jay, blue (Cyanocitta cristata),
hoarding food, 90, 91; worried by
a wren, 92; 128, 130, 236; a de-
vourer of the eggs and young of
other birds, 289; mobbed by
robins, 289, 290; 293; a male
feeding his mate, 298, 299; 300;
notes of, 128, 299 ; nest and eggs
of, 92, 128, 298, 299.

Jefferies, Richard, a reporter of
nature, 207; his Wild Life, 207;
a sympathetic spectator of na-
ture, not an observer, 211; his
Gamekeeper at Home, 211; his
Amateur Poacher, 211; his My
Old Village, 211; quotation from,
211-213.

Jewel-weed, 28, 29.

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 204, 205; on
scorpions and swallows, 251.

Joint-snake. See Snake, glass.

Journal, keeping a, 155-158.

Junco. See Snowbird.

Kentucky, the journey into, 221-
223; the blue-grass region of,
223-234 ; the birds of, 234-239 ;
Mammoth Cave, 241-250.

Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus),
293 ; nest of, 70, 259, 260.

Kingfisher, belted (Ceryle alcyon),
nest and eggs of, 65.

Aengtieer English, 65; eggs of,

Knott, Governor, 238.

Lady’s-slipper, showy (Cypripedi-
um spectabile), 6-8.

Lady’s-slipper, stemless or pink
(Cypripedium acaule), 6, 71.

Lark, shore or horned (Otocoris al-
pestris) and prairie horned lark

INDEX

(0. a. praticola), 163, 164, 287 ; in
confinement, 288; notes of, 163,
164, 287, 288.

Larkins, his house in the Cats-
kills, 37, 56,57 ; directions from,
38, 39 ; his dog, 59, 60.

Licks, of Kentucky, the, 225.

Lilies, scarlet, 98.

Lily, meadow, 17. See Pond-lily.

Limestone, of Kentucky, 234,

Linneus, quotation from, 266.

Lion’s-foot, 30.

Liver-leaf, or hepatica, 14.

Loon (Urinator imber), 309.

Loosestrife, purple, 12, 29.

i Canada (Lynx canadensis),

Mallow. See Marsh-mallow.

Mammoth Cave, general impres-
sions of, 241, 242, 248; relics of
1812, 242; the clock, 243; timid-
ity of visitors, 243, 244; a dark
city, 244; as a sanitarium, 244,
245; the Star Chamber, 245, 246;
musical rocks, 246, 247; water
in, 247, 248; Goring Dome, 248 ;
the entrance, 248, 249; a river of
cool air, 249, 250.

Maple, red, 17.

Maple, sugar, keys of, 152; starting
of the sap, 159; a good sap day,
160, 161.

March, atypical] day of, 161; tokens
of, 219, 220.

Marigold, marsh, 19.

Meer mallers (Althea officinalis),

Martin, Mrs., her Home Life on an
Ostrich Farm, 86.

Martin, purple (Progne subis), eggs
of, 65.

Meadow-beauty, or rhexia, 10.

Meadowlark (Sturnella magna),
236 ; notes of, 165, 167.

Medeola. See Indian cucumber
root.

Melilotus. See Clover, sweet.

Milkweed, marsh, 13,

Mimicry, 308, 309.

a ae purple, 07 monkey-flower,

Mink (Putorius vison), 103, 104;
tracks of, 126, 127; 309.

Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos),
239, 302 ; song of, 308.

Monarda, or bee-balm, 11.

Monkey-flower. See Mimulus.

Moose (Alce alces), pursuit of a,
280, 281.

INDEX

Mountain-ash, 42,
Mounteclim Ping, in the Catskills,

Mountains, their meaning to Orien-
tal minds, 44, 45.

Mt. Graham, 43,

Mount Sterling, 223.

Mt. Wittenberg, 35, 38, 56, 57.

Mouse, meadow, 256; crossing a
lake, 309-311.

Mouse, white-footed, a mother with
her young, 311.

Mouse-ear, 21-23.

Muskrat (Fiber zibethicus), 103,
104; in a doorway, 177, 178; 303.

Nature, the language of, 118; vari-
ous forms of the love of, 203,
204; the real lover of, 205, 206;
the passion for Nature not a mere
curiosity about ner, 207, 208; the
creative touch of the imagination
needed in descriptions of, 213,
215; fresh impressions of, 215-
220; many dramas played at once
on her stage, 268; all things to
allmen, 269, 270; the gradations
in, 307-309.

Neversink, the, 34.

Newt, water, 162.

Night, Jefferies on, 213; Whitman
on, 213, 214; in Senancour’s Ober-
mann, 214, 215,

Nightingale, song of, 308.

Oaks, English, 212.
Obermann, by Etienne Pivert de
Senancour, quotation from, 214,

Observation, the gift of, 90; alert-
ness of mind necessary in, 118,
286 ; a translation of nature’s lan-
guage into human speech neces-
sary in, 118; on the part of wild
creatures, 119; selective and de-
tective, 208, 211; an unbiased
mind necessary in, 252; special-
ized, 252, 253; all possible sources
of error to be taken into account
in, 253; a steady and patient as
well as sharp eye necessary in,
262-269, 286; love of nature the
first step in, 283; the critical
habit of mind necessary in, 291.

Oriole, Baltimore (Icterus galbula),
236-238, 286; nest and eggs of,
65, 66, 124, 237, 238.

Osmunda fern, royal, 16.

Osprey, | American, or fish hawk
(P étus carolinensis),

821

Tegular habits of an osprey, 172,
173; 257.

Ostrich, 86.

Otter, American (Lutra hudsonica),
tracks of, 303, 304; habits of, 304,

Oven-bird. See Thrush, golden-
crowned.

Owl, great horned (Bubo virgini-
anus), 197 ; nest of, 61.

Owl, screech (Megascops asio), a
brood of young, 294; notes of,
220; nest of, 61.

Owl, snowy (Nyctea nyctea), 197.

Owls, the eggs of, 62; 198,

Oxen, 99, 100.

Panther Mountain, 43, 56, 57.
Partridge. See Grouse, ruffed.
Peak-o’-Moose, 43,

Peeper. See Hyla.

Perch, 16, 212.

Pheebe-bird (Sayornis phebe), 286,
293, 294 ; nest and eggs of, 62-64,
70, 249, 260, 297.

Pickerel, 16.

Pigeon, passenger (Ectopistes mi-
gratorius), 101 ; nest of, 62.

Pike, barred, 212,

Pink, prairie, 98.

Pitcher plant, 6.

Polygala, fringed, 20, 21.

Pond-lily, 15-18.

Porcupine, Canada (Erethizon dor-
satus), 36, 37, 47, 53, 58, 309.

Prairie, the, notes from, 87-109;
like the ocean, 88; life in the fif-
ties on, 97-107; game on, 101-
107; a dead level, 224.

Prarie hen. See Grouse, pinnated.

Primrose. See Evening primrose.

Proctor, Professor, 224.

Pussy-willows, 220.

Quail, or bob-white (Colinus virgin-
ianus), 101; setting, 136; young
of, 137; answering a call, 175,
176; batching of the young, 291,
292; notes of, 175, 176; nest and
eggs of, 75, 135-137, 291, 292.

Rabbit, 48.

Rabbit, gray. (he sylvaticus),
176 ; a captive, 182, 183; timidity
and ‘witleseness oe 19 7, 498.

Raccoon (Procyon lotor), 163; a
we 178,179; courage of, i96,

Rain, in camp, 48.
Rat, pet squirrel and, 96; 104.
Red-bird, summer, o7 summer tana-

322

ger (Piranga rubra), 236; song
of, 236.

Rhexia. See Meadow-beauty.

Roads, in Kentucky, 232.

Robin, American (Merula migra-
toria), 72; courtship of, 78, 79 ;
duels of, 78, 79; 142, 190 ; sing-
ing a brown thrasher’s song, 267 ;
mobbing a blue jay, 289, 290; a
brood of young fed bya wren,
314, 315; notes of, 57, 159, 163,
166, 167, 267; nest of, 15, 91, 124,
300, 314.

Robin redbreast, song of, 308.

Rocks, of the Catskills, 34, 46, 47.

Rondout Creek, 34, 49.

Rose, wild, 11, 98.

Rudbeckia. See Cone-flower.

Sapsucker, yellow-bellied. See
Woodpecker, yellow-bellied.

Scorpion, 251.

Senancour, Etienne Pivert de, quota-
tion from his Obermann, 214, 215.

Shad, 15.

Shad-bush, low, 42.

Shakespeare, quotation from, 316.

Shelby, Colonel, his form, 225.

Bhrike (ZLanius sp.), and chip-
unk, 147, 304-806; song of, 303,

06.

Sink-holes, 229, 230.
Skunk (Mephitis mephitica), a nar-
108 escape, 179; fearlessness of,

Skunk cabbage, 162, 219.

Skylark, on the Hudson, 210; song
of, 210.

Slide Mountain, location and de-
scription of, 33, 34; 35; ascent of,
37-42 ; on the summit, 3 de-
scent of, 54-56.

Snake, black, fight with a pair, 128-
130 ; rifling nests, 128, 130; swal-
lowing a garter snake, 131; 146,
195, 256; as a rattler, 309.

Snake, garter, 131; as a rattler, 309.

Snake, glass, or joint-snake, 263, 264.

Snake, green, 131; protective color-
ing of, 260, 261.

Snakes, spring awakening of, 163;
their so-called power of charming,
255-257. See Hair-snake.

Snow, on Slide Mt., 54; damage to
peach buds caused by, 160 ; tracks
in, 302-304.

Snowbird, or slate-colored junco
(Junco hyematlis), 159.

Snowtlake. See Bunting, snow.

Sparrow, bush or russet or field

INDEX

(Spizella pusilla), 119; song of,
165, 167.

Sparrow, Canada or tree (Spizella
‘monticola), 159.

Sparrow, English (Passer domesti-
cus), 62, 77, 118, 119, 272, 275; a
female assists a chippie in feeding
a young cowbird, 315.

Sparrow, fox (Passerella iliaca),
song of, 308.

Sparrow, Henslow’s (Ammodramus
henslowii), 296.

Sparrow, lark. See Finch, lark,

Sparrow, savanna (Ammodramus
sandwichensis savanna), 296.

Sparrow, social. See Chippie.

Sparrow, song (Melospiza fasciata),
64; building on an insecure founda-
tion, 123, 124 ; 159 ; an interesting
couple, 187-189 ; song of, 169, 170,
187, 189; nest and eggs of, 15, 63,
64, 123, 124, 185, 187-189.

Sparrow, swamp (Melospiza georgt-
ana), 17; nest of, 17.

Sparrow, yellow-winged or grass-
hopper (Ammodramus savanna-
rum passerinus), 295-297 ; notes
of ods, 296; nest and eggs of,
296.

Spider, a Javan, 309.

Spider, flying, 220.

Spring, first days of, 158-160, 218-
220.

Spring beauty. See Claytonia.

Springs, in Kentucky, 232.

Spruce, 6; a grove on Slide Moun-
tain, 41; 42, 43.

Spruce, Norway, 285.

Squirrel, flying (Sciuropterus vo-
tans), 116 ; habits of, 307.

Squirrel, gray (Sciurus carolinensis,
var. leucotis), five tame squirrels,
93-96 ; 177.

Squirrel, red (Sciurus hudsonicus),
95, 145, 184; cautious habits of,
193, 194; not so provident as the
chipmunk, 194; caught by cats
and snakes, 194,195, 256; a race
with a dog, 198, 199; as a para-
chute, 306, 307.

Squirrel corn (Dicentra canadensis),

, 6.

Starling, red-shouldered, or red-
winged blackbird (A gelaius pheni-
ceus), notes of, 218.

Stars, the, 215, 216.

Steeple-bush, or hardhack, 11.

Strawberries, wild, 42, 43, 57.

Streams, in Kentucky, 231.

Sunflower, wild, 19,

INDEX

Swallow, bank (Clivicola riparia),
eggs of, 65.

Swallow, barn (Chelidon erythrogas-
ter), 166, 260; nest and eggs of,
65, 69, 70, 260.

Swallow, chimney, or chimney swift
(Chetura pelagica), flight of, 69;
nest and eggs of, 65, 68, 69.

Swallow, cliff (Petrochelidon luni-
Jrons), eggs of, 65.

Swallow, white- bellied or tree
(Lachycineta bicolor), eggs of, 65.

Swallows, hibernating of, 251, 252.

Swift, chimney. ‘ee Swallow,
chimney.

Swift, European, eggs of, 65.

Table Mountain, 43.

Tanager, scarlet (Piranga erythro-
melas), eggs of, 64.

Tanager, summer. See Red-bird,
summer.

Terrapin, or land turtle, 196.

Thoreau, Henry David, a woman’s
view of, 107; 156, 204; his Wal-
den, 208; his Journals, 208-210;
as an observer, 208-210 ; 253 ; quo-
tation from, 208, 209.

Thrasher, brown (Harporhynchus
rufus), an unfortunate pair, 185-
187 ; 236; its song sung by arobin,
267; song of, 168, 306; nest and
eggs of, 185-187.

Thrush, Bicknell’s (Turdus alicie
bicknellt), 46, 45; visiting a gar-
gen, 300; song of, 46, 48, 49, 54,

Thrush, golden-crowned, or golden-
crowned accentor, or oven-bird
(Seiurus aurocapillus), 70, 71;
song of, 71; nest and eggs of, 70,
71

Thrush, gray-cheeked (Turdus ali-

ci), 14,

Thrush, hermit (Turdus aonalasch-
ke pallasii), 14; song of, 17, 46.

Thrush, wood (Turdus mustelinus),
struggles with a piece of paper,
125, 126 ; a domestic tragedy, 184,
185; song of, 184, 185; nest and
eggs of, 125, 126, 184, 185,

Thyme, wild, 30.

oad, 168 ; the young after a shower,

Toad-flax, 29.

Torrey, John, 253.

Tortoise, box, 309.

Towhee. See Chewink.
Tree-frog, or tree-toad, 254, 261.
Trees, succession of forest, 91.

323

Trillium, painted, 43.

Trout, brook, 57, 58.

Trout streams, beauty and purity of,
39, 40.

Turkey, domestic, 86.

Turkey, wild (Meleagris gallopavo),

Turtle, land. See Terrapin.
Turtle, spotted, 196.
Turtle-head. See Chelone.
Turtles, 163, 196, 210.

Vervain, 29.

Violet, Canada, 20.

Violet, common, 20.

Violet, dog’s-tooth. See Adder’s-
tongue.

Violet, small white, 20.

Violet, spurred, 20.

Vireo (Vireo sp.), a brood of young
fed by a bluebird, 313, 314.

Vireo, red-eyed (Vireo olivaceus),
289, 297; notes of, 297; nest and
eggs of, 8, 290, 291.

Virginia, journey through, 221, 222.

Warbler, black-poll (Dendroica
striata), on Slide Mountain, 46;
song of, 46.

Warbler, hedge, song of, 308.

Wasps, stingless, 269.

Water-lily. See Pond-lily.

Waxwing, cedar. Sce Cedar-bird.

Weasel (Putorius sp.), and his den,
111-117; pursuing a chipmunk,
152-154 ; 309.

Wheat, chess grass and, 262, 263.

Whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vocif-
erus), T1, 72; protective coloring
of, 261; eggs of, 71, 261.

White, Gilbert, 266.

Whitman, Walt, quotations from,
213, 214, 247.

Wild animal, a mythical, 174, 175.

Willow-herb, 16.

Witch-hazel, 27.

Wittenberg, the, 35, 38, 56, 57.

Wolf, gray (Canis lupus), 102, 103,

Wolf, prairie (Canis latrans), 102.

Woman, observations of an invalid,
87-109.

Women, about the best lovers of
nature, 88.

Woodchuck (Arctomys monaz),
friendly calls, 179; mother and
young, 180, 181; a pet, 181, 182. °

Woodcock, American (Philohela |
minor), 219, 220.

Woodland Valley, 37.

Woodpecker, downy (Dryobates

824

pubescens), 66; drumming of, 83,
145, 166; winter retreats of, 271-
273; attacked by a bluebird, 272.

Woodpecker, hairy (Dryobates vil-
losus), 273.

Woodpecker, red-headed (Melaner-
pes erythrocephalus), 238.

Woodpecker, yellow-bellied (Sphy-
rapicus varius), sapsucking hab-
its of, 258, 259.

Woodpeckers, eggs of, 64, 65 ; drum-
ming of, 83-85; courtship of,,83-
85.

Woods, traveling through pathless,
50, 51; in Kentucky, 227-231.

Wordsworth, William, his love of
nature, reales quotations from,
19, 204, 2

Wren, Cas (Thryothorus ludo-
vicianus), on the Hudson, 300-
302; a performer, 301; song of,
301, 302 ; nest of, 68.

INDEX

Wren, European, nest of, 68.

Wren, house (Troglodytes aédon),
occupying orioles’ nests, 65, 66;
war with a bluebird, 66-68 ;92;
feeding a brood of young robins,
314, 315; overflowing with life
and activity, 315; ‘cock-nests”
built by the male, 315; notes of,
67, 68, 314; nest and eggs of, 65,
66, 68, 70, 92, 314, 315.

Wren, Tong-billed marsh (Cistotho-
rus palustris), ‘‘ cock-nests ’’ built
Lim the male, 315; nest of, 68,

Wren, short-billed marsh (Cistotho-
rus stellaris), nest of, 68.

Wren, winter (Troglodytes hiema-
lis), 41; song of, 41; nest of, 68,

Wryneck, eggs of, 65.

Yellowbird. See Goldfinch.

Sot

ae