THE FALL 0 F

LAS LOR

iiHADD

'ONE OF THE EAGLES STRUCK ME A STINGING BLOW ON THE HEAD'

Cl,apter V.

THE
FALL OF THE YEAR

BY

DALLAS LORE SHARP

AUTHOR OF "THE LAY OF THE LAND,'
"THE FACE OF THE FIELDS," BTC.

ILLUSTRATED BY

ROBERT BRUCE HORSFALL

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

(The LJiDrrfirtc |3rroD C ambrtUjf

COPYRIGHT, 1896, 1903, BY PERRY MASON COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY HOL'GHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY THE GOLDEN RULE COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, igll, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, IpII, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO
DOCTOR AND MRS. TRASK

OF THE

SOUTH JERSEY INSTITUTE
BEST OF TEACHERS, DEAREST OF FRIENDS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION t xi

I. THE CLOCK STRIKES ONE 1

II. ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE Fox .... 9

III. IN THE TOADFISH'S SHOE 21

IV. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS FALL . . 29
V. WHIPPED BY EAGLES 36

VI. THANKSGIVING AT GRANDFATHER'S FARM . . 46

VII. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO Do THIS FALL . . 62

VIII. THE MUSKRATS ARE BUILDING .... 61

IX. THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW 67

X. AN OUTDOOR LESSON 76

XI. LEAFING 80

XII. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL . . 88

XIII. HONK, HONK, HONK ! 96

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS . . 105

ILLUSTRATIONS

" ONE OF THE EAGLES STRUCK ME A STINGING BLOW ON THE

HEAD" Frontispiece

THE FALL OF THE YEAR Facing 1

INITIAL, CHAPTER I 1

INITIAL, CHAPTER II 9

"OVER THE HILL IN A WHIRLWIND OF DOST AND HOWLS "

Facing 18
INITIAL, CHAPTER III 21

"HERE I FOUND HIM KEEPING HOUSE" .... Facing 24

INITIAL, CHAPTER IV 29

A SILKY SKEIN OF COBWEB 30

" A WILD CREATURE, THAT WON'T GET OUT OF YOUR WAY "

Facing 32
THE PYXIE 32

THE FIELD OF CORN IN THE SHOCK 33

V

THE WINGED, AND PLUMED, AND BALLOONED SEEDS . . 34, 35

INITIAL, CHAPTER V .
INITIAL, CHAPTER VI

"THE LANTERN FLICKERS, THE MILK FOAMS, THE STORIES

FLOW" Facing 48

viii ILLUSTRATIONS •

INITIAL, CHAPTER VII 52

A COON 54

QUAILS 55

SHAGBARKS 56

WILD SEA FOWL 57

BLACK HAWTHORN BERRIES 58

INITIAL, CHAPTER VIII ... 61

" TO-NIGHT THERE is NO LOAFING ABOUT THE LODGE " Facing 62

TAILPIECE 66

INITIAL, CHAPTER IX 67

AWHITEFOOT . . 68

A CHIPMUNK 70

A WOODCHUCK 72

FIVE DAYS OF LIFE AND PLENTY FOR THE BIRDS ... 74

INITIAL, CHAPTER X 76

INITIAL, CHAPTER XI 80

" BUT COME, BOYS, GET AFTER THOSE BAGS ! " . . Facing 84

INITIAL, CHAPTER XII 88

A LOON 89

WHEN NIGHT COMES 90

A BLUE JAY .91

ILLUSTRATIONS «

A RED SQUIRREL ............ 92

A KINGLET ............. 93

INITIAL, CHAPTER XIII .......... 96

WILD GEESE ............. 102

TAILPIECE ............. 103

NOTE

It is interesting to observe that the subject of the initial for chapter iv is
witch-hazel ; that for chapter VH, the cocoons of the cecropia, the prome-
thea, and the basket worm ; and that for chapter viii, a sprig of aider,
with the old fruit and a budded catkin. The subjects of the other initials
require no identification.

INTRODUCTION

THERE are three serious charges brought
against nature books of the present time,
namely, that they are either so dull as to be
unreadable, or so fanciful as to be misleading, or so
insincere as to be positively harmful. There is a real
bottom to each of these charges.

Dull nature-writing is the circumstantial, the de-
tailed, the cataloguing, the semi-scientific sort, dried
up like old Rameses and cured for all time with the
fine-ground spice of measurements, dates, conditions
— observations, so called. For literary purposes, one
observation of this kind is better than two. Rarely
does the watcher in the woods see anything so new
that for itself it is worth recording. It is not what
one sees, so much as the manner of the seeing, not
the observation but its suggestions that count for in-
terest to the reader. Science wants the exact observa-
tion ; nature-writing wants the observation exact and
the heart of the observer along with it. We want
f lenty of facts in our nature books, but they have all
been set down in order before ; what has not been set
down before are the author's thoughts and emotions.
These should be new, personal, and are pretty sure
therefore to be interesting.

xii INTRODUCTION

More serious than dullness (and that is serious
enough) is the charge that nature books are untrust-
worthy, that they falsify the facts, and give a wrong
impression of nature. Some nature books do, as
some novels do with the facts of human life. A
nature book all fall of extraordinary, better-class
animals who do extraordinary stunts because of their
superior powers has little of real nature in it. There
are no such extraordinary animals, they do no such
extraordinary things. Nature is full of marvels —
Niagara Falls, a flying swallow, a star, a ragweed,
a pebble; but nature is not full of dragons and cen-
taurs and foxes that reason like men and take their
tea with lemon, if you please.

I have never seen one of these extraordinary ani-
mals, never saw anything extraordinary out of doors,
because the ordinary is so surprisingly marvelous.
And I have lived in the woods practically all of my
life. And you will never see one of them — a very
good argument against anybody's having seen
them.

The world out of doors is not a circus of perform-
ing prodigies, nor are nature-writers strange half-
human creatures who know wood-magic, who talk
with trees, and call the birds and beasts about then?
as did one of the saints of old. No, they are plain
people, who have seen nothing more wonderful in
the woods than you have, if they would tell the
truth.

INTRODUCTION xiii

When I protested with a popular nature-writer
some time ago at one of his exciting but utterly im-
possible fox stories, he wrote back, —

" The publishers demanded that chapter to make
the book sell."

Now the publishers of this book make no such
demands. Indeed they have had an expert naturalist
and woodsman hunting up and down every line of
this book for errors of fact, false suggestions, wrong
sentiments, and extraordinaries of every sort. If this
book is not exciting it is the publishers' fault. It
may not be exciting, but I believe, and hope, that
it is true to all of my out of doors, and not untrue
to any of yours.

The charge of insincerity, the last in the list,
concerns the author's style and sentiments. It does
not belong in the same category with the other two,
for it really includes them. Insincerity is the mother
of all the literary sins. If the writer cannot be true
to himself, he cannot be true to anything. Children
are the particular victims of the evil. How often are
children spoken to in baby-talk, gush, hollow ques-
tions, and a condescension as irritating as coming
teeth ! They are written to, also, in the same spirit.
» The temptation to sentimentalize in writing of the
" beauties of nature " is very strong. Raptures run
through nature books as regularly as barbs the length
of wire fences. The world according to such books
is like the Garden of Eden according to Ridinger,

xiv INTRODUCTION

all peace, in spite of the monstrous open -jawed
alligator in the foreground of the picture, who must
be smiling, I take it, in an alligatorish way at a fat
swan near by.

Just as strong to the story-writer is the tempta-
tion to blacken the shadows of the picture — to
make all life a tragedy. Here on my table lies a
child's nature-book every chapter of which ends in
death — nothing but struggle to escape for a brief
time the bloody jaws of the bigger beast — or of the
superior beast, man.

Neither extreme is true of nature. Struggle and
death go on, but, except where man interferes, a very
even balance is maintained, peace prevails over fear,
joy lasts longer than pain, and life continues to mul-
tiply and replenish the earth. " The level of wild
life," to quote my words from " The Face of the
Fields," " of the soul of all nature is a great serenity.
It is seldom lowered, but often raised to a higher
level, intenser, faster, more exultant."

This is a divinely beautiful world, a marvelously
interesting world, the best conceivable sort of a
world to live in, notwithstanding its gypsy moths,
tornadoes, and germs, its laws of gravity, and of
cause and effect ; and my purpose in this series of
nature books is to help my readers to come by this
belief. A clear understanding of the laws of the
Universe will be necessary for such a belief in the
end, and with the understanding a profound faith

INTRODUCTION xv

iii their perfect working together. But for the pre-
sent, in these books of the Seasons, if I can describe
the out of doors, its living creatures and their doings,
its winds and skies with their suggestions — all of
the out of doors, as it surrounds and supports me
here in my home on Mullein Hill, Hingham, so that
you can see how your out of doors surrounds and
supports you, with all its manifold life and beauty,
then I have done enough. If only I can accomplish
a fraction of this I have done enough.

DALLAS LORE SHARP.

MULLEIN HILL, September, 1911.

THE FALL OF THE YEAR

THE FALL OF THE YEAR

CHAPTER I

THE CLOCK STRIKES ONE

" The clock strikes one,

And all is still around the house !
But in the gloom f

A little mouse
Goes creepy-creep from room to room."

HE clock of the year strikes one ! —
not in the dark silent night of winter,
but in the hot light of midsummer.

It is a burning July day, — one
o'clock in the afternoon of the year,
— and all is still around the fields
and woods. All is still. All is hushed.
But yet, as I listen, I hear things in
the dried grass, and in the leaves
overhead, going " creepy-creep," as you have heard
the little mouse in the silent night.

I am lying on a bed of grass in the shade of a
great oak tree, as the clock of the year strikes one.
I am all alone in the quiet of the hot, hushed day.
Alone? Are you alone in the big upstairs at mid-
night, when you hear the little mouse going " creepy-

2 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

creep" from room to room ? No ; and I am not
alone.

High overhead the clouds are drifting past ; and
between them, far away, is the blue of the sky —
and how blue, how cool, how far, far away ! But
how near and warm seems the earth !

I lie outstretched upon it, feeling the burnt crisp
grass beneath me, a beetle creeping under my
shoulder, the heat of a big stone against my side. I
throw out my hands, push my fingers into the hot
soil, and try to take hold of the big earth as if I
were a child clinging to my mother.

And so I am. But I am not frightened, as I used
to be, when the little mouse went "creepy-creep,"
and my real mother brought a candle to scare the
mouse away. It is because I am growing old?
But I cannot grow old to my mother. And the earth
is my mother, my second mother. The beetle mov-
ing under my shoulder is one of my brothers ; the
hot stone by my side is another of my brothers ; the
big oak tree over me is another of my brothers;
and so are the clouds, the white clouds drifting, drift-
ing, drifting, so far away yonder, through the blue,
blue sky.

The clock of the year strikes one. The summer
sun is overhead. The flood-tide of summer life has
come. It is the noon hour of the year.

The drowsy silence of the full, hot noon lies deep
across the field. Stream and cattle and pasture-slope

THE CLOCK STRIKES ONE 3

are quiet in repose. The eyes of the earth are heavy.
The air is asleep. Yet the round shadow of my oak
begins to shift. The cattle do not move ; the pasture
still sleeps under the wide, white glare.

But already the noon is passing — to-day I see thq
signs of coming autumn everywhere.

Of the four seasons of the year summer is the
shortest, and the one we are least acquainted with.
Summer is hardly a pause between spring and au-
tumn, simply the hour of the year's noon.

We can be glad with the spring, sad with the au-
tumn, eager with the winter; but it is hard for us to
go softly, to pause and to be still with the summer ;
to rest on our wings a little like the broad-winged
hawk yonder, far up in the wide sky.

But now the hawk is not still. The shadow of
my oak begins to lengthen. The hour is gone ; and,
wavering softly down the languid air, falls a yellow
leaf from a slender birch near by. I remember, too,
that on my way through the woodlot I frightened a
small flock of robins from a pine ; and more than
a week ago the swallows were gathering upon the
telegraph wires. So quickly summer passes. It
was springtime but yesterday, it seems; to-day the
autumn is here.

It is a July day. At dawn the birds were singing,
fresh and full-throated almost as in spring. Then
the sun burned through the mist, and the chorus
ceased. Now I do not hear even the chewinkandthe

4 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

talkative vireo. Only the fiery notes of the scarlet
tanager come to me through the dry white heat of
the noon, and the resonant song of the indigo bunt-
ing — a hot, metallic, quivering song, as out of a
" hot and copper sky."

There are nestlings still in the woods. This indigo
bunting has eggs or young in the bushes of the hill-
side ; the scarlet tanager by some accident has but
lately finished his nest in the tall oaks. I looked in
upon some half-fledged cuckoos along the fence. But
all of these are late. Most of the year's young are
upon the wing.

A few of the spring's flowers are still opening. I
noticed the bees upon some tardy raspberry blossoms ;
here and there is a stray dandelion. But these are late.
The season's fruit has already set, is already ripening.
Spring is gone ; the sun is overhead ; the red wood-
lily is open. To-day is the noon of the year.

High noon ! and the red wood-lily is aflame in the
old fields, and in the low tangles of sweet-fern and
blackberry that border the upland woods.

The wood-lily is the flower of fire. How impossi-
ble it would be to kindle a wood-lily on the cold,
damp soil of April ! It can be lighted only on this
kiln-dried soil of July. This old hilly pasture is
baking in the sun ; the low mouldy moss that creeps
over its thin breast crackles and crumbles under my
feet ; the patches of sweet-fern that blotch it here
and there crisp in the heat and fill the smothered air

THE CLOCK STRIKES ONE 5

with their spicy, breath ; while the wood-lily opens
wide and full, lifting its spotted lips to the sun for
his scorching kiss. See it glow ! Should the withered
thicket burst suddenly into a blaze, it would be no
wonder, so hot and fiery seem the petals of this
flower of the sun.

How unlike the tender, delicate fragrant flowers
of spring are these strong flowers of the coming
fall ! They make a high bank along the stream —
milkweed, boneset, peppermint, turtle-head, joe-pye-
weed, jewel-weed, smartweed, and budding golden-
rod ! Life has grown lusty and lazy and rank.

But life has to grow lusty and rank, for the winter
is coming ; and as the woodchucks are eating and
eating, enough to last them until spring comes again,
so the plants are storing fat in their tap-roots, and
ripening millions of seeds, to carry them safely
through the long dead months of winter.

The autumn is the great planting time out of
doors. Every autumn wind is a sower going forth to
sow. And he must have seeds and to spare — seeds
for the waysides for the winter birds to eat, seeds for
the stony places where there is no depth of soil for
them, seeds for the ploughed fields where they are not
allowed to grow, seeds for every nook and corner, in
order that somewhere each plant may find a place
to live, and so continue its kind from year to year.

Look at the seeds of the boneset, joe-pye-weed,
milkweed, and goldenrod ! Seeds with wings and

6 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

plumes and parachutes that go floating and flying
and ballooning.

" Over the fields where the daisies grow,

Over the flushing clover,
A host of the tiniest fairies go —
Dancing, balancing to and fro,
Rolling and tumbling over.

" Quivering, balancing, drifting by,
Floating in sun and shadow —

• Maybe the souls of the flowers that die

Wander, like this, to the summer sky
Over a happy meadow."

So they do. They wander away to the sky, but
they come down again to the meadow to make it
happy next summer with new flowers ; for these are
the seed-souls of thistles and daisies and fall dande-
lions seeking new bodies for themselves in the warm
soil of Mother Earth.

Mother Earth ! How tender and warm and abund-
ant she is ! As I lie here under the oak, a child in
her arms, I see the thistle-down go floating by, and
on the same laggard breeze comes up from the maple
swamp the odor of the sweet pepper-bush. A little
flock of chickadees -stop in the white birches and
quiz me. "Who are you?" "Who are you-you-
you ? " they ask, dropping down closer and closer to
get a peek into my face.

Perhaps they don't know who I am. Perhaps I
don't know who they are. They are not fish hawks,
of course ; but neither am I an alligator or a pump-

THE CLOCK STRIKES ONE 7

kin, as the chickadees surely know. This much I am
quite sure of, however: that this little flock is a
family — a family of young chickadees and their two
parents, it may be, who are out seeing the world
together, and who will stay together far into the
cold coming winter.

They are one of the first signs of the autumn to
me, and one of my surest, sweetest comforts as the
bleak cold winds come down from the north. For
the winds will not drive my chickadees away, no
matter how cold and how hard they blow, no matter
how dark and how dead the winter woods when, in
the night of the year, the clock strikes twelve.

The clock to-day strikes one, and all is still with
drowsy sleep out of doors. The big yellow butter-
flies, like falling leaves, are flitting through the
woods; the thistledown is floating, floating past; and
in the sleepy air I see the shimmering of the spiders'
silky balloons, as the tiny aeronauts sail over on their
strange voyages through the sky.

How easy to climb into one of their baskets, and
in the fairy craft drift far, far away ! How pleasant,
too, if only the noon of the year would last and last ;
if only the warm sun would shine and shine ; if only
the soft sleepy winds would sleep and sleep ; if only
we had nothing to do but drift and drift and drift !

But we have a great deal to do, and we can't get
any of it done by drifting. Nor can we get it done
by lying, as I am lying, outstretched upon the warm

8 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

earth this July day. Already the sun has passed
overhead ; already the cattle are up and grazing ;
already the round shadow of the oak tree begins to
lie long across the slope. The noon hour is spent. I
hear the quivering click-clack of a mowing-machine
in a distant hay field. The work of the day goes on.
My hour of rest is almost over, my summer vacation
is nearly done. Work begins again to-morrow.

But I am ready for it. I have rested outstretched
upon the warm earth. I have breathed the sweet air
of the woods. I have felt the warm life-giving sun
upon my face. I have been a child of the earth. I
have been a brother to the stone and the bird and the
beetle. And now I am strong to do my work, no
matter what it is.

CHAPTER II

ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE FOX

ITH only half a chance
our smaller wild animals
— the fox, the mink, the
'coon, the 'possum, the
rabbit — would thrive,
and be happy forever on
the very edges of the
towns and cities. Instead of a hindrance, houses
and farms, roads and railways are a help to the
wild animals, affording them food and shelter as
their natural conditions never could. So, at least,
it seems; for here on Mullein Hill, hardly twenty
miles from the heart of Boston, there are more wild
animals than I know what to do with — just as if
the city of Boston were a big skunk farm or fox
farm, from which the countryside all around (par-
ticularly my countryside) were being continually
restocked.

But then, if I seem to have more foxes than a
man of chickens needs to have, it is no wonder, liv-
ing as I do on a main traveled road in Foxland, a
road that begins off in the granite ledges this side
of Boston, no one knows where, and, branching,

10 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

doubling, turning, no one knows how many times,
comes down at last along the trout brook to the
street in front of my house, where, leaping the
brook and crossing the street, it runs beside my
foot-path, up the hill, to the mowing-field behind
the barn.

When I say that last fall the hunters, standing
near the brook where this wild-animal road and the
wagon road cross, shot seven foxes, you will be quite
ready to believe that this is a much-traveled road,
this road of the foxes that cuts across my mowing-
field ; and also that I am quite likely to see the trav-
elers, now and then, as they pass by.

So I am, especially in the autumn, when game
grows scarce; when the keen frosty air sharpens
the foxes' appetites, and the dogs, turned loose in the
woods, send the creatures far and wide for — chick-
ens !

For chickens ? If you have chickens, I hope your
chicken-coop does not stand along the side of a fox
road, as mine does. For straight across the mowing-
field runs this road of the foxes, then in a complete
circle right round the chicken yard, and up the
bushy ridge into the wood.

How very convenient! Very, indeed ! And how
thoughtful of me ! Very thoughtful ! The foxes
appreciate my kindness; and they make a point of
stopping at the hen-yard every time they pass this
way.

ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE FOX 11

It is interesting to know, too, that they pass this
way almost every night, and almost every afternoon,
and at almost every other odd time, so that the hens,
with hundreds of grubby acres to scratch in, have
to be fenced within a bare narrow yard, where they
can only be seen by the passing foxes.

Even while being driven by the dogs, when nat-
urally they are in something of a hurry, the foxes
will manage to get far enough ahead of the hounds
to come by this way and saunter leisurely around the
coop.

I have a double-barreled gun and four small boys ;
but terrible as that combination sounds, it fails
somehow with the foxes. It is a two-barreled-four-
boyed kind of a joke to them. They think that I am
fooling when I blaze away with both barrels at them.
But I am not. Every cartridge is loaded with BB
shot. But that only means Blank-Blank to them, in
spite of all I can do. The way they jump when the gun
goes off, then stop and look at me, is very irritating.

This last spring I fired twice at a fox, who jumped
as if I had hit him (I must have hit him), then turned
himself around and looked all over the end of the
barn to see where the shots were coming from. They
were coming from the back barn window, as he saw
when I yelled at him.

It was an April morning, cold and foggy, so cold
and foggy and so very early that my chattering
teeth, I think, disturbed my aim.

12 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

It must have been about four o'clock when one of
the small boys tiptoed into my room and whispered,
"Father, quick ! there's a fox digging under Pigeon
Henny's coop behind the barn."

I was up in a second, and into the boys' room.
Sure enough, there in the fog of the dim morning I
could make out the moving form of a fox. He was
digging under the wire runway of the coop.

The old hen was clucking in terror to her chicks.
It was she who had awakened the boys.

There was no time to lose. Downstairs I went,
down into the basement, where I seized the gun, and,
slipping in a couple of shells, slid out of the cellar
door and crept stealthily into the barn.

The back window was open. The thick wet fog
poured in like dense smoke. I moved swiftly in my
bare feet and peered down upon the field. There
stood the blur of the coop, — a dark shadow only in
the fog, — but where was the fox?

Pushing the muzzle of my double-barreled gun
across the window-sill, I waited. And there in the
mist stood the fox, reaching in with his paw under
the wire that inclosed the coop.

Carefully, deliberately, I swung the gun on the
window-sill until the bead drew dead upon the thief ;
then, fixing myself as firmly as I could with bare
feet, I made sure of my mark and fired.

I do not wonder that the fox jumped. I jumped,
myself, as both barrels went off together. A gun is

ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE FOX 13

a sudden thing at any time of day, but so early in
the morning, and when everything was wrapped in
silence and ocean fog, the double explosion was
extremely startling.

The fox jumped, as naturally he would. When,
however, he turned deliberately around and looked
all over the end of the barn to see where I was fir-
ing from, and stood there, until I shouted at him —
I say it was irritating.

But I was glad, on going out later, to find that
neither charge of shot had hit the coop. The coop
was rather large, larger than the ordinary coop ;
and taking that into account, and the thick, uncer-
tain condition of the atmosphere, I had not made
a bad shot after all. It was something not to have
killed the hen.

But the fox had killed eleven of the chicks. One
out of the brood of twelve was left. The rascal had
dug a hole under the wire ; and then, by waiting as
they came out, or by frightening them out, had
eaten them one by one.

There are guns and guns, and some, I know, that
shoot straight. But guns and dogs and a dense pop-
ulation have not yet availed here against the fox.

One might think, however, when the dogs are
baying hard on the heels of a fox, that one's chickens
would be safe enough for the moment from that par-
ticular fox. But there is no pack of hounds hunt-
ing in these woods swift enough or keen enough to

14 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

match the fox. In literature the cunning of the fox
is very greatly exaggerated. Yet it is, in fact, more
than equal to that of the hound.

A fox, I really believe, enjoys an all-day run be-
fore the dogs. And as for house dogs, I have seen
a fox, that was evidently out for mischief and utterly
tired of himself, come walking along the edge of
the knoll here by the house, and, squatting on his
haunches, yap down lonesomely at the two farm
dogs below.

This very week I heard the hounds far away in
the ledges. I listened. They were coming toward me,
and apparently on my side of the brook. I had just
paused at the corner of the barn when the fox, slip-
ping along the edge of the woods, came loping down
to the hen-yard within easy gun-shot of me. He
halted for a hungry look* at the hens through the
wire fence, then trotted slowly off, with the dogs
yelping fully five minutes away in the swamp.

How many minutes would it have taken that fox
to snatch a hen, had there been a hen on his side of
the fence ? He could have made chicken-sandwiches
of a hen in five minutes, could have eaten them, too,
and put the feathers into a bolster — almost ! How
many of my hens he has made into pie in less than
five minutes !

As desserts go, out of doors, he has a right to a
pie for fooling the dogs out of those five crowded
minutes. For he does it against such uneven odds,

ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE FOX 15

and does it so neatly — sometimes so very thrillingly !
On three occasions I have seen him do the trick,
each time by a little different dodge.

One day, as I was climbing the wooded ridge be-
hind the farm, I heard a single foxhound yelping
at intervals in the hollow beyond. Coming cautiously
to the top, I saw the hound below me beating slowly
along through the bare sprout-land, half a mile away,
and having a hard time holding to the trail. Every
few minutes he would solemnly throw his big black
head into the air, stop stock-still, and yelp a long
doleful yelp, as if begging the fox to stop its fooling
and try to leave a reasonable trail.

The hound was walking, not running ; and round
and round he would go, off this way, off that, then
back when, catching the scent again, he would up
with his muzzle and howl for all the woods to hear.
But I think it was for the fox to hear.

I was watching the curious and solemn perform-
ance, and wondering if the fox really did hear and
understand, when, not far from me, on the crown of
the ridge, something stirred.

Without moving so much as my eyes, I saw the
fox, a big beauty, going slowly and cautiously round
and round in a small circle among the bushes, then
straight off for a few steps, then back in the same
tracks; off again in another direction and back
again ; then in and out, round and round, until,
springing lightly away from the top of a big stump

16 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

near by, the wily creature went gliding swiftly down
the slope.

The hound with absolute patience worked his
sure way up the hill to the circle and began to go
round and round, sniffling and whimpering to him-
self, as I now could hear ; sniffling and whimpering
with impatience, but true to every foot-print of the
trail. Round and round, in and out, back and forth,
he went, but each time in a wider circle, until the
real trail was picked up, and he was away with an
eager cry.

I once again saw the trick played, so close to me,
and so deliberately, with such cool calculating, that
it came with something of a revelation to me of how
the fox may feel, of what may be the state of mind
in the wild animal world.

It was a late October evening, crisp and clear,
with a moon almost full. I had come up from the
meadow to the edge of the field behind the barn,
and stood leaning back upon a short-handled hay-
fork, looking. It was at everything that I was look-
ing — the moonlight, the gleaming grass, the very
stillness, so real and visible it seemed at the falling
of this first frost. I was listening too, when, as far
away as the stars, it seemed, came the cry of the
hounds.

You have heard at night the passing of a train
beyond the mountains? the sound of thole-pins
round a distant curve in the river ? the closing of a

ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE FOX 17

barn door somewhere down the valley ? Strange it
may seem to one who has never listened, but the far-
off cry of the hounds is another such friendly and
human voice, calling across the vast of the night.

They were coming. How clear their tones, and
bell-like ! How mellow in the distance, ringing on
the rim of the moonlit sky, as round the sides of a
swinging silver bell. Their clanging tongues beat
all in unison, the sound rising and falling through
the rolling woodland, and spreading like a curling
wave as the pack broke into the open over the level
meadows.

I waited. Rounder, clearer, came the cry. I be-
gan to pick out the individual voices as now this
one, now that, led the chorus across some mighty
measure of The Chase.

Was it a twig that broke ? Some brittle oak leaf
that cracked in the path behind me? A soft sound
of feet ! Something breathed, stopped, came on —
and in the moonlight before me stood the fox !

The dogs were coming, but I was standing still.
And who was I, anyway? A stump? A post? No,
he saw instantly that I was more than an ordinary
post. How much more ?

The dogs were coming !

" Well," said he, as plainly as anything was ever
said, " I don't know what you are. But I will find
out." And up he came and sniffed at my shoes. " This
is odd," he went on, backing carefully off and sitting

18 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

down on his tail in the edge of a pine-tree shadow.
" Odd indeed. Not a stump ; not a man, in spite of
appearances, for a man could never stand still so
long as that."

The dogs were crashing through the underbrush
below, their fierce cries quivering through the very
trees about me.

The fox got up, trotted back and forth in front
of me for the best possible view, muttering, " Too
bad ! Too bad ! What an infernal nuisance a pack
of poodles can make of themselves at times ! Here
is something new in the woods, and smells of the
hen-yard, as I live ! Those silly dogs ! " and trotting
back, down the path over which he had just come,
he ran directly toward the coming hounds, leaped
off into a pile of brush and stones, and vanished as
the hounds rushed up in a yelping, panting whirl
about me.

Cool ? Indeed it was ! He probably did not stop,
as soon as he was out of sight, and make faces at
the whole pack. But that is because they have po-
liter ways in Foxland.

It is no such walking-match as this every time.
It is nip and tuck, neck and neck, a dead heat
sometimes, when only his superior knowledge of the
ground saves the fox a whole skin.

Perhaps there are peculiar conditions, at times,
that are harder for the fox than for the dogs, as
when the undergrowth is all adrip with rain or dew,

'OVER THE HILL IN A WHIRLWIND OF DUST AND HOWLS'

ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE FOX 19

and every jump forward is like a plunge overboard.
His red coat is longer than the short, close hair of
the hound, and his big brush of a tail, heavy with
water, must be a dragging weight over the long
hard course of the hunt. If wet fur to him means
the same as wet clothes to us, then the narrow es-
cape I witnessed a short time ago is easily explained.
It happened in this way : —

I was out in the road by the brook when I caught
the cry of the pack ; and, hurrying up the hill to
the " cut," I climbed the gravel bank for a view
down the road each way, not knowing along which
side of the brook the chase was coming, nor where
the fox would cross.

Not since the Flood had there been a wetter
morning. The air could not stir without spilling ; the
leaves hung weighted with the wet ; the very cries
of the hounds sounded thick and choking, as the
pack floundered through the alder swamp that lay
at the foot of the hill where I was waiting.

There must be four or five dogs in the pack, I
thought ; and surely now they are driving down the
old runway that crosses the brook at my meadow.

I kept my eye upon the bend in the brook and
just beyond the big swamp maple, when there in
the open road stood the fox.

He did not stand ; he only seemed to, so suddenly
and unannounced had he arrived. Not an instant had
he to spare. The dogs were smashing through the

20 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

briars behind bim. Leaping into tbe middle of the
road, he flew past me straight up the street, over
the ridge, and out of sight.

I turned to see the burst of the pack into the
road, when flash ! a yellow streak, a rush of feet, a
popping of dew-laid dust in the road, and back was
the fox, almost into the jaws of the hounds, as
he shot into the tangle of wild grapevines around
which the panting pack was even then turning !

With a rush that carried them headlong past the
grapevines, the dogs struck the warm trail in the
road and went up over the hill in a whirlwind of
dust and howls.

They were gone. The hunt was over for that day.
Somewhere beyond the end of the doubled trail the
pack broke up and scattered through the woods,
hitting a stale lead here and there, but not one of
them, so long as I waited, coming back upon the
right track to the grapevines, through whose thick
door the hard-pressed fox had so narrowly won his
way.

CHAPTER IH
IN THE TOADFISH'S SHOE

WAS winding up my summer vaca-
tion with a little fishing party all by
myself, on a wharf whose piles stood
deep in the swirling waters from
Buzzards Bay. My heavy-leaded line
hummed taut in the swift current;
my legs hung limp above the
water ; my back rested comfort-
ably against a great timber that
was warm in the September sun.
Exciting? Of course not. Fish-
ing is fishing — any kind of fishing is fishing to me.
But the kind I am most used to, and the kind I like
best, is from the edge of a wharf, where my feet
dangle over, where my "throw-out" line hums taut
over my finger, in a tide that runs swift and deep
and dark below me.

For what may you not catch in such dark waters?
And when there are no " bites," you can sit and wait;
and I think that sitting and waiting with my back
against a big warm timber is just as much fun now
as it used to be when I was a boy.

But after all it is fish that you want when you

22 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

go fishing; and it is exciting, moreover, just to sit as
I was sitting on the wharf, with all the nerves of
your body concentrated in the tip of your right fore-
finger, under the pressure of your line. For how
do you know but that the next instant you may
get a bite? And how do you know what the fish
may be?

When you whip a trout stream for trout — why,
you expect trout; when you troll a pond for pickerel,
you expect pickerel ; but when you sit on a wharf
with your line far out in big, deep waters — why, you
can expect almost anything — except shoes !

Shoes? Yes, old shoes !

As I sat there on the wharf of Buzzards Bay,
there was suddenly a sharp tug at my line. A short
quick snap, and I hooked him, and began quickly
hauling him in.

How heavily he came ! How dead and stupid !
Even a flounder or a cod would show more fight
than this ; and very naturally, for on the end of my
line hung an old shoe !

"Well," I thought, "I have fished for soles, and
down on the Savannah I have fished for 'gators, but
I never fished for shoes before " ; and taking hold of
my big fish (for it must have been a No. 12 shoe),
I was about to feel for the hook when I heard a
strange grunting noise inside, and nearly tumbled
overboard at sight of two big eyes and a monstrous
head filling the whole inside of the shoe !

IN THE TOADFISH'S SHOE 23

"In the name of Davy Jones ! " I yelled, flinging
line and shoe and thing (whatever it might be) far
behind me, "I've caught the Old Man of the Sea
with his shoe on!" And, scrambling to my feet, I
hurried across the wharf to see if it really were a fish
that now lay flapping close beside the shoe.

It was really a fish ; but it was also a hobgoblin,
nightmare, and ooze-croaker! — if you know what
that is!

I had never seen a live toadfish before, and it is
small wonder that I sighed with relief to see that he
had unhooked himself ; for he looked not only un-
canny, but also dangerous ! He was slimy all over,
with a tremendous head and a more tremendous
mouth (if that could be), with jaws studded on the
inside with rows of sharp teeth, and fringed on the
outside with folds of loose skin and tentacles. Great
glaring eyes stared at me, with ragged bits of skin
hanging in a ring about them.

Ugly? Oh, worse than ugly? Two thirds of the
monster was head ; the rest, a weak, shapeless, slimy
something with fins and tail, giving the creature the
appearance of one whose brain had grown at the
expense of the rest of his body, making him only a
kind of living head.

I looked at him. He looked 'at me, and croaked.

"I don't understand you," said I, and he croaked
again. "But you are alive," said I ; "and God made
you, and therefore you ought not to look so ugly to

24 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

me," and he flapped in the burning sun and croaked

again.

Stooping quickly, I seized him, crowded him back
into the old shoe, and dipped him under water. He
gasped with new life and croaked again.

"Now," said I, "I begin to understand you. That
croak means that you are glad to taste salt water
again"; and he croaked again, and I dipped him in
again.

Then I looked him over thoughtfully. He was
about fifteen inches long, brown in color, and coarsely
marbled with a darker hue, which ran along the fins
in irregular wavy lines.

"You are odd, certainly, and peculiar, and alto-
gether homely," said I ; "but really you are not very
ugly. Ugly? No, you are not ugly. How could any-
body be ugly with a countenance so wise and learned?
— so thoughtful and meditative?" And the toad-
fish croaked and croaked again. And I dipped him
in again, and understood him better, and liked him
better all the time.

Then I took him in his shoe to the edge of the
wharf.

"I am glad to have made your acquaintance, sir,"
said I. "If I come this way next summer, I shall look
you up; for I want to know more about you. Good-
by." And I heard him croak " Good-by," as he and
his shoe went sailing out and dropped with a splash
into the deep dark water of the Bay.

"HERE I FOUND HIM KEEPIKG HOUSE"

IN THE TOADFISH'S SHOE 25

I meant what I said, and the next summer, along
the shores of the Bay I hunted him up. He was not
in an old shoe this time, but under certain rather
large stones that lay just below ebb-tide mark, so
that they were usually, though not always, covered
with water. Here I found him keeping house; and
as I was about to keep house myself, my heart really
warmed to him.

I was understanding him more and more, and so
I was liking him better and better. Ugly? Wait
until I tell you what the dear fellow was doing.

He was keeping house, and he was keeping it all
alone ! Now listen, for this is what I learned that
summer about the strange habits of Mrs. Toadfish,
and the handsome behavior of her husband.

It is along in June that the toadfish of our New
England bays begin to look round for their summer
homes. As far as we now know, it is the female who
makes the choice and leaves her future mate to find
her and her home. A rock is usually chosen, always
iii shallow water, and sometimes so far up on the
shore that at low tide it is left high and almost dry.
The rock may vary in size from one as small as your
hat up to the very largest.

Having selected the place for her nest, she digs a
pathway down under the rock, .and from beneath
scoops out a hollow quite large enough to swim round
in. This completes the nest, or more properly burrow,
in which her little toadfish babies are to be reared.

26 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

She now begins to lay the eggs, but not in the
sand, as one would suppose; she deliberately pastes
them on the under surface of the rock. Just how
she does this no one knows.

The eggs are covered with a clear, sticky paste
which hardens in contact with water, and is the
means by which the mother sticks them fast to the
rock. This she must do while swimming on her back,
fastening one egg at a time, each close beside its
neighbor in regular order, till all the cleared surface
of the rock is covered with hundreds of beautiful
amber eggs, like drops of pure, clear honey.

The eggs are about the size of buckshot; and,
curiously enough, when they hatch, the young come
out with their heads all turned in the same direction.
Does the mother know which is the head end of the
egg? Or has some strange power drawn them around?
Or do they turn themselves for some reason?

It will be noticed, in lifting up the rocks, that the
heads of the fish are always turned toward the en-
trance to their nest, through which the light and
fresh water come; and it is quite easy to see that
these two important things have much to do with
the direction in which the little fish are turned.

After Mrs. Fish has finished laying her eggs, her
maternal cares are over. She leaves both eggs and
cares to the keeping of Mr. Fish, swims off, and
crawls into a tin can — or old shoe! — to meditate in
sober satisfaction for the rest of the summer.

IN THE TOADFISH'S SHOE 27

So it was she that I caught, and not the gallant
Mr. Toadfish at all ! I am glad of it. I have a deal
of sympathy and down-right admiration for Mr. Fish.
He behaves most handsomely.

However, Mrs. Fish is very wise, and could not
leave her treasures in better keeping. If ever there
was a faithful parent, it is a Father Toadfish. For
three weeks he guards the eggs before they hatch
out, and then they are only half hatched ; for it has
taken the little fish all this time to get out on the
top side of the eggs, to which they are still attached
by their middles, so that they can move only their
heads and tails.

They continue to wiggle in this fashion for some
weeks, until the yolk of the egg is absorbed, and
they have grown to be nearly half an inch long.
They are then free from the rock and swim off, look-
ing as much like their parents as children can, and
every bit as ugly.

Ugly ? Did I say ugly ? Is a baby ever ugly to its
mother? Or a baby toadfish to its father? No. You
cannot love a baby and at the same time see it ugly.
You cannot love the out of doors with all your mind
as well as with all your heart, and ever see it ugly.

All this time the father has been guarding the
little toadfish ; and if, during the whole period, he
goes out to get a meal, I have not been able to find
when it is, for I always find him at home, minding
the babies.

28 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

The toadfish lives entirely unmolested by enemies,
so far as I can learn ; and his appearance easily ex-
plains the reason of it. I know of nothing that would
willingly enter a croaking, snapping, slimy toadfish's
nest to eat him ; and it takes some courage to put
one's hand into his dark hole and pull him out.

His principal diet seems to be shrimp, worms and
all kinds of small fish. Yet he may be said to have
no principal diet ; for, no matter what you are fish-
ing for, or what kind of bait you are using, if there
is a toadfish in the vicinity you are sure to catch
him. If fishing along a wharf in September, you may
catch the fish, and an old shoe along with him —
with her, perhaps I should say.

And if you do, please notice how wise and thought-
ful the face, how beautifully marbled the skin, how
courageous the big strong jaw !

Ugly ? Not if you will put yourself in the toad-
fish's shoe.

CHAPTER IV

A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS PALL

OU ought to see the sky — every
day. You ought to see, as often
as possible, the breaking of
dawn, the sunset, the moonrise, and
the stars. Go up to your roof, if you
live in the city, or out into the mid-
dle of the Park, or take a street-car
ride into the edge of the country —
just to see the moon come up over the woods or over
a rounded hill against the sky.

II

You ought to see the light of the October moon,
as it falls through a roof of leafless limbs in some si-
lent piece of woods. You have seen the woods by
daylight ; you have seen the moon from many places ;
but to be in the middle of the moonlit woods after
the silence of the October frost has fallen is to have
one of the most beautiful experiences possible out

of doors.

Ill

You ought to see a wooded hillside in the glorious
colors of the fall — the glowing hickories, the deep

30 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

flaming oaks, the cool, dark pines, the blazing gums
and sumacs ! Take some single, particular woodland
scene and look at it until you can see it in memory

forever.

IV

You ought to see the spiders in their airships,
sailing over the autumn meadows. Take an Indian

Summer day, lazy, hazy, sunny, and lie down on your
back in some small meadow where woods or old rail
fences hedge it around. Lie so that you do not face the
sun. The sleepy air is heavy with balm and barely
moves. Soon shimmering, billowing, through the
light, a silky skein of cobweb will come floating over.
Look sharply, and^you will see the little aeronaut
swinging in his basket at the bottom of the balloon,
sailing, sailing —

THINGS TO SEE THIS FALL 31

Away iu the air —

Far are the shores of Anywhere,

Over the woods and the heather.

You ought to see (only see, mind you,) on one of
these autumn nights, when you have not on your
party clothes — you ought to see a " wood pussy." A
wood pussy is not a house pussy ; a wood pussy is a
wood pussy ; that is to say, a wood pussy is a —
skunk ! Yes, you ought to see a skunk walking calmly
along a moonlit path and not caringafigfor you. You
will perhaps never meet a wild buffalo or a grizzly
bear or a jaguar in the woods nearest your house;
but you may meet a wild skunk there, and have the
biggest adventure of your life. Yes, you ought to
see a skunk some night, just for the thrill of meet-
ing a wild creature that won't get out of your way.

VI

You ought to see the witch-hazel bush in blossom
late in November. It is the only bush or tree in the
woods that is in full bloom after the first snow may
have fallen. Many persons who live within a few
minutes' walk of the woods where it grows have
never seen it. But then, many persons who live with
the sky right over their heads, with the dawn break-
ing right into their bedroom windows, have never
seen the sky or the dawn to think about them, and
wonder at them ! There are many persons who have

32 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

never seen anything at all that is worth seeing. The
witch-hazel bush, all yellow with its strange blossoms
in November, is worth seeing, worth taking a great
deal of trouble to see.

There is a little flower in southern New Jersey
called pyxie, or flowering moss, a very rare and hid-
den little thing ; and I know an old botanist who
traveled five hundred miles just to have the joy of
seeing that little flower
growing in the sandy
swamp along Silver Run.
If you have never seen the
witch-hazel in bloom, it
will pay you to travel five
hundred and five miles to see it. But you won't need
to go so far, — unless you live beyond the prai-
ries, — for the witch-hazel grows from Nova Scotia
to Florida and west to Minnesota and Alabama.

There is one flower that, according to Mr. John
Muir (and he surely knows ! ), it will pay one to
travel away up into the highest Sierra to see. It is
the fragrant Washington lily, " the finest of all the
Sierra lilies," he says. "Its bulbs are buried in
shaggy chaparral tangles, I suppose for safety from
pawing bears ; and its magnificent panicles sway and
rock over the top of the rough snow-pressed bushes,
while big, bold, blunt-nosed bees drone and mumble
in its polleny bells. A lovely flower worth going
hungry and footsore endless miles to see. The whole

'A WILD CREATURE THAT WON'T GET OUT OF TOUR WAY"

THINGS TO SEE THIS FALL

33

world seems richer now that I have found this plant
in so noble a landscape."

And so it seemed to the old botanist who came
five hundred miles to find the tiny pyxie in the sandy
swamps of southern New Jersey. So it will seem to
you — the whole world will not only seem richer,
but will be richer for you — when you have found
the witch-hazel bush all coveretl with summer's gold
in the bleak woods of November.

VII

You ought to see a big pile of golden pumpkins
in some farmhouse shed or beside the great barn door.

You ought to see a field of corn in the shock ; hay
in a barn mow; the jars of fruit, the potatoes,
apples, and great chunks of wood in the farmhouse
cellar. You ought to see how a farmer gets ready
for the winter — the comfort, the plenty, the suf-
ficiency of it all !

84

THE FALL OF THE YEAR

VIII

You ought to see how the muskrats, too, get ready
for the winter, and the bees and the flowers and the
trees and the frogs — everything. Winter is coming.
The cold will kill — if it has a chance. But see how
it has no chance. How is it that the bees will buzz,
the flowers open, the birds sing, the frogs croak
again next spring as if there had been no freezing,
killing weather ? Go out and see why for yourselves.

IX

You ought to see the tiny seed " birds " from the
gray birches, scattering on the autumn winds; the
thistledown, too ; and a dozen other of the winged,
and plumed, and ballooned, seeds that
sail on the wings of the
winds. You should see the
burdock burs in the
cows' tails when

they come
home from the
pasture, and the
stick-tights and beggar-
needles in your own
coat-tails when you come
home from the pastures. And
seeing that, you should think
— for that is what real see-

THINGS TO SEE THIS FALL

35

ing means. Think what ? Why, that you are f
just as good as a cow's tail to scatter Nature's 1.
seeds for her, and not a bit better, as she v&V i
sees you.

X

You ought to see the migrating
birds as they begin to flock on
the telegraph wires, in Ltj\^

neys, and among the
the river. You

the chim-
reeds of
ought to see
the swallows,
blackbirds, robins,
and bluebirds, as they flock
together for the long southern
flight. There are days in late Septem-
ber and in early October when the very
air seems to be half of birds, especially
toward nightfall, if the sun sets full and clear : birds
going over ; birds diving and darting about you ;
birds along the rails and ridge-poles ; birds in the
grass under your feet — birds everywhere. You
should be out among them where you can see them.
And especially you should see — without fail, this
autumn and every autumn — the wedge of wild
geese cleaving the dull gray sky in their thrilling
journey down from the far-off frozen North.

CHAPTER V

\.

WHIPPED BY EAGLES

S you head into Maurice River Cove
from Delaware Bay by boat, the
great eagle's nest of Garren's
Neck Swamp soon looms into
view. It is a famous nest, and
an ancient nest; for it has a
place in the chart of every
boat that sails up the river, and has had for I don't
know how many years. From the river side of the
long swamp the nest is in sight the year round, but
from the land side, and from the house where we
lived, the nest could be seen only after the leaves
of the swamp had fallen. Then all winter long we
could see it towering over the swamp ; and often, in
the distance, we could see the eagles coming and
going or soaring in mighty circles high up in the
air above it.

That nest had a strange attraction for me. It was
the home of eagles, the monarchs of this wide land
of swamp and marsh and river.

Between me and the great nest lay a gloomy gum
swamp, wet and wild, untouched by the axe and un-
traveled, except in winter by the coon-hunters. The

WHIPPED BY EAGLES 37

swamp began just across the road that ran in front
of the house ; and often at night I would hear the
scream of a wild cat in the dark hollows ; and once
I heard the pat, pat of its feet as it went leaping
along the road.

Then beyond the swamp and the nest stretched a
vast wild marsh-land, where the reeds grew, and the
tides came in, and the mud-hens lived. And beyond
that flowed the river, and beyond the river lay an-
other marsh, and beyond the marsh another swamp.
And over all this vast wild world towered the nest of
the eagles, like some ancient castle ; and over it all —
swamp and marsh and river — ruled the eagles, as
bold and free as the mighty barons of old.

Is it any wonder that I often found myself gazing
away at that nest on the horizon and longing for
wings ? — for wings with which to soar above the
swamp and the bay and the marsh and the river, to
circle about and about that lofty eyrie, as wild as
the eagles and as free ? Is it any wonder that I de-
termined some day to stand up in that nest, wings
or no wings, while the eagles should scream about
me, and away below me should stretch river and
marsh and swamp?

To stand up in that nest, to yell and wave my
arms with the eagles wheeling arid screaming over
me, became the very peak of my boy ambitions.

And I did it. I actually had the eggs of those
eagles in my hands. I got into the nest ; but I am

38 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

glad even now that I got out of the nest and
reached the ground.

It must have been in the spring of my fourteenth
year when, at last, I found myself beneath the eagle
tree. It was a stark old white oak, almost limbless,
and standing out alone on the marsh some distance
from the swamp. The eagle's nest capped its very
top.

The nest, I knew, must be big ; but not until I
had climbed up close under it did I realize that it
was the size of a small haystack. There was certainly
half a cord of wood in it. I think that it must orig-
inally have been built by fish hawks.

Holding to the forking top upon which the nest
was placed, I reached out, but could not touch the
edge from any side.

I had come determined to get up into it, however,
at any hazard; and so I set to work. I never thought
of how I was to get down ; nor had I dreamed,
either, of fearing the eagles. A bald eagle is a bully.
I would as soon have thought of fearing our hissing
old gander at home.

As I could not get out to the edge of the nest
and scale the walls, the only possible way up, appar-
ently, was through the nest. The sticks here in the
bottom were old and quite rotten. Digging was easy,
and I soon had a good beginning.

The structure was somewhat cone-shaped, the
smaller end down. It had grown in circumference as

WHIPPED BY EAGLES 39

it grew in years and in height, probably because at the
bottom the building materials had decayed and grad-
ually fallen away, until now there was a decided
outward slant from bottom to top. It had grown lop-
sided, too, there being a big bulge on one side of
the nest near the middle.

The smalluess of the bottom at first helped me ;
there was less of the stuff to be pulled out. I easily
broke away the dead timbers and pushed aside the
tougher sticks. I intended to cut a channel clear to
the top and go up through the nest. Already my
head and shoulders were well into it.

Now the work became more difficult. The sticks
were newer, some of them being of seasoned oak and
hickory, which the birds had taken from cord-wood
piles.

I had cut my channel up the side of the nest nearly
halfway when I came to a forked branch that I could
neither break off nor push aside. I soon found that
it was not loose, but that it belonged to the oak tree
itself. It ran out through the nest horizontally, ex-
tending a little more than a foot beyond the rough
walls.

Backing down, I saw that this fork was tlie support
of the bulge that had given the nest its lopsided
appearance. A few large timbers had been rested
across it, small loose pieces had gradually lodged
upon these, and thus in time brought about the big
bulge.

40 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

I pushed off this loose stuff and the few heavy
timbers and found that the fork would bear my
weight. It now projected a little way from the walls
of the nest. I got a firm hold on the forks out at
their ends, swung clear, and drew myself up between
them. After a lively scramble, I got carefully to my
feet, and, clutching the sticks protruding from the
side, stood up, with my eyes almost on a level with
the rim of the great nest. This was better than cut-
ting a channel, certainly — at least for the ascent,
and I was not then thinking of the descent.

I looked over the protruding sticks of the rim. I
caught a glimpse of large dull white eggs!

Eggs of shining gold could not have so fascinated
me. There were thousands of persons who could have
gold eggs if- they cared. But eagles' eggs ! Money
could not buy such a sight as this.

I was more than ever eager now to get into the
nest. Working my fingers among the sticks of the
rim for a firm grip, I stuck my toes into the rough
wall and began to climb. At some considerable hazard
and at the cost of many rents in my clothing, I
wriggled up over the edge and into the hollow of
the nest where the coveted eggs lay.

The eagles were wheeling and screaming overhead.
The weird cac, cac, cac of the male came down from
far above me; while the female, circling closer, would
swoop and shrill her menacing, maniacal half-laugh
almost in my ears.

WHIPPED BY EAGLES 41

Their wild cries thrilled me, and their mighty
wings, wheeling so close around me, seemed to catch
me in their majestic sweep and almost to carry me
in swift, swinging circles through the empty air.
An ecstasy of excitement overcame me. I felt no
body, no weight of anything. I lost my head com-
pletely, and, seizing the eggs, rose to my feet and
stood upright in the nest.

The eagles swept nearer. I could feel the wind
from their wings. I could see the rolling of their
gleaming eyes, and the glint of the sun on their
snow-white necks. And as they dipped and turned
and careened over me, I came perilously near trying
to fly myself.

What a scene lay under me and rolled wide and
free to the very edge of the world ! The level marsh,
the blue, hazy bay, the far-off, unblurred horizon
beyond the bending hill of the sea ! The wild, free
wind from the bay blew in upon my face, the old
tree trembled and rocked beneath me, the screaming
eagles wove a mazy spell of double circles about me,
till I screamed back at them in wild delight.

The sound of my voice seemed to infuriate the
birds. The male turned suddenly in his round and
swooped directly at me. The movement was instantly
understood by his mate, who, thus emboldened, cut
under him and hurled herself downward, passing
with a vicious grab at my face. I dodged, or she
would have hit me.

42 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

For the moment I had forgotten where I stood ;
and, in dodging the eagle, I almost stepped over the
edge of the nest. I caught my balance and dropped
quickly to my knees, completely unnerved.

Fear like a panic took instant hold on me. Only
one desire possessed me — to get down. I crept to
the edge and looked over. The sight made me dizzy.
Sixty feet of almost empty air! Far down, a few
small limbs intervened between me and the ground.
But there was nothing by which to descend.

I was dismayed ; and my expression, my posture
— something, betrayed my confusion to the eagles.
They immediately lost all dread of me. While I was
looking over, one of them struck me a stinging blow
on the head, knocking my cap off into the air.

That started me. I must climb down or be knocked
over. If only I had continued with my channel to
the top ! If only that forked branch by which I as-
cended were within reach! But how could I back
over the flaring rim to my whole length and swing
my body under against the in ward -slanting nest
until my feet could touch the fork? But if I ever got
down, that was what I must do ; for the eagles gave
me no chance to cut a channel now.

Laying the eggs back for the time in the hollow,
I began tearing away the rim of the nest in order to
clear a place over which to back down.

I was momentarily in danger of being hurled off
by the birds ; for I could not watch them and work,

WHIPPED BY EAGLES 43

too. And they were growing bolder with every dash.
One of them, driving fearfully from behind, flattened
me out on the nest. Had the blow been delivered from
the front, I should have been knocked headlong to
the ground.

I was afraid to delay longer. A good-sized breach
was opened in the rim of the nest by this time.
And now, if the sticks would not pull out, I might
let myself over and reach the fork. Once my feet
touched that, I could manage the rest, I knew.

Digging my hands deep into the nest for a firm
hold, I began cautiously to back over the rough,
stubby rim, reaching with my feet toward the fork.

The eagles seemed to appreciate the opportunity
my awkward position offered them. I could not have
arranged myself more conveniently to their minds, I
am sure. And they made the most of it. I can laugh
now ; but the memory of it can still make me shiver,
too.

I had wriggled over just so that I could bend my
body at the waist and bring my legs against the nest
when a sharp stub caught in my clothes and held
me. I could get neither up nor down. My handhold
was of the most precarious kind, and I dared not let
go for a moment to get off the snag.

I tried to back out and push off from it, but it
seemed to come out with me. It must be broken ;
and pulling myself up, I dropped with all the force
I could put into my body. That loosened, but did

44 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

not break it. Suddenly, while I was resting between
the efforts, the thing gave way.

I was wholly unprepared. All my weight was in-
stantly thrown upon my hands. The jagged sticks
cut into my wrists, my grip was pried off, and I fell.

Once, twice, the stubs in the wall of the nest
caught and partly stopped me, then broke. I clutched
frantically at them, but could not hold. Then, almost
before I realized that I was falling, I hung suspended
between two limbs — the forks of the white oak
branch in the side of the nest.

I had been directly above it when the stub broke,
and had fallen through it ; and the two branches had
caught me right under both of my arms.

For a second I was too dazed to think. Then a
swish of wings, a hard blow on the neck, and a
shooting pain made my position clear. I was not
down yet nor out of danger. The angry birds still
had me in reach.

Hanging with one arm, I twisted round until the
other arm was free, then seized the branches and
swung under, but not before the eagles had given
me another raking dab.

Here beneath the branches, close up to the bottom
of the nest, I was quite out of the reach of the birds ;
and through the channel I had cut in my ascent, I
climbed quickly down into the tree.

It was now a mere matter of sliding to the ground.
But I was so battered and faint that I nearly turn-

WHIPPED BY EAGLES 45

bled. I was a sorry-looking boy — my clothing torn,
my hands bleeding, my head and neck clawed in a
dozen places.

But what did I do with the eagles' eggs? Why,
I allowed the old eagles to hatch them. What else
could I do ? or what better ?

CHAPTER VI

THANKSGIVING AT GRANDFATHER'S FARM

HANKSGIVING at Grand-
father's farm was more than
a holiday. It was a great date on
the calendar, for it divided the
year in halves as no other single
day of the three hundred and
sixty-five did. It marked the end
of the outdoors, and the begin-
ning of the indoors — the day
when everybody came home;
when along with them into the
house came all the outdoors, too,
as if the whole farm were brought
in to toast its toes before the
great hearth fire !
For the hearth fire was big enough and cheery

THANKSGIVING AT GRANDFATHER'S 47

enough. And so was the farmhouse — that is, if you
added the big barn and the crib-house and the
wagon-house and the dog-house and the hen-house
and the " spring-house ! "

Oh, there was plenty of room inside for everybody
and for everything ! And there needed to be ; for
did not everybody come home to Grandfather's for
Thanksgiving? And did not everything that any-
body could need for the winter, grow on Grand-
father's farm ?

And it all had to be brought in by Thanksgiving
Day — everything brought in, everything housed
and stored and battened down tight. The prepara-
tions began along in late October, continuing with
more speed as the days shortened and darkened and
hurried us into November. And they continued with
still more speed as the gray lowering clouds thickened
in the sky, and the wind began to whistle through
the oak grove. Then, with the first real cold snap,
the first swift flurry of snow, how the husking and
the stacking and the chopping went on !

Thanksgiving must find us ready for winter in-
doors and out.

The hay-mows were full to the beams where the
swallows built; the north and west sides of the barn-
yard were flanked with a deep wind-break of corn-
fodder that ran on down the old worm-fence each
side of the lane in yellow zigzag walls ; the big
wooden pump under the turn-o'-lane tree by the barn

48 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

was bundled up and buttoned to the tip of its drip-
ping nose; the bees by the currant bushes were
doubled-hived, the strawberries covered with hay,
the wood all split and piled, the cellar windows
packed, and the storm-doors put on.

The very cows had put on an extra coat, and
turned their collars up about their ears ; the turkeys
had changed their roost from the ridge-pole of the
corn-crib to the pearmain tree on the sunny side of
the wagon-house; the squirrels had finished their
bulky nests in the oaks ; the muskrats of the lower
pasture had completed their lodges; the whole farm
— house, barn, fields, and wood-lot — had shuffled
into its greatcoat and muffler and settled comfort-
ably down for the winter.

The old farmhouse was an invitation to winter.
It looked its joy at the prospect of the coming cold.
Low, weather-worn, mossy-shingled, secluded in its
wayward garden of box and bleeding-hearts, shel-
tered by its tall pines, grape-vined, hop-vined, clung
to by creeper and honeysuckle, it stood where the
roads divided, halfway between everywhere, un-
painted, unpretentious, as much a part of the land-
scape as the muskrat-lodge, and, like the lodge,
roomy, warm, and hospitable.

Round at the back, under the wide, open shed, a
door led into the kitchen ; another led into the living-
room ; another, into the store-room ; and two big,
slanting double-doors, scoured and slippery with

' THE LANTERN FLICKERS, THE MILK FOAMS, THE STORIES FLOW "

THANKSGIVING AT GRANDFATHER'S 49

four generations of sliders, covered the cavernous
way into the cellar. But they let the smell of apples
up, as the garret door let the smell of sage and thyme
come down ; while from the door of the store-room,
mingling with the odor of apples and herbs, filling
the whole house and all my early memories, came
the smell of broom-corn, came the sound of Grand-
father's loom.

For Grandfather in the winter made brooms —
the best brooms, I think, that ever were made. The
tall broom-corn was grown on the farm in the sum-
mer, ripened and cut and seeded, and then, as soon
as winter set in, was loomed and wired and sewed
into brooms.

But the cured and seeded broom-corn was not the
main thing, after all, that was brought in for the
winter. Behind the stove in the kitchen, stood the
sweet-potato box (a sweet potato, you know, must
be kept dry and warm). An ample, ten-barrel box it
was, fresh-papered like the walls, full of Jersey sweets
that were sweet — long, golden, syrupy potatoes,
such as grow only in the warm sandy soil of south-
ern New Jersey.

Against that big box in Grandmother's kitchen
stood the sea-chest, fresh with the same kitchen
paper and piled with wood. There was another such
chest in the living-room near the old fireplace, and
still another in Grandfather's work-room behind the
"template" stove.

50 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

But wood and warmth and sweet smells were not
all. There was music also, the music of life, of young
life and of old life — grandparents, grandchildren
(about twenty-eight of the latter). There were seven
of us alone — a girl at each end of the seven and
one in the middle. Thanksgiving always found us
all at Grandfather's and brimming full of thanks.

That, of course, was long, long ago. Things are
different nowadays. There are as many grandfathers,
I suppose, as ever ; but they don't make brooms in
the winter and live on farms.

They live in flats. The old farm with its open acres
has become a city street ; the generous old farmhouse
has become a speaking-tube, kitchenette, and bath —
all the "modern conveniences "; the cows have evapo-
rated into convenient cans of condensed " milk " ; the
ten-barrel box of potatoes has changed into a conven-
ient ten-pound bag, the wood-pile into a convenient
five-cent bundle of blocks tied up with a tarred string,
the fireplace into a convenient gas log, the seven
children into one or none, or into a little bull-terrier
pup.

But is it so ? No, it is not so — not so of a million
homes. For there is many an old-fashioned farm-
house still in the country, and many a new-fashioned
city house where there are more human children than
little bull-terrier pups.

And it is not so in my home, which is neither a
real farm nor yet a city home. For here are some

THANKSGIVING AT GRANDFATHER'S 51

small boys who live very much as I did when I was
a boy. No, they are not farmer's boys ; for I am not
a farmer, but only a " commuter " • — if you know
what that is. I go into a great city for my work ;
and when the day's work is done, I turn homeward
here to Mullein Hill — far out in the country. And
when the dark November nights come, I hang the
lantern high in the stable, as my father used to do,
while four shining faces gather round, as four small
boys seat themselves on upturned buckets behind the
cow. The lantern flickers, the milk foams, the stories
flow — " Bucksy " stories of the noble red-man ; and
stories of the heroes of old ; and marvelous stories
of that greatest hero of all — their father, far away
yonder when he was a boy, when there were so many
interesting things to do on Grandfather's farm just
before Thanksgiving Day.

CHAPTER VII

A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO DO THIS FALL
I

OU ought to go out into the fields
and woods as many as six times this
fall, even though you have to take a long
street-car ride to get out of the city. Let me
give you just six bits of sound advice about
going afield : —

First, go often to the same place, so that
you can travel over and over the same ground
and become very familiar with it. The first
trip you will not see much but woods and
fields. But after that, each succeeding walk
will show you particular things — this dead tree
with the flicker's hole, that old rail-pile with its
rabbit-hole — until, by and by, you will know every
turn and dip, every pile of stones, every hole and

THINGS TO DO THIS FALL 53

nest ; and you will find a thousand things that on
the first trip you didn't dream were there.

Secondly, when you go into the woods, go expect-
ing to see something in particular — always looking
for some particular nest, bird, heast, or plant. You
may not find that particular thing, but your eyes
will be sharpened by your expectation and purpose,
and you will be pretty sure therefore to see some-
thing. At worst you will come back with a disap-
pointment, and that is better than coming back
without a thing !

Thirdly, go off when you can alone. Don't be
selfish, unsociable, offish — by no means that. But
you must learn to use your own eyes and ears, think
your own thoughts, make your own discoveries, and
follow the hints and hopes that you alone can have.
Go with the school class for a picnic, but for wood-
craft go alone.

Fourthly, learn first of all in the woods to be as
silent as an Indian and as patient as a granite rock.
Practice standing still when the mosquitoes sing,
and fixing your mind on the hole under the stump
instead of the hole the mosquito is boring between
your eyes.

Fifthly, go out in every variety of weather, and
at night, as well as during the day. There are three
scenes to every day — morning, noon, and early even-
ing— when the very actors themselves are changed.
To one who has never been in the fields at daybreak,

54

THE FALL OF THE YEAR

the world is so new, so fresh and strange, as to seem
like a different planet. And then the evening —
the hour of dusk and the deeper, darker night ! Go
once this autumn into the woods at night.

And lastly, don't go into the woods as if they
were a kind of Noah's Ark ; for you cannot enter
the door and find all the animals standing in a row.
You will go a great many times before seeing them
all. Don't be disappointed if they are not so plenti-
ful there as they are in your books. Nature books
are like menageries — the animals are caught and
caged for you. The woods are better than books
and just as full of things, as soon as you learn to

take a hint, to
read the signs,
to put two and
two together
and get —
four — four
paws — black
paws, with a long black snout, a big ringed and
tail — a coon !

Whether you live in the heart of a great city or in
the open country, you ought to begin this fall to learn
the names and habits of the birds and beasts (snakes,
lizards, turtles, toads ! ) that live wild in your region.
Even when all the summer birds have gone south

THINGS TO DO THIS FALL

55

for the winter, there will remain in your woods and
fields crows, jays, juncos, tree sparrows, chickadees,
kinglets, nuthatches, screech owls, barred owls, —
perhaps even snowy owls, — quails, partridges, gold-
finches, with now and then a flock of crossbills,

snow buntings, and other northern visitors, and
even a flicker, robin, and bluebird left over from the
fall migrations. These are plenty to begin on ; and
yet, as they are so few, compared with the numbers
of the summer, the beginner's work is thus all the
easier in the autumn.

Ill

You should go out one of these frosty mornings
for chestnuts, if they grow in your woods; or for
" shagbarks," if you live in New England ; for
black walnuts, if you live in the Middle States ; for
pecan nuts, if you live in the Gulf States ; for but-

56 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

ternuts, if you live in the
states of the
Middle West ;

for — what kind of nuts can
you not go for, if you live in
California where they make every-
thing grow ! It matters little whether
you go for paper-shelled English
walnuts or for plate-armored pignuts
so long as you go. It is the going
£y that is worth while.

IV

You ought to go " cocooning " this fall — to
sharpen your eyes. But do not go often ; for once
you begin to look for cocoons, you are in danger of
seeing nothing else — except brown leaves. And how
many brown leaves, that look like cocoons, there
are ! They tease you to vexation. But a day now and
then " cocooning " will do you no harm ; indeed,
it will cultivate your habit of concentration and close
seeing as will no other kind of hunting I know.

Bring home with you the big brown silky cocoons
of cecropia — the largest cocoon you will find,
lashed all along its length to its twig, and usually
near the ground. Look on the black cherry, the
barberry, sassafras, and roadside and garden trees
for the harder, whiter cocoon of the promethea
moth. This hangs by its tip, because the caterpillar

THINGS TO DO THIS FALL

57

has begun his house by using the leaf, spinning it
into the cocoon as part of its walls, much as does
the wretched " brown-tail." The gray cocoons, or
rather nests, of this "brown-tail" moth you must
bring home to burn, for they are one of our greatest
pests. You will find them full of tiny caterpillars as
you tear them open.

Bring home your collection and, with the help of
such a book as " Moths and Butterflies " by Mary C.
Dickerson, identify them and hang them up for
their " coming out " in the spring.

near the

If you live in the city, you ought to go up fre-
quently to your V roof and watch for the birds
that fly over. If mV in one of our many cities
- JpT" water, you will have
a chance that those
in the country sel-
dom have, of seeing
the seabirds — the
~N white her-
ring gulls

(the young gulls are brown, and look like a different

58

THE FALL OF THE YEAR

species), as they pass over whistling plaintively, and
others of the wild seafowl, that merely to hear and
see in the smoky air of the city, is almost as refresh-
ing as an ocean voyage. Then there are the parks
and public gardens — never without their birds and,
at the fall migrating time, often sheltering the very
rarest of visitors.

VI

In order to give point and purpose to one of these
autumn outings, you should take your basket, or
botanizing can, and scour the
woods and fields for autumn
berries. No bunch of
flowers in June could
be lovelier than the
bunch of autumn ber-
ries that you can
gather from thicket
and wayside to carry
home. And then,
in order to enjoy
the trip all over
again, read James
Buckham's exqui-
site story, " A
Quest for Fall

Berries," in his book, " Where Town and Country
Meet."

THINGS TO DO THIS FALL 59

VII

Take your botany can on a trip toward the end
of November and see how many blossoming flowers
you can bring home from the woods. Wild flowers
after Thanksgiving in any northern state? Make
the search, on all the southern slopes and in all the
sheltered corners and see for yourselves. When you
get back, you will want to read Mr. Bradford Torrey 's
account of the flowers that he found blossoming out
of doors in New England in the month of Novem-
ber. But who is Mr. Bradford Torrey ? and where
can you find this account of his November walk ?
You do not know? Well, then there is something
more for you to do this fall.

VIII

While you are finding out who Mr. Torrey is and
what he has written, you should also get acquainted
with John Burroughs, Olive Thorne Miller, Thoreau,
Frank Bolles, William Hamilton Gibson, C. C. Ab-
bott, Edward B reck, Gilbert White, and — but these
will do for this fall. Don't fail to read dear old
Gilbert White's " Natural History of Selborne " ;
though perhaps we grown-ups like it better than you
may this fall. If you don't understand Gilbert White,
then read this year " The Life of a Scotch Natural-
ist "by Samuel Smiles, and Arabella Buckley's two
books, " Life and Her Children," and " Winners in
Life's Race."

60 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

IX

You ought to tie up a piece of suet for the birds ;
keep your cat in the house, except during the mid-
dle of the day, and — but I shall tell you no more.
There is no end to the interesting things to do in
your study of the out of doors and in your tramps
afield this autumn.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MUSKRATS ARE BUILDING

E have had a week of almost un-
•// broken rain, and the water is stand-
ing over the swampy meadow. It
is a dreary stretch, — this wet, sedgy
land in the cold twilight, — drearier
than any part of the woods or the
upland pastures. They are empty;
' ' ' ^ but the meadow is flat and wet, it is
naked and all unsheltered. And a
November night is falling.

The darkness deepens. A raw wind is rising. At
nine o'clock the moon swings round and full to the
crest of the ridge, and pours softly over. I button
my heavy ulster close, and in my rubber boots go
down to the stream and follow it out to the middle
of the meadow, where it meets the main ditch. There

62 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

is a sharp turn here toward the swamp ; and here at
the bend, behind a clump of black alders, I sit quietly
down and wait.

I have come out to the bend to watch the muskrats
building; for that small mound up the ditch is not
an old haycock, but a half-finished muskrat house.

As I wait, the moon climbs higher over the woods.
The water on the meadow shivers in the light. The
wind bites through my heavy coat and drives me
back, but not before I have seen one, two, three
little creatures scaling the walls of the house with
loads of mud-and-reed mortar. I am driven back by
the cold, but not before I know that here in the
desolate meadow is being rounded off a lodge, thick-
walled and warm, and proof against the longest,
bitterest of winters.

This is near the end of November. My fire-wood
is in the cellar ; I am about ready to put on the
double-windows and the storm-doors. The muskrats
are even now putting on theirs, for their house is
all but finished. Winter is at hand : but we are pre-
pared, the muskrats and I.

Throughout the summer the muskrats had no
house, only their tunnels into the sides of the ditch,
their roadways out into the grass, and their beds
under the tussocks or among the roots of the old
stumps. All those months the water was low in the
ditch, and the beds among the tussocks were safe
and dry enough.

"TO-NIGHT THERE IS NO LOAFING ABOUT THE LODGE1

THE MUSKRATS ARE BUILDING 63

Now the November rains have filled river and
ditch, flooded the tunnels, and crept up into the
beds under the tussocks. Even a muskrat will creep
out of his bed when cold, wet water creeps in.
What shall he do for shelter? He knows. And long
before the rains begin, he picks out the place for a
house. He does not want to leave his meadow, there-
fore the only thing to do is to build, — move from
under the tussock out upon the top of the tussock;
and here, in its deep, wiry grass, make a new bed high
and dry above the rising water ; and close this new
bed in with walls that circle and dome, and defy the
very winter.

Such a house will require a great deal of work
to build. Why should not two or three muskrats
combine — make the house big enough to hold
them all, save labor and warmth, too, and, withal,
live sociably together? So they left, each one his
single bed, and, joining efforts, started, about the
middle of October, to build this winter house.

Slowly, night after night, the domed walls have
been rising, although for several nights at a time I
could see no apparent progress with the work. The
builders were in no hurry. The cold was far off. But
it is coming^ and to-night it feels near and keen.
And to-night there is no loafing about the lodge.

When this house is done, when the last hod of
mud plaster has been laid on, — then the rains may
descend and the floods come, but it will not fall. It

64 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

is built upon a tussock ; and a tussock — did you
ever try to pull up a tussock?

Winter may descend, and boys and foxes may
come — and they will come, but not before the walls
are frozen. Then, let them come. The house will
stand. It is boy-proof, almost ; it is entirely rain-,
cold-, and fox-proof. I have often seen where the
fox has gone round and round the house in the
snow, and where, at places, he has attempted to dig
into the frozen mortar. But it was a foot thick, as
hard as flint, and utterly impossible for his pick and
shovel.

I said the floods, as well as the fox, may come.
So they may, ordinarily; but along in March, when
one comes as a freshet and rises to the dome of the
house, then it fills the bed-chamber to the ceiling
and drowns the dwellers out. I remember a freshet
once in the end of February that flooded Lupton's
Pond and drove the muskrats of the whole pond
village to their ridgepoles, to the bushes, and to
whatever wreckage the waters brought along.

" The best-laid schemes o' mice and men
Gang aft agley "

— and of muskrats, too.

But not very often do the muskrats' plans go thus
agley. For muskrats and wood mice and birds and
bees, and even the very trees of the forest, have a kind
of natural foresight. They all look ahead, at the ap-
proach of autumn, and begin to provide against the

THE MUSKRATS ARE BUILDING 65

(Joining cold. Yet, weather-wise as a muskrat may be,
still he cannot know all that may happen ; he can-
not be ready for everything. And so, if now and
then, he should prove foresight to be vain, he only
shows that his plans and our plans, his life and our
lives, are very much alike.

Usually, however, the muskrat's plans work out
as he would have them. His foresight proves to be
equal to all that the winter can bring. On the
coldest winter days I shall look out over the bleak
white waste to where his house shows, a tiny mound
in the snow, and think of him safe and warm inside,
as safe and warm as I am, in my house, here on the
hilltop.

Indeed, I think the muskrat will be the warmer ;
for my big house here on Mullein Hill is sometimes
cold. And the wind ! If only I could drive the winter
wind away from the corners of the house ! But
the house down in the meadow has no corners. It
has walls, mud walls, so thick and round that the
shrieking wind sweeps past unheard by the dwellers
within ; and all unheeded the cold creeps over and
over the low thatch, to crawl back and stiffen upon
the meadow.

The doors of this meadow house swing wide open
throughout the winter; for they are in the bottom
of the house, beneath the water, where only the
muskrat can enter. Just outside the doors, down
under the water and the roof of ice that covers all

66 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

the flooded meadow, are fresh calamus roots, afflB
iris and arum — food in abundance, no matter how
long the winter lasts.

No, the winter has not yet come; but it is coming,
for the muskrats are building. Let it come. Let the
cold crawl stiff and gray across the meadow. Let
the whirling snow curl like smoke about the pointed
top of the little tepee down by the meadow ditch.
Let the north wind do its worst. For what care the
dwellers in that thick-walled lodge beneath the snow?
Down under the water their doors are open; their
roadways up the ditches as free as in the summer ;
and the stems of the sedges just as juicy and pink
and tender.

The muskrats are building. The buds are leav-
ing. Winter is coming. I must get out my own
storm-windows and double-doors ; for even now a
fire is blazing cheerily on my wide, warm hearth.

CHAPTER IX

THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW

" The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will poor Robin do then,
Poor thing ? "

ND what will Muskrat do? and Chip-
munk ? and Whitefoot, the wood
mouse? and Chickadee? and the
whole world of poor things out
of doors?

Never fear. Robin knows as well as you that
the north wind doth blow, and is now far away on
his journey to the South ; Muskrat knows, too, and
is building his warm winter lodge ; Chipmunk has
already made his bed deep down under the stone
wall, where zero weather is unheard of ; Whitefoot,
the wood mouse, has stored his hollow poplar stub
full of acorns, and, taking possession of Robin's de-
serted nest near by, has roofed it and lined it and
turned it into a cosey, cold-proof house, while Chick-

68 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

adee, dear thing — has done nothing at all. Not so

much as a bug or a single beetle's egg has he stored

up for the winter. But he knows where there is a

big piece of suet

for him on a

certain

lilac

bush.

And he

knows

where there is a

snug little hole in

a certain elm tree limb. The north wind may blow,

blow, blow ! It cannot get through Chickadee's

feathers, nor daunt for one moment his brave little

heart.

The north wind sweeping the bare stubble fields
and winding its shivering horn through the leafless
trees does sometimes pierce my warm coat and strike
a chill into my heart. Then how empty and cold seems
the outdoor world ! How deadly the touch of the win-
ter ! How fearful the prospect of the coming cold !

Does Muskrat think so ? Does Whitefoot ? Does
Chickadee ? Not at all, for they are ready.

The preparations for hard weather may be seen
going on all through the autumn, beginning as far
back as the flocking of the swallows late in July. Up
to that time no one had thought of a coming winter,
it would seem ; but, one day, there upon the tele-

THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW 69

graph-wires were the swallows — the first sign that
the getting ready for winter has begun.

The great migratory movements of the birds are
very mysterious ; but they were in the beginning, I
think, and are still, for the most part, mere shifts to
escape the cold. Yet not so much to escape the cold
itself do the birds migrate, as to find a land of food.
When the northland freezes, when river and lake are
sealed beneath the ice and the soil is made hard as
flint, then the food supplies for most of the birds
are utterly cut off, causing them to move southward
ahead of the cold, or starve.

There are, however, a few of the seed-eating birds,
like the quail, and some of the insect-eaters, like the
chickadee, who are so well provided for that they
can stay and survive the winter. But the great ma-
jority of the birds, because they have no storehouse
nor barn, must take wing and fly away from the lean
and hungry cold.

And I am glad to see them go. The thrilling honk
of the flying wild geese out of the November sky
tells me that the hollow forests and closing bays of
the vast desolate North are empty now, except for
the few creatures that find food and shelter in the
snow.

Here in my own small woods and marshes there
is much getting ready, much comforting assurance
that Nature is quite equal to herself, that winter is
not approaching unawares. There will be great lack,

70 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

no doubt, before there is plenty again ; there will be
suffering and death. But what with the building,
the strange deep sleeping, and the harvesting, there
will be also much comfortable, much joyous and
sociable, living.

Long before the muskrats began to build, even
before the swallows commenced to flock, my chip-
munks started their win-
ter stores. I don't know
which began his work
first, which kept harder
at it, Chipmunk or the provident ant.
The ant has a great reputation for thrift, and verses
have been written about her. But Chipmunk is just
as thrifty. So is the busy bee.

It is the thought of approaching winter that keeps
the bee busy far beyond her summer needs. Much
of her labor is entirely for the winter. By the first
of August she has filled the brood chamber of the
hive with honey — forty pounds of it, enough for
the hatching bees and for the whole colony until the
willows tassel again. But who knows what the winter
may be? how cold and long drawn out into the
coming May ? So the harvesting is pushed with vigor
on, until the frosts kill the last of the autumn asters
— on, until fifty, a hundred, or even three hundred
pounds of honey are sealed in the combs, and the
colony is safe should the sun not shine again for a
year and a day.

THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW 71

The last of the asters have long since gone ; so
have the witch-hazels. All is quiet about the hives.
The bees have formed into their warm winter clusters
upon the combs ; and except " when come the calm,
mild days," they will fly no more until March or
April. I will half close their entrances — and so help
them to put on their storm-doors.

The whole out of doors around me is like a great
beehive, stored and sealed for the winter, its swarm-
ing life close-clustered, and safe and warm against
the coming cold.

I stand along the edge of the hillside here and
look down the length of its frozen slope. There is
no sign of life. The brown leaves have drifted into
the mouths of the woodchuck holes, as if every
burrow were forsaken ; sand and sticks have washed
in, too, littering and choking the doorways. A
stranger would find it hard to believe that all of my
forty-six woodchucks are gently snoring at the bot-
toms of these old uninteresting holes. Yet here they
are, and quite out of danger, sleeping the «leep of
the furry, the fat, and the forgetful.

The woodchuck's manner of providing for winter
is very curious. Winter spreads far and fast, and
Woodchuck, in order to keep ahead, out of danger,
would need wings. But wings weren't given him.
Must he perish then? Winter spreads far, but it
does not go deep — down only about four feet; and
Woodchuck, if he cannot escape overland, can,

72 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

perhaps, escape underload. So down he goes through
the winter, down into a mild and even temperature,
Jive feet away — only five feet, but as far away from
the snow and the cold as Bobolink among the reeds
of the distant Orinoco.

Indeed, Woodchuck's is a farther journey and
even more wonderful than Bobolink's ; for these five
feet carry him to the very gates of death. That he
will return with Bobolink, that he will come up alive
with the spring out of this dark way, is passing
strange.

Muskrat built him a house, and under the spread-
ing ice turned all the meadow into a well-stocked
cellar. Beaver built him a
dam, cut and an-
. chored under water

sticks near his lodge, so that
he too would be under cover
when the ice formed, with an
abundance of tender bark at
hand. Chipmunk spent half of
his summer laying up food near his underground
nest. But Woodchuck simply digged him a hole,—
a grave, — then ate until no particle more of fat
could be got within his baggy hide, then crawled
into his bed to sleep until the dawn of spring !

This is his shift ! This is the length to which he
goes, because he has no wings, and because he can-

THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW 73

not cut, cure, and store away, in the depths of the
stony hillside, clover hay enough to last him through
the winter. The beaver cans his fresh food in cold
water ; the chipmunk selects long-keeping things and
buries them ; but the woodchuck simply fattens him-
self, then buries himself, and sleeps — and lives!

" The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,"

but what good reason is there for our being daunted
at the prospect? Robin and all the others are well
prepared. Even the wingless frog, who is also with-
out fur or feathers or fat, even he has no fear at
the sound of the cold winds. Nature provides for
him, too, in her own motherly way. All he has to
do is to dig into the mud at the bottom of the ditch
and sleep — and sometimes freeze !

No matter. If the cold works down and freezes
him into the mud, he never knows. He will thaw
out as good as new ; he will sing again for joy and
love as soon as his heart warms up enough to beat.
I have seen frogs frozen into the middle of solid
lumps of ice. Drop the lump on the floor, and the
frog would break out like a fragment of the ice
itself. And this has happened more than once to the
same frog without causing him the least ache or pain.
He would gradually limber up, and croak, and look
as wise as ever.

The north wind may blow, for it is by no means
a cheerless prospect, this wood-and-meadow world of

74 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

mine in the gray November light. The grass-blades
are wilting, the old leaves are falling ; but no square
foot of greensward will the winter kill, nor a single
tree perhaps in all my wood-lot. There will be little
less of life next April because of this winter. The
winter birds will suffer most, and a few may die.

Last February, I came upon two partridges in the
snow, dead of hunger and cold. It was after an ex-
tremely long " severe spell " ; but this was not the only
cause. These two birds since fall had been feeding
regularly in the dried fodder corn that stood shocked
over the field. One day all the corn was carted away.
The birds found their supply of food suddenly cut off,
and, unused to foraging the fence-rows and tangles
for wild seeds, they seem to have given up the strug-
gle at once, although within easy reach of plenty.

Hardly a minute's flight away was a great thicket
of dwarf sumac covered with berries. There were

bayberries, rose-
hips, greenbrier,
' bittersweet,black

alder, and checkerberries
^ia^ *^ey might have
found. These berries would have

^een kar(* ^are> doubtless, a^er

an unstinted supply of sweet corn;
but still they were plentiful and would have been
sufficient had the birds made use of them.

The smaller birds that stay through the winter,

THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW 75

like the tree sparrow and the junco, feed upon the
weeds and grasses that ripen unmolested along the
roadsides and in the waste places. A mixed flock of
these small birds lived several days last winter upon
the seeds of the ragweed in my mowing-field.

The weeds came up in the early fall after the field
was sowed to clover and timothy. They threatened
to choke out the grass. I looked at them and thought
with dismay of how they would cover the field by
another fall. After a time the snow came, a foot
and a half of it, till only the tops of the seedy rag-
weeds showed above the level white. Then the jun-
cos, goldfinches, and tree sparrows came; and there
was a five-day shucking of ragweed seed on the
crusty snow — five days of life and plenty for the
birds.

Then I looked again, and thought that weeds and
winters, which were made when the world was made
— that even ragweeds and winters have a part in
the beautiful divine scheme of things.

" The north wind doth blow
And we shall have snow " —

but the wild geese are going over ; the wild mice
have harvested their acorns ; the bees have clustered ;
the woodchucks have gone to sleep ; the muskrats
have nearly finished their lodge ; the sap in the big
hickory tree by the side of the house has crept down
out of reach of the fingers of the frost. And what
has become of Robin, poor thing ?

CHAPTER X

AN OUTDOOR LESSON

HAVE had many a person ask me, " What
is the best way to learn about the out of
doors ? " and I always answer, " Don't try
to learn about it, but first go out of the
house and get into the out of doors. Then
open both eyes, use both of your ears, and
stand in one place stock still as long as
you can ; and you will soon know the out of doors
itself, which is better than knowing about it."

" But," says my learner, " if I go out of the house,
I don't get into the out of doors at all, but into a
city street ! "

Look there — in the middle of the street! What
is it? An English sparrow ? Yes, an English sparrow
— six English sparrows. Are they not a part of the
out of doors? And look up there, over your head —
a strip of sky ? Yes — is not a strip of blue sky a part
of the out of doors?

Now let me tell you how I learned an outdoor
lesson one night along a crowded city street.

It was a cold, wet night ; and the thick, foggy
twilight, settling down into the narrow streets, was
full of smoke and smell and chill. A raw wind blew
in from the sea and sent a shiver past every corner.

AN OUTDOOR LESSON 77

The street lights blinked, the street mud glistened,
the street noises clashed and rattled, and the street
crowds, poured up and down and bore me along
with them.

I was homesick — homesick for the country. I
longed to hear the sound of the wind in the pine
trees ; I longed to hear the single far-away bark of the
dog on the neighboring farm, or the bang of a barn-
door, or the clack of a guinea going to roost. It was
half-past five, and thousands of clerks were pouring
from the closing stores; but I was lonely, homesick
for the quiet, the wideness, the trees and sky of the
country.

Feeling thus, and seeing only the strange faces
all about me, and the steep narrow walls of the street
high above me, I drifted along, until suddenly I
caught the sound of bird voices shrill and sharp
through the din.

I stopped, but was instantly jostled out of the
street, up against a grim iron fence, to find myself
peering through the pickets into an ancient ceme-
tery in the very heart of Boston.

As I looked, there loomed up in the fog and rain
overhead the outlines of three or four gaunt trees,
whose limbs were as thick with sparrows as they had
ever been with leaves. A sparrow roost ! Birds, ten
thousand birds, gone to roost in the business section
of a great city, with ten thousand human beings
passing under them as they slept !

78 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

I got in behind a big waste-barrel by the iron fence
and let the crowd surge past. It was such a sight as
I had never seen. I had seen thousands of chimney
swallows go to roast in the deserted chimneys of a
great country house ; I had many a time gone down
at night to the great crow-roost in the pines at
Cubby Hollow ; but I had never stumbled upon a
bird-roost on a crowded city street before !

The hurrying throng behind me thinned and
straggled while I waited, watching by the iron fence.
The wind freshened, the mist thickened into fine
rain that came slanting down through the half-lighted
trees ; the sleeping sparrows twittered and shifted
uneasily on the limbs.

The streets were being deserted. It was going to
be a wild night on the water, and a wild night in
the swaying, creaking tops of these old elm trees.
I shivered at the thought of the sparrows sleeping
out in such a night as this, and turned away toward
my own snug roost hardly two blocks away.

The night grew wilder. The wind rattled down
our street past a hundred loose shutters ; the rain
slapped against the windows, and then stopped as
a heavy gust curled over the line of roofs opposite.
I thought of the sparrows. Had they been driven
from the tossing limbs? Could they cling fast in
such a wind, and could they sleep?

Going to the window I looked down into the
street. Only the electric light at the corner showed

AN OUTDOOR LESSON 79

through the blur of the storm. The street was
empty.

I slipped into my coat and went out; not even a
policeman was in sight. Only the whirling sheets of
rain, only the wild sounds of the wind were with
me. The lights flared, but only to fill the streets
with fantastic shadows and to open up a yawning
cavern in every deep, dark doorway.

Keeping in the lee of the shuttered buildings, I
made my way to the sparrow roost. I shall never
forget the sight ! Not a sparrow had left his perch,
but every bird had now turned, facing the wind—
breasting the wind, I should say ; for every head
was under a wing, as near as I could make out, and
every breast was toward the storm. Here, on the
limbs, as close as beads on a string, they clu-ng and
rocked in the arms of the wind, every one with his
feathers tight to his body, his tail lying out flat on
the storm.

Now there is the outdoor lesson I learned, and
that is how I learned it. And what was the lesson ?
Why, this: that you are not shut away from Nature
even in the heart of a great city ; that the out of
doors lies very close about you, as you hurry down
a crowded city street.

CHAPTER XI

LEAFING

10, you never went "leafing" —
not unless you are simon-
pure country-bred. You do
not know what the word
means. You cannot find it
in the unabridged diction-
ary— not in the sense in which I am using it. But
there are many good words we country people use
that are not, perhaps, in the dictionary.

And what do I mean by " leafing " ? Get down
that bundle of meal sacks, hitch into the one-horse
hay-rig, throw in the rakes, and come. We are going
into the woods for pig-bedding, for leaves to keep
the pigs dry and warm this winter!

You never went after leaves for the pigs ? Perhaps
you never even had a pig. But a pig is worth having,
if only to see the comfort he takes in the big bed of
dry leaves you give him in the sunny corner of his
pen. And if leafing had no other reward, the thought
of the snoozing, snoring pig buried to his winking
snout in the bed, would give joy and zest enough to
the labor.

But leafing, like every other humble labor, has its

LEAFING 81

own rewards, not the least of them being the leaves
themselves and the getting of them !

We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the
back wood-road, and turn off upon an old stumpy
track over which cord wood was carted years ago.
Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded
hill, the winds have whirled the oak and maple
leaves into drifts almost knee-deep.

We are off the main road, far into the heart of
the woods. We straddle stumps ; bend down saplings ;
stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet birch ; tack
and tip and tumble and back through the tight
squeezes between the trees ; and finally, after a pro-
digious amount of whoa-ing and oh-ing and squeal-
ing and screeching, we land right side up and so
headed that we can start the load out toward the
open road.

You can yell all you want to when you go leafing ;
yell at every stump you hit ; yell every time a limb
knocks off your hat or catches you under the chin ;
yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on the
twigs and stands you meekly on your head in the
bottom of the rig. You can screech and howl and
yell like the wild Indian that you are, you can dive
and wrestle in the piles of leaves and cut all the
crazy capers you know; for this is a Saturday, these
are the wild woods and the noisy leaves, and who is
there looking on besides the mocking jays and the
crows ?

82 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen among
the tall, naked trees ; the dull cloud hangs low above
the ridge ; and through the cold gray of the maple
swamp below you, peers the face of Winter.

You start up the ridge with your rake and draw
down another pile, thinking, as you work, of the
pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm glow all
over your body strikes into your heart. You rake
away as if it were your own bed you were gathering
— as really it is. He that rakes for his pig, rakes also
for himself. A merciful man is merciful to his beast ;
and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a
blanket of down over his own winter bed.

Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull
on my boots at ten o'clock and go my round at the
barn? Yet it warms my feet through and through
to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her
cud, and the horse cleaning up his supper hay, stand-
ing to his fetlocks in his golden bed of new rye-
straw ; and then, going to the pig's pen, to hear him
snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in
the depths of his leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms
my heart, too !

So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to
have a pig to work for ! What zest and purpose it
lends to one's raking and piling and storing ! If I
could get nothing else to spend myself on, I should
surely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in
the woods, I should be obliged, occasionally, to carry

LEAFING 83

a rake and a bag with me — much better things to
take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to
scratch into light a number of objects that would
never come within the range of opera-glass or gun
or walking stick. To see things through a twenty-
four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as
through a microscope magnifying twenty-four diam-
eters.

And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp
lookout for what the rake uncovers — here, under a
rotten stump, a hatful of acorns, probably gathered
by the white-footed wood mouse. For the stump
gives at the touch of the rake, and a light kick
topples it down the hill, spilling out a big nest of
feathers and three dainty little creatures that scurry
into the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are
the white-footed wood mice, long-tailed, big-eared,
and as clean and high-bred looking as greyhounds.

Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes,
we dislodge a large stone, exposing a black patch of
fibrous roots and leaf mould, in which something
moves and disappears. Scooping up a double hand-
ful of the mould, we capture a little red-backed sala-
mander.

This is not* the "red" salamander that Mr.
Burroughs tells us is "the author of that fine plaintive
piping to be heard more or less frequently, according
to the weather, in our summer and autumn woods."
His " red " salamander is really a " dull orange,

84 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

variegated with minute specks or spots," a species
I have never found here in my New England
woods.

Nor have I ever suspected my red-backed salaman-
der of piping; though he may do it, as may the
angleworms, for aught I am able to hear, so filled
with whir of iron wheels are my dull ears. But listen !
Something piping! Above the rustle of the leaves
we also hear a "fine plaintive" sound — no, a shrill
and ringing little racket, rather, about the bigness
of a penny whistle.

Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the
call — it seems to speak out of every tree trunk — and
find the piper clinging to a twig, no salamander at
all, but a tiny tree-frog, Pickering's hyla, his little
bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally
the scattered summer by his tiny, mighty "skirl."
Take him nose and toes, he is surely as much as an
inch long, not very large to pipe against the north
wind turned loose in the leafless woods.

We go back to our raking. Above us, among the
stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christmas fern ;
around the foot of the trees we uncover trailing clus-
ters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crim-
son berries; we rake up the prince's pine, pipsissewa,
creeping Jennie, and wintergreen red with ripe ber-
ries,— a whole bouquet of evergreens, — exquisite,
fairy-like forms, that later shall gladden our Christ-
mas table.

'BUT COME, BOYS, GET AFTER THOSE BAGS I"

LEAFING 85

But how they gladden and cheer the October
woods! Summer dead? Hope all gone? Life van-
ished away ? See here, under this big pine, a whole
garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready
to bloom ! The snows shall come before their sweet
eyes open ; but open they will at the very first touch
of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake
up in saucers of clean water in our sunny south
windows.

Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us ! We make a
clean sweep down the hillside, "jumping" a rabbit
from its form, or bed, under a brush-pile ; discovering
where a partridge roosts in alow-spreading hemlock;
coming upon a snail cemetery, in a hollow hickory
stump ; turning up a yellow-jacket's nest, built two-
thirds underground ; tracing the tunnel of a bob-
tailed mouse in its purposeless windings in the leaf
mould; digging into a woodchuck's —

" But come, boys, get after those bags ! It is leaves
in the hay-rig that we want, not woodchucks at the
bottom of woodchuck holes." Two small boys catch
up a bag and hold it open, while the third boy stuffs
in the crackling leaves. Then I come along with my
big feet and pack the leaves in tight, and onto the
rig goes the bulging thing !

Exciting ? If you can 't believe it exciting, hop
up on the load and let us jog you home. Swish ! bang !
thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt !— Hold on to your
ribs! Look out for the stump ! Is n't it fun to go leaf-

•

86 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

ing? Isn't it fun to do anything that your heart does
with you — even though you do it for a pig?

Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags of
leaves. See him caper, spin on his toes, shake him-
self, and curl his tail. That curl is his laugh. We
double up and weep when we laugh hard ; but the
pig can't weep, and he can't double himself up, so
he doubles up his tail. There is where his laugh comes
off, curling and kinking in little spasms of pure pig

Boosh ! Boosh ! he snorts, and darts around the
pen like a whirlwind, scattering the leaves in forty
ways, to stop short — the shortest stop ! — and fall
to rooting for acorns.

He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest, —
this snow-white, sawed-off, pug-faced little porker
of mine — ages and ages ago. But he still remem-
bers the smell of the forest leaves ; he still knows
the taste of the acorn-mast ; he is still wild pig in his
soul.

And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed sav-
ages who roamed the forest hunting him — ages and
ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember the smell
of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest fruits
— and of pig, roast pig ! And if the pig in his heart
is still a wild boar, no less are we, at times, wild
savages in our hearts.

Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go
" leafing." I want to give my pig a taste of acorns,

LEAFING 87

and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep into that he
cannot see his pen. I can feel the joy of it myself.
No, I do not live in a pen ; but then, I might, if once
in a while I did not go leafing, did not escape now
and then from my little daily round into the wide,
wild woods — my ancestral home.

CHAPTER XII

A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL

I

^ OU ought to hear the scream
of the hen-hawks circling
high in the air. In August and
September and late into October,
if you listen in the open country,
you will hear their piercing whistle, —
shrill, exultant scream comes nearer
to describing it, — as they sail and sail a mile away
in the sky.

II

You ought to go out upon some mowing hill or
field of stubble and hear the crickets, then into the
apple orchard and hear the katydids, then into the
high grass and bushes along the fence and hear the
whole stringed chorus of green grasshoppers, katy-

THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL 89

dids, and crickets. You have heard them all your
life ; but the trouble is that, because you have heard
them so constantly in the autumn, and because one
player after another has come gradually into the or-
chestra, you have taken them as part of the natural
course of things and have never really heard them in-
dividually, to know what parts they play. Now any-
body can hear a lion roar, or a mule bray, or a loon
laugh his wild crazy laugh over a silent mountain
lake, and know what sound it is ; but who can hear a
cricket out of doors, or a grasshopper, and know
which is which ?

Ill

Did you ever hear a loon laugh ? You ought to.
I would go a hundred miles to hear that weird,
meaningless, melancholy, maniacal laughter of the
loon, or great northern diver, as the dusk comes down
over some lonely
lake in the wil-
derness of the
far North. From
Maine westward
to northern Illi-
nois you may listen for him in
early autumn ; then, when the mi-
gration begins, anywhere south to the Gulf of
Mexico. You may never hear the call of the bull
moose in the northern woods, nor the howl of a coy-
ote on the western praires, nor the wild cac, cac, cac

90

THE FALL OF THE YEAR

of the soaring eagles, nor the husky yap, yap, yap
of the fox. But, if you do, "make a note of it," as
Captain Cuttle would say ; for the tongues that utter
this wild language are fast ceasing to speak to us.

IV
One strangely sweet, strangely wild voice that you

still may hear in our old apple orchards, is the whim-
pering, whinnying voice of the
little screech owl. " When night
comes," says the bird book, " one
may hear the screech owl's trem-
ulous, wailing whistle. It is a
weird, melancholy call, welcomed
only by those who love Nature's
voice, whatever be the medium
through which she speaks." Now
listen this autumn for the screech
owl ; listen until the weird, mel-
ancholy call is welcomed by you,
until the shiver that creeps up
your back turns off through your

hair, as you hear the low plaintive voice speaking to

you out of the hollow darkness, out of the softness

and the silence of night.

You ought to hear the brown leaves rustling un-
der your feet.

THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL 91

" Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead ;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread."

And they should rustle to your tread as well.
Scuff along in them where they lie in deep windrows
by the side of the road ; and hear them also, as the
wind gathers them into a whirling flurry and sends
them rattling over -the fields.

VI

You ought to hear the cry of the blue jay and the
caw of the crow in the autumn woods.

" The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day."

Everybody knows those lines of Bryant, because
everybody has heard that loud scream of the jay in
the lonesome woods, and the caw, caw, caiv of the
sentinel crow from the top of some
tall tree. The robins may not be all
gone, for I heard and saw a flock of
them this year in January; but they
are silent now, and so many of the
birds have gone, and the woods have
become so empty, that the cries of
the jay and the crow seem, on a
gloomy day, to be the only sounds
in all the hollow woods. There could
hardly be an autumn for me if I did not hear these
two voices speaking — the one with a kind of warn-
ing in its shrill, half-plaintive cry ; the other with a

92

THE FALL OF THE YEAR

message slow and solemn, like the color of its sable

coat.

VII

You ought to hear, you ought to catch, I should
say, a good round scolding from the red squirrel this
fall. A red squirrel is always ready to scold you (and

doubtless you are al-
ways in need of his
scolding), but he is
never so breathless and
emphatic as in the fall.
"Whose nuts are these
in the woods ? " he
asks, as you come up
with your stick and bag. "Who found this tree
first ? Come, get out of here ! Get right back to the
city and eat peanuts! Come, do you hear? Get out
of this ! "

No, don't be afraid; he won't "eat you alive" —
though I think he might if he were big enough. He
won't blow up, either, and burst ! He is the kind of
fire-cracker that you call a "sizzler" — all sputter
and no explosion. But isn't he a tempest! Isn't he
a whirlwind! Isn't he a red-coated cyclone! Let
him blow ! The little scamp, he steals birds' eggs in
the summer, they say ; but there are none now for
him to steal, and the woods are very empty. We
need a dash of him on these autumn days, as we
need a dash of spice in our food.

THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL 93

In the far western mountains he has a cousin
called the Douglas squirrel ; and Mr. John Muir calls
him " the brightest of all the squirrels I have ever
seen, a hot spark of life, making every tree tingle with
his prickly toes, a condensed nugget of fresh moun-
tain vigor and valor, as free from disease as a sun-
beam. How he scolds, and what faces he makes, all
eyes, teeth, and whiskers ! "

You must hear him this fall and take your scold-
ing, whether you deserve it or not.

VIII

You ought to hear in the cedars, pines, or spruces
the small thin cheep f cheep, cheep of the chickadees
or the kinglets. You must take a quiet day on the
very edge of winter and, in some sunny dip or glade,
hear them as they feed and flit
about you. They speak in a lan-
guage different from that
of the crow and the jay.
This tiny talk of the king-
let is all friendly and
cheerful and personal
and confidential, as if
you were one of the party and
liked spiders' eggs and sunshine and did n't care a
snap for the coming winter ! In all the vast gray
out of doors what bits of winged bravery, what
crumbs of feathered courage, they seem! One is

94 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

hardly ready for the winter until he has heard them
in the cedars and has been assured that they will
stay, no matter how it snows and blows.

IX

You ought to hear, some quiet day or moonlit
night in October or November, the baying of the
hounds as they course the swamps and meadows on
the heels of the fox. Strange advice, you say ? No,
not strange. It is a wild, fierce cry that your fathers
heard, and their fathers, and theirs — away on back
to the cave days, when life was hardly anything but
the hunt, and the dogs were the only tame animal,
and the most useful possession, man had. Their deep
bass voices have echoed through all the wild forests
of our past, and stir within us nowadays wild mem-
ories that are good for us again to feel. Stand still,
as the baying pack comes bringing the quarry through
the forest toward you. The blood will leap in your
veins, as the ringing cries lift and fall in the chorus
that echoes back from every hollow and hill around ;
and you will on with the panting pack — will on in
the fierce, ^ld exultation of the chase ; for instinct-
ively we are hunters, just as all our ancestors were.

No, don't be afraid. You won't catch the fox.

X

You ought to hear by day — or better, by night
— the call of the migrating birds as they pass over,

I)

THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL 95

through the sky, on their way to the South. East or
west, on the Alantic or on the Pacific shore, or in
the vast valley of the Mississippi, you may hear at
night, so high in air that you cannot see the birds,
these voices of the passing migrants. Chink, chink,
chink ! will drop the calls of the bobolinks — fine,
metallic, starry notes; honk, honk, honk! the clarion
cry of the wild geese will ring along the aerial way,
as they shout to one another and to you, listening
far below them on the steadfast earth.

Far away, yonder in the starry vault, far beyond
the reach of human eyes, a multitude of feathered
folk, myriads of them, are streaming over ; armies
of them winging down the long highway of the
sky from the frozen North, down to the rice fields
of the Carolinas, down to the deep tangled jungles of
the Amazon, down beyond the cold, cruel reach
of winter.

Listen as they hail you from the sky.

CHAPTER XIII

HONK, HONK, HONK!

ONK, honk, honk ! Out of the silence of
the November night, down through the
depths of the darkened sky, rang the
thrilling call of the passing geese.

Honk, honk, honk ! I was out of bed in
__ _ an instant ; but before I had

^HPN touched the floor, there was a

* • -i^ ": '"• ' ''

^— patter of feet in the boys' room,

^T the creak of windows going up,
and — silence.

Honk, honk, honk! A. mighty flock was coming.
The stars shone clear in the far blue ; the trees stood
dark on the rim of the North ; and somewhere be-
tween the trees and the stars, somewhere along a
pathway running north and south, close up against
the distant sky, the wild geese were winging.

Honk, honk, honk I They were overhead. Clear
as bugles, round and mellow as falling flute notes,
ordered as the tramp of soldiers, fell the honk, honk,
honk, as the flock in single line, or double like the
letter V, swept over and was gone.

We had not seen them. Out of a sound sleep they
had summoned us, out of beds with four wooden

HONK, HONK, HONK! 97

legs and no wings ; and we had heard the wild sky-
call, had heard and followed through our open win-
dows, through the dark of the night, up into the blue
vault under the light of the stars.

Round and dim swung the earth below us, hushed
and asleep in the soft arms of the night. Hill and
valley lay close together, farm-land and wood-land,
all wrapped in the coverlet of the dark. City and
town, like watch fires along the edge of a sleeping
camp, burned bright on the rivers and brighter still
on the ragged line of shore and sea, for we were far
away near the stars. The mountains rose up, but
they could not reach us; the white lakes beckoned,
but they could not call us down. For the stars were
bright, the sky-coast was clear, the wind in our
wings was the keen, wild wind of the North, and the
call that we heard — ah! who knows the call? Yet,
who does not know it — that distant haunting call
to fly, fly, fly?

I found myself in my bed the next morning. I
found the small boys in their beds. I found the big
round sun in the sky that morning and not a star in
sight! There was nothing unusual to be seen up
there, nothing mysterious at all. But there was some-
thing unusual, something mysterious to be seen in
the four small faces at the breakfast-table that morn-
ing — eyes all full of stars and deep with the far,
dark depths of the midnight sky into which they had
gazed — into which those four small boys had flown !

98 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

We had often heard the geese go over before, but
never such a flock as this, never such wild waking
clangor, so clear, so far away, so measured, swift,
and — gone!

I love the aound of the ocean surf, the roar of a
winter gale in the leafless woods, the sough of the
moss-hung cypress in the dark southern swamps.
But no other voice of Nature is so strangely, deeply
thrilling to me as the honk, honk, honk of the pass-
ing geese.

For what other voice, heard nowadays, of beast
or bird is so wild and free and far-resounding? Heard
in the solemn silence of the night, ithe notes fall as
from the stars, a faint and far-off sanitation, like the
call of sentinels down the picket line — " All's well!
All's well!" Heard in the open day, when you can
see the winged wedge splitting through the dull gray
sky, the notes seem to cleave the dun clouds, driven
down by the powerful wing-beats where the travel-
ers are passing high and far beyond the reach of
our guns.

The sight of the geese going over in the day, and
the* sound of their trumpetings, turn the whole world
of cloud and sky into a wilderness, as wild and pri-
meval a wilderness as that distant forest of the far
Northwest where the howl of wolves is still heard
by the trappers. Even that wilderness, however, is
passing ; and perhaps no one of us will ever hear the
howl of wolves in the hollow snow-filled forests, as

HONK, HONK, HONK! 99

many of our parents have heard. But the honk of
the wild geese going over we should all hear, and
our children should hear ; for this flock of wild crea-
tures we have in our hands to preserve.

The wild geese breed in the low, wet marshes of
the half-frozen North, where, for a thousand years
to come they will not interfere with the needs of
man. They pass over our northern and middle states
and spend the winter in the rivers, marshes, and
lagoons of the South, where, for another thousand
years to come, they can do little, if any, harm to
man, but rather good.

But North and South, and all along their journey
back and forth, they are shot for sport and food.
For the wild geese cannot make this thousand-mile
flight without coming down to rest and eat; and
wherever that descent is made, there is pretty sure
to be a man with a gun on the watch.

Here, close to my home, are 'four ponds; and
around the sides of each of them are "goose blinds"
— screens made of cedar and pine boughs fixed into
the shore, behind which the gunners lie in wait.
More than that, out upon the surface of the pond
are geese swimming, but tied so that they cannot
escape — geese that have been raised in captivity
and placed there to lure the flying wild flocks down.
Others, known as "flyers," are kept within the blind
to be let loose when a big flock is seen approaching
— to fly out and mingle with them and decoy them

100 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

to the pond. These " flyers " are usually young birds
and, when thrown out upon their wings, naturally
come back, bringing the wild flock with them, to
their fellows fastened in the pond.

A weary flock comes winging over, hungry, and
looking for a place to rest. Instantly the captive
geese out on the pond see them and set up a loud
honking. The flying flock hear them and begin to
descend. Then they see one (tossed from the blind)
coming on to meet them, and they circle lower to
the pond, only to fall before a fury of shots that
pour from behind the blind.

Those of the flock that are not killed rise frightened
and bewildered to fly to the opposite shore, where
other guns riddle them, the whole flock sometimes
perishing within the ring of fire !

Such shooting is a crime because it is unfair, giv-
ing the creature no chance to exercise his native wit
and caution. The fun of hunting, as of any sport, is
in playing the game — the danger, the exercise, the
pitting of limb against limb, wit against wit, patience
against patience ; not in a heap of carcasses, the dead
and bloody weight of mere meat !

If the hunter would only play fair with the wild
goose, shoot him (the wild Canada goose) only along
the North Carolina coast, where he passes the winter,
then there would be no danger of the noble bird's
becoming extinct. And the hunter then would know
what real sport is, and what a long-headed, far-

HONK, HONK, HONK! 101

sighted goose the wild goose really is — for there are
few birds with his cunning and alertness.

Along the Carolina shore the geese congregate in
vast numbers ; and when the day is calm, they ride
out into the ocean after feeding, so far off shore
that no hunter could approach them. At night they
come in for shelter across the bars, sailing into the
safety of the inlets and bays for a place to sleep.
If the wind rises, and a storm blows up, then they
must remain in the pools and water-holes, where the
hunter has a chance to take them. Only here, where
the odds, never even, are not all- against the birds,
should the wild geese be hunted.

With the coming of March there is a new note in
the clamor of the flocks, a new restlessness in their
movements ; and, before the month is gone, many
mated pairs of the birds have flocked together and
are off on their far northern journey to the icy lakes
of Newfoundland and the wild, bleak marshes of
Labrador.

Honk, honk, honk! Shall I hear them going over,
— going northward, — as I have heard them going
southward this fall? Winter comes down in their
wake. There is the clang of the cold in their trumpet-
ing, the closing of iron gates, the bolting of iron
doors for the long boreal night. They pass and leave
the forests empty, the meadows brown and sodden,
the rivers silent, the bays and lakes close sealed.
Spring will come up with them on their return ; and

102

THE FALL OF THE YEAR

their honk, honk, honk will waken the frogs from
their oozy slumbers and stir every winter sleeper to
the very circle of the Pole.

Honk, honk, honk! Oh, may I be awake to hear
you, ye strong-winged travelers on the sky, when ye
go over northward, calling the sleeping earth to
waken, calling all the South to follow you through
the broken ice-gates of the North !

Honk, honk, honk ! The wild geese are passing
— southward !

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

CHAPTER I

TO THE TEACHER

Go yourself frequently into the fields and woods, or into the city
parks, or along the water front — anywhere so that you can touch
nature directly, and look and listen for yourselves. Don't try to teach
what you do not know, and there is nothing in this book that you
cannot know, for the lesson to be taught in each chapter is a spiritual
lesson, not a number of bare facts. This spiritual lesson you must
first learn before you can teach it — must feel, I should say ; and a
single thoughtful excursion alone into the autumn fields will give you
possession of it. And what is the lesson in this chapter ? Just this :
that the strong growths of summer, the ripening of seeds and fruits,
the languid lazy spirit, and the pensive signs of coming autumn are
all the manifold preparations of nature for a fresh outburst of life
with the coming of spring.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 1

The clock of the year strikes one: When, in the daytime, the clock
strikes one, the hour of noon is past ; the afternoon begins. On
the 21st of June the clock of the year strikes twelve — noon !
By late July the clock strikes one — the noon hour is past ! Sum-
mer is gone ; autumn — the afternoon of the year — begins.
going " creepy-creep " : In the quiet of some July day in fields or
woods, listen to the stirring of the insects and other small wood
creatures. All summer long they are going about their business,
but in the midst of stronger noises we are almost deaf to their
world of little sounds.
PAGE 3

begins to shift : Why is the oak's shadow likely to be " round " at
noon ? What causes the shadow to " shift" ; or move ? In which
direction would it move ?

106 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

falls a yellow leaf from a slender birch near by . . . small flock of
robins from a pine . . . swallows were gathering upon the telegraph
wires : Next summer, note the exact date on which you first see
signs of autumn — the first falling of the leaves, the first gather-
ing of birds for their southern trip. Most of the migrating birds
go in flocks for the sake of companionship and protection.
chewink (named from his call, che-wink' ; accent on second, not
on first, syllable, as in some dictionaries) or ground robin, or
towhee or joree ; one of the finch family. You will know him by
his saying "chewink" aiid by his vigorous scratching among the
dead leaves, and by his red-brown body and black head and neck.
vireo (vir'-e-o) : the red-eyed vireo, the commonest of the vireo
family ; often called " Preacher " ; builds the little hanging nest
from a small fork on a bush or tree so low often that you can
look into it.

fiery notes of the scarlet tanager (tan'-a-jer) : His notes are loud
and strong, and he is dressed in fiery red clothes and sings on
the fieriest of July days.
PAGE 4

resonant song of the indigo bunting: or indigo-bird, one of the finch
family. He sings from the very tip of a tree as if to get up close
under the dome of the sky. Indeed, his notes seem to strike
against it and ring down to us ; for there is a peculiar ringing
quality to them, as if he were singing to you from inside a great
copper kettle.

scarlet tanager by some accident : The tanager arrives among the
last of the birds in the spring, and builds late ; but, if you find a
nest in July or August, it is pretty certain to be a second nest,
the first having been destroyed somehow — a too frequent occur-
rence with all birds.

half-fledged cuckoos : The cuckoo also is a very late builder. I
have more than once found its eggs in July.

red wood-lily : Do you know the wood-lily, or the " wild orange-
red lily " as some call it (Lilium philadelphicuni) ? It is found
from New England to North Carolina and west to Missouri, but
only on hot, dry, sandy ground, whereas the turk's-cap and the
wild yellow lily are found only where the ground is rich and moist.
low mouldy moss : Bring to school a flake, as large as your hand,
of the kind of lichen you think this may be. Some call it " rein-
deer moss."

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 107

sweet-fern : Put a handful of sweet-fern (Myrica asplenifolia) in
your pocket, a leaf or two in your book ; and whenever you pass
it in the fields, pull it through your fingers for the odor. Sweet
gale and bayberry are its two sweet relatives.

PAGE 5

milkweed, boneset, peppermint, turtle-head, joe-pye-weed, jewel-weed,
smartweed, and budding goldenrod : Go down to the nearest mead-
ow stream and gather for school as many of these flowers as you
can find. Examine their seeds.

toind is a sower going forth to sow: Besides the winds what other
seed-scatterers do you know ? They are many and very interest-
ing.

PAGE 6

" Over the fields where the daisies grow. . . ." From " Thistle-
down " in a volume of poems called " Summer-Fallow," by
Charles Buxton Going.

seed-souls of thistles and daisies and fall dandelions seeking new
bodies for themselves in the warm soil of Mother Earth : On your
country walks, watch to see where such seeds have been caught,
or have fallen. They will be washed down into the earth by rain
and snow. If you can mark the place, go again next spring to see
for yourself if they have risen in " new bodies " from the earth.
sweet pepper-bush : The sweet pepper-bush is also called white
alder and clethra.

chickadees : Stand stock-still upon meeting a flock of chickadees
and see how curious they become to know you. You may know
the chickadee by its tiny size, its gray coat, black cap and throat,
its saying " chick-a-dee," and its plaintive call of " pbxebe " in three
distinct syllables.

PAGE 7

clock strikes twelve : As we have thought of midsummer as the
hour from twelve to one in the day, so the dead of winter seems
by comparison the twelve o'clock of midnight.
shimmering of the spiders' silky balloons : It is the curious habit
of many of the spiders to travel, especially in the fall, by throw-
ing skeins of silky web into the air, which the breezes catch
and carry up, while the spiders, like balloonists, hang in their
web ropes below and sail away.

108 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

CHAPTER II

TO THE TEACHER

I have chosen the fox in this chapter to illustrate the very inter-
esting and striking fact that wild animals, birds and beasts, thrive in
the neighborhood of man if given the least protection ; for if the fox
holds his own (as surely he does) in the very gates of one of the larg-
est cities in the United States, how easy it should be for us to pre-
serve for generations yet the birds and smaller animals ! I might
have written a very earnest chapter on the need for every pupil's
joining the Audubon Society and the Animal Rescue League ; but
young pupils, no less than their elders, hate to be preached to. So I
have recounted a series of short narratives, trusting to the suggestions
of the chapter, and to the quiet comment of the teacher to do the
good work. Every pupil a protector of wild life is the moral.

FOR THE PUPIL

There are two species of foxes in the eastern states — the gray
fox, common from New Jersey southward, and the larger red fox, so
frequent here in New England and northward, popularly known as
Reynard. Far up under the Arctic circle lives the little white or Arc-
tic fox, so valuable for its fur ; and in California still another species
known as the coast fox. The so-called silver or blue, or black, or
cross fox, is only the red fox with a blackish or bluish coat.
PAGE 9

Mullein Hill : the name of the author's country home in Hingham,
Massachusetts. The house is built on the top of a wooded ridge
looking down upon the tops of the orchard trees and away over
miles of meadow and woodland to the Blue Hills, and at night
to the lights that flash in Boston Harbor. Years before the house
was built the ridge was known as Mullein Hill because of the
number and size of the mulleins ( Verbascum Thapsus) that grew
upon its sides and top.
PAGE 10

mowing-field : a New England term for a field kept permanently
in grass for hay.

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 109

PAGE 11

grubby acres : referring to the grubs of various beetles found in

the soil and under the leaves of its woodland.

BB: the name of shot about the size of sweet pea seed.

PAGE 12

Pigeon Henny's coop : a pet name for one of the hens that looked
very much like a pigeon.

shells : loaded cartridges used in a breech-loading gun.
bead drew dead : when the little metal ball on the end of the gun-
barrel, used to aim by, showed that the gun was pointing directly
at the fox.

PAGE 16

the mind in the wild animal world : how the animals may really
feel when being chased, namely, not frightened to death, as we
commonly think, but perhaps cool and collected, taking the chase
as a matter of course, even enjoying it.

PAGE 17

The Chase : The sound of the hunting is likened to a chorus of
singing voices; the changing sounds, as when the pack emerges
from thick woods into open meadow, being likened to the vari-
ous measures of the musical score; the whole musical composition
or chorus being called The Chase.

PAGE 18

dead heat : a race between two or more horses or boats where two
of the racers come out even, neither winning.

PAGE 19

Flood : Why spelled with a capital ? What flood is meant ?

PAGE 20

hard-pressed fox had narrowly won his way : In spite of the author's
attempt to shoot the fox that was stealing his chickens do you think
the author would be glad if there were no foxes in his woods ?
How do they add interest to his out of doors ? What other things
besides chickens do they eat ? Might it not be that their destruc-
tion of woodchucks (for they eat woodchucks) and mice and musk-
rats quite balances their killing of poultry ? (The author thinks
so.)

110 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

CHAPTER III

TO THE TEACHER

The thought in this chapter is evident, namely, that love for the
out of doors is dependent upon knowledge of the out of doors. The
more we know and the better we understand, the more perfect and
marvelous nature seems and the more lovely. The toad fish looks
loathly, but upon closer study he becomes very interesting, even ad-
mirable — one of the very foundations of real love. So, as a teacher
and as a lover of nature, be careful never to use the words " ugly "
or " nasty " or " loathly "; never shrink from a toad; never make a
wry face at a worm; never show that you are having a nervous fit at
a snake; for it all argues a lack of knowledge and understanding.
All life, from Man to the Amoeba, is one long series of links in a
golden chain, one succession of wonderful life-histories, each vastly
important, all making up the divinely beautiful world of life which
our lives crown, but of which we are only a part, and, perhaps, no
more important a part than the toadfish.

FOR THE PUPIL

The toadfish of this story is Batrachus tau, sometimes called oyster-
fish or sapo. The fishing-frog or angler is by some called toadfish, as
is also the swell-fish or common puffer of the Atlantic Coast.
PAGE 21

Buzzards Bay : Where is Buzzards Bay ? Do you know Whittier's
beautiful poem, The Prayer of Agassiz, which begins : —

" On the isle of Penikese
Ringed about by sapphire seas."

Where is Penikese ? What waters are those " sapphire seas," and
what was Agassiz doing there ?
PAGE 23

Davy Jones : Who is Davy Jones ? Look him up under Jones,
Davy, in your dictionary of Proper Names. Get into the " looking
up " habit. Never let anything in your reading, that you do not
understand, go unlocked up.

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 111

Old Man of the Sea: Look him up too. Are he and Davy Jones
any relation ?

It was really a fish : What names do you think of that might fit
this fish ?

PAGE 24

coarsely marbled with a darker hue : What is the meaning of marbled f

PAGE 25

covered with water : The author means that the rock is not always
covered with water, not the hole under the rock. Of course the
hole is always built so that it is full of water, else the fish would
perish at low tide.

PAGE 27

love the out of doors with all your mind : Do you know what is
meant by loving the out of doors with your mind ? Just this :
that while you feel (with your heart) the beauty of a star, at the
same time you know (with your mind) that that particular star, let
us say, is the Pole Star, the guide to the sailors on the seas ; that
it is also only one of a vast multitude of stars each one of which
has its place in the heavens, its circuit or path through the skies,
its part in the whole orderly universe — a thought so vast and
wonderful that we cannot comprehend it. All this it means to love
with our minds. Without minds a star to us is only a point of
light, as to Peter Bell

" A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And it was nothing more."

Does the toadfish become anything more than a mere toadfish in
a shoe before the end of the chapter ?
PAGE 28

in the toadjish's shoe : What does the author mean by asking you
to put yourself in the toadfish's shoe ? Only this : to try, even
with the humblest of creatures, to share sympathetically their
lives with them. The best way to do this with man as well as with
toadfish is to learn about their lives.

112 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

CHAPTER IV

TO THE TEACHER

There are several practical uses to which you can put this chapter,
and the similar chapters, vn and xn : they can be made the pur-
pose for field excursions with the class. Such excursions might be
quite impossible for many a teacher in school hours ; and we know
how the exacting duties overcrowd the after-school hours ; but one
field excursion each season of the year, no matter how precious your
time, would do more for you and your class than many books about
nature read inside your four plastered walls. Better the books than
nothing ; but take the book and go with your pupils into the real out
of doors.

Again, you can make these chapters a kind of nature test, asking
each pupil to try to see each of the things suggested here ; or, if
these do not chance to be the sights characteristic of the autumn in
your region, then such sights as are characteristic. So the chapter
can serve as a kind of field guide to the pupil, and a kind of test of
his knowledge of nature.

Again, you can make each item mentioned here the subject for a
short composition direct from the pupil's experience — the only kind
of subject for him to write upon. Or make each item (say, No. iv,
the Ballooning Spiders) the beginning for a short course of study or
collateral reading for the individual pupil particularly interested in
spiders !

CHAPTER V

TO THE TEACHER

The real point of this story (but first of all it is a story and should
not be spoiled with any moral) is the thought in the lines : —

" There were thousands of persons who could have gold eggs if
they cared. But eagles' eggs ! Money could not buy such a sight as
this." Which means, that the simple joys of the out of doors, and
the possession of youth and health, are better than any joys that
money can create, and more precious possessions than all the money

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 113

in the world can buy. One can get all the thrilling sensations of
height by standing up in a quaking eagle's nest sixty feet from the
ground, that one can possibly get from the top of the Eiffel Tower
or on the peak of Mount Washington, or from a flying-machine
among the clouds. And then who among the rich of the world ever
saw eagles' eggs in a nest, or had eagles dig him with their talons ?
To be alive to all the wonder of the life, to all the beauty of the
world about us, is the very secret of living. An eagle's nest to climb
into is as good as a flying-machine.

Take occasion, too, at the end of the story to say how much better,
how much more interesting, an act it was to leave the eggs to hatch
than to rob the nest and thus destroy two young eagles. Some years
later, for instance, two young eagles were taken from a neighboring
nest and were sent to the Zoological Gardens at Philadelphia, where
they may still be living for thousands of visitors each year to see.
Who knows but that one of the parents of these two captive birds
may have been in the eggs laid back by the boy in that nest ?

.FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 36

Maurice River Cove : Where is Maurice River Cove ? What is
the Cove famous for ?

great eagle's nest: Look up the habits of the bald eagle in some
natural history. Is he a very great enemy to man ? If a pair of
the noble birds lived in your neighborhood would you want their
nest destroyed and the birds shot? Do you know the story of
" Old Abe " ? Look that up also.
PAGE 37

scream of a wild cat : The wild cat is still to be found throughout
the United States wherever the country is very wild and wooded.
Its cry or scream is an indescribable thrill that shoots cold all
over you, freezing fast in the roots of your hair.
mud-hens : The mud-hen or American coot, a dark bluish slate-
colored bird of the marshes about the size of a large bantam,
with an ivory-white bill and peculiar lobed toes, instead of webbed
like a duck's.

eyrie : What does the word mean ? Are there any other ways of
spelling it ?

114 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

PAGE 38

size of a small haystack : This is no exaggeration. From one nest
of a fish hawk (and this nest was probably built first by a fish
hawk) that blew down from the top of an old house chimney in the
Maurice River Marshes, the author knew six one-horse cartloads
of loose sticks to be taken.

PAGE 40

such a sight as this : Have you ever seen a sunset more gorgeous
than any artist could paint and any rich man could buy ? Ever
had a smell of trailing arbutus that no perfumer could equal, that
all the money in the world could not create ? Old Midas had a
golden touch and turned his daughter into gold. Was he not more
than willing to be the poorest man in his kingdom if only he
might be rid of the fatal touch, be a natural man again and have
his loving little daughter a natural child again ? To be your nat-
ural selves, and to enjoy your beautiful natural world is better
than to be anything else, or to have anything else, in the world.

CHAPTER VI

TO THE TEACHER

We hear so much of the drudgery of farm life, of its dreariness, and
meagre living that this chapter, aside from its picture of cheer and
plenty, should be made the text for a good deal of comment upon the
many other phases of farm life that make for the fullest kind of exist-
ence ; namely, the independence of the farmer; the vast and interesting
variety of his work ; his personal contact with domestic animals, his
fruit-trees, garden, and fields of grain; his intimate acquaintance with
the weather ; his great resourcefulness in meeting insect plagues,
blights, and droughts ; his out-of-door life that makes him strong
and long-lived, etc., etc.

If you are a country teacher it is one of your great missions to
show the boys that they should stay upon the farm, or rather that
the farm is a good place to stay on for life ; if you are a city teacher
it should be your mission to head many a boy country ward for life
with the understanding that it requires more sound sense and re-
sourcefulness to make a successful farmer than it does to make a
bank president.

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 115

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 46

end of the outdoors : The fall plowing, even the digging of the
ditches — all the work in the soil is about over by Thanksgiving
when the ground begins to freeze.

PAGE 47

crib-house : Where the writer lived as a boy the corn was husked
and left in the ear and stored in long, narrow houses built of bev-
eled slats spaced about half an inch apart to allow the wind free
play, but like the thin slats of a shutter so arranged that the rain
ran down and, except in a driving wind, did not wet the grain.
"spring-house": Spring- houses took the place of modern ice-
chests, being little cupboard-like houses well ventilated and
screened, built near the farmhouse and usually over a spring of
water that kept the milk and other contents cool.
battened: Is this a " land " term or a " sea " term ? What does it
mean ? Look it up and report.

the swallows : These were the barn swallows — the beautiful swal-
lows with the long, finely-forked tail. You will always know
them on the wing by the brown breast andyme forked tail.
worm-fence: A worm-fence is built of rails laid one on top of the
other, running zigzag, each corner held together by two upright
stakes, set in the ground and crossed just above the next-to-the-
top rail. The top rail is laid in the crotch of the two stakes.
turn-o'-lane : name of a very excellent old-fashioned apple that
got its name from the fact that the original tree of the kind grew
at a turn of the lane — the writer does not know whose lane.

PAGE 48

double-hived : It is customary to cover beehives with newspapers,
then slip an outside box down over papers and all to keep the
swarm from the cutting cold winds of winter. Bees are frequently
brought into the cellar for the winter in northern latitudes.
put on an extra coat, and turned their collars up about their ears:
What does the writer mean ?

changed their roost from the ridge-pole : Turkeys roost high ; but
*the ridge-pole of the crib-house used to be too cold in the dead of
winter, so they would change to the more protected apple-tree,
still roosting high, however.

116 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

pearmain : name of a " summer " apple in New Jersey ;~of a winter
apple in this section of Massachusetts.
garden of box : the box bush.

bleeding-hearts : an old-fashioned flower ; a low shrub with pend-
ent blossoms shaped like a heart.
creeper : the Virginia creeper, or woodbine.

PAGE 49

" template " stove : from template or templet, a strip of sheet iron
used in boiler-making. A simple long stove made of a single
piece of sheet iron, bent like an inverted U, and riveted to a cast
iron bottom. It had a single door in the front ; aud burnt pieces
of wood about two feet long. Often called " tenplate " stove.

PAGE 50

seven of us alone: seven brothers and sisters in the writer's family.
fiats : Describe the outside appearance of a city " flat," and also
the inside if you have ever been in a flat. Is it like a farmhouse ?
kitchenette: What kind of a kitchen is a kitchenette t
neither a farm nor a city home : By which the writer means a farm
in the ordinary sense of land cultivated for a living. His is a home
only, with several acres around it, largely in woods and grass.

PAGE 51

" Bucksy " : the invented name of a little Indian hero about whom
the writer tells stories to his little boys.

CHAPTER VII

TO THE TEACHER

Suggestions as to the practical uses to which this chapter can be
put may be gathered from the notes to chapter iv and chapter XII,
each of which is similar to this one.

CHAPTER VIII

TO THE TEACHER

This chapter and the next (chapter ix) should be taken together
as a single study of the provision of nature against the severity of
winter's cold, chapter vm being a detailed account of one creature's

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 117

preparations, while chapter ix follows, showing how the foresight
and care obtain even among the plants and trees. The two chapters
together should give the pupils a glad thought for winter, should
utterly change their conventional language and • feeling for it as a
time of death. And instead of lamenting the season as a necessary
evil, you must show them that it is to be welcomed as a period of sleep
for nature from which she will waken in all the freshness of a spring-
time such as is nowhere to be had outside of the temperate zone.
" It is not always May," wails the poet ; but ask them : Who wants
it always May ? We want the variety, the contrasts of our four
seasons, and as to winter, let the North Wind blow at will, redden
our cheeks, quicken our step, put purpose into our wills and — it
won't starve us ; for we, too, like the muskrat, are provided for.

FOR THE PUPIL

If there is a muskrat house or village of houses in your neighbor-
hood, report to the class, or better, take teacher and class, as soon as
freezing weather conies, to see it. Go out yourselves and try to see
the muskrats plastering their walls on one of the bright October
nights.
PAGE 63

muskrats combine : The author has frequently found as many as

six rats in a single house ; but whether all of these helped in the

building or not, he is unable to say.

winter house : If the house is undisturbed (as when situated out

in a stumpy pond) it will stand for years, the rats dwelling in it

the year around.
PAGE 64

pick and shovel : What is meant by a fox's " pick and shovel " ?

Lupton's Pond : the name of a little wood-walled pond that the

author haunted as a boy.

'• The best-laid schemes o' mice and men
Gang aft agley."

Learn this poem (" To A Mouse ") by heart. Burns is the author.
PAGE 65

very much alike : Name some other respects in whicK animals and
men are alike in their lives. What famous line in the poem just
quoted is it that makes men and mice very closely related ?

118 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

bottom of the house: Down in the very foundation walls of the
muskrat's house are two runways or " doors " that open under
water and so far under that they rarely if ever freeze. See picture
of such a house with its door in the author's " Wild Life Near
Home," page 174.
PAGE 66

tepee : What is a tepee ?

juicy and pink and tender : The muskrats eat grass stems and
roots, so that under the water near the lodge you will often find
in winter little stacks of these tender pink stems and roots ready
for eating — much as the beaver stores up sticks of tender bark
under the water near his lodge for food when the ice forms over-
head.
Winter is coming : Are you glad or sorry ? Are you ready ?

CHAPTER IX

TO THE TEACHER

Let the pupils continue this list of examples of winter preparations
by watching and observing for themselves. Every field, every tree,
every roadside, will reveal the work done or going on under their
eyes. Without preaching you may draw many an interesting and
telling parallel with their own preparation — in school for instance.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 67

" The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will the Robin do then,
Poor thing?"

Where does the verse come from ? Mother Goose ? Yes, but who
was she ?

Chipmunk: Our little striped ground squirrel, interesting because
he has cheek-pouches and thus forms a link between the arboreal
squirrels (gray squirrels, etc.) and the ground squirrels or sper-
mophiles, of which the beautiful little thirteen-lined squirrel of
the prairies is an example.

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 119

Whitefoot, the wood mouse : The white-footed or wood mouse or deer
mouse.

PAGE 68

Not so much as a bug or a single beetle's egg has he stored : Why
not, seeing that these are his food ?

a piece of suet for him on a certain lilac bush : Whose bush might
it be ? Is there a piece on yours ?

upon the telegraph-wires were the swallows — the first sign that the
getting ready for winter has begun : What kind or kinds of swal-
lows ? Have you any earlier sign ?

PACK 69

the few creatures that find food and shelter in the snow: Name four
of the animals that so find their food and shelter. Are there any
others ? Look them up.

PAGE 70

there will be suffering and death : In your tramps afield this winter
look out for signs of suffering. There are many little things that
you can do to lessen it — a little seed scattered, a piece of suet
nailed up on a tree, a place cleared in the snow where gravel
stones can be picked up.

or even three hundred pounds of honey : By not allowing the bees to
swarm, and thus divide their strength, bee-keepers often get more
than three hundred pounds of comb-honey (in the little pound boxes
or sections) from a single hive. The bees themselves require only
about twenty to twenty-five pounds to carry them through the
winter.

PAGE 71

the witch-hazels : The witch-hazels do not yield honey so far as the
author has observed. Suppose you watch this autumn to see if
the honey-bees (do you know a honey-bee when you see her ?)
visit it. Whence comes this quotation? From which poeui of
Bryant's : —

" when come the calm, mild days."

put on their storm-doors : In modern bee-hives there is a movable
board in front upon which the bees alight when entering the
hive ; this can be so turned as to make a large doorway for the
summer, and a small entrance for the cold winter.
whole drove of forty-six woodchucks : The author at one time had
forty-six inhabited woodchuck holes on his farm.

120 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

PAGE 72

as Bobolink among the reeds of the distant Orinoco : The bobolink
winters even farther south — beyond the banks of the Amazon.
to sleep until dawn of spring : What is the name for this strange
sleeping ? What other American animals do it ? Name three.

PAGE 73

frogs frozen into the middle of solid lumps of ice : Of course, this
was never done intentionally : each time the frogs were forgotten
and left in the laboratory, where they froze.

PAGE 74

they seem to have given up the struggle at once . . . : This may not
be the explanation. One of the author's friends suggests that it
may have been caused by exposure, due to their having been
frightened in the night from their usual bed and thus forced to
roost where they could until morning.

PAGE 75

timothy : " Herd's-grass " or " English hay " — as it is sometimes
called in New England.

plenty for the birds : What are the " weeds " made for ? You
growl when you are set to pulling them in the garden. What are
they made for ? Can you answer ?

CHAPTER X

TO THE TEACHER

Perhaps you are in a crowded school-room in the heart of a great
city. What can you do for your pupils there ? But what can't you do ?
You have a bit of sky, a window surely, an old tin can for earth,
a sprig of something to plant — and surely you have English spar-
rows behind the rain pipe or shutter ! You may have the harbor too,
and water-front with its gulls and fish, and the fish stores with their
windows full of the sea. You have the gardens and parks, burial-
grounds and housetops, bird stores, museums — why, bless you, you
have the hand-organ man and his monkey ; you have — but I have
mentioned enough. It is a hungry little flock that you have to feed,
too, and no teacher can ask more.

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 121

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 76

An English sparrow: Make a long and careful study of the
sparrows that nest about you. If you live in the country try to
drive them away from the bluebird house and the martin-boxes.
The author does not advise boys and girls to do any killing, but
carefully pulling dqwn a sparrow's nest with eggs in it — if you
are sure it is a sparrow's nest — is kindness, he believes, to the
other, more useful birds. Yet only yesterday, August 17th, he
saw a male sparrow bring moth after moth to its young in a
hole in one of the timbers of a bridge from which the author
was fishing. It is not easy to say just what our duty is in this
matter.

PAGE 77

clack of a guinea going to roost : The guinea-fowl as it goes to

roost frequently sets up a clacking that can be heard half a mile

away.

an ancient cemetery in the very heart of Boston : The cemetery was

the historic King's Chapel on Tremont Street, Boston. Some of

the elm trees have since been cut down.

PAGE 78

Cubby Hollow: a small pond near the author's boyhood home,

running, after a half-mile course through the woods, into Lupton's

Pond, which falls over a dam into the meadows of Cohansey

Creek.

on the water : What water is it that surrounds so large a part of

the City of Boston ?

PAGE 79

the shuttered buildings : Along some of the streets, especially in

the wholesale district, the heavy iron shutters, closed against the

high walls of the buildings, give the deserted streets a solemn,

almost a forbidding aspect.

facing the wind : like an anchored boat, offering the least possible

resistance to the storm.

out of doors lies very close about you, as you hurry down a crowded

city street : Opportunities for watching the wild things, for seeing

and hearing the things of nature, cannot be denied you even in

the heart of the city, if you have an eye for such things. Read

Bradford Torrey's " Birds on Boston Common," or the author's

122 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

"Birds from a City Roof" in the volume called "Roof and
Meadow."

CHAPTER XI

TO THE TEACHER

This is a chapter 00 the large wholesomeness of contact with nature ;
that even the simple, humble tasks out of doors are attended with a
freedom and a naturalness that restore one to his real self by putting
him into his original primitive environment and by giving him an
original primitive task to do.

Then, too, how good a thing it is to have something alive and re-
sponsive to work for — if only a goat or a pig ! Take occasion to
read to the class Lamb's essay on Roast Pig — even fifth grade pupils
will get a lasting picture from it.

Again — and this is the apparent purpose of the chapter — how
impossible it is to go into the woods with anything — a hay-rake —
and not find the woods interesting !

FOR THE PUPIL

PAGE 80

the unabridged dictionary : What does " unabridged " mean ?
hay-rig: a simple farm wagon with a " rigging" put on for cart-
ing hay.

PAGE 81

cord wood : wood cut into four-foot lengths to be cut up smaller
for burning in the stove. What are the dimensions of a cord of
wood?

PAGE 82

through the cold gray of the maple swamp below you, peers the face of

Winter : What does one see in a maple swamp at this time of

year that looks like the " face of winter." Think.

he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket of down over his

own winter bed: How is this meant to be taken ?

round at the barn : It is a common custom with farmers to make

this nightly round in order to see that the stock is safe for the

night. Were you ever in a barn at night where the horses were

still munching hay, and the cattle rattling their stanchions and

horns ? Recall the picture in Whittier's " Snow-Bound."

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 123

PAGE 83

diameters : the unit of measure in the " field " or the lens of the
microscope, equivalent to " times."

white-footed wood mouse: Text should read or wood mouse. There
are other wood mice, but Whitefoot is known as the wood mouse.
gives at the touch : an idiom, meaning moves back, gives way.
red-backed salamander : very common under stones ; his scientific
name is Plethodon erythronotus.

His "red" salamander: Read chapter v in "Pepacton," by Bur-
roughs. His salamander is the red triton, Spelerpes ruber.

PAGE 84

dull ears : Our ears are dulled by the loud and ceaseless noises of

our city life, so that we cannot hear the small voices of nature

that doubtless many of the wild creatures are capable of hearing.

tiny tree-frog, Pickering's hyla : the one who peeps so shrill from

the meadows in spring.

"skirl": a Scotch term; see "Tarn O'Shanter," by Burns : "He

screwed the pipes and gart them skirl."

bunches of Christmas fern : Gathered all through the winter here

in the ledges about Mullein Hill by the florists for floral pieces.

PAGE 85

yelloiv-jacketjs nest : one of the Vespa Wasps, Vespa Germanica.
Read the first chapter of " Wasps Social and Solitary," by G. W.
and E. G. Peckham.

PAGE 86

long-tusked boar of the forest : The wild boar, the ancestor of our
domestic pigs is still to be found in the great game preserves in
European forests ; in this country only in zoological gardens.
live in a pen : How might one, though living in a big modern
house, well furnished and ordered, still make a " pen " of it only.

CHAPTER XII

TO THE TEACHER

Notice again that in the three chapters on things to see and do
and hear a few of the characteristic sights and sounds and doings have
been mentioned. Let the whole teaching of these three chapters be
to quicken the pupil to look for and listen for the dominant, charac-

124 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

teristic sights and sounds of the season, as he must be trained to look
for and listen for the characteristic notes and actions of individual
things — birds, animals, flowers. If, for instance, his eye catches the
galloping, waving motion of the woodpecker's flight, if his ear is
trained to distinguish the rappings of the same bird on a hollow limb
or resonant rail, then the pupil knows that bird and has clues to what
is strange in his plumage, his anatomy, his habits, his family traits.

The world outdoors is all a confusion until we know how to separate
and distinguish things ; and there is no better training for this than
to get in the way of looking and listening for what is characteristic.

Karh locality differs, however, to some extent in its wild life ; so
that some of the sounds in this chapter may need to have others sub-
stituted to meet those differences. Remember that you are the
teacher, not the book. The book is but a suggestion. You begin
where it leaves off ; you fill out where it is lacking. A good book is
a very good thing ; but a good teacher is a very much better thing.

FOR THE PUPIL

Now do not stuff cotton in your ears as soon as you have heard
these ten sounds ; or, what amounts to the same thing, do not stop
listening. If you do only what the book says and nothing else, learn
just the day's lesson and nothing more, your teacher may think you
a very "good scholar," but I will tell you that you are a poor
student of nature. The woods are full of sounds — voices, songs,
whisperings — that are to be heard when none of these ten are
speaking.
PAGES 88 AND 90

hear their piercing whistle: the husky yap, yap, yap of the fox: It
is usually the young hawks in the fall that whistle, as it is usually
the young foxes in the summer and fall t hat bark.
PAGE 91

" Heaped in the hollows of the prove, the autumn leaves lie dead ;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread."

" The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day."

Study this whole poem ("The Death of the Flowers," by Bryant)
for its excellent natural history. Could the poet have written it
had he been ignorant of nature ? Can you appreciate it all unless

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 125

you, too, have heard these sounds, so that the poem can sound
them again to you as you read ? Nature is not only interesting
for herself ; but also absolutely necessary for you to know if you
would know and love poetry.

the one with a kind of warning in its shrill, half-plaintive cry ; the
other with a message slow and solemn : What is the warning, would
you say, in the scream of the jay ? the solemn message in the
caw of the crow ?

PAGE 94

cave days : Cave days mean those prehistoric times in the history
of man, when he lived in caves and subsisted almost wholly upon
the flesh of wild animals killed with his rude stone weapons.

PAGE 95

to the deep tangled jungles of the Amazon: Some of the birds go
even farther south — away into Patagonia at the end of the south-
ern hemisphere. There is no more interesting problem, no more
thrilling sight in all nature, than this of the migrating birds —
the little warblers flying from Brazil to Labrador for the few
weeks of summer, there to rear their young and start back again
on the long, perilous journey !

CHAPTER XIII

TO THE TEACHER

Let the chapter be read aloud by one pupil, with as much feeling
as possible to the paragraph beginning, " I love the sound of the
surf," etc.; for this part is story, action, movement. Do not try to
teach anything in this half. Let some other thoughtful pupil read the
next section as far as, ". Honk, honk, honk," beginning the third para-
graph from the end. This contains the lesson, the moral, and if you
stop anywhere to talk about bird-protection, do it here. Let a third
pupil read the rest of the chapter. Better than a moral lesson di-
rectly taught (and such lessons are much like doses of castor oil) will
be the touching of the child's imagination by the picture of the long
night-flight high up in the clouds. Read them " To a Water Fowl,"
by Bryant; and also some good account of migration like that by
D. Lange (" The Great Tidal Waves of Bird-Life ") in the Atlantic

126 THE FALL OF THE YEAR

Monthly for August, 1909. Read to them Audubon's account of the
wild goose, in his " Birds."

FOR THE PUPIL

PAGE 97

followed through our open windows: "followed" how? Must one
have wings or a flying-machine in order to " follow " the wild
geese ?

Round and dim swung the earth below us. . . . : What is the pic-
ture ? It is seen from what point of view ?

the call to fly, fly, fly : Did you ever feel the call to fly ? Ever
wish you had wings ? Ever start and run as Mowgli did, or long
to get up and go somewhere as the pilgrims did in the Canter-
bury Tales ?

PAGE 99

in our hands to preserve : Do you belong to the Audubon Society,
to the " Grange," or to any of the organizations that are trying
to protect and preserve the birds ? And are you doing all you can
in your neighborhood to protect them ?

PAGE 100

not in a heap of carcasses, the dead and bloody weight of mere meat :
We may be hunters by instinct; we may love the chase, and we
may like to kill things. But do you think that means we ought to,
or that we any longer may, kill things ? No ; bird life has become
so scarce that even if we do want to, it is now our duty to give
over such sport in the larger interests of the whole country, and
try to find a higher, finer 'kind of pleasure, — as we can in trying
to photograph, or " shoot " with the camera, a bird, getting an
interesting picture in place of a dead body.

PAGE 101

the mated pairs of the birds have flocked together : In domestic
geese the mated pairs often live together for life; and among the
wild geese this, doubtless, is often true.

PAGE 102

may 1 be awake to hear you : In what sense " awake " ?

The wild geese are passing — southward : the end of the autumn,

the sign that winter is here.

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

THE LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Santa Barbara

THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW.

Series 9482