THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

PRESENTED BY

PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND
MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID

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of

AUTHOR OF " WILD LIFE NEAR HOME " AND
" ROOF AND MEADOW "

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

1908

COPYRIGHT 1908 BY DALLAS LORE SHARP
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published September iqo8

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Confente

I. The Muskrats are Building I

II. Christmas in the Woods .... 19

III. A Cure for Winter . . . . . 3S

IV. The Nature-Student . ". . . 56
V. Chickadee . . . . . , 74

VI. The Missing Tooth ..... 89

VII. The Sign of the Shad-bush ... .105

VIII. The Nature Movement . . . . n4

IX. June . / .. . . , . . I27

X. A Broken Feather . . . . . 137

XI. High Noon . . .^ . . . . 148

XII. The Palace in the Pig-pen . . . 161

XIII. An Account with Nature . . . . 175

XIV. The Buzzard of the Bear Swamp . . 189
XV. The Lay of the Land 200

WE have had a series of long, heavy rains, and water
is standing 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, naked and all unsheltered. And a Novem-
ber 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 the
heavy ulster close, and in my rubber boots go down
to the river and follow it out to the middle of the
meadow, where it meets the main ditch at the sharp
turn toward the swamp. Here at the bend, behind a
clump of black alders, I sit quietly down and wait.

of t$

I am not mad, nor melancholy ; I am not after
copy. Nothing is the matter with me. 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.

The moon climbs higher. The water on the meadow
shivers in the light. The wind bites through my
heavy coat and sends me back, but not until I have
seen one, two, three little figures scaling the walls of
the house with loads of mud-and-reed mortar. I am
driven back by the cold, but not until 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 wood is in
the cellar ; I am about ready to put on the double
windows and storm doors ; and the muskrats' house
is all but finished. Winter is at hand : but we are
prepared, the muskrats even better prepared than
I, for theirs is an adequate house, planned per-
fectly.

Throughout the summer they had no house, only
their tunnels into the sides of the ditch, their road-
ways out into the grass, and their beds under the

tussocks or among the roots of the old stumps. All
these months the water had been low in the ditch,
and the beds among the tussocks had been safe and
dry enough.

Now the autumnal 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 a house ? He does not want to leave his meadow.
The only thing to do is to build, — move from under
the tussock, out upon the top, and here, in the deep,
wiry grass, make a new bed, high and dry above the
rising water, and close the new bed in with walls
that circle and dome and defy the winter.

Such a house will require a great deal of work to
build. Why not combine, make it big enough to hold
half a dozen, save labor and warmth, and, withal, live
sociably together ? So they left, each one his bed,

and joining efforts, started, about the middle of Octo-

•
ber, to build this winter house.

Slowly, night after night, the domed walls have
been rising, although for several nights at a time
there would be no apparent progress with the work.
The builders were in no hurry, it seems ; the cold

3

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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, then the rains may de-
scend, and the floods come, but it will not fall. It is
built upon a tussock ; and a tussock, you will know,
who have ever grubbed at one, has hold on the bot-
tom of creation. The winter may descend, and the
boys, and foxes, come, — and they will come, but not
before the walls are frozen, — yet the house stands.
It is boy-proof, almost ; it is entirely rain-, cold-, and
fox-proof. Many a time I have hacked at its walls
with my axe when fishing through the ice, but I never
got in. I have often seen, too, 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.

Yet strangely enough the house sometimes fails of
the very purpose for which it was erected. I said the
floods may come. So they may, ordinarily ; but along
in March when one comes as a freshet, it rises some-
times to the dome of the house, filling the single bed-
chamber and drowning the dwellers out. I remember

4

QEfuif bin$

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' muskrats too
Gang aft a-gley.

But ganging a-gley is not the interesting thing, not
the point with my muskrats : it is rather that my
muskrats, and the mice that Burns ploughed up, the
birds and the bees, and even the very trees of the
forest, have foresight. They all look ahead and pro-
vide against the coming cold. That a mouse, or a
muskrat, or even a bee, should occasionally prove
foresight to be vain, only shows that the life of the
fields is very human. Such foresight, however, oftener
proves entirely adequate for the winter, dire as some
of the emergencies are sure to be.

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

And what will Muskrat do ? and Chipmunk ? and
Whitefoot ? and little Chickadee ? poor things ! Never
fear. Robin has heard the trumpets of the north wind

5

of

and is retreating leisurely toward the south, wise
thing ! Muskrat is building a warm winter lodge ;
Chipmunk has already dug his but and ben, and so
far down under the stone wall that a month of zeros
could not break in ; Whitefoot, the woodmouse, has
stored the hollow poplar stub full of acorns, and has
turned Robin's deserted nest, near by, into a cosy
house; and Chickadee, dear thing, Nature herself
looks after him. There are plenty of provisions for
the hunting, and a big piece of suet on my lilac bush.
His clothes are warm, and he will hide his head under
his wing in the elm-tree hole when the north wind
doth blow, and never mind the weather.

I shall not mind it either, not so much, anyway,
on account of Chickadee. He lends me a deal of
support. So do Chipmunk, Whitefoot, and Muskrat.

This lodge of my muskrats in the meadow makes
a difference, I am sure, of at least ten degrees in the
mean temperature of my winter. How can the out-
of-doors freeze entirely up with such a house as this
at the middle of it ? For in this house is life, warm
life, — and fire. On the coldest day I can look out
over the bleak white waste to where the house shows,
a tiny mound in the snow, and I can see the fire burn,

6

just as I can see and feel the glow when I watch the
slender blue wraith rise into the still air from the
chimney of the old farmhouse along the road below.
For I share in the life of both houses ; and not less
in the life of the mud house of the meadow, because,
instead of Swedes, they are muskrats who live there.
I can share the existence of a muskrat ? Easily. I
like to curl up with the three or four of them in that
mud house and there spend the worst days of the
winter. My own big house here on the hilltop is
sometimes cold. And the wind ! If sometimes I could
only drive the insistent winter wind from the house
corners ! But down in the meadow the house has no
corners ; the mud walls are thick, so thick and round
that the shrieking wind sweeps past unheard, and all
unheeded the cold creeps over and over the thatch,
then crawls back and stiffens upon the meadow.

The doors of our house in the meadow swing open
the winter through. Just outside the doors stand our
stacks of fresh calamus roots, and iris, and arum. The
roof of the universe has settled close and hard upon
us, — a sheet of ice extending from the ridge of the
house far out to the shores of the meadow. The win-
ter is all above the roof — outside. It blows and snows

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of

and freezes out there. In here, beneath the ice-roof,
the roots of the sedges are pink and tender ; our roads
are all open and they run every way, over all the rich,
rooty meadow.

The muskrats are building. Winter is coming. The
muskrats are making preparations, but not they alone.
The preparation for hard weather is to be seen every-
where, and it has been going on ever since the first
flocking of the swallows back in July. Up to that
time the season still seemed young ; no one thought
of harvest, of winter ; — when there upon the tele-
graph wires one day were the swallows, and work
against the winter had commenced.

The great migratory movements of the birds, mys-
terious in some of their courses as the currents of
the sea, were in the beginning, and are still, for the
most part, mere shifts to escape the cold. Why in
the spring these same birds should leave the south-
ern lands of plenty and travel back to the hungrier
north to nest, is not easily explained. Perhaps it is
the home instinct that draws them back ; for home
to birds (and men) is the land of the nest. However,
it is very certain that among the autumn migrants
there would be at once a great falling off should there

8

(ttlusfevafe <m QBuiCbing

come a series of warm open winters with abundance
of food.

Bad as the weather is, there are 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 majority 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. The wild geese pass, and I hear behind them
the clang of the arctic gates, the boom of the bolt —
then the long frozen silence. Yet it is not for long.
Soon the bar will slip back, the gates will swing wide,
and the wild geese will come honking over, swift to
the greening marshes of the arctic bays once more.

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,

9

of

no doubt, before there is plenty again ; there will be
suffering and death. But what with the migrating,
the strange deep sleeping, the building and harvest-
ing, there will be also much comfortable, much joy-
ous and sociable living.

Long before the muskrats began to build, even be-
fore the swallows commenced to flock, my chipmunks
started their winter stores. I don't know which be-
gan his work first, which kept harder at it, chipmunk
or the provident ant. The ant has come by a reputa-
tion for thrift, which, though entirely deserved, is
still not the exceptional virtue it is made to seem.
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 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 to the
flowering of the last autumn asters — on until fifty, a
hundred, or even three hundred pounds of surplus

10

QEfutt bin$

honey are sealed in the combs, and the colony is safe
should the sun not shine again for a year and a day.

But here is Nature, in these extra pounds of honey,
making preparation for me, incapable drone that I
am. I could not make a drop of honey from a whole
forest of linden bloom. Yet I must live, so I give
the bees a bigger gum log than they need ; I build
them greater barns ; and when the harvest is all
in, this extra store I make my own. I too with the
others am getting ready for the cold.

It is well that I am. 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 contract their
entrances, — put on their storm-doors. And now
there is little else that I can do but put on my own.

The whole of my out-of-doors is a great hive,
stored and sealed for the winter, its swarming life
close-clustered, and covering in its centre, as coals
in the ashes, the warm life-fires of summer.

I stand along the edge of the hillside here and
look down the length of its frozen slope. The brown

ii

of

leaves have drifted into the entrances, as if every
burrow were forsaken ; sand and sticks have washed
in, too, littering and choking the doorways.

There is no sign of life. A stranger would find it
hard to believe that my whole drove of forty-six
ground hogs (woodchucks) are gently snoring at the
bottoms of these old uninteresting holes. Yet here
they are, and quite out of danger, sleeping the sleep
of the furry, the fat, and the forgetful.

The woodchuck's is a curious shift, a case of Na-
ture outdoing herself. Winter spreads far and fast,
and Woodchuck, in order to keep ahead out of dan-
ger, would need wings. But he was n't given any.
Must he perish then ? Winter spreads far, but does
not go deep — down only about four feet ; and Wood-
chuck, if he cannot escape overland, can, perhaps,
underlznd. So down he goes through the winter,
down into a mild and even temperature, five long
feet away — but as far away from the snow and 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 beyond the bounds of time and space into
the mysterious realm of sleep, of suspended life, to

12

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 very strange.

For he went in most meagrely prepared. He took
nothing with him, apparently. The muskrat built
him a house, and under the spreading ice turned all
the meadow into a well-stocked cellar. The beaver
built a dam, cut and anchored under water a plenty
of green sticks near his lodge, so that he too would
be under cover when the ice formed, and have an
abundance of tender bark at hand. Chipmunk spent
half of his summer laying up food near his under-
ground nest. But Woodchuck simply digged him a
hole, a grave, then ate until no particle more of fat
could be got into his baggy hide, and then crawled
into his tomb, gave up the ghost, and waited the
resurrection of the spring.

This is his shift ! This is the length to which he
goes, because he has no wings, and because he can-
not cut, cure, and mow away in the depths of the
stony hillside, enough clover hay to last him over
the winter. The beaver cans his fresh food in cold
water; the chipmunk selects long-keeping things
and buries them ; the woodchuck makes of himself a

13

of

sjlo, eats all his winter hay in the summer while it is
green, turns it at once into a surplus of himself, then
buries that self, feeds upon it, 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 lack-
ing in fur and feathers and fat, even he has no care
at tfce sound of the cold winds. Nature provides for
him too, in her way, which is neither the way for the
robin, the muskrat, nor the woodchuck. He survives,
and all he has to do about it is to dig into the mud
at the bottom of the ditch. This looks at first like
the journey Woodchuck takes. But it is really a
longer, stranger journey than Woodchuck's, for it
takes the frog far beyond the realms of mere sleep,
on into the cold, black land where no one can tell
the quick from the dead.

The frost may or may not reach him here in the
ooze. No matter. If the cold works down and freezes
him into the mud, he never knows. But he will
thaw out as good as new ; he will sing again for joy

14

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 in the laboratory. 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
apparent suffering or inconvenience. He would come
to, and croak, and look as wise as ever.

The north wind may blow,

but the muskrats are building ; and it is by no
means a cheerless prospect, this wood-and-meadow
world of mine in the gray November light. The
frost will not fall to-night as falls the plague on men ;
the brightness of the summer is gone, yet this chill
gloom is not the sombre shadow of a pall. Nothing
is dying in the fields : 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 my wood-lot. There will be no less of
life next April because of this winter, unless, per-
chance, conditions altogether exceptional starve some
of the winter birds. These suffer most ; yet as the

of

seasons go, life even for the winter birds is comfort-
able and abundant.

The fence-rows and old pastures are full of berries
that will keep the fires burning in the quail and par-
tridge during the bitterest weather. Last February,
however, I came upon two partridges in the snow,
dead of hunger and cold. It was after an extremely
long severe spell. But this was not all. 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, un-
used to foraging the fence-rows and tangles for wild
seeds, they seem to have given up the struggle 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, green brier, bittersweet, black
alder, and checkerberries — hillsides of the latter —
that they might have found. These were hard fare,
doubtless, after 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 of the winter, like the tree
16

Q1Xu06tafe are

sparrow and junco, feed upon the weeds and grasses
that ripen unmolested along the roadsides and waste
places. A mixed flock of these small birds lived
several days last winter upon the seeds of the rag-
weed in my mowing. The weeds came up in the
early fall after the field was laid down to clover and
timothy. They threatened to choke out the grass. I
looked at them, rising shoulder-high and seedy over
the greening field, and thought with dismay of how
they would cover it by the next fall. After a time
the snow came, a foot and a half of it, till only the
tops of the seedy ragweeds showed above the level
white; then the juncos, goldfinches, and tree spar-
rows came, and there was a five-day shucking of
ragweed-seed in the mowing, and five days of life
and plenty.

Then I looked and thought again — that, perhaps,
into the original divine scheme of things were put
even ragweeds. But then, perhaps, there was no
original divine scheme of things. I don't know. As
I watch the changing seasons, however, across the
changeless years, I seem to find a scheme, a plan, a
purpose, and there are weeds and winters in it, and
it seems divine.

17

of tfy

The muskrats are building ;. the last of the migrat-
ing geese have gone over ; the wild mice have har-
vested their acorns ; the bees have clustered ; the
woodchucks are asleep ; and the sap in the big hick-
ory by the side of the house has crept down out of
reach of the fingers of the frost. I will put on the
storm-doors and the double windows. Even now the
logs are blazing cheerily on the wide, warm hearth.

n

ON the night before this particular Christ-
mas every creature of the woods that could
stir was up and stirring, for over the old snow was
falling swiftly, silently, a soft, fresh covering that
might mean a hungry Christmas unless the dinner
were had before morning.

But when the morning dawned, a cheery Christ-
mas sun broke across the great gum swamp, lighting
the snowy boles and soft-piled limbs of the giant
trees with indescribable glory, and pouring, a golden
flood, into the deep spongy bottoms
below. It would be a perfect Christ-
mas in the woods, clear, mild,
stirless, with silent footing for me,
and everywhere the telltale snow.
19

of t

And everywhere the Christmas spirit, too. As I
paused among the pointed cedars of the pasture,
looking down into the cripple at the head of the
swamp, a clear wild whistle rang in the thicket, fol-
lowed by a flash through the alders like a tongue of
fire, as a cardinal grosbeak shot down to the tangle
of greenbrier and magnolia under the slope. It was a
fleck of flaming summer. As warm as summer, too,
the stag-horn sumac burned on the crest of the ridge
against the group of holly trees, — trees as fresh as
April, and all aglow with berries. The woods were
decorated for the holy day. The gentleness of the
soft new snow touched everything ; cheer and good-
will lighted the unclouded sky and warmed the thick
depths of the evergreens, and blazed in the crimson-
berried bushes of the ilex and alder. The Christmas
woods were glad.

Nor was the gladness all show, mere decoration.
There was real cheer in abundance, for I was back
in the old home woods, back along the Cohansey,
back where you can pick persimmons off the trees at
Christmas. There are persons who say the Lord might
have made a better berry than the strawberry, but He
did n't. Perhaps He did n't make the strawberry at

20

n

all. But He did make the Cohansey Creek persimmon,
and He made it as good as He could. Nowhere else
under the sun can you find such persimmons as these
along the creek, such richness of flavor, such gummy,
candied quality, woodsy, wild, crude, — especially the
fruit of two particular trees on the west bank, near
Lupton's Pond. But they never come to this perfec-
tion, never quite lose their pucker, until midwinter,
— a's if they had been intended for the Christmas
table of the woods.

It had been nearly twenty years since I crossed
this pasture of the cedars on my way to the per-
simmon trees. The cows had been crossing every
year, yet not a single new crook had they worrT1n
the old paths. But I was half afraid as I came to
the fence where I could look down upon the pond
and over to the persimmon trees. Not one of the
Luptons, who owned pasture and pond and trees,
had ever been a boy, so far as I could remember, or
had ever eaten of those persimmons. Would they
have left the trees through all these years ?

I pushed through the hedge of cedars and stopped
for an instant, confused. The very pond was gone !
and the trees! No, there was the pond, — but how

21

of t§e

small the patch of water ! and the two persimmon
trees ? The bush and undergrowth had grown these
twenty years. Which way — Ah, there they stand,
only their leafless tops showing; but see the hard
angular limbs, how closely globed with fruit ! how
softly etched upon the sky !

I hurried around to the trees and climbed the one
with the two broken branches, up, clear up to the
top, into the thick of the persimmons.

Did I say it had been twenty years ? That could
not be. Twenty years would have made me a man,
and this sweet, real taste in my mouth only a boy
could know. But there was college, and marriage, a
Massachusetts farm, four boys of my own, and — no
matter! it could not have been years — twenty years
— since. Jt was only yesterday that I last climbed this
tree and ate the rich rimy fruit frosted with a Christ-
mas snow.

And yet, could it have been yesterday? It was
storming, and I clung here in the swirling snow and
heard the wild ducks go over in their hurry toward
the bay. Yesterday, and all this change in the vast
treetop world, this huddled pond, those narrowed
meadows, that shrunken creek ! I should have eaten

22

n

the persimmons and climbed straight down, not
stopped to gaze out upon the pond, and away over
the dark ditches to the creek. But reaching out
quickly I gathered another handful, — and all was
yesterday again.

I filled both pockets of my coat and climbed down.
I kept those persimmons and am tasting them to-
night. Lupton's Pond may fill to a puddle, the mead-
ows may shrivel, the creek dry up and disappear, and
old Time may even try his wiles on me. But I shall
foil him to the end ; for I am carrying still in my
pocket some of yesterday's persimmons, — persim-
mons that ripened in the rime of a winter when I was
a boy.

High and alone in a bare persimmon tree for one's
dinner hardly sounds like a merry Christmas. But I
was not alone. I had noted the fresh tracks beneath
the tree before I climbed up, and now I saw that the
snow had been partly brushed from several of the
large limbs as the 'possum had moved about in
the tree for his Christmas dinner. We were guests
at the same festive board, and both of us at Nature's
invitation. It mattered not that the 'possum had
eaten and gone this hour or more. Such is good form

23

in the woods. He was expecting me, so he came
early, out of modesty, and, that I too might be en-
tirely at my ease, he departed early, leaving his greet-
ings for me in the snow.

Thus I was not alone ; here was good company and
plenty of it. I never lack a companion in the woods
when I can pick up a trail. The 'possum and I ate
together. And this was just the fellowship I needed,
this sharing the persimmons with the 'possum. I had
broken bread, not with the 'possum only, but with all
the out-of-doors. I was now fit to enter the woods,
for I was filled with good-will and persimmons, as
full as the 'possum ; and putting myself under his
gentle guidance, I got down upon the ground, took
up his clumsy trail, and descended toward the swamp.
Such an entry is one of the particular joys of the
winter. To go in with a fox, a mink, or a 'possum
through the door of the woods is to find yourself at
home. Any one can get inside the out-of-doors, as the
grocery boy or the census man gets inside our houses.
You can bolt in at any time on business. A trail,
however, is Nature's invitation. There may be other,
better beaten paths for mere feet. But go softly with
the 'possum, and at the threshold you are met by the

24

in tfyt Tttoob*

spirit of the wood, you are made the guest of the
open, silent, secret out-of-doors.

I went down with the 'possum. He had traveled
home leisurely and without fear, as his tracks plainly
showed. He was full of persimmons. A good happy
world this, where such fare could be had for the
picking ! What need to hurry home, except one were
in danger of falling asleep by the way ? So I thought,
too, as I followed his winding path ; and if I was
tracking him to his den, it was only to wake him for
a moment with the compliments of the season. But it
was not even a momentary disturbance ; for when I
finally found him in his hollow gum, he was sound
asleep, and only half realized that some one was pok-
ing him gently in the ribs and wishing him a merry
Christmas.

The 'possum had led me to the centre of the
empty, hollow swamp, where the great-boled gums
lifted their branches like a timbered, unshingled roof
between me and the wide sky. Far away through the
spaces of the rafters I saw a pair of wheeling buz-
zards, and under them, in lesser circles, a broad-
winged hawk. Here, at the feet of the tall, clean
trees, looking up through the leafless limbs, I had

25

of tfyt

something of a measure for the flight of the birds.
The majesty and the mystery of the distant buoyant
wings were singularly impressive.

I have seen the turkey-buzzard sailing the skies on
the bitterest winter days. To-day, however, could
hardly be called winter. Indeed, nothing yet had felt
the pinch of the cold. There was no hunger yet in
the swamp, though this new snow had scared the
raccoons out, and their half-human tracks along the
margin of the swamp stream showed that, if not hun-
gry, they at least feared that they might be.

For a coon hates snow. He will invariably sleep
off the first light snowfalls, and even in the late
winter he will not venture forth in fresh snow unless
driven by hunger or some other dire need. Perhaps,
like a cat or a hen, he dislikes the wetting of his feet.
Or it may be that the soft snow makes bad hunting —
for him. The truth is, I believe, that such a snow
makes too good hunting for the dogs and the gunner.
The new snow tells too clear a story. His home is no
inaccessible den among the ledges ; only a hollow in
some ancient oak or tupelo. Once within, he is safe
from the dogs, but the long fierce fight for life taught
him generations ago that the nest-tree is a fatal trap

26

in tt TJJoob*

when behind the dogs come the axe and the gun. So
he has grown wary and enduring. He waits until the
snow grows crusty, when without sign, and almost
without scent, he can slip forth among the long
shadows and prowl to the edge of dawn.

Skirting the stream out toward the higher back
woods, I chanced to spy a bunch of snow in one of
the great sour gums that I thought was an old nest.
A second look showed me tiny green leaves, then
white berries, then mistletoe.

It was not a surprise, for I had found it here be-
fore, — a long, long time before. It was back in my
schoolboy days, back beyond those twenty years, that
I first stood here under the mistletoe and had my first
romance. There was no chandelier, no pretty girl, in
that romance, — only a boy, the mistletoe, the giant
trees, and the sombre silent swamp. Then there was
his discovery, the thrill of deep delight, and the
wonder of his knowledge of the strange unnatural
plant ! All plants had been plants to him until, one
day, he read the life of the mistletoe. But that was
English mistletoe ; so the boy's wonder world of
plant life was still as far away as Mars, when, ram-
bling alone through the swamp along the creek, he

27

of t$

stopped under a big curious bunch of green, high up
in one of the gums, and — made his first discovery.

So the boy climbed up again this Christmas Day
at the peril of his precious neck, and brought down
a bit of that old romance.

I followed the stream along through the swamp to
the open meadows, and then on under the steep
wooded hillside that ran up to the higher land of
corn and melon fields. Here at the foot of the slope
the winter sun lay warm, and here in the sheltered
briery border I came upon the Christmas birds.

There was a great variety of them, feeding and
preening and chirping in the vines. The tangle was
a-twitter with their quiet, cheery talk. Such a medley
of notes you could not hear at any other season out-
side a city bird store. How far the different species
understood one another I should like to know, and
whether the hum of voices meant sociability to them,
as it certainly meant to me. Doubtless the first cause
of their flocking here was the sheltered warmth and
the great numbers of berry-laden bushes, for there
was no lack either of abundance or variety on the
Christmas table.

In sight from where I stood hung bunches of with-
28

in t§t

ering chicken or frost grapes, plump clusters of blue-
black berries of the greenbrier, and limbs of the
smooth winterberry bending with their flaming fruit.
There were bushes of crimson ilex, too, trees of fruit-
ing dogwood and holly, cedars in berry, dwarf sumac
and seedy sedges, while patches on the wood slopes
uncovered by the sun were spread with trailing par-
tridge berry and the coral-fruited wintergreen. I had
eaten part of my dinner with the 'possum ; I picked a
quantity of these wintergreen berries, and continued
my meal with the birds. And they also had enough
and to spare.

Among the birds in the tangle was a large flock
of northern fox sparrows, whose vigorous and con-
tinuous scratching in the bared spots made a most
lively and cheery commotion. Many of them were
splashing about in tiny pools of snow-water, melted
partly by the sun and partly by the warmth of their
bodies as they bathed. One would hop to a softening
bit of snow at the base of a tussock, keel over and
begin to flop, soon sending up a shower of sparkling
drops from his rather chilly tub. A winter snow-
water bath seemed a necessity, a luxury indeed, for
they all indulged, splashing with the same purpose

29

Of tfy

and zest that they put into their scratching among
the leaves.

A much bigger splashing drew me quietly through
the bushes to find a marsh hawk giving himself
a Christmas souse. The scratching, washing, and
talking of the birds ; the masses of green in the
cedars, holly, and laurels ; the glowing colors of the
berries against the snow ; the blue of the sky, and
the golden warmth of the light made Christmas in
the heart of the noon that the very swamp seemed
to feel.

Three months later there was to be scant picking
here, for this was the beginning of the severest win-
ter I ever knew. From this very ridge, in February,
I had reports of berries gone, of birds starving, of
whole coveys of quail frozen dead in the snow ; but
neither the birds nor I dreamed to-day of any such
hunger and death. A flock of robins whirled into
the cedars above me ; a pair of cardinals whistled
back and forth ; tree sparrows, j uncos, nuthatches,
chickadees, and cedar-birds cheeped among the trees
and bushes ; and from the farm lands at the top of
the slope rang the calls of meadowlarks.

Halfway up the hill I stopped under a blackjack
30

in tt TUoob*

oak, where, in the thin snow, there were signs of
something like a Christmas revel. The ground was
sprinkled with acorn shells and trampled over with
feet of several kinds and sizes, — quail, jay, and par-
tridge feet ; rabbit, squirrel, and mice feet, all over
the snow as the feast of acorns had gone on. Hun-
dreds of the acorns were lying about, gnawed away
at the cup end, where the shell was thinnest, many
of them further broken and cleaned out by the birds.
As I sat studying the signs in the snow, my eye
caught a tiny trail leading out from the others
straight away toward a broken pile of cord-wood.
The tracks were planted one after the other, so
directly in line as to seem like the prints of a single
foot. "That's a weasel's trail," I said, "the death's-
head at this feast," and followed it slowly to the
wood. A shiver crept over me as I felt, even sooner
than I saw, a pair of small sinister eyes fixed upon
mine. The evil pointed head, heavy but alert, and
with a suggestion of fierce strength out of all rela-
tion to the slender body, was watching me from
between the sticks of cord-wood. And so he had been
watching the mice and birds and rabbits feasting
under the tree !

of

I packed a ball of snow round and hard, slipped
forward upon my knees, and hurled it. " Spat ! " it
struck the end of a stick within an inch of the ugly
head, filling the crevice with snow. Instantly the
head appeared at another crack, and another ball
struck viciously beside it. Now it was back where it
first appeared, and did not flinch for the next, nor
the next ball. The third went true, striking with a
"chug" and packing the crack. But the black, hating
eyes were still watching me a foot lower down.

It is not all peace and good-will in the Christmas
woods. But there is more of peace and good-will
than of any other spirit. The weasels are few. More
friendly and timid eyes were watching me than bold
and murderous. It was foolish to want to kill — even
the weasel. For one's woods are what one makes
them, and so I let the man with the gun, who
chanced along, think that I had turned boy again,
and was snowballing the woodpile, just for the fun
of trying to hit the end of the biggest stick.

I was glad he had come. As he strode off with
his stained bag I felt kindlier toward the weasel.
There were worse in the woods than he, — worse,
because all of their killing was pastime. The weasel

32

n

must kill to live, and if he gloated over the kill, why,
what fault of his ? But the other weasel, the one
with the blood-stained bag, he killed for the love
of killing. I was glad he was gone.

The crows were winging over toward their great
roost in the pines when I turned toward the town.
They, too, had had good picking along the creek
flats and ditches of the meadows. Their powerful
wing-beats and constant play told of full crops and
no fear for the night, already softly gray across the
white silent fields. The air was crisper; the snow
began to crackle under foot ; the twigs creaked and
rattled as I brushed along ; a brown beech leaf wav-
ered down and skated with a thin scratch over the
crust ; and pure as the snow-wrapped crystal world,
and sweet as the soft gray twilight, came the call of
a quail.

The voices, colors, odors, and forms of summer
were gone. The very face of things had changed ; all
had been reduced, made plain, simple, single, pure !
There was less for the senses, but how much keener
now their joy! The wide landscape, the frosty air,
the tinkle of tiny icicles, and, out of the quiet of the
falling twilight, the voice of the quail !

33

of

There is no day but is beautiful in the woods ; and
none more beautiful than one like this Christmas
Day, — warm and still and wrapped, to the round red
berries of the holly, in the magic of the snow.

Ill
Cur£ for TtHnfer

FOR, lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone —

yet the snow lies white upon the fields, my little
river huddles under the ice, and a new calendar
hangs against the faded wall. But the storm is spent,
the sun is out, there is a cheery drip, drip, drip from
the eaves, eggs are sixty cents a dozen, and I am
writing to the golden cackle of my hens. New Year's
Day, and winter gone ! No, not quite gone, with eggs
at such a price ; still, it must be plain to every one
that I can have but little of winter left : eggs are
liable to come down any day.

It would be different, of course, were I buying
eggs at sixty cents, — all the difference between a
winter-sick and a winter-well condition. Selling eggs

35

of

for sixty cents is a cure, though not for poverty
when one has only thirty hens ; but it is a cure for
winter. The virtue, however, is not in the sixty cents.
There is no cure for winter in mere money. The
virtue is in the eggs, or, perhaps, it is really found
in keeping the hens.

Keeping the hens, and the two pigs, the horse,
the cow, the four boys, and the farm, for the year
around, is a sure cure for winter, and for a great
many other ills. In addition to the farm, one must
have some kind of a salary, and a real love for na-
ture ; but given the boys and the farm, the love will
come, for it lies dormant in human nature, as certain
seeds seem to lie dormant in the soil ; and as for the
salary, one must have a salary — farm or flat.

The prescription, then, should read : —

R

A small farm — of an acre or more,
A small income — of a thousand or more,
A small family — of four boys or more,
A real love of nature.

Sig. Morning and evening chores. The dose to be
taken daily, as long as winter lasts.

This will cure. It is an old-fashioned household
36

Cutt for TUintetr

mixture that can be compounded in any country
kitchen. But that is the trouble with it, — it is a
home remedy that cannot be bought of the apothe-
cary. There is more trouble with it, too, largely on
account of the regularity with which milking time
returns and the dose of chores. But it is effective.
A farm and congenial chores are a sovereign cure
for uncongenial time.

Here on the farm the signs of coming winter are
not ominous signs. The pensive, mellowing days of
early autumn have been preparing the garden and
your mind for the shock of the first frost. Once past
this and winter is welcome ; it becomes a physical,
spiritual need. The blood reddens at the promise of
it ; the soul turns comfortingly in and finds itself ;
and the digging of the potatoes commences, and the
shocking of the corn, the picking of the apples, the
piling up on the sunny side of the barn of the big
golden squashes.

A single golden squash holds over almost enough
of the summer to keep a long winter away from the
farm ; and the six of them in the attic, filling the
rafter room with sunshine, never allow the hoary old
monarch to show more than his face at the skylight.

37

Pie is not the only thing one brings in with his winter
squashes. He stores the ripe September in their
wrinkled rinds, rinds that are ridged and bossy with
the summer's gold.

To dig one's own potatoes ! to shock one's own
corn ! to pick one's own apples ! to pile one's own
squashes at one's own barn ! It is like filling one's
system with an antitoxin before going into a fever-
plagued country. One is immune to winter after this,
provided he stays to bake his apples in his own wood
fire. One works himself into a glow with all this
digging, and picking, and piling that lasts until
warm weather comes again ; and along with this har-
vest glow comes stealing over him the after-harvest
peace. It is the serenity of Indian summer, the mood
of the after-harvest season, upon him, — upon him
and his fields and woods.

The stores are all in : the acorns have ripened and
lie hidden where the squirrels will forget some of
them, but where none of the forgotten will forget to
grow ; the winged seeds of the asters have drifted
down the highways, over .the hillsides and meadows;
the birds are gone; the muskrats' lodge is all but
finished ; the hickories and the leaf-hid hepaticas are

38

Cutt for TXKnfer

budded against the coming spring. All is ready, all
is safe, — the stores are all in. Quiet and a golden
peace lie warm upon the fields. It is Indian summer.

Such a mood is a necessary condition for the cure.
Such a mood is the cure, indeed, for such a mood
means harmony with earth and sky, and every wind
that blows. In all his physical life man is as much a
part of Nature, and as subject to her inexorable laws,
as the fields and the trees and the birds. I have seen
a maple growing out of the pavement of a city street,
but no such maple as stands yonder at the centre of
my neighbor's meadow. I lived and grew on the same
street with the maple ; but not as I live and grow
here on the farm. Only on a farm does a man live in
a normal, natural environment, only here can he com-
ply with all the demands of Nature, can he find a cure
for winter.

To Nature man is just as precious as a woodchuck
or a sparrow, but not more. She cares for the wood-
chuck as long as he behaves like a woodchuck ; so
she cares for the sparrow, the oyster, the orchid, and
for man. But he must behave like a natural man,
must live where she intended him to live, and at the
approach of winter he must neither hibernate nor

39

migrate, for he is what the naturalists call a " winter
resident." It is not in his nature to fly away nor to go
to sleep, but, like the red squirrel and the muskrat,
to prepare to live up all the winter. So his original,
unperverted animal instinct leads him to store.

Long ago he buried his provisions in pits and hung
them up on poles. Even his vocabulary he gathered
together as his word-hoard. He is still possessed of
the remnant of the instinct ; he will still store. Cage
him in a city, give him more than he needs for winter,
relieve him of all possibility of want, and yet he will
store. You cannot cage an instinct nor eradicate it.
It will be obeyed, if all that can be found in the way
of pit and pole be a grated vault in the deep recesses
of some city bank.

Cage a red squirrel and he will store in the cage ;
so will the white-footed mouse. Give the mouse more
than he can use, put him in a cellar, where there is
enough already stored for a city of mice, and he will
take from your piles and make piles of his own. He
must store or be unhappy and undone.

A white-footed mouse got into my cellar last winter
and found it, like the cellar of the country mouse in
the fable, -

40

Cure for

Full benely stuffit, baith but and ben,

Of beirris and nuttis, peis, ry and quheit —

all of it, ready stored, so that,

Quhen ever scho list scho had aneuch to eit.
Enough to eat ? Certainly ; but is enough to eat all
that a mouse wants ? So far from being satisfied with
mere meat was this particular mouse, that finding
herself in the cellar in the midst of plenty, she at
once began to carry my winter stores from where I
had put them, and to make little heaps for herself
in every dark cranny and corner of the cellar. A pint,
or less, of " nuttis " — shagbarks — she tucked away
in the toe of my hunting boot. The nuts had been
left in a basket in the vegetable cellar ; the boots
stood out by the chimney in the furnace room, and
there were double doors and a brick partition wall
between. No matter. Here were the nuts she had
not yet stored, and out yonder was the hole, smooth
and deep and dark, to store them in. She found a
way past the partition wall.

Every morning I shook those nuts out of my boot
and sent them rattling over the cellar floor. Every
night the mouse gathered them up and put them
snugly back into the toe of the boot. She could not

41

have carried more than one nut at a time, — up the
tall boot-leg and down the oily, slippery inside. I
should have liked to see her scurrying about the
cellar, looking after her curiously difficult harvest.
Apparently, they were new nuts to her every evening.
Once or twice I came down to find them lying un-
touched. The mouse, perhaps, was away over night
on other business. But the following night they
were all gathered and nicely packed in the boot
as before. And as before I sent them sixty ways
among the barrels and boxes of the furnace room.
But I did it once too often, for it dawned upon
the mouse one night that these were the same old
nuts that she had gathered now a dozen times ; and
that night they disappeared. Where? I wondered.
Weeks passed, and I had entirely forgotten about the
nuts, when I came upon them, the identical nuts of
my boot, tiered carefully up in a corner of the deep,
empty water-tank away off in the attic.

Store? The mouse had to store. She had to, not
to feed her body, — there was plenty in the cellar for
that, — but to satisfy her soul. A mouse's soul, that
something within a mouse which makes for more than
meat, may not be a soul at all, but only a bundle of

42

Cute for TXKnfer

blind instincts. The human soul, that thing whose
satisfaction is so often a box of chocolates and a silk
petticoat, may be better and higher than the soul of
a mouse, may be a different thing indeed ; but origi-
nally it, too, had simple, healthful instincts; and
among them, atrophied now, but not wholly gone,
may still be found the desire for a life that is more
than something to eat and something to put on.

To be sure, here on the farm, one may eat all of his
potatoes, his corn, his beans and squashes before the
long, lean winter comes to an end. But if squashes
to eat were all, then he could buy squashes, bigger,
fairer, fatter ones, and at less cost, no doubt, at the
grocery store. He may need to eat the squash, but
what he needs more, and cannot buy, is the raising
of it, the harvesting of it, the fathering of it. He needs
to watch it grow, to pick it, to heft it, and have his
neighbor heft it; to go up occasionally to the attic
and look at it. He almost hates to eat it.

A man may live in the city and buy a squash and
eat it. That is all he can do with a boughten squash ;
for a squash that he cannot raise, he cannot store,
nor take delight in outside of pie. And can a man
live where his garden is a grocery? his storehouse a

43

of

grocery? his bins, cribs, mows, and attics so many
pasteboard boxes, bottles, and tin cans ? Tinned squash
in pie may taste like any squash pie ; but it is no longer
squash; and is a squash nothing if not pie? Oh, but
he gets a lithograph squash upon the can to show him
how the pulp looked as God made it. This is a sop
to his higher sensibilities; it is a commercial re-
minder, too, that life even in the city should be more
than pie, — it is also the commercial way of preserving
the flavor of the canned squash, else he would not
know whether he were eating squash or pumpkin or
sweet potato. But then it makes little difference,
all things taste the same in the city, — all taste of
tin.

There is a need in the nature of man for many
things, — for a wife, a home, children, friends, and a
need for winter. The wild goose feels it, too, and no
length of domesticating can tame the wild desire to
fly when the frosts begin to fall ; the woodchuck feels
it; carry him to the tropics and still he will sleep as
though the snows of New England lay deep in the
mouth of his burrow. The partridge's foot broadens
at the approach of winter into a snowshoe; the er-
mine's fur turns snow-white. Winter is in their bones ;

44

Cure for

it is good for them; it is health, not disease — with
snowshoes provided and snow-colored fur.

Nature supplies her own remedies. Winter brings
its own cure, — snowshoes and snowy coats, short
days and long nights, the narrowed round, the wid-
ened view, the open fire, leisure, quiet, and the com-
panionship of your books, your children, your wife,
your own strange soul — here on the farm.

Where else does it come, bringing all of this ?
Where else are conditions such that all weather is
good weather ? the weather a man needs ? Here he
is planted like his trees ; his roots are in the soil ; the
changing seasons are his life. He feeds upon them ;
works with them ; rests in them ; yields to them, and
finds in their cycle more than the sum of his physical
needs.

A man lives quite without roots in a city, like some
of the orchids, hung up in the air ; or oftener, like
the mistletoe, rooted, but drawing his life parasiti-
cally from some simpler, stronger, fresher life planted
far below him in the soil. There he cannot touch the
earth and feed upon life's first sources. He knows
little of any kind but bad weather. Summer is hot,
winter is nasty, spring and autumn scarcely are at,

45

of t$t

all, for they do not make him uncomfortable. The
round year is four changes of clothes — and a tank-
sprinkled, snow-choked, smoke-clouded, cobble-paved,
wheel-wracked, street-scented, wire-lighted half-day,
half-night something, that is neither spring, summer,
autumn, nor winter.

A city is a sore on the face of Nature ; not a dan-
gerous, ugly sore, necessarily, if one can get out of
it often enough and far enough, but a sore, neverthe-
less, that Nature will have nothing kindly to do with.
The snows that roof my sheds with Carrara, that
robe my trees with ermine, that spread close and
warm over my mowing, that call out the sleds and
the sleigh-bells, fall into the city streets as mud, as
danger on the city roofs, — as a nuisance over the
city's length and breadth, a nuisance to be hauled
off and dumped into the harbor as fast as shovels
and carts can move it.

But you cannot dump your winter and send it off
to sea. There is no cure for winter in a tip-cart ; no
cure in the city. There is consolation in the city, for
there is plenty of company in the misery. But com-
pany really means more of the misery. If life is to
be endured, if all that one can do with winter is to

46

for

shovel it and suffer it, then to the city for the winter,
for there one's share of the shoveling is small, and
the suffering there seems very evenly distributed.

Here on the farm is neither shoveling nor suffer-
ing, no quarrel whatever with the season. Here you
have nothing to do with its coming or going further
than making preparation to welcome it and to bid it
farewell. You slide, instead, with your boys ; you do
up the chores early in the short twilight, pile the
logs high by the blazing chimney and — you remem-
ber that there is to be a lecture to-night by the man
who has said it all in his book ; there is to be a con-
cert, a reception, a club dinner, in the city, sixteen
blissful miles away, — and it is snowing ! You can go
if you have to. But the soft tapping on the window-
panes grows faster, the voices at the corners of the
house rise higher, shriller. You look down at your
slippers, poke up the fire, settle a little deeper into
the big chair, and beg Eve to go on with the reading.
And she reads on —

Shut in from all the world without,

We sat the clean-winged hearth about,

Content to let the north wind roar

In baffled rage at pane and door,

While the red logs before us beat

47

of t$

The frost-line back with tropic heat ;
And ever, when a louder blast
Shook beam and rafter as it passed,
The merrier up its roaring draught
The great throat of the chimney laughed.

And, for the winter fireside meet,
Between the andirons' straddling feet,
The mug of cider simmered slow,
The apples sputtered in a row,
And, close at hand, the basket stood
With nuts from brown October's wood.

But you will be snow-bound in the morning and
cannot get to town ? Perhaps ; but it happened so
only twice to me in the long snowy winter of 1904.
So twice we read the poem, and twice we lived the
poem, and twice? yes, a thousand times, we were
glad for a day at home that was n't Sunday, for a
whole long day to pop corn with the boys.

A farm, of all human habitations, is most of a
home, and never so much of a home as in the winter
when the stock and the crops are housed, when fur-
row and boundary fence are covered, when earth and
sky conspire to drive a man indoors and to keep him
in, — where he needs to stay for a while and be quiet.

No problem of city life is more serious than the
48

Cute for TXKntet:

problem of making in the city a home. A habitation
where you can have no garden, no barn, no attic, no
cellar, no chickens, no bees, no boys (we were al-
lowed one boy by the janitor of our city flat), no
fields, no sunset skies, no snow-bound days, can
hardly be a home. To live in the fifth flat, at No. 6
West Seventh Street, is not to have a home. Pic-
tures on the walls, a fire in the grate, and a prayer
in blending zephyrs over the door for God to bless
the place can scarcely make of No. 6 more than a
sum in arithmetic. There is no home environment
about this fifth flat at No. 6, just as there is none
about cell No. 6, in the fifth tier of the west corridor
of the Tombs.

The idea, the concept, home, is a house set back
from the road behind a hedge of trees, a house with a
yard, with flowers, chickens, and a garden, — a country
home. The songs of home are all of country homes : —

How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood
When fond recollection presents them to view :

The gutter, the lamp-post, the curb that ran by it,
And e'en the brass spigot that did for a well. —

Impossible ! You cannot sing of No. 6, West Seventh,

49

fifth flight up. And what of a home that cannot be
remembered as a song ! It is not a home, but only a
floor over your head, a floor under your feet, a hole
in the wall of the street, a burrow into which you
are dumped by a hoisting machine. It is warm in-
side ; Eve is with you, and the baby, and your books.
But you do not hear the patter of the rain upon the
roof, nor the murmur of the wind in the trees ; you
do not see the sun go down beyond the wooded hills,
nor ever feel the quiet of the stars. You have no
largeness round about you; you are the centre of
nothing ; you have no garden, no harvest, no chores,
— no home ! There is not room enough about a city
flat for a home, nor chores enough in city life for a
living.

For a man's life consisteth not in an abundance of
things, but in the particular kind and number of his
chores. A chore is a fragment of real life that is
lived with the doing. All real living must be lived ;
it cannot be bought or hired. And herein is another
serious problem in city life, — it is the tragedy of city
life that it is so nearly all lived for us. We hire
Tom, Dick, and Harry to live it ; we buy it of the
butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. It is not

So

Cutt for TXKnfer

so here on the farm ; for here one has the full round
of life's chores, and here, on a professor's salary, one
may do all the chores himself.

We may hire our praying and our thinking done
for us and still live ; but not our chores. They are to
the life of the spirit what breathing and eating and
sleeping are to the life of the body. Not to feed your
own horse is to miss the finest joy of having a horse,
— the friendship of the noble creature ; not to "pick
up" the eggs yourself, nor hoe your own garden, nor
play with your own boys ! Why, what is the use of
having boys if you are never going to be "it " again,
if you are not to be a boy once more along with
them!

There are some things, the making of our clothes,
perhaps, that we must hire done for us. But clothes
are not primitive and essential ; they are accidental,
an adjunct, a necessary adjunct, it may be, but be-
longing to a different category from children, gar-
dens, domestic animals, and a domestic home. And
yet, how much less cloth we should need, and what
a saving, too, of life's selvage, could we return to the
spinning-wheel and loom as we go back to the farm
and the daily chores !

51

of

She, harvest done, to char work did aspire,
Meat, drink, and twopence were her daily hire.

And who has not known the same aspiration ? has
not had a longing for mere chores, and their ample
compensation ? It is such a reasonable, restful, satis-
fying aspiration! Harvest done! Done the work and
worry of the day ! Then the twilight, and the even-
ing chores, and the soft closing of the door ! At
dawn we shall go forth again until the evening ;
but with a better spirit for our labor after the fine
discipline of the morning chores. The day should
start and stop in our own selves ; labor should begin
and come to an end in the responsibility of the whole-
some, homely round of our own chores.

Summer is gone, the harvest is done, and winter
is passing on its swiftest days. So swift, indeed, are
the days that morning and evening meet, bound up
like a sheaf by the circle of the chores. For there is
never an end to the chores ; never a time when they
are all done ; never a day when the round of them
is not to be done again. And herein lies more of
their virtue as a winter cure.

Life is not busier here than elsewhere ; time is not
swifter, but more enjoyable, because so much of life

52

Cutre for

is left unfinished and time is thrown so much more
into the future. There is no past on the farm ; it is
all to come ; no sure defeat, but always promise ;
no settled winter, but always the signs of coming
spring.

To-day is the first of January, snowy, brilliant,
but dripping with the sound of spring wherever the
sun lies warm, and calling with the heart of spring
yonder where the crows are flocking. There is
spring in the talk of the chickadees outside my win-
dow, and in the cheerful bluster of a red squirrel in
the hickory. No bluebird has returned yet : spring is
not here, not quite, I hope, but it is coming, and so
near that I shall drop my pen and go out to the barn
to put together some new beehives, for I must have
them ready for the spring, Winter ! The winter is
almost gone. Why, it is barely a month since I
brought my bees into the cellar, and here I am
taking them out again — in prospect.

The hives have just come from the factory "in the
flat": sawed, planed, dovetailed, and matched, — a
delightful set of big blocks, — ready to be nailed to-
gether. You feel a bit mean, keeping them from the
children. But the oldest of the boys is only six, and

53

of

he had a walking bear for Christmas. Besides, when
you were a little boy you never had many blocks, and
never a walking bear. So you keep the hives. And
how suddenly the January day goes ! You hammer
on into the deepening dusk, and the chickens go to
roost without their supper. You would have ham-
mered on all night, but the hives ran out. Five hives
won't last very long ; and you sigh as they stand
finished. You could wish them all in pieces to do
over again, so smooth the stock, so fragrant the piny
smell, so accurate and nice the parts from cover to
bottom board !

Winter ! with January started, and February two
days short ! It is all a fiction. You had dreams of
long evenings, of books and crackling fires, and of
days shut in. It still snows ; there is something
still left of the nights, but not half enough, for the
seed catalogues are already beginning to arrive.

The snow lies a foot deep over the strawberry
bed and the frozen soil where the potatoes are to
be. Yet the garden grows — on paper ? No, not on
paper, but in your own eager soul. The joy of a
garden is as real in January as in June.

And so the winter goes. For if it is not the gar-
54

Cut# for TXKnfer

den and the bees, it is some of a thousand other
chores that keep you busy and living past the pre-
sent, — and past the present is the spring.

I am watching for the phcebes to return to the
shed, — they are my first birds. I long to hear the
shrill piping of the March frogs, to pick a blue
hepatica from beneath the pines ; for these are some
of the things, besides cheaper rent, more room, more
boys, fresh air, quiet, and a cow, that one lives for
here on the farm. But I am not waiting, winter-sick,
for I have stored the summer in attic and cellar;
I am already having my spring — in prospect ; and
as for the actual winter, the snow-bound days are all
too few for the real winter joys of this simple, ample
life, here in the quiet, among the neighbor fields.

IV

I HAD made a nice piece of dissection, a pretty
demonstration — for a junior.

" You did n't know a dog was put together so
beautifully, did you ? " said the professor, frankly
enjoying the sight of the marvelous system of nerves
laid bare by the knife. " Now, see here," he went
on, eyeing me keenly, "does n't a revelation like
that take all the moonshine about the ' beauties of
nature ' clean out of you ? "

I looked at the lifeless lump upon my table, and
answered very deliberately : "No, it doesn't. That's

56

a fearful piece of mechanism. I appreciate that. But
what is any system of nerves or muscles — mere
dead dog — compared with the love and affection
of the dog alive ? "

The professor was trying to make a biologist out
of me. He had worked faithfully, but I had persisted
in a very unscientific love for live dog. Not that I
didn't enjoy comparative anatomy, for I did. The
problem of concrescence or differentiation in the
cod's egg also was intensely interesting to me. And
so was the sight and the suggestion of the herring
as they crowded up the run on their way to the
spawning pond. The professor had lost patience. I
don't blame him.

" Well," he said, turning abruptly, " you had better
quit. You'll be only a biological fifth wheel."

I quit. Here on my table lies the scalpel. Since
that day it has only sharpened lead pencils.

Now a somewhat extensive acquaintance with sci-
entific folk leads me to believe that the attitude of
my professor toward the out-of-doors is not excep-
tional. The love for nature is all moonshine, all
maudlin sentiment. Even those like my professor,
who have to do with out-of-door life and conditions,

57

— zoologists, botanists, geologists, — look upon nat-
uralists, and others who love birds and fields, as of
a kind with those harmless but useless inanities who
collect tobacco tags, postage stamps, and picture
postal cards. Sentiment is not scientific.

I have a biological friend, a professor of zoology,
who never saw a woodchuck in the flesh. He would
not know a woodchuck with the fur on from a mon-
goose. Not until he had skinned it and set up the
skeleton could he pronounce it Arctomys monax with
certainty. Yes, he could tell by the teeth. Dentition
is a great thing. He could tell a white pine (strobus)
from a pitch pine (rigida) by just a cone and a
bundle of needles, — one has five, the other three,
to the bundle. But he would n't recognize a columned
aisle of the one from a Jersey barren of the other.
That is not the worst of it : he would not see even
the aisle or the barren, — only trees.

As we jogged along recently, on a soft midwinter
day that followed a day of freezing, my little three-
year-old threw his nose into the air and cried : " Oh,
fader, I smell de pitch pines, de scraggly pines, —
'ou calls 'em Joisey pines ! " And sure enough, around
a double curve in the road we came upon a single

58

clump of the scraggly pitch pines. Our drive had
taken us through miles of the common white species.

Did you ever smell the pitch pines when they are
thawing out ? It is quite as healthful, if not as sci-
entific, to recognize them by their resinous breath as
by their needles per bundle.

I want this small boy some time to know the dif-
ference between these needle bundles. But I want
him to learn now, and to remember always, that the
hard days are sure to soften, and that then there
oozes from the scraggly pitch pines a balm, a piny,
penetrating, purifying balm, — a tonic to the lungs,
a healing to the soul.

All foolishness ? sentiment ? moonshine ? — this
love for woods and fields, this need I have for com-
panionship with birds and trees, this longing for
the feel of grass and the smell of earth ? When
I told my biological friend that these longings were
real and vital, as vital as the highest problems of the
stars and the deepest questions of life, he pitied me,
but made no reply.

He sees clearly a difference between live and dead
men, a difference between the pleasure he gets from
the society of his friends, and the knowledge, inter-

59

of f§e

esting as it may be, which he obtains in a dissecting-
room. But he sees no such difference between live
and dead nature, nature in the fields and in the lab-
oratory. Nature is all a biological problem to him,
not a quick thing, — a shape, a million shapes, in-
formed with spirit, — a voice of gladness, a mild and
healing sympathy, a companionable soul.

" But there you go ! " he exclaims, "talking poetry
again. Why don't you deal with facts? What do
you mean by nature-study, love for the out-of-doors,
anyway ! "

I do not mean a sixteen weeks' course in zoology,
or botany, or in Wordsworth. I mean, rather, a gentle
life course in getting acquainted with the toads and
stars that sing together, for most of us, just within
and above our own dooryards. It is a long life course
in the deep and beautiful things of living nature, —
the nature we know so well as a corpse. It is of
necessity a somewhat unsystematized, incidental,
vacation-time course, — the more 's the pity. The
results do not often come as scientific discoveries.
They are personal, rather ; more after the manner
of revelations,— data that the professors have little
faith in. For the scientist cannot put an April dawn

60

into a bottle, cannot cabin a Hockomock marsh, nor
cage a December storm in a laboratory. And when,
in such a place, did a scientist ever overturn a "wee
bit heap o' weeds an' stibble " ? Yet it is out of
dawns and marshes and storms that the revelations
come ; yes, and out of mice nests, too, if you love all
the out-of-doors, and chance to be ploughing late in
the fall.

But there is the trouble with my professor. He
never ploughs at all. How can he understand and
believe ? And is n't this the trouble with many of
our preacher poets, also ? Some of them spend their
summers in the garden ; but the true poet — and
the naturalist — must stay later, and they must
plough, plough the very edge of winter, if they would
turn up what Burns did that November day in the
field at Mossgiel.

How amazingly fortunate were the conditions of
Burns's life ! What if he had been professor of Eng-
lish literature at Edinburgh University? He might
have written a life of Milton in six volumes, — a
monumental work, but how unimportant compared
with the lines "To a Mouse " !

We are going to live real life and write real poetry
61

of

again, — when all who want to live, who want to
write, draw directly upon life's first sources. To live
simply, and out of the soil ! To live by one's own
ploughing, and to write !

Instead, how do we live ? How do I live ? Nine
months in the year by talking bravely about books
that I have not written. Between times I live on the
farm, hoe, and think, and write, — whenever the hoe-
ing is done. And where is my poem to a mouse ?

Its silly wa's the win's are strewin !

With a whole farm o' foggage green, and all the
year before me, I am not sure that I could build a
single line of genuine poetry. But I am certain that,
in living close to the fields, we are close to the source
of true and great poetry, where each of us, at times,
hears lines that Burns and Wordsworth left unmea-
sured,— lines that we at least may live into song.

Now, I have done just what my biological friend
knew I would do, — made over my course of nature-
study into a pleasant but idle waiting for inspiration.
I have frankly turned poet ! No, not unless Gilbert
White and Jefferies,Thoreau, Burroughs, Gibson, Tor-
rey, and Rowland Robinson are poets. But they are
poets. We all are, — even the biologist, with half a

62

chance, — and in some form we are all waiting for
inspiration. The nature-lover who lives with his fields
and skies simply puts himself in the way of the most
and gentlest of such inspirations.

He may be ploughing when the spirit comes, or
wandering, a mere boy, along the silent shores of a
lake, and hooting at the owls. You remember the
boy along the waters of Winander, how he would
hoot at the owls in the twilight, and they would call
back to him across the echoing lake ? And when
there would come a pause of baffling silence,

Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents ; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery.

That is an inspiration, the kind of experience one
has in living with the out-of-doors. It does n't come
from books, from laboratories,' not even from an
occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship
with nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any
one, nor only to poets who write. I have had such
experiences, such moments of quiet insight and

63

of

uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of
the woods.

It was in the latter end of December, upon a
gloomy day that was heavy with the oppression of
a coming storm. In the heart of the maple swamp all
was still and cold and dead. Suddenly, as out of a
tomb, I heard the small, thin cry of a tiny tree frog.
And how small and thin it sounded in the vast
silences of that winter swamp ! And yet how clear
and ringing! A thrill of life tingling out through
the numb, nerveless body of the woods that has ever
since made a dead day for me impossible.

That was an inspiration. I learned something,
something deep and beautiful. Had I been Burns or
Wordsworth I should have written a poem to Hyla.
All prose as I am, I was, nevertheless, so quickened
by that brave little voice as to write : —

The fields are bleak, the forests bare,

The swirling snowflakes fall
About the trees a winding-sheet,

Across the fields a pall.

A wide, dead waste, and leaden sky,

Wild winds, and dark and cold !
The river's tongue is frozen thick,

With life's sweet tale half told.
64

Dead ! Ah, no ! the white fields sleep,

The frozen rivers flow ;
And summer's myriad seed-hearts beat

Within this .breast of snow.

With spring's first green the holly glows

And flame of autumn late, —
The embers of the summer warm

In winter's roaring grate.

The thrush's song is silent now,

The rill no longer sings,
But loud and long the strong winds strike

Ten million singing strings.

O'er mountains high, o'er prairies far,

Hark ! the wild paean's roll !
The lyre is strung 'twixt ocean shores

And swept from pole to pole !

My meeting with that frog in the dead of winter
was no trifling experience, nor one that the biologist
ought to fail to understand. Had I been a poet, that
meeting would have been of consequence to all the
world ; as I was, however, it meant something only
to me, — a new point of view, an inspiration, — a
beautiful poem that I cannot write.

This attitude of the nature-lover, because it is
contemplative and poetical, is not therefore mystical

65

or purely sentimental. Hooting at the owls and
hearing things in baffling silences may not be sci-
entific. Neither is it unscientific. The attitude of
the boy beside the starlit lake is not that of Charlie,
the man who helps me occasionally on the farm.

We were clearing up a bit of mucky meadow re-
cently when we found a stone just above the surface
that was too large for the horse to haul out. We
decided to bury it.

Charlie took the shovel and mined away under the
rock until he struck a layer of rather hard sandstone.
He picked a while at this, then stopped a while ; picked
again, rather feebly, then stopped and began to think
about it. It was hard work, — the thinking, I mean,
harder than the picking, — but Charlie, however un-
scientific, is an honest workman, so he thought it
through.

"Well," he said finally, "'t ain't no use, nohow.
You can't keep it down. You bury the darned thing,
and it '11 come right up. I suppose it grows. Of
course it does. It must. Everything grows."

Now that is an unscientific attitude. But that is
not the mind of the nature-lover, of the boy with the
baffling silences along the starlit lake. He is senti-

66

mental, certainly, yet not ignorant, nor merely vapid.
He does not always wander along the lake by night.
He is a nature-student, as well as a nature-lover, and
he does a great deal more than hoot at the owls.
This, though, is as near as he comes to anything
scientific, and so worth while, according to the pro-
fessor.

II

And it is as near as he ought to come to reality
and facts — according to the philosopher.

"We want only the facts of nature," says the sci-
entist. "Nothing in nature is worth while," says the
philosopher, "but mood, background, atmosphere."

"Nor can I recollect that my mind," says one of
our philosophers, "in these walks, was much called
away from contemplation by the petty curiosities of
the herbalist or birdlorist, for I am not one zealously
addicted to scrutinizing into the minuter secrets -of
nature. It never seemed to me that a flower was
made sweeter by knowing the construction of its
ovaries. . . . The wood thrush and the veery sing as
melodiously to the uninformed as to the subtly curi-
ous. Indeed, I sometimes think a little ignorance is
wholesome in our communion with nature."

67

of

So it is. Certainly if ignorance, a great deal of igno-
rance, were unwholesome, then nature-study would
be a very unhealthy course, indeed. For, when the
most curious of the herbalists and birdlorists (Mr.
Burroughs, say) has made his last prying peep into
the private life of a ten-acre woodlot, he will still be
wholesomely ignorant of the ways of nature. Is the
horizon just back of the brook that marks the termi-
nus of our philosopher's path ? Let him leap across,
walk on, on, out of his woods to the grassy knoll in
the next pasture, and there look ! Lo ! far yonder the
horizon ! beyond a vaster forest than he has known,
behind a range of higher rolling hills, within a shroud
of wider, deeper mystery.

There is n't the slightest danger of walking off
the earth ; nor of unlearning our modicum of whole-
some ignorance concerning the universe. The nature-
lover may turn nature-student and have no fear of
losing nature. The vision will not fade.

Let him go softly through the May twilight and
wait at the edge of the swamp. A voice serene and
pure, a hymn, a prayer, fills all the dusk with peace.
Let him watch and see the singer, a brown-winged
wood thrush, with full, spotted breast. Let him be

68

glad that it is not a white-winged spirit, or a disem-
bodied voice. And let him wonder the more that so
plain a singer knows so divine a song.

Our philosopher mistakes his own dominant mood
for the constant mood of nature. But nature has no
constant mood. No more have we. Dawn and dusk
are different moods. The roll of the prairie is unlike
the temper of a winding cowpath in a New England
pasture. Nature is not always sublime, awful, and
mysterious ; and no one but a philosopher is persist-
ently contemplative. Indeed, at four o'clock on a
June morning in some old apple orchard, even the
philosopher would shout, —

" Hence, loathed melancholy ! "

He is in no mind for meditation; and it is just pos-
sible, before the day is done, that the capture of a
drifting seed of the dandelion and the study of its
fairy wings might so add to the wonder, if not to
the sweetness, of the flower, as to give him thought
for a sermon.

There are times when the companionship of your
library is enough ; there are other times when you
want a single book, a chapter, a particular poem. It

69

of f§e

is good at times just to know that you are turning
with the earth under the blue of the sky; and just
as good again to puzzle over the size of the spots in
the breasts of our several thrushes. For I believe
you can hear more in the song when you know it is
the veery and not the wood thrush singing. Indeed,
I am acquainted with persons who had lived neigh-
bors to the veery since childhood, and never had
heard its song until the bird was pointed out to
them. Then they could not help but hear.

No amount of familiarity will breed contempt for
your fields. Is the summer's longest, brightest day
long enough and bright enough, to dispel the brood-
ing mystery of the briefest of its nights? And tell
me, what of the vastness and terror of the sea will
the deep dredges ever bring to the surface, or all
the circumnavigating drive to shore ? The nature-
lover is a man in a particular mood ; the nature-
student is the same man in another mood, as the
fading shadows of the morning are the same that
lengthen and deepen in the afternoon. There are
times when he will go apart into the desert places
to pray. Most of the time, however, he will live con-
tentedly within sound of the dinner horn, glad of

70

the companionship of his bluebirds, chipmunks, and
pine trees.

This is best. And the question most frequently
asked me is, How can I come by a real love for my
pine trees, chipmunks, and bluebirds ? How can I
know real companionship with nature?

How did the boy along the starlit lake come by
it, — a companionship so real and intimate that the
very cliffs knew him, that the owls answered him,
that even the silences spoke to him, and the imagery
of his rocks and skies became a part of the inner
world in which he dwelt ? Simply by living along
Winander and hallooing so often to the owls that
they learned to halloo in reply. You may need: to
be born again before you can talk the language of
the owls ; but if there is in you any hankering for
the soil, then all you need for companionship with
nature is a Winander of your own, a range, a haunt,
that you can visit, walk around, and get home from
in a day's time. If this region can be the pastures,
woodlots, and meadows that make your own door-
yard, then that is good; especially if you buy the
land and live on it, for then Nature knows that you
are not making believe. Sne will accept you as she

of tfy

does the peas you plant, and she will cherish you as
she does them. This farm, or haunt, or range, you
will come to know intimately: its flowers, birds,
walls, streams, trees, — its features large and small,
as they appear in June, and as they look in July and
in January.

For the first you will need the how-to-know books,
— these while you are getting acquainted ; but soon
acquaintance grows into friendship. You are done
naming things. The meanings of things now begin
to come home to you. Nature is taking you slowly
back to herself. Companionship has begun.

Many persons of the right mind never know this
friendship, because they never realize the necessity
of being friendly. They walk through a field as they
walk through a crowded street; they go into the
country as they go abroad. And the result is that all
this talk of the herbalist and birdlorist, to quote the
philosopher again, seems "little better than cant
and self-deception."

But let the philosopher cease philosophizing (he
was also a hermit), and leave off hermiting ; let him
live at home with his wife and children, like the rest
of us ; let him work in the city for his living, hoe in

72

his garden for his recreation; and then (I don't care
by what prompting) let him study the lay of his neigh-
bor fields, woods, and orchards until he knows every
bird and beast, every tree-hole, earth-hole, even the
times and places of the things that grow in the
ground ; let him do this through the seasons of the
year, — for two or three years, — and he will know
how to enjoy a woodchuck; he will understand many
of the family affairs of his chipmunks ; he will re-
cognize and welcome back his bluebirds ; he will love
and often listen to the solemn talk of his pines.

All of this may be petty prying, not communion
at all ; it may be all moonshine and sentiment, not
science. But it is not cant and self-deception, — in
the hearts of thousands of simple, sufficient folk,
who know a wood thrush when they hear him, and
whose woodpaths are of their own wearing. And if
it is not communion with nature, I know that it is
at least real pleasure, and rest, peace, contentment,
red blood, sound sleep, and, at times, it seems to me,
something close akin to religion.

ONCE (it was a good while ago, when I was a boy), I
tried to write a poem. The first stanza ran : —

I heard him when the reeds were young

Along a clover sea ;
Above the purple waves he hung,
And o'er the fragrant waters flung

His storm of ecstasy;

and the last stanza ran : —

He 1s left the meadows burnt and hot,
He 's left me lone and drear ;
But still within the white-birch lot
Cheeps Chickadee — whom I forgot
While Bobolink was here ;

74

which means in plainer prose that chickadee does not
sing a while in June and then fly away and leave us.
He stays the year around; he is constant and faithful
in his friendship, though I sometimes forget.

He cannot sing with bobolink. But suppose I could
have only one of the birds ? As it is, I get along for
more than half the year without bobolink, but what
would my out-of-doors be without chickadee ? There
is not a single day in the year that I cannot find him,
no matter how hot, or cold, how hard it rains or snows.
Often he is the only voice in all the silent woods, the
only spark of life aglow in all my frozen winter world.

I was crunching along through the January dusk
toward home. The cold was bitter. A half-starved
partridge had just risen from the road and fluttered
off among the naked bushes, — a moment of sound, a
bit of life vanishing in the winter night of the woods.
I knew the very hemlock in which he would roost ;
but what \vere the thick, snow-bent boughs of his
hemlock, and what were all his winter feathers in
such a night as this? — this vast of sweeping winds
and frozen snow !

The road dipped from the woods into a meadow,
where the winds were free. The cold was driving,

75

of

numbing here with a power for death that the ther-
mometer could not mark. I backed into the wind
and hastened on toward the double line of elms that
arched the road in front of the house. Already I
could hear them creak and rattle like things of glass.
It was not the sound of life. Nothing was alive ; for
what could live in this long darkness and fearful cold ?

Could live? The question was hardly thought,
when an answer was whirled past me into the near-
est of the naked elms. A chickadee ! He caught for
an instant on a dead limb over the road, scrambled
along to its broken tip, and whisked over into a hole
that ran straight down the centre of the stub, down,
for I don't know how far.

I stopped. The stub lay out upon the wind, with only
an eddy of the gale sucking at the little round hole in
the broken end, while far down in its hollow heart,
huddling himself into a downy, dozy ball for the night,
was the chickadee. I know by the very way he struck
the limb and turned in that he had been there before.
He knew whither, across the sweeping meadows, he
was being blown. He had even helped the winds as
they whirled him, for he had tarried along the roads
till late. But he was safe for the night now, in the

76

very bed, it may be, where he was hatched last sum-
mer, and where at this moment, who knows, were half
a dozen other chickadees, the rest of that last sum-
mer's brood, unscathed still, and still sharing the old
home hollow, as snug and warm this bitter night as
in the soft May days when they were nestlings here
together.

The cold drove me on ; but the chickadee had
warmed me and all my naked world of night and
death. And so he ever does. The winter has yet to
be that drives him seeking shelter to the south. I
never knew it colder than in January and February
of 1904. During both of those months, morning and
evening, I drove through a long mile of empty, snow-
buried woods. For days at a time I would not see even
a crow, but morning and evening, at a certain dip in
the road, two chickadees would fly from bush to bush
across the hollow and cheer me on the way. They
came out to the road, really, to pick up whatever
scanty crumbs were to be found in my wake. They
came also to hear me, to see me pass, — to escape for
a moment, I think, the silence, desertion, and death
of the woods. They helped me to escape, too.

Four other chickadees, all winter long, ate with
77

of

us, sharing, as far as the double windows would allow,
the cheer of our dining-room. We served them on the
lilac bush outside the window, tying their suet on so
that they could see us and we them during meal time.
Perhaps it was mere suet, no feast of soul at all, that
they got ; but constantly, when our pie was opened,
the birds began to sing, — a dainty dish indeed, sa-
vory, wholesome, and good for our souls.

There are states in the far Northwest where the
porcupine is protected by law, as a last food resource
for men lost and starving in the forests. Perhaps the
porcupine was not designed by nature for any such
purpose. Perhaps chickadee was not left behind by
summer to feed our lost and starving hope through
the cheerless months. But that is the use I make of
him. He is summer's pledge to me. The woods are
hollow, the winds chill, the earth cold and stiff, but
there flits chickadee, and — I cannot lose faith, nor
feel that this procession of bleak white days is all a
funeral !

He is the only bird in my little world that I can find
without fail three hundred and sixty-five days in the
year. From December to the end of March he comes
daily to my lilac bush for suet ; from April to early

78

July he is busy with domestic cares in the gray birches
of the woodlot; from August to December he and his
family come hunting quietly and sociably as a little
flock among the trees and bushes of the farm ; and
from then on he is back for his winter meals at " The
Lilac."

Is it any wonder that he was the first bird I ever
felt personally acquainted with, and the first bird my
children knew? That early acquaintance, however,
was not due to his abundance and intrusion, as it
might be with the English sparrow, but rather due
to the cheerful, confiding, sociable spirit of the little
bird. He drops down and peeps under your hat-brim
to see what manner of boy you are, and if you are
really fit to be abroad in this world, so altogether
good — for chickadees.

He has a mission to* perform besides the eating
of eggs and grubs of the pestiferous insects. This
destruction he does that the balance of things may
be maintained out of doors. He has quite another
work to do, which is not economic, and which, in
nowise, is a matter of fine feathers or sweet voice,
but simply a matter of sweet nature, vigor, and con-
centrated cheerfulness.

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I said he is summer's pledge, the token of hope
to me. He is a lesson also. I don't often find ser-
mons in stones, because, no doubt, I look so little
for the sermons, so little for the very stones. But I
cannot help seeing chickadee, — and chickadee is all
sermon. I hear him on a joyous May morning call-
ing Chick-a-dee ! dee ! Chick-a-dee ! dee ! — brisk,
bright, and cheery ; or, soft and gentle as a caress,
he whistles, Phce-ee-bee ! Phce-ee-bee ! I meet him
again on the edge of a bleak, midwinter night. He
is hungry and cold, and he calls, as I hasten along,
Chick-a-dee ! dee! CJiick-a-dee ! dee! — brisk, bright,
and cheery; or, soft and gentle as a caress, he
whistles, Phce-ee-bee ! Phce-ee-bee !

Will you lend me your wings, chickadee, those in-
visible wings on which you ride the winds of life so
evenly ? For I would hang ray ill-balanced soul be-
tween them, as your bird soul hangs, and fly as you
fly.

The abundant summer, the lean and wolfish winter,
find chickadee cheerful and gentle. He is busier at
some seasons than at others, with fewer chances
for friendship. He almost disappears in the early
summer. But this is because of family cares ; and

80

because the bigger, louder birds have come back,
and the big leaves have come out and hidden him.
A little searching, and you will discover him, in one
of your old decayed fence posts, maybe, or else deep
in the swamp, foraging for a family so numerous
that they spill over at the door of their home.

Here about the farm, this is sure to be a gray
birch home. Other trees will do — on a pinch. I
have found chickadee nesting in live white oaks,
maples, upturned roots, and tumbling fence posts.
These were shifts, however, mere houses, not real
homes. The only good homelike trees are old gray
birches dead these many years and gone to punk, —
mere shells of tough circular bark walls.

Why has chickadee this very decided preference ?
Is it a case of protective coloration, — the little gray
and black bird choosing to nest in this little gray and
black tree because bird and tree so exactly match each
other in size and color ? Or (and there are many
instances in nature) is there a subtle strain of poetry
in chickadee's soul, something aesthetic, that leads
him into this exquisite harmony, — into this little gray
house for his little gray self ?

Explain it as you may, it is a fact that this little
Si

of t

bird shows a marked preference, makes deliberate
choice, and in his choice is protection, and poetry,
too. Doubtless he follows the guidance of a sure and
watchful instinct (whatever instinct be), but who shall
deny to him a share of the higher, finer things of the
imagination ? a share of real aesthetic taste?

His life inside the birch is of a piece with the
artistic exterior. It is all gentle and sweet and idyllic.
There is no happier spot in the summer woods than
that about the birch of the chickadees ; and none
whose happiness you will be so little liable to disturb.

Before the woods were in leaf one spring I found
a pair of chickadees building in a birch along the edge
of the swamp. They had just begun, having dug out
only an inch of cavity. It was very interesting to dis-
cover them doing the work themselves, for usually
they refit some abandoned chamber or adapt a ready-
made hole.

The birch was a long, limbless cylinder of bark,
broken off about fourteen feet up, and utterly rotten,
the mere skin of a tree stuffed with dust. I could
push my finger into it at any point. It was so weak
that every time the birds lighted upon the top the
whole stub wobbled and reeled. Surely they were

82

building their house upon the sand. Any creature
without wings would have known that. Birds, how-
ever, seem to have lost the sense of such insecu-
rity, often placing their nests as if they expected
them also to take wings and fly to safety when the
rains descend and the winds come.

This shaking stub of the chickadees was standing
directly beneath a great overshadowing pine, where,
if no partridge bumped into it, if two squirrels did not
scamper up it together, if the crows nesting overhead
did not discover it, if no strong wind bore down upon
it from the meadow side, it might totter out the nest-
ing season. But it didn't. The birds were leaving
too much to luck. I knew it, and should have pushed
their card house down, then and there, and saved the
greater ruin later. Perhaps so, but I was too inter-
ested in their labor.

Both birds were working when I discovered them,
and so busily that my coming up did not delay them
for a single billful. It was not hard digging, but it
was very slow, for chickadee is neither carpenter nor
mason. He has difficulty in killing a hard-backed bee-
tle. So, whenever you find him occupying a clean-
walled cavity, with a neat, freshly clipped doorway,

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of

you may be sure that some woodpecker built the house,
not this short-billed, soft-tailed little tit. He lacks
both the bill-chisel and the tail-brace. Perhaps the
explanation of his fondness for birch trees lies here :
they die young and soon decay.

The birds were going down through the top, not
by a hole in the leathery rind of the sides, for the
bark would have been too tough for their beaks.
They would drop into the top of the stub, pick up a
wad of decayed wood, and fly off to the dead limb of
the pine. Here, with a jerk and a snap of their bills,
they would scatter the stuff in a shower so thin and
far around that I could neither hear it fall nor find a
trace of it upon the dead leaves of the ground. This
nest would never be betrayed by the workmen's
chips.

Between the pair there averaged three beakfuls of
excavating every two minutes, one of the birds regu-
larly shoveling twice to the other's once. They looked
so exactly alike that I could not tell which bird was
pushing the enterprise ; but I have my suspicions.

There is nothing so superior about his voice or
appearance that he should thus shirk. He was doing
part of his duty, apparently, but it was half-hearted

84

work. Hers was the real interest, the real anxiety ;
and hers the initiative. To be a male and show off !
That 's the thing. To be a male and let your wife
carry the baby ! The final distinctive difference be-
tween a truly humanized, civilized man and all other
males of every order, is a willingness to push the
baby carriage.

The finer the feathers or the song among male
birds the less use they are in practical, domestic ways.
Fine beaux, captivating lovers, they become little else
than a nuisance as husbands. One of my friends has
been watching a pair of bluebirds building. The male
sat around for a week without bringing in a feather.
Then one day he was seen to enter the hole, after his
busy mate had just left it, and carry out a beakful of
grass which he scattered to the winds in pure per-
versity, criticising her bungling work, maybe ! More
likely he was jealous.

Chickadee was no such precious fool as that. He
was doing something ; trying to drown his regret for
the departing honeymoon in hard labor, not, however,
to the danger of his health.

I sat a long time watching the work. It went on in
perfect silence, not a chirp, not the sound of a flut-

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tering wing. The swamp along whose margin the
birds were building had not a joyous atmosphere.
Damp, dim-shadowed, and secret, it seemed to have
laid its spell upon the birds. Their very gray and
black was as if mixed of the dusk, and of the gray,
half-light of the swamp ; their noiseless coming and
going was like the slipping to and fro of shadows.
They were a part of it all, and that sharing was their
defense, the best defense they knew.

It did n't save their nest, however. They felt and
obeyed the spirit of the swamp in their own conduct,
but the swamp did not tell them where to build. It
was about three weeks later that I stopped again
under the pine and found the birch stub in pieces
upon the ground. Some robber had been after the
eggs and had brought the whole house tumbling down.
This is not the fate of all such birch-bark houses.
Now and again they escape ; but it is always a mat-
ter for wonder.

I was following an old disused wood road once when
I scared a robin from her nest. Her mate joined her,
and together they raised a great hubbub. Immedi-
ately a chewink, a pair of vireos, and two black and
white warblers joined the robins in their din. Then a

86

chickadee appeared. He (I say "he" knowingly;
and here he quite redeems himself) had a worm in
his beak. His anxiety seemed so real that I began to
watch him, when, looking down among the stones for
a place to step, what should I see but his mate emerg-
ing from the end of a birch stump at my very feet.
She had heard the din and had come out to see what
it was all about. At sight of her, he hastened with
his worm, brushing my face, almost, as he darted to
her side. She took it sweetly, for she knew he had
intended it for her. But how do I know that ? Per-
haps he meant it for the young! There were no young
in the nest, only eight eggs. Even after the young
came (there were eight of them !), and when life, from
daylight to dark, was one ceaseless, hurried hunt for
worms, I saw him over and over again fly to her side
caressingly and tempt her to eat.

The house of this pair did not fall. How could it
when it stood precisely two and a half feet from the
ground ! But that it was n't looted is due to the sheer
audacity of its situation. It stood alone, against the
road, so close that the hub of a low wheel in passing
might have knocked it down. Perhaps a hundred
persons had brushed it in going by. How many dogs

87

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and cats had overlooked it no one can say, nor how
many skunks and snakes and squirrels. The accident
that discovered it to me happened apparently to no
one else, and I was friendly.

Cutting a tiny window in the bark just above the
eggs, I looked in upon the little people every day.
I watched them grow and fill the cavity and hang
over at the top. I was there the day they forced my
window open, the day when there was no more room
at the top, and when, at the call of their parents, one
after another of this largest and sweetest of bird
families found his wings and flew away through the
woods.

VI

THE snow had melted from the river meadows, leav-
ing them flattened, faded, and stained with mud, — a
dull, dreary waste in the gray February. I had stopped
beside a tiny bundle of bones that lay in the matted
grass a dozen feet from a ditch. Here, still show-
ing, was the narrow path along which the bones had
dragged themselves ; there the hole by which they
had left the burrow in the bank of the ditch. They
had crawled out in this old runway, then turned off
a little into the heavy autumn grass and laid them
down. The rains had come and the winter snows.
The spring was breaking now, and the small bundle,
gently loosened and uncovered, was whitening on the
wide, bare meadow.

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of

I had recognized the bones at once as the skeleton
of a muskrat. It was something peculiar in the way
they lay that had caused me to pause. They seemed
outstretched, as if composed by gentle hands, the hands
of Sleep. They had not been flung down. The deli-
cate ribs had fallen in, but not a bone was broken
or displaced, not one showed the splinter of shot, or
the crack that might have been made by a steel trap.
No violence had been done them. They had been
touched by nothing rougher than the snow. Out
into the hidden runway they had crept. Death had
passed them here ; but no one else in all the winter
months.

The creature had died — a "natural" death. It had
starved, while a hundred acres of plenty lay round
about. Picking up the skull, I found the jaws locked
together as if they were a single solid bone. One of
the two incisor teeth of the upper jaw was missing,
and apparently had never developed. The opposite
tooth on the lower jaw, thus unopposed and so un-
worn, had grown beyond its normal height up into the
empty socket above, then on, turning outward and
piercing the cheek-bone in front of the eye, whence,
curving like a boar's tusk, it had slowly closed the

90

jaws and locked them, rigid, set, as fixed as jaws of
stone.

Death had lingered cruelly. At first the animal had
been able to gnaw; but as the tooth curved through
the bones of the face and gradually tightened the
jaws, the creature got less and less to eat, until, one
day, creeping out of the burrow for food, the poor
wretch was unable to get back.

One seldom comes upon the like of this. It is com-
moner than we think ; but it is usually hidden away
and quickly over. How often do we see a wild thing
sick, — a bird or animal suffering from an accident, or
dying, like this muskrat, because of some physical
defect? The struggle between two lives for life — the 4
falling of the weak as prey to the strong — is ever
before us; but this single-handed fight between the
creature and Nature is a far rarer, silenter tragedy.
Nature is too swift, too merciless to allow us time
for sympathy. It was she who taught the old Roman
to take away his weak and malformed offspring and
expose it on the hills.

There is, at best, scarcely a fighting chance in
the meadow. Only strength and craft may win. The
muskrat with the missing tooth never enters the race

of

at all. He slinks from some abandoned burrow, and,
if the owl and mink are not watching, dies alone in
the grass, and we rarely know.

I shall never forget the impression made upon me
by those quiet bones. It was like that made by my
first visit to a great city hospital, — out of the busy,
cheerful street into a surgical ward, where the sick
and injured lay in long white lines. We tramp the
woods and meadows and never step from the sweet
air and the pure sunlight of health into a hospital.
But that is not because no sict, ill-formed, or in-
jured are there. The proportion is smaller than
among us humans, and for very good reasons, yet
* there is much real suffering, and to come upon it, as
we will, now and then, must certainly quicken our
understanding and deepen our sympathy with the
life out of doors.

No sensible person could for a moment believe
the animals capable of suffering as a human being
can suffer, or that there is any such call for our
sympathy from them as from our human neighbors.
But an unselfish sharing of the life of the fields de-
mands that we take part in all of it, — and all of it is
but little short of tragedy. Nature wears a brave

92

face. Her smile is ever in the open, her laughter
quick and contagious. This brave front is no mask.
It is real. Sunlight, song, color, form, and fragrance
are real. And so our love and joy in Nature is real.
Real, also, should be our love and sorrow with Na-
ture. For do I share fully in as much of her life as
even the crow lives as long as I think of the creature
only with admiration for his cunning or with Wrath
for his destruction of my melons and corn ?

A crow has his solemn moments. He frequently
knows fear,, pain, hunger, accident, and disease ; he
knows something very like affection and love. For
all that, he is a mere crow. But a mere crow is no
mean thing. Few of us, indeed, are ourselves, and
as much besides as a mere crow. A real love, how-
ever, will give us part in all of his existence. We will
forage and fight with him ; we will parley and play ;
and when the keen north winds find him in the
frozen pines, we will suffer, too.

With Nature as mere waters, fields, and skies, it is,
perhaps, impossible for us to sorrow. She is too self-
sufficient, too impersonal. She asks, or compels,
everything except tears. But when she becomes
birds and beasts, — a little world of individuals

93

of

among whom you are only one of a different kind,
— then all the others, no matter their kind, are
earth-born companions and fellow mortals.

Here are the meadow voles. I know that my hay
crop is shorter every year for them, — a very little
shorter. And I can look with satisfaction at a cat
carrying a big bobtailed vole out of my mowing.
The voles are rated, along with other mice, as injuri-
ous to man. I have an impulse to plant both of my
precious feet upon every one that stirs in its run-
way.

If that feeling was habitual once, it is so no longer ;
for now it is only when the instincts of the farmer
get the better of me that I spring at this quiet stir
in the grass. Perhaps, long ago, my forbears wore
claws, like pussy ; and, perhaps (there is n't the
slightest doubt), I should develop claws if I con-
tinued to jump at every mouse in the grass because
he is a mouse, and because I have a little patch of
mucky land in hay.

One day I came upon two of my voles struggling in
the water. They were exhausted and well-nigh dead.
I helped them out as I should have helped out any
other creature, and having saved them, why, what

94

could I do but let them go — even into my own
meadow? This has happened several times.

When the drought dries the meadow, the voles
come to the deep, walled spring at the upper end,
apparently to drink. The water usually trickles over
the curb, but in a long dry spell it shrinks a foot or
more below the edge, and the voles, once within for
their drink, cannot get out. Time and time again I
had fished them up, until I thought to leave a board
slanting down to the water, so that they could climb
back to the top.

It is stupid and careless to drown thus. The voles
are blunderers. White-footed mice and house mice
are abundant in the stumps and grass of the vicinity,
but they never tumble into the spring. Still, I am
partly responsible for the voles, for I walled up the
spring and changed it into this trap. I owe them
the drink and the plank, for certainly there are rights
of mice, as well as of men, in this meadow of mine,
where I do little but mow. But even if they have no
rights, surely

A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request

for such of them as the foxes, cats, skunks, snakes,

95

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hawks, and owls leave! Rights or no, hay or no, I
don't jump at my meadow mice any more, for fear of
killing one who has taken a cup of cold water from
me off the plank, or has had my helping hand out of
the depths of the spring.

It is wholesome to be the good Samaritan to a
meadow mouse, to pour out, even waste, a little of
the oil and wine of sympathy on the humblest of our
needy neighbors.

Here are the chimney swallows. One can look with
complacency, with gratitude, indeed, upon the swal-
lows of other chimneys, as they hawk in the sky ; yet,
when the little creatures, so useful, but so uncombed
and unfumigated, set up their establishments myour
chimney, to the jeopardy of the whole house, then
you need an experience like mine.

I had had a like experience years before, when the
house did not belong to me. Now, however, the
house was mine, and if it became infested because of
the swallows, I could not move away ; so I felt like
burning them in the chimney, bag and baggage.
There were four nests, as nearly as I could make
out, and, from the frequent squeakings, I knew they
were all filled with young. Then one day, when the

96

birds were feathered and nearly ready to fly, there
came a rain that ran wet far down the sooty chimney,
loosened the mortar of the nests, and sent them
crashing into the fireplace.

Some of the young birds were killed outright ; the
others were at my mercy, flung upon me, — helpless,
wailing infants! Of course I made it comfortable
for them on the back-log, and let their mothers flut-
ter down unhindered to feed them. Had I under-
stood the trick, I would have hawked for them and
helped feed them myself.

They made a great thunder in the chimney ; they
rattled down into the living-room a little soot ; but
nothing further came of it. We were not quaran-
tined. On the contrary, we had our reward, accord-
ing to promise ; for it was an extremely interesting
event to us all. It dispelled some silly qualms, it
gave us intimate part in a strange small life, so
foreign, yet so closely linked to our own, and it
made us pause with wonder that even our empty,
sooty chimney could be made use of by Nature to
our great benefit.

I wonder if the nests of the chimney swallows
came tumbling down when the birds used to build in

97

of f§

caves and hollow trees ? It is a most extraordinary
change, this change from the trees to the chimneys,
and it does not seem to have been accompanied by
an increase of architectural wisdom necessary to
meet all the contingencies of the new hollow. The
mortar or glue, which, I imagine, held firmly in the
empty trees, will not mix with the chimney soot, so
that the nest, especially when crowded with young,
is easily loosened by the rain, and is sometimes even
broken away by the slight wing-stroke of a descend-
ing swallow, or by the added weight of a parent bird
as it settles with food.

We little realize how frequent fear is among the
birds and animals, nor how often it proves fatal. A
situation which would have caused no trouble ordi-
narily, becomes through sudden fright a tangle or a
trap. I have known many a quail to bolt into a fast
express train and fall dead. Last winter I left the
large door of the barn open, so that my flock of j un-
cos could feed inside upon the floor. They found
their way into the hayloft, and went up and down
freely. On two or three occasions I happened in so
suddenly that they were thoroughly frightened, and
flew madly into the cupola to escape through the

98

(ttli00in3

windows. They beat against the glass until utterly
dazed, and would have perished there, had I not
climbed up later and brought them down. So thou-
sands of the migrating birds perish yearly by flying
wildly against the dazzling lanterns of the light-
houses, and thousands more lose their way in the
thick darkness of the stormy nights, or are blown
out of their course, and drift away to sea.

Hasty, careless, miscalculated movements are not
as frequent among the careful wild folk as among
us, perhaps ; but there is abundant evidence of their
occasional occurrence and of their sometimes fatal
results.

Several instances are recorded of birds that have
been tangled in the threads of their nests ; and one
case of a bluebird that was caught in the flying
meshes of an oriole's nest into which it had been
spying.

I once found the mummied body of a chippy twist-
ing and swinging in the leafless branches of a peach
tree. The little creature was suspended in a web of
horsehair about two inches below the nest. It looked
as if she had brought a snarled bunch of the hair
and left it loose in the twigs. Later on, a careless

99

of t$

step and her foot was fast, when every frantic effort
for freedom only tangled her the worse. In the nest
above were four other tiny mummies, — a double
tragedy that might with care have been averted.

A similar fate befell a song sparrow that I dis-
covered hanging dead upon a barbed-wire fence. By
some chance it had slipped a foot through an open
place between the two twisted strands, and then, flut-
tering along, had wedged the leg and broken it in
the struggle to escape.

We have all held our breath at the hazardous trav-
eling of the squirrels in the treetops. What other
animals take such risks, — leaping at dizzy heights
from bending limbs to catch the tips of limbs still
smaller, saving themselves again and again by the
merest chance.

But luck sometimes fails. My brother, a careful
watcher in the woods, was hunting on one occasion,
when he saw a gray squirrel miss its footing in a
tree and fall, breaking its neck upon a log beneath.

I have frequently known them to fall short dis-
tances, and once I saw a red squirrel come to grief
like the gray squirrel above. He was scurrying
through the tops of some lofty pitch pines, a little

100

hurried and flustered at sight of me, and nearing
the end of a high branch was in the act of springing,
when the dead tip cracked under him and he came
tumbling headlong. The height must have been
forty feet, so that before he reached the ground he
had righted himself, — his tail out and legs spread,
— but the fall was too great. He hit the earth with
a dull thud, and before I could reach him lay dead
upon the needles, with blood oozing from his eyes
and nostrils.

Unhoused and often unsheltered, the wild things
suffer as we hardly yet understand. No one can esti-
mate the deaths of a year from severe cold, heavy
storms, high winds and tides. I have known the nests
of a whole colony of gulls and terns to be swept away
in a great storm ; and I have seen the tides, over
and over, flood the inlet marshes, and drown out
the nests in the grass, — those of the clapper-rails
by thousands.

I remember a late spring storm that came with
the returning redstarts and, in my neighborhood,
killed many of them. Toward evening of that day
one of the little black and orange voyageurs flut-
tered against the window and we let him in, wet,

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of f§

chilled, and so exhausted that for a moment he lay
on his back in my open palm. Soon after there was
another soft tapping at the window, — and two little
redstarts were sharing our cheer and drying their
butterfly wings in our warmth.

During the summer of 1903 one of the commonest
of the bird calls about the farm was the whistle of
the quails. A covey roosted down the hillside within
fifty yards of the house. Then came the winter, —
such a winter as the birds had never known. Since
then, just once have we heard the whistle of a quail,
and that, perhaps, was the call of one which a game
protective association had liberated in the woods
about two miles away.

The birds and animals are not as weather-wise as
we ; they cannot foretell as far ahead nor provide as
certainly against need, despite the popular notion to
the contrary.

We point to the migrating birds, to the muskrat
houses, and the hoards of the squirrels, and say,
" How wise and far-sighted these nature-taught chil-
dren are ! " True, they are, but only for conditions
that are normal. Their wisdom does not cover the
exceptional. The gray squirrels did not provide for

102

the unusually hard weather of the winter of 1904.
Three of them from the woodlot came begging of
me, and lived on my wisdom, not on their own.

Consider the ravens, that neither sow nor reap,
that have neither storehouse nor barn, yet they are
fed, — but not always. Indeed, there are few of our
winter birds that go hungry so often, and that die in
so great numbers for lack of food and shelter, as the
crows.

After severe and protracted cold, with a snow-
covered ground, a crow-roost looks like a battlefield,
so thick lie the dead and wounded. Morning after
morning the flock goes over to forage in the frozen
fields, and night after night returns hungrier, weaker,
and less able to resist the cold. Now, as the dark-
ness falls, a bitter wind breaks loose and sweeps
down upon the pines.

List'ning the doors an' winnocks rattle,
I thought me on the owrie cattle,

and how often I have thought me on the crows biding
the night yonder in the moaning pines ! So often, as
a boy, and with so real an awe, have I watched them
returning at night, that the crows will never cease
flying through my wintry sky, — an endless line of

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of $

wavering black figures, weary, retreating figures,
beating over in the early dusk.

To-night another wild storm sweeps across the
January fields. All the afternoon the crows have
been going over, and at five o'clock are still passing
though the darkness settles rapidly. Now it is eight,
and the long night is but just begun. The storm
is increasing. The wind shrieks about the house,
whirling the fine snow in hissing eddies past the
corners and driving it on into long, curling crests
across the fields. I can hear the roar as the wind
strikes the shoal of pines where the fields roll into
the woods, — a vast surf sound, but softer and higher,
with a wail like the wail of some vast heart in pain.

I can see the tall trees rock and sway with their
burden of dark forms. As close together as they can
crowd on the bending limbs cling the crows, their
breasts turned all to the storm. With crops empty
and bodies weak, they rise and fall in the cutting,
ice-filled wind for thirteen hours of night !

Is it a wonder that the life fires burn low ? that
the small flames flicker and go out ?

VII

of

THE shad-bush is open ! My bees have seen the
sign. They are dropping down upon the alighting-
boards of their hives and running with little bags of
gold into the still half-closed entrances. During the
sunny hours of the last three weeks there has been
a quiet buzzing about the hives : the bees have been
visiting the early alders, the soft maples, and the
dusty-catkined willows ; but not before to-day, the
first day of the blowing shad-bush, have things been
busy at the hives, — have they hummed.

Off along the meadows I can see large patches of
garnet against the purple of the sky, — the bloom
of the red maples. As I approach, a soft murmur
around and through the misty garnet fills the air,
like the murmur of a million tiny tongues. Nearer

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of

still, and I can see the bees. Here is where they
are getting their gold. But not all of it. Some of it
to-day is coming from the marsh marigolds.

Early in April, before the shad-bush had opened,
or a bee had ventured to the meadows, I picked the
first hardy blossom of the marigolds out of icy water,
out of mud that had barely thawed. A token this,
a promise ; but not the sure sign of spring. The bees
did not see it ; they were waiting, like me, for the
shad-bush. So were the marigolds, for to-day the low,
wet edge of the meadow ditch is all aglow with the
shining of their gold, which the bees are pocketing by
the thighful. Among the "flowers," the marigolds
are the first here to offer a harvest for the hives.

The procession is under way. The assembling be-
gan weeks ago, with the March hepatica, the stray
April arbutus, windflower, spice-bush, and bloodroot.
There were saxifrage and everlasting out, too ; but
they all came singly and timidly. There was no move-
ment of the flowers until the shad-bush opened. Now
the marigolds appear in companies, the windflowers
drift together, and the hepaticas, leading the line,
make a show. The procession of the flowers has
started ; spring is here.

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of

My spring, I should have said. Your spring came
long ago, perhaps, or still delays. "The dandelion
tells me when to look for the swallow, the dog-tooth
violet when to expect the wood thrush, and when
I have found the wake-robin in bloom I know the
season is fairly inaugurated. With me this flower is
associated, not merely with the awakening of Robin,
for he has been awake some weeks, but with the
universal awakening and rehabilitation of Nature."

I watch for the sign of the shad-bush. Spring !
There is the smell of spring in the yellow spice-
bush ; the sound of spring in the trills of the hylas ;
the color of spring in the blue of the hepatica. A
February rain spatters your face with spring ; the
wild geese trumpet spring in the gray skies as they
pass ; the bluebird brings spring in spite of your
fears and the weather : -

All white and still lie stream and hill —

The winter cold and drear !
When from the skies, a bluebird flies

And — spring is here !

True enough. But then suddenly the bluebird dis-
appears ; a heavy snowstorm sets in (as happened
not many springs ago), and thousands of the birds

107

perish. Spring was here. It has gone again. And
so it will come and go until the shad-bush blooms —
for me.

You will not miss one of the returning birds, not
even the wild geese ; not one of the early flowers,
either, by waiting for the shad-bush. The skunk-
cabbage and pussy-willow are still in blossom ; and
still in the woods and fields is the smell of the soil,
— that fragrance, that essence which is the breath of
the wakening earth. You can yet taste it on the lips
of the hepatica, the arbutus, and bloodroot. It still
lingers on the early catkins, too, — a strangely rare
and delicate odor, that is not of the flowers at all,
but of the earth, and sweeter than any perfume that
the summer can distill.

It has been a slow, unwilling season until to-day,
so slow that the green still shows richest in the
sheltered meadows, and the lively color on the rocky
slope that runs up from my tiny river is largely the
color of mosses and Christmas ferns. Here is a
stretch of southern exposure, however, and here are
spots where springtime came weeks ago. Already
the dog-tooth violets are out in a sunny saucer be-
tween the rocks ; just above them, on an unshaded

1 08

of

shelf, is a patch of saxifrage, and close at hand
among the clefts, their " honey pitcher upside down,"
swing the first of my columbines.

Yet Spring does not come thus by spots ; she
does not crawl out and sun herself like a lizard. The
columbine seeks the sun, but the hepaticas came up
and opened their exquisite eyes in the deepest, damp-
est shadows of the woods. I have seen them and
the lingering snowdrifts together. Many of them are
never touched with a sunbeam, their warmth and life
coming from within, from a store saved through
the winter, rather than from without. Here under
the mat of fallen leaves and winter snow they have
kept enough of the summer to make a spring.

The fires of summer are never out. They are
only banked in the winter, smouldering always
under the snow, and quick to brighten and burst
into blaze. There came a warm day in January, and
across my thawing path crawled a woolly bear cater-
pillar, a vanessa butterfly flitted through the woods,
and the j uncos sang. That night a howling snow-
storm swept out of the north. The coals were covered
again. So they kindled and darkened, until to-day
they leap from the ashes of winter, a pure, thin

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of

blaze in the shad-bush, to burn higher and hotter
across the summer, to flicker and die away, a line of
yellow embers in the weird witch-hazel of the autumn.

At the sign of the shad-bush the doors of my
springtime swing wide open. My birds are back,
my turtles are out, my squirrels and woodchucks
show themselves, my garden is ready to plough and
plant. There is not a stretch of woodland or meadow
now that shows a trace of winter. Over the pasture
the bluets are beginning to drift, as if the haze, on
the distant hills, floating down in the night, had
been caught in the dew-wet grass. They wash the
field to its borders in their delicate azure hue.

Along with the bluets ("innocence" we should
always call them), under the open sky, there unroll
in .the wet shaded bottoms of the maple swamps the
pointed arum leaves of the Jacks, or Indian turnips.
How they fight for room ! There are patches where
all the pews are pulpits, with some of the preachers
standing three deep.

Now why should there be such a scramble for
place among the Jacks, while just above them in the
dry woods the large showy lady's-slipper opens in
isolated splendor ? Here is one, yonder another, with

no

room between for a thousand. Occasionally you will
see a dozen together, though not in a crowd ; but
more often the solitary blossom opens alone and far
removed from any of its kind.

The lady's-slippers, however, are really social com-
pared with the arbutus. Here is a flower that is
naturally tribal, — bound together by common root-
stalks, trailing shrubby plants that seem free to
possess the earth. They were doubtless here in the
soil before the Pilgrim came. The angels planted
them, I am sure, for they smell of a celestial garden.
The paths of heaven are carpeted with them, not
paved with gold. But something is the matter with
this earthly soil. They grow just where they were
originally planted and nowhere else. There was a
patch set in the woods three quarters of a mile, as
the crow flies, from my front door. That was several
millenniums ago. It is there still, a patch as big as
my hat. There are other scattered bits of it beyond,
but none any nearer to me, yet the soil seems the
same, and there are woods all the way between.

Were it as common as the violet, perhaps some of
its sweetness would be lost upon us. After all, the
heavenly streets may be paved with gold, and instead

in

of t$t

of a carpet of arbutus, we shall find patches of it
only, hidden away under the fallen leaves of the
Elysian groves. For we shall need to get out of even
the celestial city into the open fields and woods,
and I can think of nothing so likely to draw us away
from our mansions and beyond the pearly gates as
the chance to go "May-flowering."

And, even here below, among the unransomed
souls of Boston, when Mayflower-time arrives, you
may see young men and maidens, children and
grandfathers, trooping out to the woods for a hand-
ful of the flowers. And up from the Cape, to those
who cannot go into the woods, the flowers, them-
selves, come, — tight, naked bunches, stripped of all
but the pink of their faces and the sweet of their
souls. They possess every quarter of the city. Jew
and Gentile sell them, Greek and Barbarian buy
them, as they buy and sell no other wild flower.

Why, then, is it not the arbutus, instead of the
shad-bush, that spells for me the spring ? I don't
know ; unless it is because the shad-bush takes
deeper hold upon my imagination. It certainly is
not its form, or color, or fragrance, — though it has
grace, — an airy, misty, half-substantial shape, a

112

of

wraith in the leafless woods ; it has odor, too, and
color. But it is something more than all of these
that the soft blowing shad-bush means to me. Per-
haps the something is in its name, — because it links
my inland round with the round of the sea ; and
because it links this present narrowing round with
the wide-winging round of the past.

At the sign of the shad-bush I know the fish are
running, — the sturgeon up the Delaware; the shad
into Cohansey Creek ; and through Five-Forks Sluice,
these soft, stirring nights, I know the catfish are
slipping. Is there any boy now in Lupton's Mead-
ows to watch them come ? to listen in the moonlit
quiet for the splashy splash, as the fish pass up
through the main ditch toward the dam ?

At the sign of the shad-bush how swiftly the tides
of life rise ! how mysteriously their currents run !
drifting, flying, flowing, creeping — colors, perfumes,
forms, and voices — across the heavens, over the
earth, and down the deep, dim aisles of the sea ! and
down the deep, dim aisles of our memories.

VIII

I WAS hurry ing across Boston Common. Two or three
hundred others were hurrying with me. But ahead, at
the union of several paths, was a crowd, standing still.
I kept hurrying on, not to join the crowd, but simply
to keep up the hurry. The crowd was not standing
still, it was a-hurrying, too, scattering as fast as it
gathered, and as it scattered I noticed that it wore a
smile. I hastened up, pushed in, as I had done a score
of times on the Common, and got my glimpse of the
show. It was not a Mormon preaching, not a single-
taxer, not a dog fight. It was Billy, a gray squirrel,
taking peanuts out of a bootblack's pocket. And every

114

(Ttature QTloi^ment

age, sex, sort, and condition of Bostonian came around
to watch the little beast shuck the nuts and bury them
singly in the grass of the Common.

"Ain't he a cute little cuss, mister?" said the boy
of the brush, feeling the bottom of his empty pocket,
and looking up into the prosperous face of Calumet
and Hecla at his side. C. and H. smiled, slipped some-
thing into the boy's hand with which to buy another
pocketful of peanuts for Billy, and hurried down to
State Street.

This crowd on the Common is nothing exceptional.
It happens every day, and everywhere, the wide coun-
try over. We are all stopping to watch, to feed, and —
to smile. The longest, most far-reaching pause in our
hurrying American life to-day is this halt to look at
the out-of-doors, this attempt to share its life ; and
nothing more significant is being added to our Amer-
ican character than the resulting thoughtfulness, sym-
pathy, and simplicity, — the smile on the faces of the
crowd hurrying over the Common.

Whether one will or not, he is caught up by this
nature movement and set adrift in the fields. It may,
indeed, be "adrift " for him until he gets thankfully
back to the city. "It was a raw November day,"

of t

wrote one of these new nature students, who hap-
pened also to be a college student, " and we went
for our usual Saturday's birding into the woods.
The chestnuts were ripe, and we gathered a peck
between us. On our way home, we discovered a
small bird perched upon a cedar tree with a worm in
its beak. It was a hummingbird, and after a little
searching we found its tiny nest close up against the
trunk of the cedar, full of tiny nestlings just ready
to fly."

This is what they find, many of these who are
caught up by the movement toward the fields ; but
not all of them. A little five-year-old from the village
came out to see me recently, and while playing in the
orchard she brought me five flowers, called them by
their right names, and told me how they grew. Down
in the loneliest marshes of Delaware Bay I know a
lighthouse keeper and his solitary neighbor, a farmer :
both have been touched by this nature spirit ; both
are interested, informed, and observant. The farmer
there, on the old Zane's Place, is no man of books, like
the rector of Selborne, but he is a man of birds and
beasts, of limitless marsh and bay and sky, of ever-
lasting silence and wideness and largeness and eter-

116

(ttlownttnf

nal solitude. He could write a Natural History of the
Maurice River Marshes.

These are not rare cases. The nature books, the
nature magazines, the nature teachers, are directing
us all to the out-of-doors. I subscribe to a farm jour-
nal (club rates, twenty-five cents a year !) in which an
entire page is devoted to " nature studies," while the
whole paper is remarkably fresh and odorous of
the real fields. In the city, on my way to and from
the station, I pass three large bookstores, and from
March until July each of these shops has a big window
given over almost continuously to "nature books." I
have before me from one of these shops a little cata-
logue of nature books — "a select list " — for 1907,
containing 233 titles, varying in kind all the way from
" The Tramp's Handbook " to one (to a dozen) on the
very stable subject of "The Farmstead." These are
all distinctively "nature books," books with an appeal
to sentiment as well as to sense, and very unlike the
earlier desiccated, unimaginative treatises.

There are a multitude of other signs that show as
clearly as the nature books how full and strong is
this tide that sets toward the open fields and woods.
There are as many and as good evidences, too, of the

117

of

genuineness of this interest in the out-of-doors. It
may be a fad just now to adopt abandoned farms, to
attend parlor lectures on birds, and to possess a how-
to-know library. It is pathetic to see " nature study"
taught by schoolma'ams who never did and who never
will climb a rail fence ; it is sad, to speak softly, to
have the makers of certain animal books preface the
stories with a declaration of their absolute truth ; it is
passing sad that the unnatural natural history, the
impossible out-of-doors, of some of the recent nature
books, should have been created. But fibs and failures
and impossibilities aside, there still remains the thing
itself, — the widespread turning to nature, and the
deep, vital need to turn.

The note of sincerity is clear, however, in most of
our nature writers ; the faith is real in most of our
nature teachers ; and the love, — who can doubt the
love of the tens of thousands of those whose feet feel
the earth nowadays, whose lives share in the exist-
ence of some pond or wood or field ? And who can
doubt the rest, the health, the sanity, and the satisfac-
tion that these get from the companionship of their
field or wood or pond ?

There is no way of accounting for the movement
118

(Movement

that reflects in the least upon its reality and genuine-
ness. It may be only the appropriation by the com-
mon people of the world that the scientists have dis-
covered to us ; it may be a popular reaction against
the conventionality of the eighteenth century ; or
the result of our growing wealth and leisure ; or a
fashion set by Thoreau and Burroughs, — one or all
of these may account for its origin ; but nothing
can explain the movement away, or hinder us from
being borne by it out, at least a little way, under
the open of heaven, to the great good of body and
soul.

Among the cultural influences of our times that
have developed the proportions of a movement, this
so-called nature movement is peculiarly American.
No such general, widespread turning to the out-of-
doors is seen anywhere else ; no other such body of
nature literature as ours ; no other people so close
to nature in sympathy and understanding, because
there is no other people of the same degree of culture
living so close to the real, wild out-of-doors.

The extraordinary interest in the out-of-doors is
not altogether a recent acquirement. We inherited it.
Nature study is an American habit. What else had

119

of

the pioneers and colonists to study but the out-of-
doors ? and what else was half as wonderful ? They
came from an old urban world into this new country
world, where all was strange, unnamed, and unex-
plored. Their chief business was observing nature,
not as dull savages, nor as children born to a dead
familiarity with their surroundings, but as interested
men and women, with a need and a desire to know.
Their coming was the real beginning of our nature
movement ; their observing has developed into our
nature study habit.

Our nature literature also began with them. There
is scarcely a journal, a diary, or a set of letters of
this early time in which we do not find that careful
seeing, and often that imaginative interpretation, so
characteristic of the present day. Even the modern
animal romancer is represented among these early
writers in John Josselyn and his delicious book,
" New England's Rarities Discovered."

It was not until the time of Emerson and Bryant
and Thoreau, however, that our interest in nature
became general and grew into something deeper
than mere curiosity. There had been naturalists such
as Audubon (he was a poet, also), but they went

120

off into the deep woods alone. They were after new
facts, new species. Emerson and Bryant and Thoreau
went into the woods, too, but not for facts, nor did they
go far, and they invited us to go along. We went,
because they got no farther than the back-pasture
fence. It was not to the woods they took us, but to
nature ; not a-hunting after new species in the name
of science, but for new inspirations, new estimates
of life, new health for mind and spirit.

But we were slow to get as far even as their back-
pasture fence, slow to find nature in the fields and
woods. It was fifty years ago that Emerson tried to
take us to nature ; but fifty years ago, how few there
were who could make sense out of his invitation, to
say nothing of accepting it ! And of Thoreau's first
nature book, "A Week on the Concord and Merri-
mack Rivers," there were sold, in four years after
publication, two hundred and twenty copies. But two
hundred and twenty of such books at work in the
mind of the country could leaven, in time, a big lump
of it. And they did. The out-of-doors, our attitude
toward it, and our literature about it have never
been the same since.

Even yet, however, it is the few only who respond

121

of t$

to Thoreau, Emerson, and Burroughs, who can find
nature, as well as birds and trees, who can think and
feel as well as wonder and look. Before we can think
apd feel we must get over our wondering, and we
must get entirely used to looking. This we are slowly
doing, — slowly, I say, for it is the monstrous, the
marvelous, the unreal that most of us still go out
into the wilderness for to see, — bears and wolves,
foxes, eagles, orioles, salmon, mustangs, porcupines
of extraordinary parts and powers.

There came to my desk, tied up with the same
string, not long since, three nature books of a sort
to make Thoreau turn over in his grave, — accounts
of beasts and birds such as old Thetbaldus gave us in
his " Physiologus," that pious and marvelous bestiary
of the dark ages. These three volumes that I refer
to are modern and about American animals, but they,
too, might have been written during the dark ages.
All three have the same solemn preface, declaring
the absolute truth of the observations that follow (as
if we might doubt ?), and piously pointing out their
high moral purpose ; all three likewise start out with
the same wonderful story, — an animal biography :
one, of a slum cat, born in a cracker box. Among the

122

(Yftowmmf

kittens of the cracker box was an extraordinary kitten
of "pronounced color," who survives and comes to
glory. The next book tells the biography of a fox,
born in a hole among the Canadian hills. Among
the pups born in this hole was one extraordinary pup
"more finely colored " than the others, who survives
and comes to glory. The third book tells the bio-
graphy of a wolf, born in a cave among the rocks,
still farther north. Among the cubs born in this cave
was one extraordinary cub, " larger than the others,"
who survives and, as is to be expected of a wolf,
comes to more glory than the cracker-box kitten or
the, fox pup of the hills.

Such are the stories that are made into texts and
readers for our public schools ; such are the animals
that go roaming through the woods of the American
child's imagination. But no such kittens or cubs or
pups lurk in my eight-acre woodlot. I have seen sev-
eral (six, to be exact) fox pups, but never did I see
this overworked, extraordinary, cum laude pup of the
recent nature books.

So long as we continue to read and believe such
accounts, just so long shall we find it impossible to
go with Audubon and Thoreau and Burroughs, for

123

of tffc

they have no place to take us, nothing to show us
when we arrive. Their real world does not exist.

But we know that a real, ordinary, yet a marvelous
world does exist, and right at hand. The present
great nature movement is an outgoing to discover it,
— its trees, birds, flowers, its myriad forms. This is
the meaning of the countless manuals, the " how-to-
know" books, and the nature study of the public
schools. And this desire to know Nature is the rea-
sonable, natural preparation for the deeper insight
that leads to communion with her, — a desire to be
traced more directly to Agassiz, and the hosts of
teachers he inspired, perhaps, than to the poet-essay-
ists like Emerson and Thoreau and Burroughs.

Let us learn to see and name first. The inexperi-
enced, the unknowing, the unthinking, cannot love.
One must live until tired, and think until baffled, be-
fore he can know his need of Nature ; and then he
will not know how to approach her unless already
acquainted. To expect anything more than curiosity
and animal delight in a child is foolish, and the
attempt to teach him anything more at first than to
know the out-of-doors is equally foolish. Poets are
born, but not until they are old.

124

(Ttafute Qtlowmtnl

But if one got no farther than his how-to-know
book would lead, him, he still would get into the
fields, — the best place for him this side of heaven,
— he would get ozone for his lungs, red blood, sound
sleep, and health. As a nation, we had just begun to
get away from the farm and out of touch with the
soil. The nature movement is sending us back in
time. A new wave of physical soundness is to roll
in upon us as the result, accompanied with a newness
of mind and of morals.

For, next to bodily health, the influence of the
fields makes for the health of the spirit. It is easier
to be good in a good body and an environment of
largeness, beauty, and peace, — easier here than any-
where else to be sane, sincere, and " in little thyng
have suffisaunce." If it means anything to think
upon whatsoever things are good and lovely, then it
means much to own a how-to-know book and to
make use of it.

This is hardly more than a beginning, however,
merely satisfying an instinct of the mind. It is good
if done afield, even though such classifying of the
out-of-doors is only scraping an acquaintance with
nature. The best good, the deep healing, come when

125

of

one, no longer a stranger, breaks away from his get-
ting and spending, from his thinking with men, and
camps under the open sky, where he knows without
thinking, and worships without priest or chant or
prayer.

The world's work must be done, and only a small
part of it can be done in the woods and fields. The
merchants may not all turn ploughmen and wood-
choppers. Nor is it necessary. What we need to do,
and are learning to do, is to go to nature for our rest
and health and recreation.

IX

June

A REFERENCE to one of my notebooks shows that
in June, 1895, there were thirty-six species of birds
nesting within singing distance of my study win-
dows ; in 1907 there were thirty-two, the most dis-
tant nest being less than five minutes' walk from my
door.

This is not a modern natural history story, — an
extraordinary discovery that only I am capable of
making. Start your own June list, and I warrant you
will find as many. For there is nothing peculiarly
birdy about my small farm. Any place as uncon-
genial to English sparrows and one that offers a fair
chance to the native birds will keep you busy count-
ing nests in June.

In the chimney built the swifts (three or four
127

of t$

families of them) ; in the barn loft a small colony of
barn swallows ; and under the roof of the pig-pen a
pair of phoebes, my earliest spring birds and often
the latest with a brood.

A bushy hillside drops from the porch to the old
orchard, and along this steep southern slope nested
a pair of indigo buntings and a pair of rose-breasted
grosbeaks (my rarest neighbors) ; also, here in the
thick underbrush were found chewinks, thrashers,
black and white warblers, song sparrows, and a pair
of partridges.

In the orchard there were half a dozen chippies'
nests, even more robins', two nests of bluebirds, and
one each of the tree swallow, flicker, yellow warbler,
chebec, downy woodpecker, kingbird, great crested
flycatcher, redstart, and screech owl.

Baltimore orioles nested in the elms along the road ;
close to, the little river were the nests of catbirds
and red-winged blackbirds ; a nest of swamp spar-
rows and of Maryland yellow-throats in the meadow,
and in the woodlot a pewee's nest, a crow's nest,
and three nests of ovenbirds.

All these I found ; but besides these I know that
a pair of yellow-billed cuckoos built somewhere near

128

the house, as did a pair of blue jays, wood thrushes,
and chestnut-sided warblers. These I am still waiting
for. I need another June.

Not one of all these birds is rare or even shy,
unless it be the swamp sparrow ; none of them that
the veriest beginner should not come to know in the
course of one June. For these are almost domesti-
cated, our near neighbors and friends, who desire
and who will return our friendly, neighborly calls.

There are other birds, like the hawks, the owls,
the herons, the rarer thrushes, sparrows, warblers,
and marsh birds, that require time and tramping for
their discovery. I know the very log in which I could
find young turkey buzzards in June ; the clump of
dog-roses where a least bittern will build ; the old
gum that for years has harbored a pair of barred
owls ; the little cove where, spring after spring, a
black duck nests. But I should need a vacation to
visit these.

I watch the others between times, — between five
o'clock in the morning and breakfast, between break-
fast and train time and church time, and on Satur-
days to and from the garden. If you are your own
gardener, you can carry not only a hoe, but along

129

of

with it a pair of field glasses. I even combine the
care of my pig and the study of the phoebes that share
his pen. Occasionally I drop everything and hunt for
a nest, as if life depended upon my finding it. But life
does n't, the more 's the pity, for me. Life depends
on the finding of things that are very different from
birds' nests, things that require a deal of hunting
the whole year around. Yet I take the time to hunt
birds' nests, too, for life is more than meat (I raise
a good many vegetables), and, after all, my life does
depend, in no small measure, upon my finding a few
birds' nests in June.

I remember a June when I tried to get life out of
a grocery store, and the sickness of it comes over
me even yet at times. I sold kerosene oil, brown
sugar, coffee, salt mackerel, and plug tobacco. I
breathed the mingled breath of kerosene oil, brown
sugar, coffee, salt mackerel, and plug tobacco, — the
odor of mere money, — when I knew the fox grapes
were in blossom, the magnolias and the azaleas ;
when I knew the fields were green and the birds
were in song ! I have longed for many things, but
never as I longed that June for the farm, for the long,
long day, yes, and for the long, long row. It was

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June

that kerosened, salt-mackereled, plug-tobaccoed —
moneyed — June that took me back to sweet poverty
and the farm.

I do not wish to think of living where the birds
and wild flowers do not live with me. A city flat is
convenient, and city life is exciting ; but convenience
and excitement plus meat and raiment are not the
sum of life ; neither, on the other hand, are pure air,
sunshine, birds, flowers, a garden, quiet, and time to
think, the whole of life. No; but when you consider
the matter, there appears very little still needing to
make life whole that you cannot have along with
your birds, thoughts, and garden.

Whether you love the country or not, whether you
know the difference between a kingbird and a king-
crab or not, you owe it to your body and your soul
to get out into the open fields in June, — not to col-
lect bird skins or birds' eggs or to make a herbarium
or a nature diary, but to live a while where the birds
and flowers live. The city may be heaven enough for
you all the rest of the year ; but God did n't make
the city. There are seasons — March and February,
usually — when it seems as if some one else has
a hand in making the country. In June, however,

of i

the country is all and more than the poets say, — if
it is poetry that you come out into the country for to
feel.

Take my meadow, for instance, all aglow in June
with buttercups, as if spread with a sheet of beaten
gold ! But now, if it is only hay that I am after (alas,
too often it is), then my gold turns all to brass, and
worse than brass, for buttercups, as my dairyman
neighbor tells me, make the poorest kind of hay. I
should keep no cow, perhaps. She gives nice milk, to
be sure, but she eats up my beaten gold, she kills my
buttercup poetry. Maybe I am too rich, I own too
much : one cow, one horse, two pigs, thirty hens,
fourteen acres of hills and trees. For it is the truth
that I do not enjoy the foxes now as I did before I
kept hens, nor the buttercups as I did before I got the
cow. Suppose, now, besides all of this, I had money,
— a lot of it ! — several thousand dollars ! You never
get money along with a farm, and that is one reason
why a farm is such a safe and sure investment for the
soul. It is not the cow nor the chores, but money in
or out of the bank, that robs life of its June.

Nor is owning one cow like having a dairy farm.
The average man had better keep his money in the

132

bank than invest in more than one cow. A single
.cow cannot eat all the gold out of one's meadow.
I am still glad for the buttercups ; and where the
meadow passes into the upland, where the butter-
cups give place to the daisies, my gold runs into sil-
ver; which means certainly that I am not making the
farm pay, for on a paying farm a daisy — weed that it
is, and not a native weed at that — is more like a spot
of leprosy than of silver. Our daisies are not even
those sung by the poets, I understand. What of it ?
A ten-acre field of them lies snow-white in my mem-
ory, fresh with the freshness of early June and the
sweeter freshness of boyhood. And as for poetry, I
have my own for them, — the poetry of boyhood, of
Commencement days at the Institute, and of girls in
white frocks.

There is no particular flower that means June to
me as the hepatica means March, the arbutus April,
the shad-bush May, and the red wood-lily July. I can-
not think of single blossoms, or of here and there
a spot of rare flowers, in June, but only of pastures
drifted white, meadows purple-misted, and rolling
hillsides billowy pink, — of laurel, forget-me-nots, dai-
sies, viburnums, and buttercups. This is no time to

133

of

botanize.. Leave the collecting can at home, for one
day at least, and wander forth, not to hunt, but to
drift and float, or, if you run aground, to wade knee-
deep in June. A botanist who is never poet misses
as much in the out-of-doors as the poet who is never
botanist.

If there were no other flower in the month but the
white water-lily, June would still be June. "Who can
contemplate it," exclaims Mr. Burroughs, "as it
opens in the morning sun, and distills such perfume,
such purity, such snow of petal, and such gold of
anther, from the dark water and still darker ooze!
How feminine it seems beside its coarser and more
robust congeners, how shy, how pliant, how fine in
texture and starlike in form ! "

How the water-lily and spatter-dock can grow from
the same mud is past understanding. One has every
grace, the other none. But the dock can live in
stagnant water, which perhaps is a sort of compen-
sation.

And these two, for me, are always associated with
magnolias, — Magnolia glauca, — and magnolias are
associated with "old, forgotten, far-off things." Their
absence from my swamps here is part of the price

June

I pay for my transplanting to these New England
fields.

If that were all, it were price enough. But think
of June in New Jersey, with buzzards soaring, car-
dinals whistling, and turtle doves cooing ; with swamps
magnolia-scented, and woods astir with box-turtles,
pine snakes, pine-tree lizards, and 'possums! Then
think of June in Massachusetts with none of these, —
at least in my neighborhood !

What then ? I could scarcely strain the magnolia's
breath from the mingling odors if it were here, for
the common air I breathe is the breath of blossom-
ing clover, wild grape, elder, blackberry, rose, and
azalea. I must almost smell them by families. For
here are six wild roses perfuming my air, five vibur-
nums, six dogwoods (these last quite lacking in per-
fume, be it said), and wild blackberries that I have
never dared to number. Who wants to number them ?
to spend his June with a "plant analysis," dissecting
and keeping tally? It is enough now to be alive and
out of doors among the flowers. Nor is it all of June
to find thirty-six species of birds nesting within a
radius of five hundred and fifty-five and one half feet
from your front door. I do not cite these figures in

order to startle, but to suggest, if I might, the joyous
medley of life in June, its variety and abundance.
You may not be able to name all the warblers;
you have never yet made out which is which among
the dogwoods and viburnums ; the dogwood flowers
are all four-pointed stars, while the viburnums are
all five-pointed. But what of it, — four or five, dog-
wood or viburnum ! Here they are, banked in soft,
snowy fragrance along the margin of the pond. A
tiny nest swings from a fork among them, a tiny
bird with a white ring around her eye broods and
watches you drift past. You have a fish-pole, and all
about you and within you is the June.

X

ONE of the pair of crows that nest in my woodlot has
been flying over all winter long with a gap in his right
wing. Three at least of the large wing feathers are
missing, and the result is a perceptible limp. The bird
moves through the air with the list of a boat that has
shifted or lost its ballast. Were he set upon in the
air by a hawk, as might happen if he were smaller,
the race would be short. He is plainly disabled
by the loss of these three feathers, and has been
for months. Just how and when the loss occurred
I don't know. It is likely, however, that the feath-
ers were shot away in June, — in corn-stealing
time. Now for nearly a year he has been hobbling
about on one whole and one half wing, trusting to
luck to escape his enemies, until he can get three

of tfyt

new feathers to take the places of these that are
missing.

Well, why, in all this time, if these three feathers
are so necessary, has he not gotten them ? He might
reply, " Which of you by taking thought can add as
much as one cubit to your stature, to say nothing of
three hairs to the top of your head ? " By taking time
(which is a fine human phrase for giving Nature time),
and with the right conditions, you may add the cubit.
So the crow may get his feathers. It is not an affair
between the crow and his feathers, nor between the
crow and Nature. It is wholly Nature's affair with
the crow's feathers, and so seriously does Nature
take it, so careful is she, so systematic, so almost
arbitrary about it, that the feathers of crows, like
the hairs of our heads, can truly be said to be num-
bered.

Nothing could look more haphazard, certainly, than
the way a hen's feathers seem to drop off at moulting
time. The most forlorn, undone, abject creature about
the farm is the half -moulted hen. There is one in the
chicken yard now, so nearly naked that she really is
ashamed of herself, and so miserably helpless that
she squats in a corner all night, unable to reach the

138

low poles of the roost. It is a critical experience
with the hen, this moulting of her feathers, and were
it not for the protection of the yard it might be a
fatal experience. Nature seems to have no hand in
the business at all ; if she has, then what a mess she
is making of it !

But pick up the hen, study the falling of the feath-
ers carefully, and lo ! here is law and order, system
and sequence, as if every feather were a star, every
quill a planet, and the old white hen the round sphere
of the universe. You will put her down reverently,
awfully, this hen that you took up with such compas-
sion, and you will say, "Such knowledge is too won-
derful for me."

So it is, for the moult means a great deal more than
the mere renewal of feathers, just how much more no
one seems to know. This much is plain, that once
a year, usually after the nesting season, it seems
a physical necessity for most birds to renew their
plumage.

We get a new suit (some of us) because our old
one wears out. That is the most apparent cause for
the new annual suit of the birds. Yet with them, as
with some of the favored of us humans, the feathers

of

go out of fashion, and the change, the moult, is a
mere matter of style.

But the annual moult, first of all, is Nature's wise
provision for the safety and warmth of the bird.
Feathers are not only covering, as our clothes, but
also means of locomotion, and, hence, the bird's very
means of life. A year of use leaves many of the feath-
ers worn and broken, some of them through accident
entirely lost (as with my crow), and while they might
last for two years, or even longer, Nature has found
it necessary to provide a new plumage as often as
once a year, in order to keep the race of birds at
its best.

But there are other reasons, at least there are ad-
vantages taken of the moult for other ends : such as
the adaptation of the feathers to the varying tem-
peratures of the seasons, — heavier in winter and
lighter in summer ; also the adaptation of the color
of the plumage to the changing colors of the en-
vironment,— as the change from the dark summer
color of the ptarmigan to its snow-white winter
plumage to match the snows of its far northern
home ; then, and perhaps most interesting of all, is
the advantage taken of the moult, for the adorning

140

Qj&o&n

of the bird for the mating season. Indeed, Nature
goes so far, in some cases, as to cause a special
moult to meet the exigencies of the wedding, — as if
fine feathers do make a fine bird. All this to meet
the fancy of the bride ! so, at least, the scientists tell
us. Whether or not her fancy is the cause, it is
a fact that among the birds it is the bridegroom
who is adorned for his wife, and sometimes the fine
feathers come by a special moult.

Not far from my house is a nest of black-crowned
night herons, or "quawks." Preparatory to the mating
of the pair there started from the crown of the male
(and female, also, in this case,) two or three white,
rounded plumes, which now hang eight inches In
length, waving gracefully to his shoulders. They are
the special glory of the wedding time ; but soon after
the nesting season is over they will drop out, not to
come again until he goes a-wooing Mrs. Quawk once
more. In the white American egret, and in the snowy
egret, the plumes number about fifty, and occur upon
the back close to the tail. They are straight in
the American, recurved in the snowy, and make the
famous "aigrette " plumes of the milliner. The birds
are shot in their nuptial dress, and so great has been

141

of

the heartless demand that both species, once very
abundant, are now almost extinct.

Bobolink is another special case. He has two com-
plete moults a year. Now, as I write, I hear him
singing over the meadow, — a jet black, white, and
cream-buff lover, most strikingly adorned. His* wife,
down in the grass, looks as little like him as a spar-
row looks like a blackbird. After the breeding season
he moults, changing color so completely that he and
his wife and children all look alike, all like sparrows.
They even lose their name now, flying south under
the assumed name of "reedbirds."

Bobolink passes the winter in Brazil, and at the
coming of spring, just before the long northward
journey begins, he moults again ; but you would
hardly know it to look at him, for, strangely enough,
he is not black and white, but still colored like a
sparrow as he was in the fall. Apparently he is.
Look at him more closely, however, and you will find
the brownish yellow color is all caused by a veil of
fine fringes hanging from the edges of the feathers.
Underneath are the black and white and cream-buff.
He starts northward, and by the time he reaches
Massachusetts the fringe veil is worn off and the

142

(grofcen

black and white bobolink appears. Specimens taken
after their arrival here still show traces of the yellow
veil.

Many birds do not have this spring moult at all,
and with most of those that do, the great wing
feathers are not then renewed as are bobolink's, but
only at the annual moult after the nesting is done.
In fact, the moulting of the remiges, or wing feathers,
seems to be a family affair, the process differing with
different families ; for these are the bird's most impor-
tant feathers, and their loss is so serious a matter
that Nature has come to make the change according
to the habits and needs of the birds.

With all birds the order is for the body feathers
to begin to go first, then the wings, and last the
tail. But the shedding of the wing feathers is a very
slow and carefully regulated process. In the wild
geese and other water birds the wing feathers drop
out with the feathers of the body, and all go so simul-
taneously that the birds cannot fly. On land you could
catch them with your hands, but they keep near or
on the water and thus escape, though times have
been when it was necessary to protect them from
their human enemies at this season by special laws.

of t$

The necessity for the moult entails many risks,
for it exposes the bird to peculiar dangers ; yet no
single bird is abandoned during this period, none left
without away of escape. The geese, as we have seen,
moult most rapidly and hence are most helpless, but
there are few of their enemies that they cannot
avoid by keeping to the water and grassy marshes;
the hawks, that hunt by wing, moult so slowly that
they do not feel a loss of power ; while such birds as
the quail and grouse, that always depend in part for
protection upon the blending of their colors with the
colors of their environment, seem especially so pro-
tected during the moulting season. A grouse blotched
with light patches, where the dark-tipped feathers
have fallen away, may so melt into the mottled color
scheme of its background as to escape the sharpest
eye.

Such a rapid, wholesale moult as in the case of the
geese would be fatal to land birds. Instead, their
primaries, or large wing feathers, drop out one or two
at a time and symmetrically from the two wings.
Oftentimes it is the two inner primaries that go first,
then the others following one at a time, the outer-
most last. This order varies, as in the kingfisher.

144

(gtoftm

In the snow bunting all but two of the old primaries
are gone before any new ones have grown as large as
the secondaries. In the hawks, again, birds that must
use f heir wings and must have them always at their
best, the moulting of the wing feathers is very slow,
lasting nearly the whole year. The homing pigeon,
another great flier, but not of the same kind as the
hawks, begins about May to moult his wing feathers,
losing the tenth primary first, a month later the ninth,
then the others at intervals of from eight to fifteen
days.

It is quite enough to make one pause, to make one
even wonder, when he finds that this seemingly in-
significant matter is taken so seriously by nature,
and that even here there is that perfect adaptation
of means to end. The gosling, to cite another in-
stance, goes six weeks in down, then gets its first
feathers, which it sheds in the fall. The young quail,
on the other hand, is born with quills so far advanced
that it is able to fly almost as soon as it is hatched.
These are mature feathers ; but the bird is still, young
and growing, and soon outgrows these first flight
feathers, so that they are quickly lost and new ones
come. This goes on till fall, several moults occurring

'45

of

the first summer to mq£t the increasing weight of
the growing body.

Where there are peculiar uses made of the tail, as
with the chimney swifts and woodpeckers, there is a
peculiar order of moulting. In most birds the tail is
a kind of balance or steering-gear, and not of equal
importance with the wings. Nature, consequently,
seems to have attached less importance to the feath-
ers of the tail. They are not so firmly set, and they
are hardly of the same quality or kind; for if a wing
feather is once broken or lost, after the moult, it must
go unmended until the annual moulting time comes
round again ; whereas, if a tail feather is lost through
accident, it is made good, no matter when. How
do you explain that? I know that old theory of the
birds roosting with their tails out, and so, through
generations of lost tails, those feathers now grow,
expecting to be plucked by some enemy, and so have
only a temporary hold. Perhaps.

The normal, natural way, of course, is to replace a
lost feather with a new one as soon as possible ; but
in order to give .extra strength to the wing feathers
nature has found it necessary to check their frequent
change, and so complete is the check that the annual

146

moult is required to replace one of them. The Jap-
anese have discovered the secret of this check, and
are able by it to keep certain feathers in the tails
of their cocks growing until they reach the enormous
length of ten to twelve feet.

My crow, it seems, lost his three feathers just after
his annual moult; the three broken shafts he carries
still in his wing, and must continue to carry, as
the stars must continue their courses. These three
feathers must round out their cycle to the annual
moult. The universe of worlds and feathers is a uni-
verse of law, of order, and of reason.

XI

(Tloon

LAZILY sailing clouds, and between
them, far away, the illimitable blue!
And how blue ! how cool ! how far
away! Never does the sky seem of so
real azure, so fresh and new, but so
mysteriously distant, as upon such a
July day as this; and never does the
earth seem so warm and near. I lie
outstretched upon it as close as I ever
lay upon my mother's breast. I feel the
crisp moss beneath me, the creeping of the bee-
tle under my shoulder, the heat of the gray stone
against my side. I throw out my hands, push my
fingers into the hot soil and feel them take root.
Mother earth ! The clouds sail on ; the bending blue
recedes ; and — heaven ? It matters not. Here are

148

(Ttoon

my brothers, — the beetle, the moss, the gray stone ;
and here I lie in the arms of the mother who bore
me.

I have questions to ask — to-morrow ; dreams to
dream — to-morrow ; things to do — to-morrow. To-
day I am free in the fields ; to-day I am brother to
the beetle and the stone ; I am neighbor to this
ancient white oak in whose shade I lie ; I am child
to the earth. It is enough to be to-day.

How warm is this mother breast, even here, under
the tree! The sun is overhead. The summer is at
its height. The flood-tide of life has come. It is high
noon of the year.

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

Of the four seasons summer is the shortest, and
the one we are least acquainted with. Summer is
only a pause between spring and autumn, only
the hour of the year's noon. But the hour is long

149

of

enough were we able to stop, to lie down under
a tree for the hour, unwearied, wide-awake, and
still.

We can be glad with the spring, sad with the
autumn, eager with the winter ; but it is hard for us
to go softly, to pause, to be still, complete, sufficient,
full with the full, sufficient summer ; to hang poised
and expanded like the broad-winged hawk yonder far
up in the wide sky.

But the hawk is not still. The shadow of my oak
begins to lengthen. The hour is gone even while it
comes, for wavering softly down the languid air falls
a yellow leaf from a slender gray 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. It was springtime even
yesterday ; to-day there are signs of autumn every-
where. Perhaps, after all, there is no such time as
summer, — no pause, no rest, no quiet in the fields,
no hour of noon.

Yet I get something out of the fields, these slum-
berous July days, that is neither of springtime nor of
autumn, a ripening, mellowing, quieting something,

150

(Tloon

that falls only when the leaves hang limp, when the
earth warms in the shadows, when the wood-lily
opens in the sun, and the whir of the cicada times
the throbbing of the heat. And when that some-
thing falls, then I know it is summer.

This is a late July day, but its dawn was still of
the springtime. At daybreak the birds were singing,
fresh and full-throated as in May; then the sun
burned through the mist and the chorus ceased.
Now I do not hear even the chewink and the talka-
tive vireo. Only the fiery notes of the scarlet tana-
ger come to me through the dry white heat of the
noon, and the resonant, reverberated song of the
indigo bunting, 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 up the hill-
side; the scarlet tanager 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.
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; and yonder,
amid the fixed shining colors of the wooded ridge, I

of

see the top of a chestnut tree, misty and tender, with
foamy white bloom. These are the last of the season.
The July flowering of the chestnut always seems de-
layed and accidental. The season's fruit has set, is
already ripening. Spring is gone ; the sun is over-
head ; the red wood-lily is open. To-day is summer,
— noon of the year.

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

This is a flower of fire, the worshiper of the sun,
the very heart of the summer. How impossible 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 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 with a
spicy breath ; but the wood-lily opens wide and full,
lifting its spotted lips to the Sun, for it loves his
scorching kiss. See it glow ! Should the withered
thicket burst suddenly into a blaze it would be no

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Qtoon

wonder, so little would it take to fan these glowing
petals into flame.

The marsh marigolds of May spread the meadows
with a glow of warmth, yet that was but a gilded fire
beside the wilting, withering heat of this midsummer
lily. That early flush has gone. There is hardly a
fleck of spring's freshness and delicacy on the fields,
none of the tenderness of the bluets that touched
everything in May, none even of the softness of the
hardwood greens that lasted far into June. The colors
are set now, dry and glistening, as if varnished over.
The odors, too, have changed. They were moist and
faint then, — the fragrance of the breath of things.
Now they are strong, pungent, heavy, — the tried-out
smells of the sweat of things.

Life has grown lusty and lazy and rank. It stood
no higher than the heads of the violets along my
little river at the coming of June ; to-day I cannot
catch a glimpse of the water without breaking
through a hedge of swamp milkweed, boneset, and
peppermint. Here are turtle-head, joe-pye-weed, jew-
el-weed, the budding goldenrods, and the spreading,
choking, rasping smartweed. The year is full grown.
It is strong, rich, luxuriant.

of

And how erect and unblushing ! The pointed
spireas, the sumacs, the thistles, this crowd along
the river, this red wood-lily, even the tall swaying
spray of meadow-rue ! Slender, dainty, airy, the
meadow-rue falls just short of grace and delicacy.
It feels the season's pride of life. It is angled, rigid,
rank. Were there the slightest bend to its branches,
the merest suggestion of soul to the plant, then,
from root to spreading panicles, there had been more
grace, more misty, penciled delicacy wrought into
the tall meadow-rue than into any flower-form of
my summer.

But the suggestion of soul in the meadow-rue, as
in the whole face of nature, is lost in flesh. It is the
body, not the spirit, that is now present. She is well
fed, well clothed, opulent, mature. She is conven-
tional, — as conventional as a single, stiff spire of the
steeple-bush, — turned to such a pointed nicety as to
seem done by machine.

And yet the steeple-bush rarely grows as single
spires, but by the mdadow-full. We rarely see a single
spire. We never gather summer flowers one by one,
as we gather the arbutus and hepatica of spring.
Life has lost its individuality. It is all massed,

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(Vloon

crowded, communal. The odors mingle now and drift
wide on the winds, and as wide on the hillsides spread
the colors, gold and green and white, and, where the
rocky pasture runs down to the woods, the pink of
the steeple-bush, like a flush of dawn.

Across my neighbor's pasture lies this soft glory
of the spireas all through July. It runs in irregular
streams down to the brook, rising there into a low-
hanging bank of mist where the clustering spires of
pink are interspersed with the taller, whiter meadow-
sweet, — the " willow-leaved spirea."

There are shadowy rooms in the deep woods where
the spring lingers until the leaves of autumn begin
to fall. Here, in July, I can find the little twin flow-
ers Linnea and Mitchella, blossoms that should have
opened with the bloodroot and anemone. But Life
has largely fled the woods and left them empty and
still. She is out in the open, along the roadsides,
rioting in the sun. The time of her maidenhood
is gone. She is entirely maternal now, bent on re-
plenishing the earth, on reseeding it against all pos-
sibility of death. She covers the ground with seed,
and fills the very air with seed that the winds may
sow. She has grown lusty, bold, almost defiant, no

of

longer asking leave, but claiming for her own the
pastures, gardens, waysides, even the dumps and
waste places.

Yonder where the cattle feed stands the barbed
purple thistle, arrogant, royal, unapproachable by
man or beast. " Stand back," it says, by every one
of its thousand nettles ; " this field is mine." How
savage and how splendid it is ! After the royal pur-
ple fades, the goldfinches will dare to come and eat
the plumed seeds and scatter them by the million,
but even the goldfinch has been known to perish
upon the poisoned spikes with which the plant is
armed.

As persistent and successful as the thistle, though
not as arrogant and savage, grows the wild white
carrot in the mowing fields. The courts have called
it names and set a price upon its life. It has been
pulled out, cut off and burned, — exterminated again
and again by statute.

Life snaps her fingers at us in July ; lays hold of
us, even, as we pass, and makes us carry her burs
and beggar' s-ticks for a wider planting. I am as
useful as the tail of my cow. Neither the cow nor
I ever come home from the July fields without an

156

abundant sowing of stick - tights, tick -seeds, and
burdock burs.

There is little beauty, fragrance, or even economic
value in this wild, overrunning host of thistles, docks,
daisies, plantains, yarrows, carrots, that now possess
the earth ; but when they crowd out along the dusty
roadsides and cover the sterile, neglected, and un-
sightly places, we can sing, like the good gray poet,
"the leaves and flowers of the commonest weeds" in
our " Song of Joys."

There is certainly some praise due the chicory,
or blue corn-flower, for it is a waste transformer, a
"slummer" among flowers, if ever there was one.
Like the daisy, it is a foreigner; but unlike the
daisy, its coming is wholly benevolent. It asks only
the roadsides, and for these along only the choked,
deserted stretches; and where the summer dust lies
deepest. Coarse, common, weedy, it doubtless is ;
but it never droops in the heat, and its blue shines
through the smother like azure through the mists of
the sky.

The winds and the birds are the sowers of the
wayside, and to them I am indebted for this touch of
midsummer color. But they miss certain spots along

the roads, or else these are the patches that have no
deepness of earth, where the seed of the winds' sow-
ing can get no hold, for I have had to sow these my-
self. As I go up and down I carry a pocketful of
sweet clover seed, — melilotus, — and over every waste
and sandy place I scatter a few of the tiny seeds,
when, lo ! not two blades of grass where one grew be-
fore, but a patch of tall white flowers, breathing the
sweetness of heaven into all the air, and humming in
the July sun with the joyous sound of my honey bees.
All this, and for season after season, where nothing
grew before !

Along with melilotus in the gravelly cuts and burnt
woodlands grows the fireweed, a tall showy annual
that waves its pink, plumed head throughout July.
Farther north and west, this striking flower, like the
melilotus, yields a heavy flow of delicious honey, but
it does not attract the bees in this locality. Neither
do my bees get any nectar from the fat little indigo-
bush that takes possession of the unfarmed, sandy
fields in July, though the wild bumblebees are busy
upon it as long as it remains in bloom.

But this is not the native land of the honey bee, and
it is sheer luck that the white clover, the basswood,

158

(Tloon

the goldenrod, and here in July, the sumac, give down
to these immigrant bees their honey-sweets.

High noon of the year ! The laggard breeze comes
to me now from the maple swamp, slow and sleepy
with the odor of the white azaleas ; a flock of chick-
adees stop and quiz me ; the quivering click-clack of
a distant mowing-machine fills the air with a drowsy
hum.

Up to this time I have not seen a black snake, but
now one is watching me with raised head from the
edge of ferns among the rocks. One step toward him
and the lifted, rigid neck, a flashing streak of j et, glides
swiftly, evenly, mysteriously away, leaving me with an
uncanny feeling of chill.

It, too, is a creature of the sun, as is everything that
seems to belong especially to July. Smells, colors,
sounds, shapes, are all sun-born. The hum of the in-
sects, the music of the mower, the clear, strong hues
of the flowers, the sweet breath of curing hay, the
heavy balsamic odors of the woods, — everything seems
either a distillation, a vibration, an essence, or some
direct, immediate work of the sun.

Has your blood been work and winter faded until
it runs thin ? Would you feel the pulse of a new

159

of

life ? Come, we will take a day out of July and bask
like the wood-lily and the snake ; we will sleep for
this one day in the blazing, sleeping, living, mid-
summer sun.

XII
in

IT is certainly a humble environment. The delicious
spring of water, the plenty of wild, cool air, and the
clean pavement of loose stones do not surround this
home as they did the home of Mr. Burroughs's
phoebes, nor does this look "out upon some wild
scene and overhung by beetling crags." Instead, this
phcebe's nest is stuck close up to the low board roof
in my pig-pen.

"You have taken a handful of my wooded acres,"
says Nature, "and if you have not improved them,
you at least have changed them greatly. But they
are mine still. Be friendly now, go softly, and you
shall have them all, — and I shall have them all, too.
We will share them together."

And we do. Every part of the fourteen acres is
161

mine, yielding some kind of food or fuel or shelter.
And every foot, yes, every foot, is Nature's ; as en-
tirely hers as when the thick primeval forest stood
here. The apple trees are hers as much as mine, and
she has an average of ten different bird families, liv-
ing in them every spring. A pair of crows and a pair
of red-tailed hawks are nesting in the woodlot ; there
are at least three families of chipmunks in as many
of my stone piles ; a fine old tree toad (his fourth
season now) sleeps on the porch under the climbing
rose ; a hornet's nest hangs in a corner of the eaves ;
a small colony of swifts thunder in the chimney ;
swallows twitter in the hayloft ; a chipmunk and a
half-tame gray squirrel feed in the barn ; and — to
bring an end to this bare beginning — under the roof
of the pig-pen dwell this pair of phcebes.

To make a bird house of a pig-pen, to divide it be-
tween the pig and the bird — this is as far as Nature
can go, and this is certainly enough to redeem the
whole farm. For she has not sent an outcast or a
scavenger to dwell in the pen, but a bird of character,
however much he may lack in song or color. Phoebe
does not make up well in a picture ; neither does he
perform well as a singer ; there is little to him, in

162

in tfy

fact, but personality, — personality of a kind and quan-
tity, sufficient to make the pig-pen a decent and re-
spectable neighborhood.

Phoebe is altogether more than his surroundings.
Every time I go to feed the pig, he lights upon a post
near by and says to me : " It 's wnat you are ! Not
what you do, but how you do it ! " — with a launch
into the air, a whirl, an unerring snap at a cabbage
butterfly, and an easy drop to the post again, by way
of illustration. " Not where you live, but how you
live there ; not the feathers you wear, but how you
wear them, — it is what you are that counts ! "

There is a difference between being a "character "
and having one. "Jim " Crow is a character, largely
because he has so little. That is why he is "Jim."
My phoebe lives over the pig, but he has no nick-
name like the crow. I cannot feel familiar with a
bird of his air and carriage, who faces the world so
squarely, who settles upon a stake as if he owned it,
who lives a prince in my pig-pen.

Look at him ! How alert, able, free ! Notice the
limber drop of his tail, the ready energy it suggests.
By that one sign you would know the bird had force.
He is afraid of nothing, not even the cold, and he

163

migrates only because he is a flycatcher, and is thus
compelled to. The earliest spring day, however, that
you find the flies buzzing in the sun, look for phoebe.
He is back. The first of my birds to return in the
spring is he, often beating the bluebird and robin by
almost a week. It was a fearful spring, the spring of
1904. How phoebe managed to exist those miserable
March days is a mystery. He came directly to the
pen, as he had come the year before, and his pres-
ence in that, bleakest of Marches made it almost
spring.

The same force and promptness are manifest in
the domestic affairs of the bird. The first to arrive
that spring, he was also the first to build and bring
off a brood, — or, perhaps, She was. And the size of
the brood — of the broods, for the second one is now
a-wing, and there may yet be a third !

Phoebe appeared without his mate, and for nearly
three weeks he hunted in the vicinity of the pen,
calling the day long, and, toward the end of the sec-
ond week, occasionally soaring into the air, flapping
and pouring forth a small, ecstatic song that seemed
fairly forced from him.

These aerial bursts meant just one thing : she was
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n

coming, was coming soon ! Was she coming, or was
he getting ready to go for her ? Here he had been
for nearly three weeks, his house-lot chosen, his
mind at rest, his heart beating faster with every sun-
rise. It was as plain as day that he knew — was cer-
tain— just how and just when something lovely was
going to happen. I wished I knew. I was half in
love with her myself, half jealous of him, and I, too,
watched for her.

But she was not for me. On the evening of April
14, he was alone as usual. The next morning a pair
of phcebes flitted in and out of the windows of the pen.
Here she was. Will some one tell me all about it ?
Had she just come along and fallen instantly in love
with him and his fine pig-pen ? There are foolish
female birds ; and there are records of just such
love affairs; but this was too early in the season.
It is pretty evident that he nested here last year.
Was she his old mate, as Wilson believes ? Did they
keep together all through the autumn and winter, all
the way from Massachusetts to Florida and back ? Or
was she a new bride, who had promised him before
he left Florida ? If so, then how did she know where
to find him ?

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of

Here is a pretty story. But who will tell it to me?

What followed is a pretty story, too, had I a
lover's pen with which to write it, — the story of his
love, of their love, and of her love especially, which
was last and best.

For several days after she came the weather con-
tinued raw and wet, so that nest-building was greatly
delayed. The scar of an old, last year's nest still
showed on a stringer, and I wondered if they had
decided on this or some other site for the new nest.
They had not made up their minds, for when they
did start it was to make three beginnings.

Then I offered a suggestion. Out of a bit of stick,
branching at right angles, I made a little bracket
and tacked it up on one of the stringers, down near
the lower end of the roof. It appealed to the birds
at once, and from that moment the building went
steadily on.

Saddled upon this bracket, as well as mortared to
the stringer, the nest, when finished, was as safe
as a castle. And how perfect a thing ! Few nests,
indeed, combine the solidity, the softness, and the
exquisite curve of phcebe's.

In placing the bracket, I had carelessly nailed it
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n

under one of the cracks in the loose board roof. The
nest was receiving its first linings when there came
a long, hard rain that beat through the crack and
soaked the little cradle. This was serious, for a great
deal of mud had been worked into the thick founda-
tion, and here, in the constant shade, the dampness
would be long in drying out.

The builders saw the mistake, too, and with their
great good sense immediately began to remedy it.
They built the bottom up thicker, carried the wall
over on a slant that brought the outermost point
within the crack, then raised the whole nest until
the cup was as round-rimmed and hollow as the
mould of the bird's breast could make it.

The outside of the nest, its base, is broad and
rough and shapeless enough ; but nothing could be
softer and lovelier than the inside, the cradle, and
nothing drier, for the slanting walls shed every drop
from the leaky crack.

Wet weather followed the heavy rain until long
after the nest was finished. The whole structure was
as damp and cold as a newly plastered house. It felt
wet to my touch. Yet I noticed the birds were already
brooding. Every night, and often during the day, I

167

of

would see one of them in the nest, so deep in that
only a head or a tail showed over the round rim.
After several days I looked to see the eggs, but
to my surprise found the nest empty. It had been
robbed, I thought, yet by what creature I could not
imagine. Then down cuddled one of the birds again,
— and I understood. Instead of wet and cold, the
nest to-day felt warm to my hand ; it was dry almost
to the bottom. It had changed color, too, all the
upper part having turned a soft silver-gray. She
(I am sure it was she) had not been brooding her
eggs at all ; she had been brooding her mother's
thought of them ; and for them had been nestling
here these days and nights, drying and warming their
damp cradle with the fire of her life and love.

In due time the eggs came, — five of them, white,
spotless, and shapely. While the little hen was hatch-
ing them I gave my attention further to the cock.

I am writing this with a black suspicion over-
hanging him. But of that later. I hope it is un-
founded, and I shall give him the benefit of the
doubt. A man is innocent until proved guilty. I
have no positive evidence of Mr. Phoebe's wrong.

Our intimate friendship has revealed a most pleas-
168

in tty

ing nature in phoebe. Perhaps such close and con-
tinued association would show like qualities in every
bird, even in the kingbird. But I fear only a woman,
like Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller, could find them in him.
Not much can be said of this flycatcher family, ex-
cept that it is useful, — a kind of virtue that gets its
chief reward in heaven. I am acquainted with only
four of the other nine members, — great-crest, king-
bird, pewee, and chebec, — and each of these has
some redeeming attributes besides the habit of catch-
ing flies.

They are all good nest-builders, good parents, and
brave, independent birds ; but aside from phcebe and
pewee — the latter in his small way the sweetest
voice of the oak woods — the whole family is an odd
lot, cross-grained, cross-looking, and about as musical
as a family of ducks. A duck seems to know that
he cannot sing. A flycatcher knows nothing of any
shortcoming. He knows he can sing, and in time
he will prove it. If desire and effort count for any-
thing, he certainly must prove it in time. How long
the family has already been training, no one knows.
Everybody knows, however, the success each fly-
catcher of them has thus far attained. According to

169

of

Mr. Chapman's authority, the five rarer members
perform as follows : the olive-sided swoops from the
tops of the tallest trees uttering "pu-pu" or "pu-
pip " ; the yellow-bellied sits upon the low twigs and
sneezes a song, an abrupt "pse-ek," explosive and
harsh, produced with a painful, convulsive jerk; the
Acadian by the help of his tail says " spec " or
"peet," now and then a loud " pee-e-yuk," meanwhile
trembling violently; Trail's flycatcher jerks out his
notes rapidly, doubling himself up and fairly vibrat-
ing with the explosive effort to sing " ee-zee-e-up " ;
the gray kingbird says a strong, simple "pitirri."

It would make a good minstrel show, doubtless, if
the family would appear together. In chorus, surely,
they would be far from a tuneful choir.

I should hate to hear the flycatchers all together.
Yet individually, in the wide universal chorus of the
out-of-doors, how much we should miss the king-
bird's metallic twitter and the chebec's insistent call !

There was little excitement for phcebe during this
period of incubation. He hunted in the neighborhood
and occasionally called to his mate, contented enough
perhaps, but certainly sometimes appearing tired.
One rainy day he sat in the pig-pen window looking

170

in t§t

out at the gray wet world. He was humped and si-
lent and meditative, his whole attitude speaking the
extreme length of his day, the monotony of the drip,
drip, drip from the eaves, and the sitting, the cease-
less sitting, of his brooding wife.

He might have hastened the time by catching a
few flies for her or by taking her place on the nest,
but I never saw him do it.

Things were livelier when the eggs hatched, for it
required a good many flies a day to keep the five
young ones growing. And how they grew ! Like
bread sponge in a pan, they began to rise, pushing
the mother up so that she was forced to stand over
them ; then pushing her out until she could cling
only to the side of the nest at night ; then pushing
her off altogether. By this time they were hanging
to the outside themselves, covering the nest from
sight, almost, until finally they spilled off upon their
wings.

Out of the nest upon the air ! Out of the pen and
into a sweet, wide world of green and blue and golden
light ! I saw the second brood take their first flight,
and it was thrilling.

The nest was placed back from and below the
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of t

window, so that in leaving it the young would have
to drop, then turn and fly up to get out. Below was
the pig.

As they grew I began to fear that they might try
their wings before this feat could be accomplished,
and so fall to the pig below. But Nature, in this case,
was careful of her pearls. Day after day they clung
to the nest, even after they might have flown ; and
when they did go, it was with a sure and a long flight
that carried them out and away to the tops of the
neighboring trees.

They left the nest one at a time, and were met in
the air by their mother, who darting to them, calling
loudly, and, whirling about them, helped them as
high and as far away as they could go.

I wish the simple record of these family affairs
could be closed without one tragic entry. But that
can rarely be of any family. Seven days after the
first brood were a-wing, I found the new eggs in the
nest. Soon after that the male bird disappeared.
The second brood has now been out a week, and in
all this time no sight or sound has been had of the
father.

What happened ? Was he killed ? Caught by a cat
172

n

or a hawk ? It is possible ; and this is an easy and
kindly way to think of him. Nor is it impossible that
he may have remained as leader and protector to the
first brood, or (perish the thought !) might he per-
haps have grown weary at sight of the second lot
of five eggs, of the long days and the neglect that
they meant for him, and out of jealousy and fickle-
ness wickedly deserted ?

I hope it was death, a stainless, even ignominious
death by one of my neighbor's dozen cats.

Death or desertion, it involved a second tragedy.
Five such young ones at this time were too many
for the mother. She fought nobly ; no mother could
have done more. All five were brought within a few
days of flight ; then, one day, I saw a little wing
hanging listlessly over the side of the nest. I went
closer. One had died. It had starved to death.
There were none of the parasites in the nest that
often kill these birds. It was a plain case of sacri-
fice, — by the mother, perhaps ; by the other young,
maybe, — one for the other four.

But she did well. Nine such young birds to her
credit since April. Who shall measure her actual use
to the world ? How does she compare in value with

the pig ? Yesterday I saw several of her brood along
the meadow fence hawking for flies. They were not
far from my cabbage patch.

I hope that a pair of them returns to me another
spring, and that they come early. Any bird that
deigns to dwell under roof of mine commands my
friendship ; but no other bird takes phcebe's place in
my affections, there is so much in him to like and
he speaks for so much of the friendship of nature.

" Humble and inoffensive bird " he has been called
by one of our leading ornithologies — because he
comes to my pig-pen ! " Inoffensive " ? this bird with
the cabbage butterfly in his beak ? The faint and
damning praise ! And " humble " ? There is not a
humble feather on his body. Humble to those who
see the pen and not the bird. But to me — why, the
bird has made a palace of my pig-pen.

The very pig seems less a pig because of this ex-
quisite association ; and the lowly work of feeding
the creature has been turned by phcebe into an aes-
thetic course in bird study.

XIII

n (Account fcnf§

THERE were chipmunks everywhere. The stone
walls squeaked with them. At every turn, from early
spring to early autumn, a chipmunk was scurrying
away from you. Chipmunks were common. They
did no particular harm, no particular good ; they did
nothing in particular, being only chipmunks and
common, until one morning (it was June-bug time) I
stopped and watched a chipmunk that sat atop the
stone wall down in the orchard. He was eating, and
the shells of his meal lay in a little pile upon the big
flat stone which served as his table.

They were acorn shells, I thought, yet June
seemed rather early in the season for acorns, and

of t$

looking closer I discovered that the pile was entirely
composed of June-bug shells, — wings and hollow
bodies of the pestiferous beetles !

Well, well ! I had never seen this before, never even
heard of it. Chipmunk, a useful member of society !
actually eating bugs in this bug-ridden world of
mine ! This was interesting and important. Why, I
had really never known chipmunk, after all !

So I had n't. He had always been too common.
Flying squirrels were more worth while, because
there were none on the farm. Now, however, I deter-
mined to cultivate the acquaintance of chipmunk, for
there might be other discoveries awaiting me.

And there were. A narrow strip of grass separated
the orchard and my garden patch. It was on my way
to the garden that I most often stopped to watch this
chipmunk, or rather the pair of them, in the orchard
wall. June advanced, the beetles disappeared, and
my garden grew apace. For the first time in four
years there were prospects of good strawberries.
Most of my small patch was given over to a new
berry, one that I had originated, and I was waiting
with an eagerness which was almost anxiety for the
earliest berries.

176

(ftn (Account uri^ (Ttatute

The two chipmunks in the wall were now seven,
the young ones quite as large as their parents, and
both young and old on the best of terms with me.

I had put a little stick beside each of the three
big berries that were reddening first (though I could
have walked from the house blindfolded and picked
them). I might have had the biggest of the three on
June 7th, but for the sake of the flavor I thought it
best to wait another day. On the 8th I went down
with a box to get it. The big berry was gone, and so
was one of the others, while only half of the third
was left on the vine !

Gardening has its disappointments, its seasons of
despair, — and wrath, too. Had a toad showed him-
self at that moment he would have fared badly. I
snatched a stone and let it go at a robin flying over,
for more than likely it was he who had stolen my
berries. On the garden wall sat a friendly chipmunk
eyeing me sympathetically.

Three day slater several fine berries were ripe. On
my way to the garden I passed the chipmunks in the
orchard. A shining red spot among the vine-covered
stones of their wall brought me to a stop, for I
thought, on the instant, that it was my rose-breasted

177

of t

grosbeak, and that I was about to get a clue to its
nest. Then up to the slab where he ate the June-
bugs scrambled the chipmunk, and the rose-red spot
on the breast of the grosbeak dissolved into a big
scarlet-red strawberry. And by its long wedge shape
I knew it was one of my new variety.

I hurried across to the patch and found every
berry gone, while a line of bloody fragments led me
back to the orchard wall, where a half dozen fresh
calyx crowns completed my second discovery.

No, it did not complete it. It took a little watching
to find out that the whole family — all seven ! — were
after berries. They were picking them half ripe, even,
and actually storing them away, canning them down
in the cavernous depths of the stone pile !

Alarmed ? Yes, and I was wrathful, too. The taste
for strawberries is innate, original; you can't be
human without it. But joy in chipmunks is a culti-
vated liking, aesthetic in its nature. What chance in
such a circumstance has the nature-lover with the
human man ? What shadow of doubt as to his choice
between the chipmunks and the strawberries ?

I had no gun then and no time to go over to my
neighbor's to borrow his. So I stationed myself near

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tt (Account Unf§ (tlatute

by with a fistful of stones, and waited for the thieves
to show themselves. I came so near to hitting one of
them once that the sweat started all over me. After
that there was no danger. I lost my nerve. The little
scamps knew that war was declared, and they hid and
dodged and sighted me so far off that even with a gun
I should have been all summer killing the seven of
them.

Meantime, a big rain and the warm June days
were turning the berries red by the quart. They had
more than caught up to the squirrels. I dropped my
stones and picked. The squirrels picked, too, so did
the toads and robins. Everybody picked. It was free
for all. We picked them and ate them, jammed them
and canned them. I almost carried some over to my
neighbor, but took peas instead. You simply can't
give your strawberries in New England to ordinary
neighbors, who are not of your choosing. You have
no fears at all as to what they will say to your
peas.

The season closed on the Fourth of July, and our
taste was not dim nor this natural love for straw-
berries abated ; but all four of the small boys had
the hives from over-indulgence, so bountifully did

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of t$

nature provide, so many did the seven chipmunks
leave us !

Peace between me and the chipmunks had been
signed before the strawberry season closed, and the
pact still holds. Other things have occurred since to
threaten it, however. Among them, an article in a
recent number of a carefully edited out-of-door mag-
azine, of wide circulation. Herein the chipmunk
family was most roundly rated, in fact condemned to
annihilation because of its wicked taste for birds'
eggs and for young birds. Numerous photographs
accompanied the article, showing the red squirrel
with eggs in his mouth, but no such proof (even the
red squirrel photographs I strongly believe were done
from a stuffed squirrel) of chipmunk's guilt, though
he was counted equally bad and, doubtless, will suffer
with chickaree at the hands of those who took the
article seriously.

I believe that is a great mistake. Indeed, I be-
lieve the whole article a deliberate falsehood, con-
cocted in order to sell the fake photographs. Chip-
munk is not an egg-sucker, else I should have found
it out. But because I never caught him at it does not
mean that no one else has. It does mean, however,

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n (Account toritfj

that if chipmunk robs at all he does it so seldom as
to call for no alarm nor for any retribution.

There is scarcely a day in the nesting season when
I fail to see half a dozen chipmunks about the walls,
yet I never noticed one even suspiciously near a
bird's nest. In an apple tree, barely six jumps from
the home of the family in the orchard wall, a brood
of white-bellied swallows came to wing one spring ;
while robins, chippies, and red-eyed vireos — not to
mention a cowbird, which I wish they had devoured
— have also hatched and flown away from nests that
these squirrels might easily have rifled.

It is not often that one comes upon even the red
squirrel in the very act of robbing a nest. But the
black snake, the glittering fiend ! and the dear house
cats! If I run across a dozen black snakes in the
early summer, it is safe to say that six of them will
be discovered by the cries of the birds they are
robbing. Likewise the cats. No creature, however,
larger than a June-bug was ever distressed by a chip-
munk.

In a recent letter to me Mr. Burroughs says : " No,
I never knew the chipmunk to suck or destroy eggs
of any kind, and I have never heard of any well-

181

of t$t

authenticated instance of his doing so. The red
squirrel is the sinner in this respect, and probably
the gray squirrel also."

It will be difficult to find a true bill against him.
Were the evidence all in, I believe that instead of a
culprit we should find chipmunk a useful citizen. I
reckon that the pile of June-bug bodies on the flat
stone leaves me still in debt to him even after the
strawberries have been credited. He may err occa-
sionally, and may, on occasion, make a nuisance of
himself, — but so do my four small boys, bless them !
And, well — who doesn't? When a family of chip-
munks, which you have fed all summer on the ve-
randa, take up their winter quarters inside the closed
cabin, and chew up your quilts, hammocks, table-
cloths, and whatever else there is of chewable prop-
erties, then they are anathema.

The litter and havoc that those squirrels made were
dreadful. But instead of exterminating them root
and branch, a big box was prepared the next summer
and lined with tin, in which the linen was success-
fully wintered.

But how real was the loss, after all? Here is a
rough log cabin on the side of Thorn Mountain.

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(ftn (Account Uri

What sort of a tablecloth ought to be found in such
a cabin, if not one that has been artistically chewed
by chipmunks ? Is it for fine linen that we take
to the woods in summer ? The chipmunks are well
worth a tablecloth now and then, — well worth, be-
sides these, all the strawberries and all the oats they
can steal from my small patch.

Only it is n't stealing. Since I ceased throwing
stones and began to watch the chipmunks carefully,
I do not find their manner that of thieves in the
least. They do not act as if they were taking what
they have no right to. For who has told chipmunk
to earn his oats in the sweat of his brow ? No one.
Instead he seems to understand that he is one of the
innumerable factors ordained to make me sweat, —
a good and wholesome experience for me so long as
I get the necessary oats.

And I get them, in spite of the chipmunks, though
I don't like to guess at how much they carried off, —
anywhere, I should say, from a peck to a bushel,
which they stored, as they tried to store the berries,
somewhere in the big recesses of the stone wall.

All this, however, is beside the point. It is n't
a case of oats and berries against June-bugs. You

183

don't haggle with Nature after that fashion. The
farm is not a marketplace where you get exactly
what you pay for. You must spend on the farm all
you have of time and strength and brains ; but you
must not expect merely your money's worth. Infi-
nitely more than that, and oftentimes less. Farm-
ing is like virtue, — its own reward. It pays the man
who loves it, no matter how short the oats and corn.

So it is with chipmunk. Perhaps his books don't
balance, — a few June-bugs short on the credit side.
What then ? It is n't mere bugs and berries, as I have
just suggested, but stone piles. What is the differ-
ence in value to me between a stone pile with and
without a chipmunk in it. Just the difference, rela-
tively speaking, between the house with or without
my four boys in it.

Chipmunk, with his .sleek, round form, his rich
color and his stripes, is the daintiest, most beautiful
of all our squirrels. He is one of the friendliest of my
tenants, too, friendlier even than chickadee. The two
are very much alike in spirit, but however tame and
confiding chickadee may become, he is still a bird,
and, despite his wings, belongs to a different and a
lower order of beings. Chickadee is often curious

184

(ftn (Account

about me ; he can be coaxed to eat from my hand.
Chipmunk is more than curious ; he is interested ;
and it is not crumbs that he wants, but friendship.
He can be coaxed to eat from my lips, sleep in my
pocket, and even come to be stroked.

I have sometimes seen chickadee in winter when
he seemed to come to me out of very need for living
companionship. But in the flood-tide of summer life
chipmunk will watch me from his stone pile and tag
me along with every show of friendship.

The family in the orchard wall have grown very
familiar. They flatter me. I really believe, to be
Emersonian, that I am the great circumstance in this
household. One of the number is sure to be sitting
upon the high flat slab to await my coming. He sits
on the very edge of the crack, to be truthful, and if
I take a single step aside toward him he flips, and
all there is left of him is a little angry squeak from
the depths of the stones. If, however, I pass properly
along, do not stop or make any sudden motions, he
sees me past, then usually follows me, especially if I
get well off and pause.

During a shower one day I halted under a large
hickory just beyond his den. He came running after

185

me, so interested that he forgot to look to his foot-
ing, and just opposite me slipped and bumped his
nose hard against a stone, — so hard that he sat up
immediately and vigorously rubbed it. Another time
he followed me across to the garden and on to
the barbed-wire fence along the meadow. Here he
climbed a post and continued after me by way of the
middle strand of the wire, wriggling, twisting, even
grabbing the barbs, in his efforts to maintain his
balance. He got midway between the posts, when
the sagging strand tripped him and he fell with a
splash into a shallow pool below.

Did the family in the orchard wall stay together
as a family for the first summer, I should like to
know. As late as August they all seemed to be in
the wall, for in August I cut my oats, and during this
harvest they all worked together.

I mowed the oats as soon as they began to yellow,
cocking them to cure for hay. It was necessary to let
them " make " for six or seven days, and all this time
the squirrels raced back and forth between the cocks
and the stone wall. They might have hidden their
gleanings in a dozen crannies nearer at hand ; but
evidently they had a particular storehouse, near the

1 86

n (ftccounf

home nest, where the family could get at their pro-
visions in bad weather without coming forth.

Had I removed the stones and dug out the nest,
I should have found a tunnel leading into the ground
for a few feet and opening into a chamber filled with
a bulky grass nest, — a bed capable of holding half a
dozen chipmunks, and adjoining this, by a short pas-
sageway, the storehouse of the oats.

How many trips they made between this crib and
the oat patch, how many kernels they carried in their
pouches at a trip, and how big a pile they had when
all the grains were in, — these are more of the ques-
tions I should like to know.

I might have killed one of the squirrels and num-
bered the contents of his pouches, but my scientific
zeal does not quite reach that pitch any more. The
knowledge of just how many oat kernels a chipmunk
can stuff into his left cheek (into both cheeks he can put
twenty-nine kernels of corn) is really not worth the
cost of his life. Of course some one has counted
them, — just as some one has counted the hairs on
the tail of the dog of the child of the wife of the Wild
Man of Borneo, or at least seriously guessed at the
number.

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of

But this is thesis work for the doctors of philo-
sophy, not a task for farmers and mere watchers in
the woods. The chipmunks are in no danger be-
cause of my zeal for science; not that I am uninter-
ested in the capacity of their cheeks in terms of
oats, but that I am more interested in the whole
squirrel, the whole family of squirrels.

When the first frosts come, the family — if they
are still a family — seek the nest in the ground
beneath the stone wall. But they do not go to sleep
immediately. Their outer entrances have not yet
been closed. There is still plenty of fresh air, and,
of course, plenty of food, — acorns, chestnuts, hickory
nuts, and oats. They doze quietly for a time and eat,
pushing the empty shells and hulls into some side
passage prepared beforehand to receive the debris.

But soon the frost is creeping down through the
stones and earth overhead, the rains are filling the
outer doorways and shutting off the supply of fresh
air, and one day, though not sound sleepers, the
family cuddles down and forgets to wake, — until
the frost has begun to creep back toward the sur-
face, and down through the softened soil is felt the
thrill of the waking spring.

XIV

To most eyes, no doubt, the prospect would have
seemed desolate, even forbidding. A single track of
railroad lay under my feet, while down and away in
front of me stretched the Bear Swamp, the largest,
least-trod area of primeval swamp in southern New
Jersey.

To me it was neither desolate nor forbidding, be-
cause I knew it well, — its gloomy depths, its silent
streams, its hollow stumps, its trails, and its haunting
mysteries. Yet I had never crossed its borders. I was
born within its shadows, close enough to smell the
magnolias of the margin, and had lived my first ten
years only a little farther off ; but not till now, after
twice ten years of absence, had I stood here ready

189

of

to enter and tread the paths where so long I had
slipped to and fro as a shadow.

But what a pity ever to cross such a country ! ever
to map these unexplored child-lands to a scale of
after years ! I tramped the Bear Swamp over from
edge to edge, letting the light of day into the deep-
est of its recesses, and found — a turkey buzzard's
nest.

The silent streams, the stumps, the trails, I found,
too, and there, it seems, they must be found a cen-
tury hence ; but the haunting mysteries of the great
swamp fled away before me, and are gone forever.
So much did I pay for my buzzard's nest.

The cost in time and trouble was what came near
undoing my good uncle, with whom I was staying
near the swamp. " What in thunderation ! " he ex-
claimed, when I made known my desires. "From
Boston to Haleyville to see a buzzard's nest ! " As
there are some things that even one's wife cannot
quite understand, I did n't try to reason the matter
of buzzards' nests with an uncle. If it had been a
hawk's nest or a cardinal's, he would have thought
nothing strange. But a buzzard's !

Perhaps my years of absence from the skies of the
190

of

buzzard account for it. Yet it was never mere bird,
mere buzzard, to me; so much more than buzzard,
indeed, that I often wish it would sail into these
empty New England skies. How eagerly I watch
for it when homeward bound toward Jersey ! The
moment I cross the Delaware I begin to search the
skies, and I know, for sure, when it swims into
view, that I am near the blessed fields once more.
No matter how wide and free, how full of clouds
and color, my sky to the end will always need a
soaring buzzard.

This is a burst of sentiment, truly, and does n't
explain at all why I should want to see the creature
of these divine wings in the gruesome light of^an
earth-view, on its nesting stump or in its hollow
log.

Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown!

It must, or we shall rue it :
We have a vision of our own ;

Ah ! why should we undo it ?

I understand. Nevertheless, I wanted to find a
buzzard's nest, — the nest of the Bear Swamp buz-
zard ; and here at last I stood ; and yonder on the
clouds, a mere mote in the distance, floated one of

191

of tfyt

the birds. It was coming toward me over the wide
reach of the swamp.

Its coming seemed perfectly natural, as the sight
of the swamp seemed entirely familiar, though I had
never looked upon it from this point before. Silent,
inscrutable, and alien it lay, untouched by human
hands except for this narrow braid of railroad bind-
ing its outer edges. Over it hung a quiet and reserve
as real as twilight. Like a mask it was worn, and was
slipped on, I know, at my approach. I could feel the
silent spirit of the place drawing back away from
me, though not to leave me quite alone. I should
have at least a guide to lead me through the shadow
land, for out of the lower living green towered a
line of limbless stubs, their bleached bones gleaming
white, or showing dark and gaunt against the hori-
zon and marking for me a path far out across the
swamp. Besides, here came the buzzard winding
slowly down the clouds. Soon its spiral changed to
a long pendulum swing, till just above the skeleton
trees it wheeled, and bracing itself with its flapping
wings, dropped heavily upon one of their headless
trunks.

It had come leisurely, yet with a defmiteness that
192

of

was unmistakable and that was also meaningful. It
had discovered me in the distance, and while still in-
visible to my eyes, had started down to perch upon
that giant stub in order to watch me. Its eye had told
it that I was not a workman upon the track, nor a
traveler between stations. If there was a purpose to
its movements that suggested just one thing to me,
there was a lack of purpose in mine that meant many
things to it. It was suspicious, and had come because
somewhere beneath its perch lay a hollow log, the
creature's den, holding the two eggs or young. A
buzzard has some soul.

Marking the direction of the stub, and the probable
distance, I waded into the deep underbrush, the buz-
zard for my guide, and for my quest the stump or
hollow log that held the creature's nest.

The rank ferns and ropy vines swallowed me up,
and shut out at times even the sight of the sky.
Nothing could be seen of the buzzard. Half an
hour's struggle left me climbing a pine-crested swell
in the low bottom, and here I sighted the bird again.
It had not moved.

I was now in the real swamp, the old uncut forest.
It was a land of giants ; huge tulip poplar and swamp

193

of t§e

white oak, so old that they had become solitary, their
comrades having fallen one by one, or else, unable to
loose the grip upon the soil that had widened and
tightened through centuries, they had died stand-
ing. It was upon one of these that the buzzard sat
humped.

Directly in my path stood an ancient swamp white
oak, the greatest tree, I think, that I have ever seen.
It was not the highest, nor the largest round, per-
haps, but individually, spiritually, the greatest. Hoary,
hollow, and broken-limbed, its huge bole seemed en-
circled with the centuries, and into its green and
grizzled top all the winds of heaven had some time
come.

One could worship in the presence of such a tree
as easily as in the shadow of a vast cathedral.

For it had bene an auncient tree,
Sacred with many a mysteree.

Indeed, what is there built with hands that has the
dignity, the majesty, the divinity of life? And what
life was here ! Life whose beginnings lay so far back
that I could no more reckon the years than I could
count the atoms it had builded into this majestic
form.

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of

Looking down upon the oak from twice its height
loomed a tulip poplar, clean-boiled for thirty feet, and
in the top all green and gold with blossoms. It was
a resplendent thing beside the oak, yet how unmis-
takably the gnarled old monarch wore the crown.
Its girth more than balanced the poplar's greater
height, and as for blossoms, Nature knows the beauty
of strength and inward majesty, and has pinned no
boutonniere upon the oak.

My buzzard now was hardly more than half a mile
away, and plainly seen through the rifts in the lofty
timbered roof above me. As I was nearing the top of
a large fallen pine that lay in my course, I was startled
by the burrh ! burrh ! burrh ! of three partridges tak-
ing flight just beyond, near the foot of the tree. Their
exploding seemed all the more real when three little
clouds of dust-smoke rose out of the low, wet bottom
and drifted up against the green.

Then I saw an interesting sight. In falling, the
pine with its wide-reaching, multitudinous roots had
snatched at the shallow, sandy bottom and torn out
a giant fistful, leaving a hole about two feet deep and
more than a dozen feet wide. The sand thus lifted into
the air had gradually washed down into a mound on

of

each side of the butt, where it lay high and dry above
the level of the swamp. This the swamp birds had
turned into a great dust-bath. It was in constant use,
surely, for not a spear of grass had sprouted in it, and
all over it were pits and craters of various sizes, show-
ing that not only the partridges, but also the quails,
and such small things as the warblers, washed here, —
though I can't recall ever having seen a warbler bathe
in the dust. A dry bath in the swamp was something
of a luxury, evidently. I wonder if the buzzards used
it?

I went forward cautiously now, and expectantly, for
I was close enough to see the white beak and red wat-
tled neck of my guide. It saw me, too, and began to
twist its head as I shifted, and to twitch its wing tips
nervously. Suddenly its long, black wings opened,
and with a heavy lurch that left the stub rocking,
it dropped and was soon soaring high up in the
blue.

This was the right locality ; now where should I
find the nest? Apparently I was to have no further
help from the old bird. The underbrush was so thick
that I could see hardly farther than my nose. A half-
rotten tree trunk lay near, the top end resting across

196

of

the backs of several saplings which it had borne down
in its fall. I crept up on this for a look around, and
almost tumbled off at finding myself staring directly
into the dark, cavernous hollow of an immense log
lying on a slight rise of ground a few feet ahead of
me.

It was a yawning hole, which at a glance I knew
belonged to the buzzard. The log, a mere shell of a
mighty white oak, had been girdled and felled with an
axe, by coon hunters, probably, and still lay with one
side resting upon the rim of the stump. As I stood
looking, something white stirred vaguely in the hole
and disappeared.

Leaping from my perch, I scrambled forward to the
mouth of the hollow and was greeted with hisses from
far back in the dark. Then came a thumping of bare
feet, more hisses, and a sound of snapping beaks. I
had found my buzzard's nest.

Hardly that, either, for there was not a feather,
stick, or chip as evidence of a nest. The eggs had
been laid upon the sloping cavern floor, and in the
course of their incubation must have rolled clear
down to the opposite end, where the opening was so
narrow that the buzzard could not have brooded them

197

until she had rolled them back. The wonder is that
they ever hatched.

But they had, and what they hatched was another
wonder. It was a right instinct which led the mother
to seek the middle of the Bear Swamp and there hide
her young in a hollow log. My sense of the fitness
of things should have equaled hers, certainly, and
I should have allowed her the privacy of the swamp.
It was unfair of me and rude. Nature never intended
a young buzzard for any eye but its mother's, and
she hates the sight of it. Elsewhere I have told of
a buzzard that devoured her eggs at the approach
of an enemy, so delicately balanced are her unnamable
appetites and her maternal affections !

The two freaks in the log must have been three
weeks old, I should say, the larger weighing about
four pounds. They were covered, as young owls are,
with deep, snow-white down, out of which protruded
their legs, long, black, scaly, snaky legs. They stood
braced on these, their receding heads drawn back,
their shoulders thrust forward, their bodies humped
between the featherless wings like challenging tom-
cats.

In order to examine them, I crawled into the den ; —
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of t

not a difficult act, for the opening measured four feet
and a half at the mouth. The air was musty inside,
yet surprisingly free from odor. The floor was abso-
lutely clean, but on the top and sides of the cavity
was a thick coating of live mosquitoes, most of them
gorged, hanging like a red-beaded tapestry over the
walls.

I had taken pains that the flying buzzard should
not see me enter, for I hoped she would descend to
look after her young. But she would take no chances
with herself. I sat near the mouth of the hollow,
where I could catch the fresh breeze that pulled
at the end, and where I had a view of a far-away
bit of sky. Suddenly across this field of blue, as you
have seen an infusorian scud across the field of
your microscope, there swept a meteor of black, —
the buzzard ! and evidently in that instant of passage,
at a distance certainly of half a mile, she spied me
in the log.

I waited more than an hour longer, and when I
tumbled out with a dozen kinds of cramps, the ma-
ternal creature was soaring serenely far up in the
clear, cool sky.

XV

SHE loved nature — from a veranda, a dog-cart, the
deck of a vessel. She had been to the seashore for
a whole June, the next June to the mountains, then
a June to an inland farm. " And I enjoyed it ! " she
exclaimed ; " the sky-blue, I mean, the sea-blue, and
the green of the hills. But as for seeing fiddler crabs
and chewinks and woodchucks — things ! why, I
simply did n't. In fact, I believe that most of your
fiddling crabs and moralizing stumps and philoso-
phizing woodchucks are simply the creatures of a
disordered imagination."

I quite agreed as to the fiddling (some of it) and

200

of

the philosophizing ; I disagreed, however, as to the
reality of the crabs and the woodchucks ; for it was
not the attributes and powers of these creatures that
she really disbelieved in, but the very existence of
the creatures themselves, — along her seashore, and
upon the farm that she visited.

"As for fiddler crabs and chewinks and wood-
chucks — things" she did not see them. Certainly
not. Yet a fiddler crab is as real an entity as a
thousand-acre marsh, — and in its way as interesting.
It is a sorry soul that looks for nothing out of doors
but fiddler crabs, and insists upon their fiddling ; that
never sees the sky-blue, the sea-blue, and the green
of the rolling hills. I shall never forget a moonrise
over the Maurice River marshes that I witnessed
one night in early June. It was a peculiarly solemn
sight, and one of the profoundly beautiful experiences
of my life, there in the wide, weird silence of the half
sea-land, with the tide at flood. Nor shall I ever
forget two or three of the stops which I made in the
marshes that day to watch the fiddler crabs. Nor
shall I forget how they fiddled. For fiddle they did,
just as they used to years ago, when they and I lived
on these marshes together.

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of i$

If my skeptic found no fiddler crabs along her sea-
shore, found nothing of interest smaller and more
thing-like than color and fresh air, it may be that
she did not understand how to look for crabs and
things.

To go to the seashore for one June, to the moun-
tains for a second, to the farm for a third, is not a
good way to study the out-of-doors. A better way is
to spend all three Junes at this shore or upon this
same farm. It is when one abides upon the farm,
indeed, the year around, through several Junes, that
one discovers the woodchucks. The clover is too high
in June. As one of twelve, June is a very good
month to be out of doors ; but as a season for nature
study, — no single month, not even June, is satis-
factory.

It takes time and patience and close watching to
discover woodchucks. This means a limited terri-
tory ; one can easily have too much ground to culti-
vate. I know a man who owns five hundred acres of
Jersey pine barrens, and who can hardly till enough
of it to pay taxes, whereas a friend of mine here near
Boston is quietly getting rich on three acres and a
half.

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of $t

My skeptic had too many acres. She went to the
seashore one summer, then to the mountains, then
to a farm, and now she doubts the existence of crabs
and woodchucks. Well she may. She might almost
doubt the reality of the mountains and shore, to say
nothing of the farm. One can scarcely come to be-
lieve in a mountain in the course of a mere June.
The trouble is one of size. As well try to make
friends with a crowded street. Crabs and woodchucks
live in little holes. You must hunt for the holes;
you must wait until the woodchucks come out.

For more than five years now I have been hunting
holes here on the farm, and it is astonishing the
number I have discovered. I doubt if driving past
you would see anything extraordinary in this small
farm of mine, — a steep, tree-grown ridge, with a
house at the top, a patch of garden, a bit of meadow,
a piece of woods, a stream, a few old apple trees, a
rather sterile, stony field. But live here as I do, mow
and dig and trim and chop as I do, know all the paths,
the stumps, the stone heaps, the tree holes, earth
holes, — there simply is no end of holes, and they are

all inhabited.

By actual count there are forty-six woodchuck
\) 203

of tfy

holes on these fourteen acres. Now forty-six wood-
chuck holes are a good many holes, but I have been
these five years counting them. Only two of them
are in the open, and visible from the road. Driving
past, I say, you might actually think I had no wood-
chucks at all !

You should stop all summer and milk for me some
morning. Throughout the early part of the season I
had left the kitchen with my milk-pail rather late, —
a little after five o'clock. One morning in September
I stepped out of the door a little before five, and
there in the clover close to the stoop sat a fine old
woodchuck. I stood still and watched him. He was
not expecting me yet, for he knew my comings out
and goings in. He was up to his eyes in the clover,
and he neither saw nor heard me.

Here about the kitchen door he had fed since the
clover started, and I had not known it. He had
timed his breakfast so as to be through by five
o'clock, — before I came out. Had I been a boarder,
with no cow to milk, perhaps I never should have
known it. But after that morning I saw him fre-
quently. I took pains to get up with him. Just over
the edge of the lawn, about five feet down the wooded

204

of

slope, was his burrow, which was one of the latest
of the forty-six holes to be discovered.

When I shall have been milking and huckle-
berrying and hen's nesting and aimlessly wandering
over these fourteen acres for five years more, I shall
have found, it may be, the very last of the wood-
chuck holes. No, not in five, nor in five hundred
years, for the families in the old holes keep multi-
plying, and the new holes keep multiplying too.

But woodchucks are not the only " things," not the
only crop that the farm yields, although it must cer-
tainly seem that there can be little room on these
scant acres for anything more. My farming, how-
ever, is intensive, — from the tops of my tallest pines
to the bottoms of my deepest woodchuck burrows, —
so that I have an abundant crop of crows, chip-
munks, muskrats, mice, skunks, foxes, and rabbits
(few rabbits, I ought to say, because of the many
foxes).

Lately I found a den of young foxes within bark-
ing distance of the house, but along a stony ridge
on the adjoining farm. No one would believe in
the number of foxes (or the number of times I have
counted the same fox) here on the farm, and this

205

of tty

only sixteen miles by the roundabout road from Bos-
ton Common! But let him live here — and keep
chickens !

One day, as we were sitting down to a noon
dinner, I heard the hens squawk, and out I tore.
The fox had a big black hen and was making off for
the woods. I made after the fox. There is a sharp
ridge back of the henyard, which was thickly cov-
ered with stump sprouts and slashings. The fox took
to the ridge. From the house to the henyard it is
all downhill, and I wanted that hen. She weighed a
good eight pounds, — a load for any fox, — and what
with her squawking and flopping, the tangle of brush
and the steep hillside, it is small wonder that just
short of the top I fell upon her, to the great sorrow
of the fox, who held on until I was within reach of him.

But such an experience as this, while it would be
quite impossible to a summer boarder, is yet a not
uncommon experience for my unobserving, fox-hating
neighbors. They seldom see more, however ; whereas,
a study of the lay of the land hereabout reveals a
real fox community overlying our farm community
like some faint tracing. We humans possess the land
by day and the foxes keep to their dens; the foxes

206

of

possess the land at night and we humans take to our
dens.

One of the high roads of the foxes runs across the
farm. Foxes, like men, are more or less mechanical
in their coming and going. They will move within
certain well-defined boundaries, running certain defi-
nite routes ; crossing the stream at a particular ford
every time, traveling this ridge and not that, leaving
the road at this point, and swinging off in just such
a circle through the swamp.

One autumn two foxes were shot at my lower bars
as they were jumping the little river. Their road
crosses the stream here, then leads through the
bars, along the base of the ridge, and up my path to
the pasture.

I stood in this path one night when a fox that
the dogs were driving came up behind me, stopped,
and sniffed at my boots. This last November, 1907,
a young fox, leaving the hounds in the tangle of
his trails, trotted up this same path, turned in the
pasture, and came up to the house. He halted -on
the edge of the lawn just above the woodchuck hole
that I mentioned a few pages back, and for full ten
minutes sat there in the moonlight yapping back at

207

of

the shepherd dog barking at him from my neigh-
bor's yard below.

This run up the ridge to the pasture is the high-
way from west to east. When the pack is baying off
to the eastward, and coming nearer, I can stand by
the fence between the yard and my neighbor's pasture
with the certainty of seeing the fox once in half a
dozen times, and the dogs almost every time, for the
fox breaks from the sprout land back of the henyard,
crosses the neighboring pasture, jumps the wall, and
runs my driveway to the public road and on to the
woods beyond the river.

All of this sounds very wild, indeed, and so it is —
at night ; in the daylight it is all tame enough. Only
the patient watcher knows what wild feet run these
open roads ; only he who knows the lay of every
foot of this rocky, pastured land knows that these
winding cow paths lead past the barnyards on into
the ledges and into dens. And no one can find all of
this out in a single June.

Many of our happiest glimpses of nature are ac-
cidental. We stumble upon things, yet it happens
usually when we are trying to find something. The
finding of a hummingbird's nest is always an acci-

208

of tty

dent ; and such accidents are extremely rare, as will
be seen from a statement by Mr. Burroughs in which
he says he has come upon but three hummingbirds'
nests in all his life ! He has doubtless found many
more than three owls' nests, but perhaps not one
of such finds was an accident. He hunted for the
owls.

Night after night, in the sweet silence through
which our little river sings, we hear the whimpering
of the small screech owls. They are beating for mice
and frogs over the meadow. So much we get without
watching ; but the sight of them and their nest, that
came only with my visiting every tree in the neigh-
borhood having a cavity big enough to hold the birds.

At twilight, in the late spring and early summer,
we frequently hear a gentle, tremulous call from the
woods, or from below in the orchard. " What is it?"
I had been asked a hundred times, and as many times
had answered that it sounded like the hen partridge
clucking to her brood; or that it made me think
of the mate-call of a coon ; or that I half inclined to
believe it the cry of the woodchucks ; or that pos-
sibly it might be made by the owls. In fact, I did n't
know the peculiar call, and year after year I kept

209

of t$

waiting for an accident to reveal its maker and its
meaning to me.

There were accidents and discoveries of many
sorts during these years, but not this particular acci-
dent. The accident you wait for is slow in coming.

We were seated one evening on the porch listen-
ing to the whip-poor-wills, when some one said,
"There's your woodchuck singing again." Sure
enough, there sounded the tremulous woodchtick-
part ridge-coon-owl cry, and I slipped down through
the birches determined to know that cry if I had to
follow it all night.

The moon was high and full, the footing almost noise-
less, and everything so quiet that I quickly located
the clucking sounds as coming from the orchard. I
came out of the birches into the wood road, and was
crossing the open field to the orchard, when some-
thing dropped with a swish and a vicious clacking
almost upon my head. I jumped from under, — I
should say a part of my hair, — and saw a screech
owl swoop softly up into the nearest apple tree. In-
stantly she turned toward me and uttered the gentle
purring cluck that I had been guessing so hard at for
at least three years. And even while I looked at her

210

of

I saw in the tree beyond, silhouetted against the
moonlit sky, two round bunches, — young owls evi-
dently,— which were the interpretation of the calls.
These two, and another young one, were found in
the orchard the following day.

I rejoined the guessers on the porch, and gave
them the satisfying facts. But let me say that this
was very fast, even exceptional time, indeed, for the
solving of an outdoor problem. I have questions
enough for a big chapter upon which I have been
working these more than three years. The point is
this : I might have gone on guessing about the
mother call of the screech owl to the end of time;
whereas with a little searching and I must certainly
have found out the cry in much less time than three
years.

I had laughed at some good friends over on the
other road who had bolted their front door and had
gone out of the door at the side of the house for
precisely twenty-one years because the key in the
front door lock would n't work. They kept intending
to have it fixed, but the children were little and kept
them busy; then they grew up, and of course kept them
busy ; got married at last and left home, — all but

211

of

one daughter. Still the locksmith was not called to fix
the front door. One day this unmarried daughter, in
a fit of dire impatience, got at the door herself, and
found that the key had been inserted just twenty-one
years before — upside down!

So I had sat on the porch and guessed about it. I
had left the key upside down in the lock of the front
door, and had gone out by way of the kitchen.

The first necessity for interesting nature study is an
intimate acquaintance with some locality. It does not
matter how small, how commonplace, how near the
city, — the nearer the better, provided there are trees,
water, fences, and some seclusion. If your own roof-
tree stands in the midst of it all, then that is ideal.

But you must be limited. It is a small amount of
land that one man can till with profit. Your very
bees range hardly more than two miles from the
hive. They cannot fly farther than that and store
honey. Within this little world, however, they know
every bank whereon the honey-yielding flowers grow.
In early August I can follow their line of flight
westward, through the woods for more than a mile,
to an old pasture where great patches of dwarf sumac
are in bloom. The bees hum about me in a fever

212

of

of excitement. Then I fetch a compass far around
toward home, and wherever I find the sumac in
blossom, whether a hundred clustered bushes, or a
single panicle of flowers hidden deep in the woods,
there I find my golden bees. I wonder if, in all their
range, they let waste one drop of this heavy golden
sumac honey ?

Do you know the flowers in your range as well as
the bees know them in theirs ? And, what is more,
are you getting the honey ? Do you know your dead
trees and stone piles, and the folk who dwell in them ?
Could you take me, silent and soft of foot, from hole
to hole, from nest to nest, from hedgerow to thicket,
to cripple, to meadow, making me acquainted with
your neighbors ?

This is what Gilbert White could have done had
you visited him at Selborne. This is what John
Burroughs still does when the college girls go out
to Slabsides.

Owning a farm is not necessary for all of this.
Only the parish house and the yard belonged to the
old naturalist of Selborne. Sometimes, indeed, I am
quite convinced that, for pure and lasting joy in the
fields, you should not be possessed even of a garden

213

of

patch ; for, once you have digged into earth of your
own, then have a care, else along with the cucumber
seed you will plant your soul. The man in the Scrip-
tures who bought a piece of land and wished there-
after only to dig, had a real case.

Owning a farm is not necessary. To be near the
open country is enough, so near that you can know
it intimately the year around. " He is a thoroughly
good naturalist," says Kingsley, "who knows his
own parish thoroughly." He was thinking of Gilbert
White, I am sure, — that gentle rector who lived in
Selborne, and there grew old with his tortoise.

This is all there is to nature study, this growing
old with your garden and your tame tortoise. The
study of the out-of-doors is not a new cult ; it is not
a search after a living uintatherium, or after a frog
that can swallow his pond, or a fish hawk that reads,
— not a hunt for the extraordinary or the marvelous
at all, but for things as the Lord made them. Nature
study is the out-of-door side of natural history, the
unmeasured, unprinted side of poetry. It is joy in
breathing the air of the fields ; joy in seeing, hear-
ing, living the life of the fields ; joy in knowing and
loving all that lives with you in your out-of-doors.

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