¥ATWF TM A fTTY YADH

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na

Mature in a City Jj)arb

flatute in a Cit\> |)arb

SOME RAMBLING
DISSERTATIONS THEREUPON

BY

CHARLES M. SKINNER

AUTHOR OF " MYTHS AND LEGENDS OP OUR OWN LAND,'
"VILLON. THE VAGABOND " (A PLAY). ETC.

NEW YORK

Centura Co,

1897

Copyright, 1897, by
THE CENTURY Co.

THE DcViNNE PRESS.

THIS BOOK I DEDICATE TO

MY WIFE.

IF OUR YARD HAS SOME TASTE OF THAT

FIRST GARDEN, IT IS BECAUSE SHE

WALKS THERE. SHE TOUCHES

THE EARTH AND ROSES

SPRING FROM IT.

Contents

I THE YARD . . . .: . I

II SKY . . 10

III CITY AND COUNTRY LIFE . . 25

IV WINTER ... 40
V SPRING ... . 58

VI SUMMER . . . .80

VII AUTUMN . .106

VIII FLOWERS AND INSECTS . . 126

IX THE SOUL OF NATURE • • • i&>

NATURE IN A CITY YARD

NATURE IN A CITY YARD

THE YARD

IT is a common city yard, about eighteen
feet by fifty. Part of it has to be given
up to clothes and lines on Monday, and
during the rest of the week it is a repository
for broken toys belonging to Clarence and
Harold, the younger members of the fam-
ily, and an occasional and surreptitious
tomato-can, emptied of the material that
might make it interesting. The cans we
firmly replace in the yards of the neigh-
bors who sent them. It is a yard, too, that
is loved by tuneful cats ; and even a New-
foundland dog, owned by a carpenter be-
hind us, bounces over the five-foot board
fence now and then, alighting with exac-
titude on a bed of gladiolus, so that the

2 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

flowering of that plant is a surprise, and we
lay little wagers as to whether or not there
will be a bloom this year.

The zoology of the district likewise com-
prises English sparrows, slimy slugs, and
earth-worms. Mosquitos call whenever
the wind brings them in from the fens of
Long Island and the meadows of New
Jersey ; and we are liable to have flies.
There are beetles, gnats, fire-flies, centi-
pedes, and a rarely visible mouse. In
flower time we enjoy the company of bees,
both honey and bumble, vagrom wasps,
and hornets and moths and butterflies in
great numbers.

Then, let 's see : we have a cricket or
two, and a periodical delegation of grass-
hoppers. We have stocked the place with
three toads and a turtle. The ability of
these citizens to hide themselves in a space
so small is wonderful. As to minor deni-
zens and visitors, their name is legion, and
they are a corrupt, unconscionable, per-
nickety lot. They are the aphides, the
common plant-lice that prey by myriads
on the poppies and chrysanthemums, the

THE YARD 3

wood-lice or sow-bugs, the rose-bugs, the
McGonigle boy, the caterpillars that strip
the zinnias, the blue beetles on the asters,
the mealybugs that spread over the cacti, the
scale that dot the palms, the hard-shelled,
many-legged wire-worms that burrow
through and kill the roots of bachelor-but-
tons, and our experimental louseworts, coil-
ing like ammonites when shaken out; and
we stir up potato-bugs and seventeen-year
locusts when we gather our hay crop with
a lawn-mower.

But while the flora and fauna of the re-
gion are not exciting or numerous, there
are more of both than you would suspect
from the local geography. The yard is
bounded on the north by the carpenter's
yard, with its piles of lumber; on the east
by a board fence and a lilac-bush ; on the
west by small boys and a gravel dump —
on the far side, to be sure, of three other
yards ; on the south by the two-story and
basement brick house where we live.

The house is one of a row that has uni-
formity without duplication, and is supplied
with all modern improvements except com-

4 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

fort, low rent, protection from the weather,
and a few other matters. Every second or
third house in this row has what appears
from the front to be a small, windowless
gable. But it is n't. It is a flimsy half
pyramid of tin and wood, about four feet
high; and the rent of a house crowned
with this ornament is two dollars a month
extra.

Our neighbors are peaceable, orderly
people, for the larger part, though one or
two of them do play popular marches on
the piano with their windows open. But on
every block in a city, as in every village in
the country (the number of inhabitants in
each case averaging the same), there is sure
to be a boy who is the scorn, the by-word,
and to a certain extent the terror, of the
whole community. The boy on our row
who contains sin, vicariously, for the rest
of us is Reginald McGonigle, the son of a
contractor who is fairly well off through his
political privileges, and who has moved in
among us, to the general uneasiness. He
— Michael, not Reginald — sits on his door-
step in his shirt sleeves at evening, smoking

THE YARD 5

cigars when he has company and a clay
pipe when alone. Reginald goes out with
a tin pail to a saloon on another street from
two to five times daily. Asked by one of
us why he did so, he said he was going for
yeast ; then he thrust out his chin, extruded
his lower lip with his tongue, looked in-
tensely cross-eyed, pressed his thumb at the
tip of a blunt and dirty nose, and gave a
waving motion to his fingers. Reginald is
about ten years of age, and wears knicker-
bockers and a cap ; but there is no form of
sin known to centenarians with which
he is not on terms of contemptuous famil-
iarity.

He has freckles, small, round eyes, sul-
len brows, two of his upper teeth are always
conspicuous, his hair is full of tumult and
suggestions, his clothes are expensive but
never clean, his voice is loud and harsh,
his manner imperative, and he is strong
for his age. When interrupted in a bur-
glary or a murder, he looks at the remon-
strant with majestic calm, and after hearing
him out deigns no reply, but proceeds
with his crime. If, however, any one re-

6 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

preaches him with a horsewhip or a howit-
zer, he exhibits a pair of brisk legs, and
disappears into his own stronghold, from
the windows of which he leans directly af-
ter, and offers shrill and reprehensible criti-
cisms. It is the joy of his life to injure
animals when he cannot injure people; and
not a dog or cat in the vicinage but takes
to flight when he appears. He has broken
more windows and street lamps, trampled
more flowers, secreted for his own behoof
more of other boys' marbles, knives, and
pennies, blackened more eyes, torn down
more fences, appropriated more ash-bar-
rels for bonfires, smeared mud on more
little girls' dresses, frightened more babies,
put tar on more door-steps, run off with
more bicycles, misdirected more callers
and delivery-wagons, and is oftener tres-
passing on other people's premises, than all
of the other children in the street. When
his parents are visited by an indignant
committee, they ask him if the charges
against him are true, and he modestly ad-
mits that they are not. So the parents
turn the eye of astonishment on the visi-

THE YARD 7

tors, and the incident is closed. The po-
lice have been appealed to several times ;
but Captain Muldoon, of our precinct, is
Mrs. McGonigle's cousin, and, somehow,
nothing seems to get itself done. The
McGonigle oasis in our otherwise slow
neighborhood is a fateful fixity.

Our yard, though partly grown to grass
and clothes lines and footprints, is bordered
with beds ; and we have a diamond-shaped
space near the house for pelargoniums, or
" Martha Washington geraniums," other
geraniums, and coleus. You might not
believe that we had nearly sixty varieties
of plant in bloom there at once in warm
weather, and that the orchids hanging on
the house wall above the kitchen windows,
and in a shady corner, in pots, flourished
in spite of the forebodings of florists, and
even made bold, some of them, to blossom
in a window next winter. People think
because some orchids cost a thousand dol-
lars, and perish as soon as you get them
home, — true vegetable aristocrats, — that
two-dollar orchids must die as promptly
and with equal emphasis, especially if

8 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

they are left to do a little healthy rough-
ing it.

It took an appalling amount of toil to
soften the yard into shape for agriculture.
We discovered, after moving, that the whole
block stood on " made land " which had
been dumped into a hollow. But " land "
is a relative term. Oh, yes ; there is some
sand and there are some pebbles and some
rocks in the soil; but its richness and charm
are in effete hardware, bed-springs, ashes,
bottles, bones, oyster-shells, decayed wood,
hoop-skirts, bird-cages, silk dresses, china
— in fact, I do not think of many familiar
objects that we have not extracted from our
yard in spading up the flower-beds. We
took up, at a depth of hardly more than a
foot, a set of false teeth. (Archaeologists
to whom we showed these relics thought
that they did not belong to the Indians.)
At another time I extracted a piece of
glass with a lovely soap-bubble effect on its
surface, like that on the old tear-bottles and
ointment-jars of Cyprus. It was not a tear-
bottle, — I think it had held a grief too
strong for tears when it was whole, — but

THE YARD 9

the iridescence acquired in a few years
under ground showed that one does not
have to go to the east, nor even to the
London fakirs, for opalescent glass. Nor
does one have to go to the country for
some greenery and flowers.

II

SKY

ONE thing you cannot deprive us of
entirely when you put up your houses
and factories and churches around us, and
that is the sky. You may poison the air
for us close to the earth with your smudge,
gas, vapor, dust, and evil cookery ; but we
can always look out from our wells of brick
and see the air away up where it is un-
tainted — a sheet of sapphire or turquoise,
with pearl or silver fretting ; iriscent, too,
for there is a surprising amount of color
in clouds.

The other day one of the grandest moun-
tain-ranges above the world was revealed
after the passage of a hurrying mist. The
Himalayas boast no such peaks as the af-
ternoon sun fell upon when the fog floor
had been rafted off on a western wind.

SKY II

They reached for miles toward the zenith,
and spread north and south for leagues on
leagues. Their tops were dazzling white,
and their sides were ruffled into countless
snowy bosses, softly edged with gray and
mauve; while descending valleys and cav-
erns, that would have held the nations of
the earth, were revealed in slaty shadow.
From a height of perhaps a thousand feet
hung a long curtain of dark, which at its
northern end was pulled aside as if by an
impetuous giant hand. It hid the base
of the mountain-range, and seemed to be
made of rain. Not until next day did we
learn of the cyclone that had worked in
that belt of dark, felling houses and trees
within five miles of us, and then bounding
up and whistling away to sea.

We lose much fine scenery because of
our habit of looking down. We look down
so much because that is where most of the
dollars come from.

A friend whose word I never had cause
to doubt, and whose any statement was as
good as gospel, nearly strained my credu-
lity once, and I made him tell the thing

12 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

over to be sure I had heard aright. He
was walking in a park on a balmy day,
delighting in the May-time budding and
twitter, when he met an acquaintance who
was taking a short cut across the park from
his house to his shop. After the man-
ner of our kind, my friend nodded to the
tradesman, and said it was a fine morning.
The tradesman looked up in a casual way,
as if he had heard the statement before
and agreed to it ; then, catching a glimpse
of the blue, as he raised his head out
of his commercial meditations, he asked,
" That 's what you call the sky, is n't it ? "
And he was sincere about it, apparently.

One of the occasional benefits of town
life is the chance to get up into the fifteenth
or twentieth story of one of our office-build-
ings and look at the sky. It does not
strain your neck in that way. It is nearly
equivalent to being on a hill-top. It makes
us feel as if some oxygen had suddenly en-
tered the atmosphere, and as if we had
found room to open our lungs. Our im-
aginations feel the widening of our envi-
ronment, and our eyes are so constantly

SKY 13

invited to the distance that I wonder how
any work is done in the top floors of the
sky-scrapers of New York, where the
clerks have only to look up from their let-
ters and ledgers to see the rolling country
of Long Island, the Orange Hills, the glit-
tering harbor with its islands, and the hur-
rying rivers. But poets ought to be made
in such an eyrie.

When we look away to the horizon we
gladly cheat ourselves ; we let our fancies
wander into things that are not there.
Beneath those heavy cumuli must be a
country where the people are good and
wise, where there are no Reginald Mc-
Gonigles, where every home is a palace,
where speech is music, art the daily life,
and love instead of self-interest the cohesive
social force. But we go and stand under
those clouds ; then we discover that Uto-
pia is some leagues farther on, and Arcadia
some miles behind us.

It is not often that we appreciate the
size of clouds. You may see them in
Colorado so much bigger than the Rocky
Mountains that the tallest peaks become

14 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

insignificant by contrast. Warmed air is
constantly rising from the earth, and as it
ascends toward the chill of the immensi-
ties, the moisture it holds condenses into
fog and occasionally into rain. The upper
edge of the bed of warm air defines its
shape by the form of the cloud-bottoms
that rest upon it. Floors of heavy cloud
average level; but there are innumerable
protuberances and depressions. At the
top, the air being thinner, the clouds ex-
pand into any shape they please. Away
up, miles overhead, where the air is too
light to contain or support masses like the
cumuli, the vapor feathers into cirri. The
cumuli, the summer clouds, which deepen
into thunder-heads, are Alpine in their
scenery and imposing in their volume ;
but there is something equally fine in the
cirrus when it is drawn into streams of
pallid white, like the banners flung from
the top of the world and blown by electric
currents into our heavens. Indeed, on
some nights, when the sky is charged with
cirri that faintly reflect the city lights, it is
hard to say whether or no they are the au-

SKY 15

rora borealis; for with gas-lights and lamps
and electric glares in one's eyes, it is not
easy to see whether they are pulsing.
Only after midnight, from our yard, can I
be sure of this.

These streams of cirrus cloud must be of
enormous length sometimes. You realize
it when you see their parallel lines drawn
together in each direction at the horizon,
like ridges on a muskmelon. But they are
not drawn together. They appear so to
us because they are in perspective, as the
sides of a street run together toward the
vanishing-point ; and as we can see a moun-
tain at a distance of a hundred miles in a
clear air, so in that clearer air above the
humid stratum we doubtless follow these
lines at least as far in each direction, or
two hundred miles in all. Occasionally a
cross wind scores these high clouds and
combs them into sections. Then, instead
of being streamers, they become endless
regiments marching in platoons in the
same direction as the original lines.

Occasionally, too, the cirrus is so far and
thin that we do not see it in full day,

16 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

probably because we do not look for it;
so we are surprised when at sunset the red
lights play over a web that tents in the
whole sky; and as the lights change in
color and climb higher with the falling of
the sun, we see that it is not merely one
film of cloud, but one on another; half a
dozen, perhaps. Yet we said that the sky
was clear. What weak seers we are !

In storm, especially a hot- weather one,
the riding up of the celestial navy to fire
its bolts is a glorious sight. The sky is an
inverted ocean, and whirling on its tem-
pestuous surface come the black and threat-
ening squadrons, pennants of darkness
streaming in their wake, woolly films
wreathing at their bows. They speed
across the void, whirling, twisting in mael-
stroms, rising and falling, occasionally lost
behind the black sails of swifter craft,
emerging to view again, darker and more
wicked than ever. Then comes the shot
we listen for : the air blazes, and a roar of
wrath goes out. The musketry of rain fol-
lows; and when the impenitent earth has
been properly battered and drenched, the

SKY 17

fleet rides off to other shores, and the sun
is out again with healing. But in all this
time mankind has been fussing with its
umbrellas and waiting in doorways for a
trolley-car.

Our yard has a hammock that the chil-
dren use, but that is a little too public for
grown folks, unless it is after dark, or is
brought near to the house. And it is an
invention that ought to attach to every
residence, or, rather, to some tree near
it. If it could be occupied by some
lazybones who would manage to keep his
eyes open, there is hardly a doubt that he
would accumulate some truths in the course
of a summer ; especially, perhaps, if he
slung the hammock under the apples or
the shade maples.

For the nearest approach to a new ex-
perience is to lie under a tree. It is even
more strange and more an inversion of our
conceit than it is to look about under wa-
ter. In the bed of a river things appear
much as they do when you look toward
the bottom from the bank, and the distress
of holding your breath after the first half

18 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

minute is likely to make you neglect the
landscape ; but lie flat, face up, beneath a
tree (if you have n't one, a big azalea like
the one in our yard will do), and you will
realize that you never appreciated arboreal
anatomy before. How light and strong it
is, how full of lessons for engineers and
builders and painters ! And it is so un-
accustomed; the tangents in the boughs
are so unexpected ; the masses of leaf,
flower, and fruit are so remarkable; it is
so inspiring to see that castle in the air, so
light, so fairy-like, yet so sturdy and tough,
with the birds and bees and butterflies seek-
ing its entrances !

Strangest of all is that it impresses one
in a vague way with a consciousness of its
strength and purpose. What made it bend
this bough to avoid another ? Why did it
thin out its leaves here, where it was likely
to clash them against another branchful ?
You wonder if they hear and know, these
trees, all that is said and done by the
clumsy black beetles on two legs that
crawl over their roots.

If you can't look up into a tree for ex-

SKY 19

perience, look at the clouds. The sky is
so common a luxury that we deny it to
ourselves. But if your eyes are strong, lie
on a bank of wild thyme, or something,
and just stare into the zenith. It is not so
poetic if you have to wear blue glasses ; but
the light of the sun reflected from moun-
tains of snowy cumulus, or even the far-off
and filmy tissues of the cirri, nay, even the
light that fills the unclouded air, is more
piercing than you have supposed. So, if
your eye can endure it, sprawl on the wild
thyme in your yard, or in your hammock,
close enough in the shadow of the house to
be out of view of the neighbors, and watch
those moving mountains, more vast in bulk
than the Balkans, as magnificent in scenery
as Greenland, piled into space for miles
above your head — watch these marble
domes as they are wheeled across the
heavens in the wind's track, sometimes
crumbling down in misty ribbons at a dis-
tance, sometimes turning black and bellow-
ing and belching flood and fire and terror
near at hand. The life of the air is a reve-
lation. It is as much so as the life of space

20 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

as we view it through the telescope, or the
life of stagnant water when we see it in the
microscope, or the life in the ground when
we stir the earth in spring. What are those
birds that cross the vision at mountain
height, mere specks against the argosies of
silver ? Eagles, are they, or hawks, or con-
dors and such strange winged creatures of
other lands, spying out the country ? Or
are they archa^opteryces, plesiosauri, and
pterodactyls left over from the age of sau-
rians and afraid to come down, knowing
that man, the fiercest of destroyers, would
stuff them and put them into his museums ?
Youngsters make more use of their eyes
and nature than we, and they can probably
tell us more about the sky than we see.
Their fresh fancies find odd creatures in
the air. My youngest, standing at the
window, called to his mother to look at the
horses. She, hearing no sound of hoofs on
the pavement, answered that there were no
horses near. " Yes," he insisted ; " cloud
horses, galloping in the sky."

How apt these babes are in their
speeches ! There is beauty in their abso-

SKY 21

lute simplicity. It is like the poetry of the
Indians. A little relative of mine died on
St. Valentine's day, and one of his play-
mates said, " He will be God's Valentine,
mama." Harold, in the yard, says, "The
dandelions are getting old : see their white
hair." Like all infants, he amuses us by
the quaintness and unexpectedness of his
observations. Seeing a hearse returning
from a funeral with the driver's official tile
inside, he whispered impressively, "That
man's going to bury his hat." And talk-
ing of a young man who speaks in a meek,
high soprano, he informed us that " Mr.
E had feathers in his voice."

Even a town yard is incomplete without
children. They are trying, sometimes, and
they do not value the pet plants as you do ;
but you may console yourself with the
thought that if they did not break them,
Reginald McGonigle would ; and if he
did n't, the beetles, caterpillars, lice, and
worms would eat them. The views of
youngsters on nature and mankind are the
only original ones that we hear.

To look skyward again : One night, after

22 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

the passage of a thunder-storm, I looked
southward, and there, through the haze,
appeared a long jag of lightning photo-
graphed on the sky. It did not flicker : it
simply stayed. It was much more startling
than a lively flash. And two or three sec-
onds elapsed before I made out that the
seam of pale light was merely the edge of
a cumulus cloud, high up, showing through
a rift in the reek, and lighted by a moon
invisible from the earth.

And these things are seen as easily in
the town as in the country, and we make a
pretense of liking them as well through the
window as in the pasture. Perhaps the
restriction of our ground scenery forces at-
tention to the sky. I know that certain
sunsets and sunrises have been beautiful,
though roofs and spires have risen against
them. I know that the fan of sunbeams
piercing holes in a cloud blanket — what
country people call " the sun drawing wa-
ter " — is at least as striking from the yard
as it is when I see it from the favorite hill
in Vermont, though one cannot see the
lighted spots in the landscape where these

SKY 23

rays fall. I know that when snow flies the
flakes spring out of the gray emptiness in
the same bewildering way as in the fields,
and that each flake is as marvelous a crys-
tal as if it fell in Canada. I know that even
in these dull precincts the color splen-
dors of the clouds are as obvious as in the
country — and as unregarded. We seldom
realize these colors. But put a tub of wa-
ter in the yard on a cloudy day, stand
where the sun is reflected in it, and as
the clouds pass watch this water mirror and
mark how they kindle. They do not show
rainbows, but delicate and shelly lusters,
fleeting, tender, fairy-like. You can bear
to see these reflections, because the whole
sky is not blazing into your eyes. Then,
the clear, open firmament : nothing is finer.
The winter of space is suggested, merely,
and glorified in the turquoise, windy skies
of autumn.

It is in autumn that there is a kind of
glow in the air as well as in the trees. The
leaves seem to throw their color to the sky,
where it is reflected back upon the earth,
as the white of a polar ice-cap shines into

24 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

the clouds above it. And this is not all
illusion, for the southing sun loses its heat-
rays, and the chemical light that comes
through the air is red.

Looking skyward one is face to face
with eternity. How futile, yet inevitable,
to put the questions suggested to himself
and to unanswering space and time by that
vision ! He tries to think back to the time
in eternity when matter did not exist, and
concludes it always did exist. And he
wonders if the universe is evolution or
creation. And is order mind, or has mind
developed from order ? And in the future
suns burn out, only to have their ashes
swept up by comets, scouts and scavengers
of space, and hurled together with such
fury that they become gaseous with heat,
condense, reform into suns and planets,
and the drama goes on again, endlessly.
With a spectator ? Ah, useless to ask and
wonder. Truth is in a well, so deep she
cannot come to us, nor we descend to her.
Let us be content to love and admire,
create and maintain, live and improve. It
is all — and the best — we can do.

Ill

CITY AND COUNTRY LIFE

OUR yard is only an epitome of and
substitute for the real thing, which is
the country. I do not live in town because
I want to, but because I must. The trade I
learned can be practised only in town ; its
pay is apt to be so restricted that retire-
ment on one's savings from the practice
of it is practically unheard of; and I want
to educate the children. There are no
groves of Academus, or I would pack them
off forthwith, and perhaps occupy some
adjacent cabin, and devote myself to rais-
ing potatoes and Cain for their Saturday
holiday. In the nearly hopeless hope of
some day having a home in the village of
my fathers, there being free to deal sau-
cily with mankind and take walks, I find
few sympathizers ; for is not art more than

26 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

nature ? man more than mountains? much
acquaintance more than few? No, — to
each of these propositions. A mob is
physically and mentally repellent to me,
and its clothes and its behavior have little
to do with this repugnance. Nature means
liberty, and liberty means life.

Mr. Bellamy's hopeful but fanciful econ-
omy has not considered one of the origins
for the evils that threaten us: crowding.
Americans are growing afraid of that
wholesome rural life that gave force and
composure to their fathers, and that is re-
flected so sweetly by the English and New
England writers. They are falling into the
town habit, which, like most habits, grows
by what it feeds on, and is commonly ac-
quired by crediting the fallacy that life,
society, gaiety, art, letters, learning, and
all forms of progress come of physical
aggregation.

What force is in numbers, except brute
force ? Because we do justice, keep order,
and claim privileges for each other, does
it follow that we must associate with all
men, including dirty men, mean men,

CITY AND COUNTRY LIFE 27

drunken men ? Our very admiration for
the best human qualities makes the lower
of them more offensive. Cream comes to
the top of big pans, but you get as much
of it from half the quantity of milk if the
quality is twice as good. Cities cast their
best people to the top, perhaps; but how
many sordid folks a single wise man stands
for; how much poverty is required to
make a rich man ; how few are good and
gentle, compared with the rough and vul-
gar ; and how little the goodness of the
few benefits the many ! Yet the plague
of it is that a company of quiet and con-
genial people is not allowed to settle by
itself. Directly it has done so, those round
about cry, " Hello ! here 's a chance to
get into a jam!" and they edge their way
in until the original settlers are fain to
make their way out.

Aggregation presupposes weakness in
the individual. The farmer not only sows,
reaps, hoes, and gathers, but he drives
nails, saws wood, keeps accounts, cuts ice,
kills pigs, is trustee of the village library,
and deacon in the church. He is the best

28 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

type of man we have, because he is a man
whose expediences are so many that he
suffices to himself. He lives his own life,
and leaves strong sons to man the cities.
If he were in town he would stick at some
one trade, or some department of a trade,
and hire his nailing, sawing, accounting,
and killing ; for in the specialization of
business, begotten of large manufactures,
the city man's limitations of industry are
narrowing every year. When one has not
self-poise to stand by himself, or to do
his work without company, he topples into
a town, and the neighbors help him as he
helps the neighbors : they wedge together,
so that none may tip over.

The coarseness of city life is usually
sorest to those who are best able to keep
aloof. It is courted by those who would
be better away from it : the tenement pop-
ulation. The drinking, the righting, the
yelling, the sickness, closeness, vice, igno-
rance, and slum politics disgust the visitor;
but the resident glories in them, for to him
they express society.

Wretched is that man who has no re-

CITY AND COUNTRY LIFE 29

sources within himself, who accepts any
company rather than no company, who is
afraid to be alone, who sits by the hour on
the door-step of a seething barrack, survey-
ing a landscape of rookeries, pavements,
telegraph-poles, and ash-barrels, breathing
stenches, thinking leanly and meanly, hear-
ing the din made by harsh and dirty thou-
sands, because that is society. Wretched
is that man who must ride only on drags
or in dog-carts, in certain avenues; who
must dress three times a day, wear a mon-
ocle, carry his cane head down, call only
on certain people, always be dancing, talk-
ing, driving — who, in short, must live for
show ; for that, too, is supposed to be nec-
essary to society.

The desertion of the country, with its
health, its beauty, its freedom, its practical
charms of cheapness and room, must change
the character of the people. It may not
be true that the rapid life and the wear
of incessant noise in town are shortening
our years and enfeebling our nerves ; but it
is certain that the American of to-day has
not the content and calm that belonged to

30 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

his ancestors ; that he is not a fruitful par-
ent ; that his pleasures, being artificial, are
taken in hot, crowded rooms; and that
jealousy and rivalry are more common than
they were.

If crowding has the merits that are
claimed for it, we ought to see its result
A certain glib smartness is more common
than it used to be, but illiteracy is not
decreasing, and as to the great results of
scientific investigation and artistic aspira-
tion, how many in the crowd are touched
by them? How many of New York's east-
side million know about, or are advantaged
by, the work of the painters, statuaries,
architects, poets, dramatists ? How many
of them ever heard of Huxley, Darwin,
Emerson, Edison, Pasteur, Rontgen, the
men who move the world ; and how many
of the world-movers could think or act in
the throng ? Fancy Emerson meditating
in the clatter of a hotel, Edison perfecting
his inventions in a city office, Darwin mak-
ing scientific investigations in a "flat" or a
boarding-house ! Even the actor, by na-
ture and calling the most social of the ar-

CITY AND COUNTRY LIFE 31

tists, has to gain seclusion to think out his
part, invent action, and memorize text.

To leave that abode of greed, envy, anx-
iety, and excess, the modern town, with
its extremes of wealth and poverty, for
an hour of country life — life with trees,
rocks, streams, and tuneful, uncomplaining
things — is paradise. One gets back the
health of a tired mind, and more minds
are tired now than in our fathers' day. If
it wearies a man to be with gentler, wilder
organisms than men, the reason is that he
is incomplete and does not think, read,
study, observe, eat, sleep, walk, or work
as a healthy man should. He flings him-
self before society, and demands to be
amused.

What is the cure, or is there none?
Persuasion accomplishes nothing. In hard
times, when thousands are asking food,
clothing, and coal from the thrifty, and
tramping the roads declaring their distress,
the farmers cannot get help, and families
in the country cannot procure service.
No offer of work is considered unless it
is accompanied by a promise of society.

32 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

The villages themselves do not ask for
population. They lack the local patriot-
ism that might put them into competition
with the town. They are slow to increase
or improve the benefits of corporate life :
good roads, trees, parks, schools, libraries,
sanitary appliances, and access to the arts.

The establishment of an exile for the
useless would be a blessing not to the
towns alone. The crowding of the West
and the filling up of trades and professions
will do something to bring farming into
vogue again. But perhaps increased in-
telligence and increased rent promise best
for the restoration of rural life. It is
growing more difficult every year for peo-
ple of moderate incomes to remain in town
under conditions that enable them to retain
health and self-respect. Taxes do not in-
crease in rate, but rents do ; and the tenant
who pays both gets less and less for his
money as the streets fill up and his air
and light are taken away.

The saddest part of the town habit is
the injury it entails on children. Young
folks want earth to sport on and oxygen to

CITY AND COUNTRY LIFE 33

breathe, as plants do ; and they get a few
feet of pavement where they play ball when
the police are not looking. The poor
creatures become like animals in cages,
and their delight in grass, trees, hills, and
running waters, when they reach them, is
pathetic. Their parents cheat them of
their birthright.

Pessimism, which we find in all forms
of art, — even in the drama, which has
brought an Ibsen, a Zola, a Sudermann,
and a Maeterlinck to its service, — is a phil-
osophy of exhaustion. It is as foreign to
the natural man as it would be to brutes.
That it is not accepted by the masses is
hopeful ; that many are acquiring country
places and prolonging their vacations, is
hopeful ; that a new interest has been
aroused in science — nature — is hopeful;
that fresh-air funds have been started in
every city, is most hopeful. Out of the great
hives of brick and mortar another genera-
tion may send away many to live in health,
to think their own thought, to become the
staminates of a mushy and ineffectual so-
ciety. In that generation the delights

34 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

of independent living will be appreciated
once more.

Meeting some country people, and not-
ing how little they seem to care for nature,
how concerned they are with small things,
how their ambitions turn toward the city,
one feels that he must look for a human
balance, like that of the rotation of crops,
the town folk returning to the country to
restore their exhausted energies, say every
fifty years, and the rustics going to town,
in exchange, with their high vitality and
their practical ways and sense, to run the
affairs of society. Yet we mistake when
we charge invariable discontent against the
farmer. He may have a silly notion, like
others of us, that he would like to be
President; but he does not consent to stand
behind a counter or scribble at a desk in
order to do it. Sometimes he really en-
joys the health and liberty and landscape
to which he is heir, and envies the citizen
not a whit. One of the unlikeliest con-
verts to rural life that I have met is a ped-
dler, fifty-eight years old, who, having lost
an arm in a railroad accident, gains a pre-

CITY AND COUNTRY LIFE 35

carious livelihood by selling brushes and
pills through New Jersey, lower New York,
and eastern Pennsylvania.

I quickly found that condolences were
thrown away on him. He prided himself
on the extent of his acquaintance, and the
fact that many of the farmers cheerfully
gave him a meal and lodging when he
appeared. He was particular about his
lodging. Beds he did not countenance;
but a blanket on the porch or in the hay-
mow suited him exactly. He believed in
the virtues of air, and when storm-bound
in the mountains made no bones of lying
under a rock or fallen tree, — however
much his bones may have made of him, —
with a burning log at his feet. He had
not been ill for an hour since he began his
wandering life. The tramps never worried
him, and he was able to sell enough to
keep out of the poorhouse. In winter he
lived on a farm with a man who drove a
butcher's wagon, and had no legs.

This little old man, with his butternut
clothes, had no book education ; but there
was a marked sympathy with nature in

36 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

him. While we talked together, he strolled
to and fro. Noticing the stars, — it was
after nine o'clock at night, — he said that
he often did his tramping after sunset in
summer, " because it was n't so hot then ";
and in spite of his years, his short legs, his
basket, and his calls, he occasionally made
twenty miles in a day. Of all men, to his
mind, the farmers were the best off, be-
cause, while the rich might lose every-
thing in a bad season, the farmer had his
roof, his fire-wood, and his food. With
these he could defy the fates. He wanted
little of cities. He had seen a building
thirteen stories high, and "they wanted
$8 a month on the top floor, while out in
Jersey you can buy a house, sheds, well,
patch of ground, and orchard for $600."
He reported some adventures with dogs,
but few of them exciting. One night,
while sleeping in an arbor, he was awak-
ened by the arrival of another man, who
passed a few words with him, and likewise
lay down to sleep on a plank. In the
morning he discovered that his quondam
neighbor was richly dressed, and sported

CITY AND COUNTRY LIFE 37

a gold watch and chain. " He was sensi-
ble, that man was: he liked air." And,
after all, thousands of New Yorkers sleep,
or try to, in the streets on broiling, sul-
try August nights. Only, they don't wear
gold watches.

The merit of such a life, and of all rural
life, is its individualism and independence,
its modesty, bravery, and self-sufficing-
ness. Men are a part of nature, and can-
not help it ; yet the world is full of vain
striving to get away from this fixity and
fate. The men wear starched collars, nar-
row shoes, and hard hats, and the women
wear tight foot-covering and corsets — the
aim in each case being to be as little like
men and women as they can. They do
not care to be reminded of nature. Better
the farmer, the hunter, the wood-chopper,
who eats with his knife, and is at home in
the woods and at one with them, than the
affected, lisping, dawdling fop of the town.
The clearest, if not the deepest, minds
ought to be found in the country, and
frankness is apt to be a rural trait. Bacon
objects to a naked mind. I wonder if our

38 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

commonplaces struck him as nudities, and
if he approved our social fibs as coverings.
We wear only our hands and faces visible
now ; but commonly, when we expose the
mind, there are no reservations. And of
what avail are these things we say to each
other or assent to about weather and poli-
tics ? One look at the hills is worth the
talk of a multitude as to what the weather
is, because the weather is there, without
comment, and all weathers have their wel-
comes and their uses. Woods, plains,
seas, vary every hour : but how few of us
know it ; for, alas ! we have become afraid
of nature. The woods are full of bogies,
the sea of krakens, the fields of malaria.
Shut the windows, bar the doors, converse
on politics, and keep nature out.

Content in the city is difficult. In youth
it is not commendable. But when the ob-
jects of life are gained, either in money
or place or occupation, when middle age
fixes us in our ways, comfort of mind is to
be desired. And what a rare thing is con-
tent — satisfaction with the present ! We
live in the past or future, memory or hope,

CITY AND COUNTRY LIFE 39

or in the imagination of impossibilities.
Our touch with passing facts is as light as
we might think our hold was on the future.
Seldom in our lives do we cry, as Faust,
"Stay, flying moment: thou art fair." But
if the hour strikes when we may, we hear
it in the country.

IV
WINTER

T7XCEPT for its varying physical geog-
-L/ raphy, the back yard gets little at-
tention in winter. Perhaps it deserves to
be looked at oftener, for snow will drift
in fantastic shapes, and we have miniature
mountain-ranges and plateaus, and, in
thaws, an extensive system of lakes. Our
arctic scenery does not stay arctic. Its
gloss and whiteness are dulled by smoke
and dust, and the feet of birds and cats,
by dropped leaves of withering plants, and
by the undetected yet pervading foulness
of city air. And in the longest, sharpest
winter the juices of the grass and shrubs
are not frozen, like the surface moisture,
but are merely locked in the roots until
the sun calls them into the stalks, or makes
new leaves to busy themselves in, when
March arrives.

WINTER 41

When it is not covered with snow, or,
rather, dappled with it, the yard is dull
and brown, at first glance, and the white
carpet is pierced by dry stems and ragged
leaves. But go out with green in your
mind, and it is surprising what an answer
of green you get from the earth. The
kalmia's leaves are leathery, yet they keep
a lot of color, and its stalks are tipped
with stout buds, securely waiting the ver-
nal equinox. The honeysuckle — indis-
pensable plant — retains its foliage ; its
shiny black berries drop first, the leaves
taking a slaty hue, and finally bronzing
into olive. Shreds of gourd-vine hang to
the fence, and the long ropes of morning-
glory on the house hold hundreds of their
blossom-cups, mere stars; but the green
has wholly died from them. The iris fades
only after repeated nippings, and the chry-
santhemum has to be told often that it is
winter. After the first frosts I find that
the chrysanthemums, salvia, bellis, hydran-
gea, petunia, verbena, alyssum, daisy, and
dandelion stand it best. A pet dandelion
bloomed after several frosts, and another

42 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

one came into flower at Christmas, during
one of the insipid winters that we have
along the fortieth parallel.

But it is the grass that keeps its color
best. After a succession of mild days it
really grows, and under the top-dressing
clover is often found to have started.
Grass will become dry and brown in time,
but the algae on wood, especially on tree-
trunks, never do so. They keep fresh and
bright through every winter, and snow
and rain serve only to intensify their color.
Thoreau was nearly right when he said
that it took a lichenist to see how a tree-
trunk looked. He might have added —
and an artist. The artist is the only one
who sees things as they are. The rest of
us see what we think ought to be there,
and overlook many things equally impor-
tant that are there.

Vegetation wants but a kindly hour to
bring it up. On a February morning, in
a calm between two blizzards, although it
was by no means sultry, clover was found
half an inch out of the earth ; and three
days later, in another mild spell, the warm

WINTER 43

warble of a bird was heard across the roofs.
(Pity me that I don't know what kind of
a bird it was!) In mid- January, after a
longish spell of cold, I have found fresh
leaves of buttercup and bellis and dande-
lion under the mulch.

After heavy winter rains, followed by a
quick freeze, the puddles crust over with
ice, and the water, soaking into the earth,
— partially evaporating, too, perhaps, —
leaves this ice a mere shell over nothing.
Where the freezing has been irregular be-
cause of wind, spiky ridges a foot and
more in length — true crystals, doubtless —
may be traced in the ice like Cuphic sym-
bols on a rock. And I wonder if we have
got nothing out of ice and drifts and icicles
for our arts in all these years. No Gothic
pendents, think you ? No roofs, and eaves,
and pediments ? No tessellations ? No
mural ornaments ? Art has never touched
the delicacy of the frost-ferns on the win-
dow, nor reached the splendor of the Jung-
frau's silver dome ; but out of these things
beauty may have grown into stone with-
out even conscious effort by the architect.

44 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

They ask perpetuation, these melting glo-
ries, and his is the art to keep or convert
them. Architecture appeals to more than
the eye alone. It satisfies the sense for
substance, greatness, permanence, such as
snow hints in shining shadow. In that
the builder's art is like nature. But for
this solidity, the stage palace of canvas
would serve our minds as well as Durham
Cathedral or the Chicago Fair.

One advantage in our yard is that it
gives access to the shrillest, coldest winds
of winter. And though it is a mournful
music, it is likewise of a brave, romantic
kind. True comfort of indoors is com-
plete only with a gale brattling at the win-
dows. Draw the curtains, stir the fire, see
the family bestowed for the night; let there
be no burning of garish and vulgar gas,
no dusty, choking furnaces, no thrice-
abominable cracking, clinking, smelling,
and roasting of steam radiators; have at
your elbow a mug of something cold and
bubbling, or hot and fragrant, as your
taste directs ; if there are no women at
home, or if this is your den, have a cigar

WINTER 45

if you like ; then snuggle into your easy-
chair and enjoy the concert. The boom-
ing, the gusts, the eldritch skirling, — I
don't know what that means, but it sounds
well and windy, — the whispering and
moaning, the shaking of blinds and cas-
ings, the singsong of the air's voice, are
inspiring. It is Wagner night when a
zephyr achieves forty miles an hour.
Those threatening sounds tell of far, cold
wastes, of manful souls battling homeward
on the sea, of men in lonely places doing
duty in the cold; and the fire to which
we go for pictures yields up a story of
heroism in the mountains, on the ocean,
on the plains, that the wind accompanies,
and that makes us glad to be of the precious
human race. Learn to love the wind. It
is free, wild, pure, and strong. It is a
voice that never sings false. You are never
small when you listen to it.

And the colder outside the cosier within.
There is experience enough of cold and
storm to be had through the windows to
satisfy a good many. Yet a man likes to
find that the thermometer in his yard has

46 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

gone higher in summer and lower in winter
than the thermometers of his neighbors.
It makes his place adventurous, and he
doubtless feels that he is an object of inter-
est or sympathy.

One blessed state of winter is the quiet
and late morning hours it imposes on our
neighbors' fowls. They seldom harry us
with visits after worms and seeds, but the
cocks proclaim their waking at seasons
when you do not wish to be apprised of it.
It is one of the plagues of city life that
you are thrown so close against disagreea-
ble events. The authorities recognize but
one nuisance, — that which offends the smell,
— inasmuch as it argues offense to physical
health. When a man boils bones or makes
fertilizers, his neighbors stop the work,
even going across the borders of his prop-
erty to do it ; but he is safe to offend the
sight in any way he likes, and he can take
strange liberties with our ears. The bark-
ing dog, the singing ass, the screeching
parrot, the shrilling cat, the crowing cock,
and the boy learning to play on the violin
it is hard to surpass.

WINTER 47

There was one bird who used to crow
for about forty minutes, beginning at one
o'clock in the morning. The wrath engen-
dered by these solos kept me awake until
three, and shortly after that hour he re-
sumed for another half-hour or so. At
five he began to crow in serious earnest
for the day. And that pesky bird would
go to bed while the sun was an hour high,
in order to keep his voice fresh. His
owner was one of the Seven Sleepers, and
had never heard him ; but by reason of an
order from the health board and a police
visit, I convinced him that the rest of us
did, and the warbler was shut up after dark
forthwith. He had escaped no end of
stones, coal, and kindling that had been
hurled at his voice during the night by
people who went to bed at midnight and
slept with their windows open.

Not all roosters are so offensive. I have
heard the crow of one that was a long, wail-
ing note like the howl of a dog. No two
voices are alike, be it of men or birds ; no
two faces, no two minds, no two creatures,
crystals, flowers, or petals. Nature's infi-

48 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

nite variety in unity ! Somewhere, too,
in the dawn, a cock called the hour in a
trumpet-blast, definitely musical, thus :

and redeemed himself by that perform-
ance; for, of all futilities in nature, the
harsh note of the domestic cock is most
needless. There is an utter want of mean-
ing in his tune. Inanimate things are
sometimes more agreeable than he, and
are less depraved than philosophers would
have us think. I heard from our yard a
farm- wagon grating and grinding along
a street-car track on a frosty day, and the
sound was in thirds and fifths, like two
notes of a bugle.

How would it do, now, to remove the
rooster's vocal cords, if he has any, and
by dint of stirpiculture supplant the exist-
ing species by a crowless race ? Surely,
greater wonders than this have been ac-
complished without man's help; and I often
wonder why the cock, being a low-roost-
ing bird, reached easily by prowling foxes

WINTER 49

and the like, did not long ago cease to ad-
vertise his whereabouts. Far back there
was a reason for his noise, or he would n't
have made it. It was evolved from the
grunt or hiss of some wallowing lizard,
his remotely great grandfather. Now that
he has taken to living with us, let us en-
courage him to forget it. They say that
evolution hardly explains the wonderful
adaptability and economy of everything
to its function. Why not? The most direct
is the most economic; and evolution never
goes roundabout. As soon as man got
fairly planted on his hind legs, his tail
shriveled and fell off.

Perhaps, though, the rooster does not
want to evolve, does not want to be peace-
able, does not want to lose his voice. He
may take the same joy in using it that
Reginald McGonigle takes in using his, or
that the thugs do in New York when they
lift theirs in blasphemy and foulness, proud
of their ability to create attention, to shock
where they cannot win respect. Well,
there is a foundation Tightness in this evil
way of theirs. Old Adam is only the old

So NATURE IN A CITY YARD

animal. It does not do to be too civilized.
Extremes meet. The meeting-place of
high culture and abject poverty are the
asylum and the graveyard. Society tells
us that we are helpless without civilization.
Yes ; it has made us so. Left alone from
birth, if we did not starve early we should
be " more destitute than a brute," espe-
cially as we are without any of the wings,
claws, teeth, hair, feathers, and prehensile
tails that put the eagle, the tiger, the mon-
key above us in the contest with nature.
Do we not, then, as we get older and real-
ize our loss, want to begin over again, and
recover some of these brute advantages ?

But, ah ! which one of our acquired ben-
efits are we willing to give up for more
muscle, or for budding wings? The habit
of house-building ? The art of cookery ?
The daily paper ? Hm ! Something of
our talk ? Some of that vexing and va-
riant fluid we call mind ? Or the gift
of imagination ? Not the last, I think.
That is the utmost of our evolution. It is
the agency that lets us be other, greater,
happier than we are. Life in the coun-

WINTER 51

try might be as base as life in town if it
were not for imagination. How much we
owe to it, for how little we have in life,
and death, that is tangible ! A little while
ago I heard a whistle — on a tug-boat in
the river, most likely, for I hear it once
a week at least; and whenever it sounds
across the three miles of roofs, I drop my
pen, spade, book, or what not, and am far
away for some happy minutes. Sounds
have, for me, the suggestive and reminis-
cent force that many find in odors; so,
this whistle being in my memory the same
I heard on the night boat that took me on
my first visit to the Catskills, I have the
thrill of that trip all over again. It was
before the time of mountain railroads, big
hotels, land speculations, and " No tres-
passing " signs. It was in October, and
the haunted hills were lonely and all mine.
The two days I spent there were spent
afoot, — I walked and climbed sixty miles,
— and they were a revel in color and the
pathetic fragrance of fallen leaves. So
the tug whistle dispels gloom, soothes
overwrought nerves, obliterates meaner

$2 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

sounds, and comes like a call blown by
fays and fauns of the crimson hills. It
fills the world with romance, for it is one
of the few privileges of life in the city that
there is this much to take one out of it.

And it is one of the sorrows of that same
life that there is so little winter during the
cold months. The snow that ought to oe
used for sleighing, and for snow-balls to
cast against the pot-hats and tiles of digni-
fied citizens, is trampled and fouled and
cleared away. Maybe when we have dis-
missed the horse from our service we shall
be allowed to slide over the snowy streets
in mechanically propelled sledges, and to
take walks in parks and across vacant lots
without sloshing through sweepings. There
are few finer things than to be out of doors
in wind and ugly weather. It satisfies our
longing for fight. Thoreau says we must
take long walks in storm and snow to keep
our spirits up. " Deal with brute nature.
Be cold and hungry and weary." Hard
advice for us cits. I suppose my three-
mile wade to the office on the day of the
great blizzard would not have counted with

WINTER 53

Thoreau; yet I protest I enjoyed it, and
likewise the silence of the banked-up houses
and blockaded streets for two days after.
As to the yard, I do go there on winter
evenings to see if any mistaken vegetable
has stirred in the day's sunshine, or if there
are any new McGonigle tracks in the snow.
If the yard were ten miles long I should not
try to go to the end of it, unless it were
moonlight. Walking in the small hours
over roads white with snow is one of the
most peaceful yet exhilarating of experi-
ences. As to cold, hunger, and tire, those
states are excellent tonics, but poor com-
pany. Of course it is civilization that has
made us cowardly, but there are few more
wretched men than those, too proud to
beg, who do not know at nightfall where
they shall sleep or whether they shall eat.
The life of a yard writes itself large in
new snow. It is occasionally clothes-line
thieves, but mostly cats, and they wander
about in our miniature wilderness, doubling
on their tracks like the Israelites, as if to
see how much ground to cover when there
is not much to be covered. Sparrows, too,

54 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

and pigeons occasionally descend and leave
their starry footprints on the white. Why
is it that the sparrows, which in other sea-
sons fight and travel in knots of three or
four, or go about singly, appear so often in
cold weather in flocks of a hundred ? Is it
that each is afraid the others will get some-
thing to eat, and he — the thief! — not be
on hand to fight his share away from them ?
There is a fine of one hundred dollars in
New York State for feeding an English
sparrow. It is not needed.

Perhaps if we had more patience with
this rascal of a bird, he would exhibit some
respectable qualities. Anyway, he would
show character. There is no chance to show
that when one is being "shooed " out of a
doorway. Every animal has an individuality
as marked as that of a human being. Take
cats. Take all of ours, if you like, and
don't return them. But just take the case
of cats. Their facial differences are consid-
erable, when you look for them, and they
often wear a deceptive countenance. Our
Skimplejinks has a surprised and distant
aspect, yet he gambols out to meet me in

WINTER 55

the morning, like a dog, and runs up my
trousers and coat to my shoulder. When
a boot is shied toward him along the
floor, he shoots straight into the air, like a
bucking bronco, and as high. I know two
kittens of the same family: one a seraphic-
looking youngster with a pretty face, soft
fur, and contemptible disposition ; the other
a vagrom brute with coarse gray hair
streaked with black, a vulgar countenance,
and marked courtesy and consideration.
The tramp will accept a bone thankfully,
and in teasing for more will pat you softly
to draw your attention, while the seraph
spits at everything before eating it, and
once, when I offered my ringer coated with
gravy for him to clean, he bit it instead.

It is pleasant to find that most people
esteem animals, even when they are hunters
and gourmets and wearers of ornamented
bonnets, and prefer them dead. Thoreau
says he likes the brutes because they never
talk nonsense, are never foolish, vain, pom-
pous, or stupid. How about a parrot, an
ostrich, a peacock, a horse, a hen ? They
make capital companions, when they con-

56 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

descend to associate with us, and are al-
ways interesting, for they never lay bare
their thoughts to us. They are full of sur-
prises. Why does the horse bolt furiously
up the street and kill several of us if, for
the twentieth time in a week, he sees a
harmless piece of paper blown about the
pave ? And why does Arthur, our dog,
wail and howl when I play the " Moon-
light Sonata," though I play everything
else as badly, or worse ? Yet he comes to
lie on my feet when I open the piano.
And cats are as freakish as the weather.
And there 's our canary. He will not
bathe unless his tub is put into his cage
while it is hanging. Set it on the table,
and he refuses to wet his feet.

The first snow is always an event even
in town. Winter has really come, and the
almanac is right. Even those who do not
regard the seasons or look at the sky have
this fact forced on them: that something
is under foot that was not there yesterday.
A company of gentlemen, passing as the
flakes began to fall, showed that they were
not wholly out of touch with nature.

WINTER 57

Said one, " I '11 be if it ain't

snowing ! "

Another replied, " What the do I

care if it is snowing ? " Then, in a tone of

awakening interest, "Well, by , I '11

be if it ain't snowing ! "

And the gentlemen continued their stroll.

Occasionally the plants show a surprising
indifference to frost. A rosebud that ap-
peared about the first of October was still
awaiting encouragement from the sun in
the middle of November. On Thanksgiv-
ing day I examined it again, but it had
not budged. As a mild winter followed,
I found no change in it. It remained a
swollen, but never-bursting bullet of red.
Finally I cut it and put it into a vase of
water in the house, thinking that it might
open in the warmth; but it slowly withered
without opening a leaf or abating a jot of
its toughness. After no less than six frosts
the yarrow was as green as in August.

And we often go out to look at these
survivals, that we may keep our minds
green until the time of birds and buds
comes around once more.

V

SPRING

r\ AHE last snow has fallen. The country-
JL man is now embogged, and is losing
temper and dollars because of the delays,
difficulties, and damages he has imposed on
himself by his cheap and miserable roads,
and the city man is returning thanks that
his yet more miserable street has ceased to
be a place of navigation, and may now be
forded, with rubbers. The first warm days
take one out of doors : albeit in town they
bring a forecast of the frightful August
weeks to come, when men and horses fall
at their work and have to be put on ice, —
that is, the men do, — and babies die by
hundreds in the tenements; die wretchedly
within half a dozen miles of health and
life ; die because their parents are hopeless

victims of the aggregation habit.

58

SPRING 59

Now, we pull down the books and mag-
azines on gardening; likewise the seeds
which are to grow into vines that will climb
all over the ward and star themselves with
flowers as big as soup-plates, as brilliant
as Solomon and society at the opera, but
less sounding than either. We go out and
poke the crooked spade into the ground,
and fetch up a rich assortment of old boots,
rubbers, bustles, oyster-cans, spikes, cin-
ders, cobblestones, and other reminders
that this is " improved property" — save the
mark ! This is the beginning of joy. The
birds are coming back — to other people ;
the brooks are tinkling — just listen to our
gutter; and the flowers will be here by
and by ; but ah ! will they be according to
those vivid colored catalogues of the seeds-
men ? Verily, I have a fear ; for many
benefits turn to blights. There is the
manure that we paid the stable-keeper a
dollar a load for, last fall, and look at what
we are getting from it : insects, eggs, co-
coons, wireworms, centipedes, all brought
in with that enrichment. Sometimes it
does n't seem worth while to reform, be-

60 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

cause the new evils that come with refor-
mation appear so much worse than the old
ones.

It all has to be looked up again, every
spring : the way to put bulbs and seeds in,
where, how deep, how many, in what soil ;
and even after the ground is prepared the
dibble is sure to strike subterranean pans
and flatirons, and the spade has to be re-
sumed. Then, when it is late and mild
enough to sow, the weeds are up in a lot
of new places, and are stealthily encroach-
ing on the space reserved for plants that
would please us better. And if we are
wise we do our weeding betimes. Com-
pleteness is rare in this industry. I have
seen only one exhibition of it, and that
was in the close of one of the English ca-
thedrals, where two women were seated on
the earth, patiently digging out of it, with
steel dining-forks, every growing thing
that was n't grass. The average man will
admire that conduct — and refrain.

In moderation, the exercise of weeding
encourages to good nature. It satisfies the
human instinct of destruction, and, unlike

SPRING 61

other forms of violence, it tends to good
results — in us. If only we could weed
humanity of its parasites, its vicious, its
criminal elements as quickly and ruthlessly
as we weed our gardens ! We should
have no army of 50,000 tramps to beg,
bully, and steal a living out of us, no bur-
glars, no drunken, corner-loafing, wife-
beating, non-washing, swearing, insolent
creatures. When we are better ourselves,
we shall be less soft toward the irreclaim-
able, I fancy. If any escape the right
parental and other formative influences,
we shall exile them to barren lands, where
they must hustle healthfully to live. The
weeding of the human race cannot begin
too soon, and the outlook for the rest of us
will be brighter when criminals, by surgery
if by no other means, can be prevented
from longer begetting their kind, for it is a
bad kind.

Like all reforms, weeding is easiest when
earliest. You can thrust your fingers into
the loose soil, and trace a root of witch-
grass six inches under the surface and a
foot in length, all spiked with yellow blades

62 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

that would have been up in another day
or two ; and as to the thousand other things,
— plantain, thistles, and the like, — you
have only to whistle to them, and out they
come. But in August — well, that 's dif-
ferent. And weeds are so outrageously
healthy. Or, do they merely seem so ?
The energy of vice and destructiveness
always seems greater than that of virtue,
probably because it is forced so disagree-
ably on our notice. Ugly dogs, ugly men,
armies, beasts of prey, birds, fishes — what
waste of ferocity and excess of effort in
working their purpose ! Yet I don't be-
lieve this tale that all is fear and suffering
in the lesser world. Insects, at all events,
do not suffer before they are eaten. Harsh-
ness is but a little part of nature, and ben-
efits go with it. Though the storm, the
flood, the thunderbolt, work harm, look on
the fields, and see what kindness is in the
sun and air and rain.

If we would let the weeds alone, or if
we would be good to them and water them
and cut away the corn and potatoes and
geraniums when they encroached, who

SPRING 63

knows what food for sight and stomach
they might pay us with ? For every plant
was a weed once. Yet I more incline to
fancy that the fed weed would sicken in
disgust and shame at being thus taken for
something desirable, and would peak and
pine and shrink into the earth. The skunk-
cabbage I bought of a sidewalk fakir sim-
ply refused to stay alive in the yard. He
had hurt its feelings, maybe, by calling it
an Egyptian water-lily. But with planting
to do, we cannot stop to guess what the
burdock and the ragweed might come to.
We slash them down, and know that their
brothers and sisters will be up next week.
Still, this weeding takes us into the open,
and makes the flowers so much the more
precious in that they have been fought for.
No doubt it is better that we should have
nothing as we want it. That enables us to
enjoy the wakeful emotion of surprise. It
likewise incites us to effort, and the effort-
less man is stagnant, useless, decadent.

Did a man ever plant a thing — a seed
or an idea — that he did not watch to see
it come up ? He must be a freak, or very

64 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

busy, if he did n't. He has made himself
responsible for it ; he has jibed his conduct
to that of nature ; he is a creator, in a way,
and it hurts his pride a little if he can't
raise beans. And it is a serene and pretty
satisfaction to see things come out of the
earth. It is as big a mystery as it was
when man did no planting and did no
thinking with his teacupful of brains, save
of the wherewithal to be fed. As they rise
out of the soil, these shoots are so alike for
some days that we, with our ill-trained
eyes, puzzle over their identity. What we
decide to be a daisy is a plantain, and our
lily in the other bed is an orchid. But
they all stick loyally to their type, and the
genista never turns out to be an apple-tree.
Once we coddled a weed for a month, in
the supposition that it was argeratum. It
grew from the spot where we had one of
these plants ; so far as its leaves were con-
cerned, it bej.t the argeratum, too, and did
not have a horde of green, repellent grubs
upon it, either.

Such a fresh rainbow-green as these
new things wear ! The eye never tires of

SPRING 65

it. Or, if it wants awakening, let it look
at the other colors for a minute, and it en-
joys them ; still it returns to the green
with gladness. Be sorry for the man who
takes no pleasure in color. Be twice as
sorry for the woman. Pray for them both.
There are men, usually artists, who live
by color as much as by bread. One such,
whom I know, clung to his brass and china
through a long time of almost starvation,
and would not sell one of his studio trea-
sures. He was a crank. Admirable insti-
tution, the crank — the only one of us who
wears any picturesqueness in these days.
It would be a happier world if everybody
in it were a crank. A crank is a man who
is more interested in something than his
neighbors are. He thinks he knows more
about it, and they hate him for that, and
suspect him of designs. But if everybody
were a crank, there would be no such sour-
ness of thought toward him, because no-
body would take a contract to hate the
whole human race. Besides, there are not
many bad cranks. I used to know a fel-
low who had a passionate interest in neck-

5

66 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

ties. If he could stand in front of you
and study yours while you told him where
you got it, and when, and why, and what
you paid for it, it was all he asked. He
grew in influence as he got older and had
a political job. He is distinguished by the
gorgeousness of his scarfs. None of us is
self-centered : we are results of the past ;
and I have vainly tried to imagine what
brought him about.

Scarfs suggest color, again, and that
suggests art, and both recall me to the
yard, where I have been setting out petu-
nias, which are among the safest, steadiest,
and most remunerative of all bloomers.
But I wanted to say that what we call the
artistic sense is often but the feeling for
nature altered by generations of a society
that seeks its self-protection at the ex-
pense of normal impulse. Once meshed
in the house-staying habit, the victim, who
has already lost the fineness of his sense of
smell, the delicacy of his touch, and the
savage's quickness of sight, resolves to keep
his palate with high-seasoned appliances,
and to distinguish colors, anyhow, with his

SPRING 67

eyes. The cook is an artificer; but we
forgive and even encourage him in his in-
ventions. But what is the meaning of our
rugs, our pottery, our pictures, our jewels,
our morocco bindings, our implements of
brass and silver, our patterned upholstery,
our wall-papers, if not to afford color-
equivalents of leaf, flower, water, rock, dis-
tance, and sunset ? So we employ artists
at many cunning trades, solely to keep our
heads above the social swim by color-call-
ings to our souls. A set of Chinese single-
color porcelains makes, as near as may be,
an epitome of the chromatics of the outer
world. While they are on our shelves our
eyes are not forlorn.

Winter is not an offense to me, even in
town. They say it is kind of me not to
object to it. There is a keen delight in
fighting a north wind, in wading through
snow, in feeling the tingle of blood that
such a wrestle sends through one. And
the beauty of snow, the silver of it, the
shine of it, the stillness of it, the health of it,
freezing and smothering the evil fraternity
of microbes — these are not to be gain-

68 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

said. But with the peep of spring we be-
gin to be willing to see green. There is a
lot of life in winter, especially in ourselves;
but life without vegetation is not complete.
Green is the assurance of life. So we watch
for the coming of the grasses, of the clover,
hop-clover, wild clover, chickweed, pig-
weed, purslane, plantain-rod, English
plantain, dandelion, smartweed, shepherd's-
purse, oxalis, mallow, daisy, sorrel, cam-
omile, wild parsnip, ragweed, butter-and-
eggs, thistle, aster, yellow-dock, — all of
which are indigenous to our yard, — while
we keep an eye on the moss, algae, and
fungi, and rejoice to see their increase.
The foregoing list is not complete: it is
merely recalled. When I looked first at
the yard I saw nothing but grass. The
eye sees what it wants or expects, or is
used to see. After a time I noticed clover.
I am not sure that I discovered the abun-
dance of chickweed until the canary-bird
needed some. Now I find that every
yard is a botanical garden of unguessed
variety and extent. Even some yards in
that Sahara they call New York — yards

SPRING 69

with a dozen spears of vegetation — have
at least two or three forms of plant life.

There is one lack in city farming, how-
ever, and that is birds. The chatter-
ing, quarreling English sparrow, who has
driven American birds away, infests us, of
course ; but the robins, the bluebirds, yel-
low-birds, and orioles, that I used to see in
town in my youth — they are gone : hidden
in the country, some ; sacrificed for wo-
men's hats, others. Once I did hear a robin
in a tree a few rods away, and an unknown
bird was singing in our hearing at an-
other time. There is a plenty of songsters
in the park, and I often run out there on
my wheel to hear them. The park is only
a mile away, yet almost never does one
of these birds alight in our preserve.

The night-hawk is our only visitor who
is truly wild, and he has never come to
earth in my sight. He appears in May,
and his harsh squawking is heard often on
consecutive evenings until fall. As he ar-
rives in the twilight it is hard to get a peep
at him; but one afternoon he began to cry
before sunset, and it was easy to place him

70 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

then. His flight is short and jerky as
compared with that of the great hawk.
From an elevation of perhaps three hun-
dred feet he twice swooped rapidly to
within a hundred feet of ground. His
squawk must have frightened his prey, if
he saw any. On another evening he came
flying from the southwest, hurriedly pass-
ing not more than sixty or eighty feet
overhead. Three of these hawks came
over in company at another time, and
their shrilling was far more agreeable to
me than the yell of " Clams ! Soft-shell
clams ! " on the next street. But many
will not believe it. His harsh and threat-
ening note is a gratefully wild one in the
dry, warm town. Though it sounds but a
few rods up in the air, you see nothing
with straining of your eyes; so there is
something elfish and uncanny as well as
exhilarating in this shriek from a viewless
source.

If only a crow would come around once
in a while and sing for us, the bricks and
noise would be forgotten, though not for-
given, and the country would be near.

SPRING 71

Never having crops to lose, — for that mat-
ter, knowing that he eats more insects than
corn, — the caw of the crow is music to me.
It is strong, calm, and confident — a voice
of nature. So, I take it, is the voice of
Reginald McGonigle, who may be regarded
as the crow of this neighborhood, since he
despoils yards at his pleasure.

Did I omit the pigeons ? Still, they are
not wild. Look at a flight of them : hu-
man-like creatures, following each other
without question as to the straight, sensi-
ble, profitable way. On nearly every morn-
ing they are to be seen rising from a stable
roof on another street : more than a score
of them. They fly over the roofs at a
height of sixty to a hundred feet, circling
in a ring fifty yards in diameter. After
going perhaps twenty times from right to
left, a few will spring higher into the air, the
rest following, as in " snap the whip," and
reverse the motion, so that the flight goes
from left to right. Do they get dizzy like
green waltzers or romping children ? Af-
ter wheeling for a time in the new direction
they drop to the roofs, as by general con-

72 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

sent, occasionally resuming the exercise
later. What are they doing? They do
not seem to be chasing any luckier one
of their number with a crust in his beak,
though at times there is a moment of live-
lier rush, as if hoping to overtake some-
thing. It seems rather a sport. They play
circus, or follow-my-leader. They are lit-
erally skylarking, except for the song.

When spring comes in town the arrival is
quick, but especially insidious. You quar-
rel with your overcoat, and your graceless
pot-hat makes your brow sweat. Then
you notice that it is warm, and you look
to the earth to prove it. Yes, the grass is
an inch out of the ground, yet only the
day before yesterday you noticed the yard
narrowly, and there was no new green, only
the dusty green of the rhododendron leaves
and the buds it has been cherishing since
fall ; the gray green of the honeysuckle ;
the streaks of old green in the grass, where
it was cheated by a midwinter spell of
October weather into coming out, then
brutally nipped ; and the dull stalks of the
roses with their leaf-buds in the axils of

SPRING 73

old stems that fell off at a touch in De-
cember. The iris, though its older leaves
are drooped and faded, keeps its inner and
shorter stalks firm and summery-looking
until the very last of the snowy season.

In our coast towns the awakening of the
year is heralded by a chorus of sneezes
and coughs ; for the air is charged with
moisture, making it seem warmer than it
is, and men steal into chambers to shed
their flannels and exchange them for gauze,
avoiding publicity and confession of this
swap to escape a scolding. Then they go
out, and the mercury drops twenty degrees
unannounced, and they go back home and
have things the matter with their lungs and
other interior fittings. At least they do
if they live up to the expectations of those
elderly female relatives who gather at the
bedside and say, " I told you so." Tak-
ing no joy in hot and scratchy flannel,
some of them, among whom I humbly
number myself, wear none of it, and have
only the usual number of colds. When
it is chilly one can put on an overcoat.
Doubtless if we would breathe deeply and

74 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

use our lungs as we should, a change
in temperature or atmospheric condition
would not bother us. A few people think
it a solemn duty to acquire fevers, boils,
bad blood, and other incorrect habits in
the spring; and this class of the self-de-
luded afflict themselves with bitter herbs
and nauseous stews, which are known as
"spring medicine." As if there could be
a spring medicine ! The advertising quack
vends gallons of nostrums on the strength
of an inherited faith. There are no spring
disorders, any more than there are autumn
disorders, or a " line storm," or a devil, or
a will-o'-the-wisp.

It is a subtle and wondrous change that
the trees make in the few first days of
leafage. Red is a common color for the
newest foliage, and in certain of the oaks
it is almost as strong a red as you find in
October. Does this serve any protective
purpose against insects or browsing ani-
mals? Hardly. It is that the sunlight has
not had time to kindle the chlorophyl.

Rains are to be looked for now; and
after a long, hard one I notice that the

SPRING 75

shade-maples in the street are drooping, as
if water-soaked or chilled. Does the lack
of light sadden them ? The effect is some-
what lasting, for they do not brighten
promptly when the sun returns. But how
the fall of water inspirits the algae ! Look
for them on the north side of tree-trunks
after rain. Small boys who want to trail
grizzlies and red men through the woods
may begin their education in forestry in
our yards and streets.

Earth is deceptive — at least the mixed
kind on our block is so. It looks as if it
would be an easy thing to spade up the
whole yard in a day ; but as it is impossi-
ble to run a blade full depth in less than
three tries, the job becomes appalling be-
fore even the borders are dug over. We
gather up the cobbles and coal-hods that
are exhumed in this industry, and after
dark cast them into a hollow across the
way, where they and the bed- springs are
sure to become springs of profanity in the
man who is going to build there. (And
serve him right for shutting out our view !)
Once the digging promised to be interest-

76 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

ing, for it looked as if we had discovered
moles ; but on penetrating their supposed
tunnel, it was found to be caused by the
soil working out under the fence into the
carpenter's yard, which is a foot or so lower
than ours. But there is some instinct in
us, dating back to more-times-great-grand-
fathers than we would try to enumerate,
that bids us dig, and there is a natural
conscience that approves when we have
put in and covered the seeds. The world
is going to be richer for our day's work,
and when we come in with lame back and
trembling hands, marveling that physical
labor should be so hard to the unaccus-
tomed, we feel a glow of pride, and an as-
surance that we have earned sleep and a
dinner. Better, we have earned health.
We have no pessimism where green things
are and people dig for their dinners. Pes-
simism is worse than tragedy: it is a
tragedy of the soul ; the attribute of a
tired-out race. When we keep in touch
with nature we share her splendid life.

On the day in early March when, for the
first time in the year, I saunter forth with-
out an overcoat, with the youngsters in

SPRING 77

tow, likewise without top-coats, to their
relief and glee, we find the Scleranthus
annuus brightening. What a name to roll
under the tongue, and what nonsense to
give it to such a little, harmless plant !
Also we find springing grass in warm cor-
ners, a few feet from old snowdrifts partly
glaciated to a depth of three or four feet.
But the find of the day is a caterpillar
moving stiffly over an old newspaper.
Where was he quartered all winter ? And
only last night there was a tight freeze.
Clarence and Harold carry this creature in-
to the house and put him under a tumbler,
as partial offset for the loss of the turtle.
The second turtle they brought from New
Jersey would come into the house in the
fall whenever a door was opened, instead
of burying himself as he would have done
if he had never learned that houses were
warm. We wrapped him in carpets, put
him into a box, and he went to sleep ; but
during some zero weather his slumber
merged into the long one. His predecessor
was kept in a warm cellar, and did not
hibernate. He did worse — he died.
On the night of this same March day

78 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

we are able to see the eclipse of the moon
from our yard as well as if we had been in
Walden.

With the graying and thinning of our
hair we have less warmth under it, they
say, and begin to live in the past — in that
period when we amounted to something,
or thought we did. And in this season of
the year one childish episode returns to
me : May Day. The good old custom, set
by the Druids, of rambling off to field or
grove on the first of May, and making a
show of gathering flowers that usually were
not there, was as general in Boston in my
early years as that of shooting gunpowder
and each other on the Fourth of July among
the boys of all our towns to-day. School
was dismissed, and the children put on
wreaths of flowers, and traveled about in
groups, playing games or picnicking with
their teachers or other elders among the
Cambridge elms, the Middlesex fells, and
the Newton hills. As there were few flor-
ists in those days and little pocket-money
among the juvenile Puritans, their wreaths
were made of paper ; and sheets of colored

SPRING 79

tissue, from which these garnitures were
cut, were offered in the shops at a cent
apiece, as freely as toys at Christmas.
These sheets the maternal hand wrought
into marvelous roses, camelias, and other
blossoms that had no likeness to anything
on earth; but there was color, and the
effect was innocent and pretty. Now and
then one heard of dances about the May-
pole, and the garlands were of paper, too.
The only garlands I ever saw were made
of that. Yet, from the way the poets used
to talk about them, you might suppose
that flowers grew that way on every bush.
The sweet old day is gone. Perhaps Dec-
oration Day takes the place of it. It was
not very seasonable, anyway ; and a boy
with a wreath of flowers, upturned collar,
and red nose did not look entirely spring-
like. If the true allegory of New Eng-
land's May is ever painted, she will be
represented in a sealskin sack and a pair
of overshoes, with hothouse roses in her
hand.

VI

SUMMER

QUMMER is the time when the yard
O looks best and feels worst — meaning
that the human creatures who maintain it
are least at ease ; for we have about four
months in the year when the temperature
is infernal. Those who can, and are wise,
fly to the hills. Those who are poor and
can't, or won't, stay among the baking
bricks and blistering asphalt, and toil and
drink and grumble and die. And it is not
every one who can show a yard with fifty
varieties of plant in bloom at once to miti-
gate the temperature. For, really, it seems
a shade less hot when you can smell roses
through the windows, and when the lus-
ciousness of honeysuckle pervades the
steaming, stagnant air. In the morning,

when people are gasping at the humidity,
80

SUMMER 81

and the heat is rippling up from the flag-
stones and out from the house-fronts, we
have only to go to the back windows and
look down into the lush greenery to feel as
if there were less perspiration. In New
York a yard, save just enough of one for
clothes to dry and cats to sing in, is an ex-
ception. I would rather rent this two-
story affair with a few feet of nature added,
than live in Fifth Avenue and have no
grass to put my feet on.

And there goes a statement that will be
doubted, because there are so many who
believe that everybody wants to be rich.
Comfortable, free from anxiety, yes. Rich,
no. The joys of wealth have been extolled
openly in converse, covertly in writing.
Few have published the joys of poverty —
not the pretty sentiment of song and pic-
ture, the roses and love and bread and
cheese and lowly cottage and all that, but
the real enjoyment of it. Think of its irre-
sponsibility, of its freedom from duns, for
nobody will trust you ; of the security
from invitation to drunken dinners, insipid
calls, pretentious receptions, solemn func-

82 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

tions, and fussy teas; of the liberty to do
nearly as you like, and go where you please,
and enlarge upon Mrs. Grundy as roundly
in words as you are sure to do in thought.
Poverty throws a man on himself, and he
is happiest and best when he is making
the most of himself. His pleasures, being
simple and intellectual, are lasting. He is
relieved of a lot of worry about yachts,
starch, balls, dresses, precedence, and fluff;
and he does n't have insomnia because the
papers failed to get his name " among
those present " at the dinner to Lord de
Livrus. There is a man who struggled
for years to get into the set that calls it-
self society and strangely overweens itself
because Jenkins hangs on its skirts and
reports its breathings in the public prints.
Ever since he got in he has been wonder-
ing why he did it. We are all rainbow-
chasers. The pains of poverty, where they
occur, depend on the width of the gap be-
tween a victim's material aspirations and
his possessions. The poorest people I
know are bankers and speculators with
yearly incomes of $50,000 or so, and two

SUMMER 83

houses to keep. The chief blessing of
poverty is that other folks don't ask you
to help them to live.

Truly, the opulence of gold may comfort
one, but it cannot be a substitute for the
wealth of color in our yard. No, it is not
a vain statement. Reason it out for your-
self: limitless gold, in bareness and dullness
and squalor; or next to none of it, and
brightness and gaiety and liberty and ac-
tion ?

This is when we reap that which we
have sown in the spring. We have coddled
it through the frosts, and now we glean it
for dinner and the neighbors, and some
sprays and blossoms for the always eager
children of the tenements. Reginald Mc-
Gonigle comes over the fence and helps
himself, though he does n't care much
about flowers. Few good things come
without work, — it is only the bad things
that do that, — and my wife often puts in
a morning when I am at the shop, and we
labor together for an hour after I come
home in the evening. Insects take most
of our time, but there are dead leaves to

84 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

pinch off, earth to stir, vines to train, en-
thusiastic bushes to trim, weeds to pull,
grass to cut, cats to shoo away, and the
whole place to water. If time is worth
money, it is cheaper to buy flowers at the
shops ; but it is the raising of them that
makes the best fun. Remit your care,
even for a few days, and the place becomes
"a sight"

It is surprising that weeds want so much
room. Tear them up, and you see much
bare earth under and about them. They
not only steal the nutriment from the
flowers, but try to monopolize the sun-
shine. The thrifty weed is like the thrifty
man, and even the thrifty mind ; yet no :
for the best mind is one-sided, and does
not get in the way of lesser ones. They
will have it that we ought to develop our
minds generally as well as specifically. A
mind evenly grown is prettier to look at,
like the box-trees in old-fashioned gar-
dens after the gardener has trimmed them ;
but shapeliness is not enough : strength
and reliability are more.

The mind of a Newton, a Darwin, an

SUMMER 85

Edison may, after all, be big in one de-
partment, and in others shrunken from
disuse. One may even have a mind like
a Turner or — no, I will not mention the
musician's name — that would show itself
on the outside of the head by one big bump
in a desert of depression. And here is
Got, dean of the Comedie Francaise, claim-
ing that in his calling people get on best
without minds. Bother it all ! The worst
of thought in this nineteenth century is
that you don't know what to think. My
Emerson and Bacon, even my Burroughs
and Thoreau, shall suggest nothing to me
to-day. I will leave my brains in the
house, and sit among the petunias and
sweet-peas. For nature, even a yardful
of it, makes health in her communicant.
Get away from self- consciousness. Think
not of your mind nor of your fate. Why
be always thinking on your end ? as grave-
yard literature hath it. We are here to
live, not to die. Continue the good work
that those might have done who are gone.
So shall you be prepared to die.

There may be matters that people hold

86 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

more different minds about than gardening,
but I doubt.it. The study of it from maga-
zines and floriculturists is an experience to
blister the understanding and destroy con-
fidence in man. I bought some roses.

" Don't you water 'em much," said the
man who sold them to me ; "for if you do
you are sure to rot them. They '11 send their
roots down and get all the water they want."

The man was so confident he aroused
my suspicions, so I went to a magazine to
see if he knew his business. He did n't ;
for the periodical put stress on watering>
and said that roses could not do without
it. They needed sun. Then I tried an-
other magazine. It had nothing to say
about water or lime or sun, but it insisted
on very rich earth, and on letting the
bushes alone after they were set out.
Then I tackled a gardener, and he said :
" Roses ? Well, they 're kind of unsatis-
factory ; have so many diseases and bugs ;
but if you '11 dust them with tobacco and
use a sandy soil and give them manure-
water and let them have a drink when
they look thirsty, and stir the earth up

SUMMER 87

around them every little while, they will
generally bloom, sometimes."

And then I looked up the boss of a large
flower-shop and asked him, and he said :
" Roses will live out and bloom all the
time in any kind of a soil, and it does n't
make any difference whether they have
light or shade."

Now, then, what are you going to do
about it ? I 'm going to keep on treating
mine as I treat the rest of the plants: weed
them, shower them at evening, and pick the
worms off. Then if they won't bloom they
can make way for something that will. I
may mention that the only roses that gave
us any satisfaction were the cheap, com-
mon kinds that were well grown before we
bought them. The dwarfs, so pretty in
the catalogues, were a mean and measly
lot, producing perhaps one flower apiece ;
and the crimson rambler that was to cover
our fence with pounds of bloom, promptly
rambled down into the earth and stayed
there, like our California violets that were
to bear flowers something less large than
saucers.

88 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

But if roses do not always behave in
town as you expect them to, there are
other flowers that surpass expectation.
The fleur-de-lis (flower of Louis — the
" royal lily " of France, which is not a
lily, and belongs to us as much as to Eu-
rope) is one of those steady, reliable growths
that nobody should be without. We put
ours into a clump, and as they have grown
they have matted together, so that for a
month we have a gorgeous array of white,
yellow, blue, and purple flowers, faintly fra-
grant and greatly satisfying. Insects do
not make too much havoc with them, and
they almost never touch the blooms.

Then there are morning-glories that sow
themselves like weeds, and petunias that
flower all summer, ditto geraniums, and
the sunny nasturtium with its variants of
lemon, gold, orange, scarlet, red, and crim-
son, the modest yet showy portulaca, and
sundry others. But you do not have to buy
anything. Raise wild flowers. Every va-
cant lot has them, and the suburbs are gay
with dozens of species all the way from
April to snow-time. I have never been

SUMMER 89

without them since we occupied our pres-
ent quarters, and there are few things to
beat our golden-rod, daisies, violets, butter-
cups, and dandelions. We have a wild
corner where these and other plants thrive
among ferns and mosses, and it is the
prettiest and most reliable part of the yard.

The golden-rod was sown by accident.
It was supposed to be something choice,
and we watched and watered and weeded
it. After it was a foot or so out of ground
the leaves began to look oddly familiar. It
was perhaps two feet tall before we recog-
nized it fairly as the roadside weed and
breeder of hay-fever, in other people; but
it was then so green and fair that we could
not bear to tear it up. We took up only
a root or so to set nearer to the house, and
in September we had two bouquets of yel-
low as pretty as one would wish to see.
Next year the plants had increased the
number of their shoots, ran to a height of
five feet, and bloomed copiously. Last
year they were six feet high, and their
flower-spikes were majestic.

So with our " jimson-weed." It should

90 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

be explained, for the enlightenment of
the very few who don't know, that the
name is a corruption of Jamestown weed,
as the plant spread itself liberally over the
site of Jamestown, Virginia, after that town
had been burned in 1676, as the only way
to keep the scampish and dunderheaded
Berkeley out of the place. How this par-
ticular weed got into our premises nobody
knows ; but without warning or planting it
just came up and grew. There is none
other within a thousand feet of us, I should
say ; the wind certainly did not carry the
seeds, and I should not suppose that birds
would, either, for they are poison — at
least to featherless bipeds. And being
there, I made the best of it, and before
cool weather set in it had become an ex-
hibition. But I find that others have dis-
covered it as a flower, for a seedsman's
catalogue, lately arrived, sets forth the
merits of Datura Stramonium, which is an
alias for the humble jimson. It likewise
rejoices in the name of thorn-apple in some
localities.

" Hello ! You Ve got a castor-oil plant

SUMMER 91

back there, have n't you ? " exclaimed one
visitor, as he entered our reservation ; and
he would n't believe it, for a while, when I
told him it was jimson. That was after
several weeks of feeding and watering and
stirring of the earth about its roots. Hav-
ing made a cultivated plant of it, it re-
warded us by inviting in a lot of insects and
blooming profusely. It has a regal and
tropical look, with its sleek stem and huge
leaves ; and its long lavender trumpets,
streaked with purple and delicately per-
fumed, are as fine as if the plant were ex-
pensive. The flowers last but a day or
so, then droop. We find them on the day
after blooming collapsed and depending
from the long, thread-like pistil at the
base of which the nutty-looking fruit is
forming. Its pet pest is a tiny black bee-
tle that peppers the leaves with holes.
The stramonium would be acknowledged
as a horticultural masterpiece if only it
would get rid of its smell — the sickish,
soupy odor that arises whenever it is jos-
tled. But we put up with evil smells from
other plants — the lantana, for example.

92 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

No; the objection to stramonium, as to all
other wild flowers, lies in its cheapness.
The vacant lots are full of it, and it is
called a weed ; so that settles it.

Nothing better than the jimson illus-
trates the necessity a plant is under of
blooming when you pick its wilted flowers,
and refuse to let it go to fruit. A plant has
a maternal desire for offspring, and when
thwarted it constantly renews its attempt
to make seed. The flower is simply a
means to an end. Its odor and color draw
the insect who, in his search for food, un-
consciously fertilizes it ; and conception
occurs as soon as the pollen of one flower
is dusted on the pistil of the next by the
legs or wings of the moth or bee. Some
plants have not vitality enough to form a
second crop of blossoms when the first has
been picked ; but others crack along all
summer, blooming prodigiously. Such
others are the petunias, geraniums, phlox,
pansies, and oxalis. Indeed, almost all
plants, except those of the rose and lily
tribe, will put forth a second series of
flowers if the first is clipped. I made

SUMMER 93

a moth-mullein bloom three times in a
few weeks after transplanting it from a
vacant lot, by cutting off its seed-pods ;
and the balsams were long kept in flower
by the same treatment. That is one of
the charms of the garden : the flowers give
back more than you take away.

And there are the yarrows, pink and
white, and their humbler cousin the cam-
omile. Cultivate a yarrow. No prettier
plant grows. But let it have its own wild
way so far as you can. So with the cam-
omile, which is an honest as well as a free
and modest plant, and if it has over-much
attention it will stunt and sicken. The
camomile that comes out of dusty lots,
generously hiding bricks and old bottles,
is among the soundest and largest. It is
but one of the half-noticed and wholly mis-
prized beneficences that the town does
not deserve. Coddle the plant, shade it,
manure it, and you will have done what
the flatterer does to a man from whom he
wants some favor; it will droop away
from you and withdraw painfully from
the unwelcome service. Sensitive, sensible

94 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

plant! Left to itself, it may heighten its
beauty or take on strangeness. Hamilton
Gibson said that he once found a head
of yarrow blossoms that was surrounded
with rays like a daisy or a camomile.
The foliage of yarrow and camomile are
so alike that it is easy to mistake the one for
the other ; but pinch a leaf of each to ex-
tract the smell, and the difference is plain :
the camomile is rank and herby, the yar-
row spicy and nutty. The flowers are
widely different, and the camomile is of-
ten called a daisy by city folks because it
is yellow with white rays.

What a wonder it is that people who
like flowers do not make more of the wild
ones ! Take the dandelion, noblest of the
early blooms, and the only fearless one,
and what might not be made of it ? Fancy
a window full of these golden disks in win-
ter! I chose one of these plants out of
half a hundred in our yard one spring, and
made an aristocrat of it for a month, not
taking it from its place, but merely giving
it extra attention. It had manure-water
now and then, it was sprinkled every even-

SUMMER 95

ing, broken and faded leaves were picked
off, and an effort was made to keep down
the florescence. Our dog, Arthur, and
even Skimplejinks, the cat, interfered to
some degree with the experiment; but
even after many leaves and blossoms had
been torn off, the plant formed a heavy
mat of green, and the flower-heads, though
not large, were numerous. It was not so
successful a dandelion — absurd corrup-
tion of dent de lion — as one can often find
by the wayside, but it was the best in our
yard. There was one that bore twenty-
five heads of flowers at a time, yet the
plant was so small I could cover it with
my hand. Dandelion roots are so long
that they do not take kindly to the re-
straints of civilization. I put a small one
into a pot about six inches deep, which I
plunged in one of the beds. Through the
hole in the bottom the roots cast many
threads that had to be torn when it was
taken up for winter housing, but the plant
bloomed in captivity.

Speaking of cultivated plants, I brought
in a cinquefoil from the vacant lot across

96 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

the way, potted it, and sank it in a bed to
see if cultivation would improve it. I be-
lieve it did, a little. On taking it up, I was
surprised to find the interior of the pot
lined with tough pale-brown paper, so
that when the plant was pulled out it
brought this paper with it, a perfect cast
of the pot. I was sure I had put nothing
into it but earth, and a chip of brick to
secure drainage, and this phenomenon puz-
zled me. I tore up the wrapping and dis-
covered that it was connected by many
threads with the roots of the plant. The
mystery was solved : the paper was a sheet
of rootlets. The pot was small, and so, in
their effort to get out and drink, the root-
lets had gone up and down the inner side,
weaving a fine sheath for the bit of earth
in which the cinquefoil had been set. It
is an odd fact that some domesticated plants
do not flower until they are pot-bound.

Not all wild flowers submit to care.
They get into wrong soils and situations,
and plants do not survive misfits so well
as men. Few of us are where or what we
want to be, and the world is full of round

SUMMER 97

holes with square human pegs in them.
If a plant is not rightly placed, it simply
dies and gets out of its trouble. Yet some-
times, when we think it dead, it is only in-
valided and is biding its time. It is a
plant that loves sand and sun, and has got
into a shaded piece of muck ; or it wants
shade and repose, and its foothold is hot
and windy : but a few days of drought or
rain, or warmth or coolness, will revive
the forlorn little thing, and it pops back
into daylight once more, puzzled, maybe,
but robust and glad.

And how seldom has a misplaced man
an experience like this ! Even our yard is
not a hermitage. If only the jangle of the
door-bell did not penetrate to this seclu-
sion of phlox and petunias ! It is the
world's demand to be let in to play the
spy and gossip. It is the analogue of
the Westerner who, rinding a cabin in the
wilderness with curtains drawn, reached
through the window and brushed them
aside, inquiring, " What 's going on here
so darned private ? " In a sense it re-
minds us of an alleged and supposititious

98 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

duty that we owe to the world ; some-
thing too much of our debt to the world,
and of our claims upon it ; something too
much of dragooning into the sciolistic so-
cialism of the time — a blind reaching for
more and mere animal comforts. A man's
duty is mainly to himself. If he absolve
the world from its part in the conventional
arrangement, the world must do the like
for him, even though, in loving nature
more than man, one resigns some of his
humanity, and shapes his destiny to larger,
rougher, more unsocial ends than those
of his fellows. Mountains become more
than people to him, so he goes back to
primal strength and eke to savagery.

We are afraid of unpopularity — shock-
ingly afraid. We would rather be wrong
than unusual. Unconventionality is a
greater offense than sin. Litter the street
with rubbish, breed contagion in the neigh-
borhood, be a prize-fighter or an alder-
man, swindle your friend in a stock deal,
and the law will not trouble you ; but cut
the two buttons from the back of your
coat, let your hair grow, wear sandals,

SUMMER 99

bring your favorite hippopotamus into the
house, leave off a crinoline or bustle when
those horrors are rife, and whew ! the gab-
ble and the scolding ! The laws laid down
by Mrs. Grundy are the most stringent
of all laws. Shall we ever wake up and do
our own thinking ? Let loose a Luther,
or Bellamy, or Marx, and what a coil !
Because they tell something that the others
have not told. How afraid we have been
of science, because its facts disagree with
the whimsies we have been expecting it
to prove ! We ought to love a revolution-
ist, even one of destructive theories, be-
cause he puts life enough into us to make
us complain, at all events.

Look at the superstitions that have laid
hold on us — superstitions about wealth
and society, and other superstitions about
equality ; superstitions about secret frater-
nities and spring medicine, equinoctial
storms and amber beads, goose-bones,
Bhagavat Gitas, unlucky Fridays, and night
air. Superstition is a roundabout process
of false reasoning; and it is harder to reason
falsely than right ; yet see how we keep on

loo NATURE IN A CITY YARD

doing it. Let one man swear that thirteen
is an unlucky number, and you will have
to disprove it thirteen times to prevent an
epidemic of belief. It all comes through
fear, and dates back to the time when fear
was a proper and self-preservative condi-
tion among men. It kept them at a safe
distance from each other, and from moso-
saurs and mastodons. Most people have
to be afraid of something in order to keep
their moral balance. Among the roughs
this fetish is the police, among the better
sort it is law, government, and govern-
ors; and when you meet people who
think disrespectful things of honorable
bar-keepers and the equator, you will find
them cringing before an Idea : their own
Idea, too. As to —

Ah, I see what 's the matter. The
thermometer in my yard marks 98° in the
shade, and the humidity is about 80.
States of mind are likely to happen in a
city summer. I will get out the hose and
spray the grass. Its brightening color
will bring up visions of the country.

Since the yard has been watered regu-

SUMMER 101

larly toadstools have increased in number.
There are at least two varieties, and on
some days the ground is dotted with them.
The beds that contain the heavier plants,
which cast deep shadows, are rife with cru-
cibulum vulgare, the oddest fungus that
grows. At first it was mistaken for the
seed-cup of the portulaca, left from last
year, for it is dry and rusty-looking; but
the appearance of new ones, and their
change from balls to bowls, did away with
that notion. The cup is one third to one
half an inch in diameter, and holds what
appear to be black seeds. They are not
seeds, however, but spore-cases, lightly
held to the cup by white threads, and
quite like eggs in a nest.

These fungi and oddities always make
us look into them. Flax-blooms and their
like are monotonously perfect — classic.
The classic is the perfection of the regular.
The picturesque, on the contrary, is de-
light in the irregular. Ragged vegetation
is picturesque; so are the woods; so are
orchids and cacti. Gardens are introduc-
tions of the classic into nature — the hu-

102 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

manizing of nature. It depends on the
humanizer whether the process is quietly
submitted to or not. But I am glad to
see that parks and gardens are no longer
" slicked up " as they used to be. Vain
man has discovered that nature can do some
things well. For two thousand years we
have been influenced in matters of form
by the Greeks. The Greeks are a little
too perfect for some moods. Their work
has not enough in reserve. It is like Mo-
zart's music, all light and no shade. Let
us have some rudenesses and weaknesses.
Let us be grandly and gloomily Gothic,
once in a while.

Yet the Parthenon has subtle and inten-
tional irregularities. There is not a line
in it which is mathematically straight. Its
architects must have studied the charm of
diversity and taken lessons from the flowers
and trees. Nothing exactly conforms to
rule, and sometimes rule is set at naught.
For instance, I have seen this summer a
double wild cherry — two stones and one
stem — a pear growing absolutely upright,
and flowers that freaked unaccountably in

SUMMER 103

shape and color. Such things emphasize
a general regularity, yet we are pleased
with the latent chance of divergence : it
gives latitude. Indeed, in all forms and ex-
pressions of worth and beauty we swerve
from our original aim and bend toward its
opposite. Painting that has no temper of
breadth, tone, sobriety, — repellent things
to the new eye, — how sugary, thin, and
pretty-pretty it is ! In music we would
tire of major harmonies forever, and want
a season of minor, which is nearer to dis-
cord,— yes, and even a diminished chord
and discord itself for contrast's sake. We
do not take our colors in prismatic purity ;
we do not want our sculpture, bronze, and
porcelains in weak, smooth forms. The
palate objects to pure sugar, and will have
a hint of acid or of bitter. Man will not
be led wholly by his senses, nor suffer him-
self to be confined by their experience.
Especially in the outer world should he
be willing to merge his prejudice, for when
he is fairly and sympathetically in the heart
of nature he does not find its spirit reserved
and distant, as one philosopher declares it

io4 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

to be, but close and lovable and as near
frank as it can be in silence. Its magnifi-
cences are human.

Say, rather, our humanity still finds it-
self a brother to it. Carlyle and some
others who are interested only in men
complain if one writes of scenery : as if
Thoreau's rhapsodies and Burroughs's stud-
ies and Blackmore's descriptions were not
as well worth the effort as Carlyle's dys-
peptic grumbles at the very fellows who
entertain him. The vanity of men in
claiming to be all ! As if there would be
no bears or turtles to enjoy the world if
man were not on hand to oversee them !
Man's study is himself? Well, perhaps;
but how can he know himself if he fails to
know that grander, finer, more enduring
creation that has spawned him on this drift-
ing globule of matter ? In nature we touch
life. The world's — creation's — vital juices
course in every sapling. In the animals
who have shaken their roots loose and
gambol among the fields those juices are
stronger than among those who have walled
and shedded themselves away from the

SUMMER 105

earth, air, and light, — men and barnacles,
— and delivered themselves to abstractions.
The sun ! Light ! Heat ! Let us go to
the source. Let us be Parsees. Be distant
with men, once in a while, for sanity's sake.
Let their tumult come to you softened, as
their Sunday bells sound across the fields.
Then they, too, will seem to fit into the
scheme of things, which is all beauty, ex-
cept where man has made it otherwise.

And I cannot think our yard is other-
wise in its dress of flowers this summer.

VII

AUTUMN

OF all seasons in town, autumn is most
irksome mentally. Summer causes
more profanity and drink, but autumn is
the time when people want to be out of
doors. Man takes an incurable interest in
himself. Let him get up a fair to show
what he can do, and how he runs to see it !
The greater fair of nature — he has n't
always time for that. Except in autumn.
And there never was so rank a citizen
that he did not look at the fall color and
exult in it. Even the English visitor who
said that our October woods were "raw-
ther tawdry, ye know," did us the honor
to look at them. With the chilling of the
nights and the passing of the flowers, the
yard is left partly to take care of itself.
Some of the plants, being annuals, in seed,

106

AUTUMN 107

or past the time of it and promising no
more, have been pulled up ; a few have
been cut down ; some have been mulched ;
and the place no longer wears the tropic
look of summer. In the shortening after-
noons I shower the grass with a hose, and
keep that bright ; but the best of the flower-
time is passing. So I steal away on my
bicycle, and run through the parks and out
on Long Island, and on the roads that over-
look the Hudson ; for the color of the gar-
den now is as nothing to the color that
fills the woods. There are yellow, orange,
scarlet, crimson, purple, brown, green,
sometimes confusing, always gorgeous, tri-
umphant, joyous, exhilarating. There are
no tapestries, no Oriental rugs, no Chinese
porcelains, no silks from the East, like unto
these leaves of beech, birch, poplar, ma-
ple, sumac, oak, ampelopsis, and woodbine.
The poplar is nearly at the top of the
gamut with its pale yellow, the oak at the
bottom with its crimson bronze mottled by
dark green ; but the chief factor in the
celebration, the carnival that precedes the
winter rest, is the maple, most gorgeous

io8 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

thing that grows, with every shade of red
and yellow known to the painter in its
leaves, and the sun turning them into
gems and stained-glass windows. Why is
it that with our commercial determination
we have never made merchandise of this
splendor ? Leaves that have been waxed
and ironed keep their color for a long
time, and one would suppose that a bou-
quet of them would sell in the highways
as readily as roses. I gladly note that they
are beginning to sell daisies and golden-
rod in town, and a girl in Nantucket picked
up $150 in a summer by making up books
of pressed wild-flowers of that windy,
ocean-pounded moorland.

With a lessening in the humidity that is
such a cause of suffering in summer, the
temper of the populace improves. You
hear less squalling and slapping when you
pass the tenements (may the man be for-
given who invented those abominations !),
and there are not so many tired eyes
and lagging steps in the streets. Man was
not born to be an amphibian. He pre-
fers his air and water separate. Happy, ye

AUTUMN 109

dwellers amid the hills, who know not the
sweltering August fogs and hazes of the
shore !

Autumn color is obviously a result of
ripening. You find it without frost. In
October the maples are often as brilliant in
Florida as they are in Maine, and the con-
trast they make with the dark green of the
palms and the lush green of the under-
growth is startling. We need pure air,
however, for this color; and the town is
gray and brown, as it always is, the shade-
trees merely withering. The west- and
east-side streets of New York are the
ugliest places in all the earth. Every
spear of grass, every tree, has been care-
fully rooted up, that brawling humanity
may have nothing green in its eye and its
way ; and if in better streets you find a row
of starveling maples, they show no gaiety
in these days. Yet just across the river
the noble Palisades are sheeted in reds and
yellows that fruit in the sun resplendently.
And even in our yard the evil air steals in
and rusts the leaves where they should
glow. The blossoms of the gourd no

I lo NATURE IN A CITY YARD

longer emit their refined musky odor in
the morning, but the fruit makes spots of
gorgeous orange against the dulling leaves.
Chrysanthemums and cosmos are coming
to flower, and dandelions are putting up a
second crop. The little sheep-sorrel that
is red in the spring is likewise red in the
fall, and is one of the few plants that have
vivacity in town. Certain of the lesser
things have vanished. The gradual but
utter disappearance of many plants after
flowering is one of the oddest and most
unaccountable things in nature. There is
the little Scleranthus annuus, for example :
where does it go ?

I have mentioned our toads. They were
brought home from the suburbs in a botany-
box while young — so young they could
have been put into a walnut-shell. Their
fare of insects has been so plentiful that they
have waxed fat, the first inhabitant hav-
ing taken on almost unseemly proportions.
The ability of the fellow to disappear is
surprising. You beat about the bush, as
it were, and turn the leaves, but he never
shows up until he is good and ready, when

AUTUMN III

he will pop out from vacancy under your
very nose. Probably he buries himself at
the first frost. One of our earlier and ex-
perimental batches of toads never appeared
again after their first winter. I fear they
suffered in the early spading of the flower-
beds, either being jammed deep, beyond
hope of resurrection, or cut in twain by
the ignorant implement.

Toads are not pretty, but they are use-
ful in eating insects, and there is no harm
in them. The bigger toad is active about
nightfall, but he hops into the shade if he
sees me coming. When I take him up
he discharges water and tries to get away,
ducking and flinching every time I stroke
his head. One hot afternoon I discovered
him in a dense growth of sweet alyssum
by his croak, a short, faint hen-like note
several times repeated. When one of the
children took him up he croaked in his
hands. Later in the season he became
more vocal. This toad appeared to get
his growth in about two months, and his
voice came with his stature. On taking
him up in the fall, he would occasionally

112 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

utter a low "gur-r-r-r," with rippling throat.
I found him one morning on the water-
hyacinth. He had to climb over a rockery
set with cactus to get there ; and in run-
ning from me he jumped square into one of
the most spiny and vicious of these plants,
apparently without injury to himself or
the plant.

There used to be a belief that toads were
poisonous. A dog will not hold one in his
mouth very long, they say. I never hold
them long that way, either. But I often
hold them in my hand, to their distress
probably, and find that they do not " give
warts." And that belief is like many an-
other. We ought to get up a society of
exploders — men who will blow up fallacies
of custom, government, laws, and quota-
tion. How many venerable sayings would
be killed off by such a society ! You hear,
for instance, that "you can't make bricks
without straw." Unless you have been in
the East, or in Mexico, which is much the
same, you never saw a brick with straw in
it. Haverstraw bricks have never a straw.
They speak of elusive hopes as will-o'-the-

AUTUMN 113

wisps. Well, there are no will-o'-the-wisps,
except in scientific books. Shakspere tells
us that " uneasy lies the head that wears a
crown." Look at the crowned heads of
Europe. Are they not a sleek, self-satis-
fied, well-fed, well-slept company of orna-
ments ? Science, philosophy, and art need
purgation by common-sense. The best
have the most of this uncommon quality.
People who describe great men they have
seen always exhibit a dumb surprise that
they look and act so like other folks.
Greatness never consists in holding your-
self above the mass, though you may need
to stand at one side of it. You will not be
seen at all unless you are content to stay
at the human level. The great are great
in common things. It is the clear, patent
truth in Shakspere that is admirable.

Speaking of Shakspere does not remind
me of our turtle. I just remembered him
as one of our autumn enlivenments. He
is the third we have owned, and was im-
ported from New Jersey. I don't know
what he finds to eat, but he is healthy and
happy, though in these chilly mornings he

H4 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

is apt to be sluggish. Like the toads, he
has ability in self-effacement, and can stay
lost by the quarter-hour in our few square
feet of yard. The youngsters have named
him Plato — the same being the name they
called the others by, though one had been
discovered to contain eggs. Why Plato,
more than James Q. Smith, I do not know,
unless it be for the gravity of the creature
and the inscrutability of his wisdom.

The carpenter's dog is surprised and
interested when Plato toddles across the
yard. This dog climbs upon a lumber-pile
to view the proceedings and bark his opin-
ions. But the turtle does not mind. He
travels about in his uncouth fashion, get-
ting his meals; and after acquiring nutri-
ment he likes to cover himself with an old
sod at the back of the yard, where the sun
shines warm. He will remain there, mo-
tionless, for hours; and wherever he may
be carried, he will amble back to his sod
at once. On being taken up, he hisses and
retires promptly within his shell ; though
if put on the ground he will try to walk
away, even when one is holding him. If

AUTUMN 115

put into water, he tries to get out ; but after
a dry spell we have held him under run-
ning water, and have seen him drink, with
a slow elongation of the neck at each swal-
low. On a mild morning, after rain, he
takes a joy in promenades ; and from the
window he seems to be eating petunias
and alyssum, snapping at them like a hen.
Our turtles, like other savages, have been
spoiled by civilization. They fell into a
way of coming into the house out of the
cold. They did not learn that worms and
things are not provided in a house; and
as they refused to eat anything that we
offered to them, they paid the penalty of
culture with their lives. They refused to
bury themselves as the cold increased, and
lumbered into the kitchen whenever the
door was opened, making something of a
struggle to climb the step. They knew
where it was warm ; and if the door failed
to open, they sat on the grass and became
comatose, like beggars who faint of starva-
tion or " throw fits " on your door-step in
revenge for the refusal of drink-money and
your second-best clothes.

Il6 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

Plato I. was especially persistent in
coming in, so we let him have the run
of the cellar. He stayed awake until Jan-
uary or so, bumbling around in the half-
darkness, refusing such food as we offered
to him, and drinking little ; and so he
wasted and died. Plato II. was equally
stubborn. He was stupid on cold days,
and often appeared to be dormant, for
he would allow himself to be handled
without waking. So we rolled him in a
carpet, put him in a box in the shed, and
expected him to sleep until spring. But
when the weather modified he scratched
his way to freedom again, and stayed out
of doors for a day. Once I took him from
his wrappings and set him on the grass.
He awoke and maundered aimlessly about
until the sun began to sink, when he drew
into his shell and apparently went to sleep
again. He was returned to his carpet and
box, and after a series of bitter nights,
when the mercury dropped to zero, he
was found dead of freezing.

Our autumn insects are lively until after
the frosts. One September day there is a

AUTUMN 117

great to-do among the ants in the aster
bed. Dozens of winged ants are out with
them. All run in and out in desperate
haste or anxiety. Wonder for what. Per-
haps a fresh crop of young ones has ar-
rived. Could the rain have beaten in their
roofs ? Is this a new arrival of slaves ?
Or are they holding an election ?

One of the first indications of the on-
coming cold is the retirement of the earth-
worms. Do they feel the chill at the sur-
face, and burrow deeper to get away from
it ? Or do the roots of vegetation strike
lower as the year wears on, and do the
worms follow them, or keep away from the
spread of their meshes ? Men owe much
to these humble creatures. Without worms
to loosen the soil, the face of the earth
would be a desert, dry, hard, incapable
of supporting any other vegetation than
cactus and sage-brush. The farmer could
not exist if it were not for the worm. He
swallows his way into the ground, ejecting
the earth behind, instead of scratching his
way in with claws that he does not have.
And to think that these creatures lift to

Ii8 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

the surface fifteen to twenty tons of earth
to the acre in this manner every year !
Soft as they are, their muscular tissue is
not weak. Stamp your foot near them
when they are lying half out of their holes
at evening, and see how instantly they pull
themselves in, out of sight.

One of them, a foot long, was found
wriggling over our flagged walk, like a
snake, in his haste to get to cover. I
watched another, about six inches long
when extended, crawling over the walk.
On arriving at the flower-bed, rich and
heavy with recent rain, he almost imme-
diately began to dig. In four minutes by
the watch he had buried himself, all but
the tip of his tail. Fast going, for a crea-
ture that has no bony substance. When
the yard has been manured and the rains
are heavy, the worms appear in great
abundance. They are slimy and loath-
some until you come to know them ; but
when you discover use in things you cease
to fret about their appearance. I can see
that their burrowings and castings loosen
and lighten the soil, and have never learned

AUTUMN 119

that they injured vegetation. In this they
differ from the insects that depredate among
the leaves ; and the dependence of animals
on plants is painfully, exasperatingly ob-
vious to any one who tries to raise the
latter. It is the killing and exile of our
birds, no doubt, that have caused such an
alarming increase in vermin — weeds of
the animal kingdom, creatures whose use
has not been discovered. Animal life is
in plant life everywhere. You find worms
curled in the spore-cups of lichens.

I once found a shelf fungus draped with
curling white threads, and wondered if
they could be strings of loosening spores ;
but on breaking it open, I found grubs in-
side. The strings were their excreta. And
even in water I have found earth-worms,
though how long they had been there I
don't know. Our water-hyacinth fell into
a rusty aspect; but it doubled its blooms
after I had taken it out of the jardiniere
that served as a tank for it and culled away
full half its substance in dead leaves, blad-
ders, and a few of the long, feather-like
roots. It was in this process that I dis-

120 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

covered an earth-worm quite alive in
the mud at the bottom. Had he been
there during the weeks of the plant's
growth, or had he just fallen in ? Had he
climbed the rockery, among the cacti, to
reach the water; was he trying to drink,
or had Reginald McGonigle tossed him in
during an unbidden visit ? One of these
worms, dropped from a flower-pot, was
found on the leaf of a pitcher-plant. His
surprise and bewilderment were betokened
by questioning ventures this way and that.

And as we have rotations in crops and
weeds, so I find rotations of insects and
things. This year the wire-worm is about
in myriads, the wood-louse or sow-bug
outdoes his brethren of last year five to
one, the hard-shelled, swift- footed centi-
ped is turned up so deep in the earth that
I think he must use the holes of the angle-
worms to get there, and the thrip is more
plentiful on the roses. Next year it will
be tarantulas and megatheriums, maybe.
Reginald McGonigle is the only constancy.

We begin to prize the autumn greenery,
and occasionally to put boxes or papers

AUTUMN 121

over plants when a frosty night is threat-
ening. The papers are generally blown
about the premises before morning, and
probably in their flight they break as much
as they should have saved. Our calceo-
laria, having been pinched down, is bloom-
ing anew ; our buttercup is still at it ; the
roses have a few belated buds; while the
cosmos, with its honest, wholesome, daisy-
like flowers and its feathery foliage, is just
enjoying itself. One of our cosmos plants
freaked in November in a singular fashion:
one of its flower-stalks had thickened lat-
erally until it was perhaps three quarters
of an inch wide, — obviously the union of
several stems, — and at its crest it bore
a long comb of stamens and pistils, with a
fringe of petals. This comb, or oval flower,
must have consisted of at least five united
flowers, and was three inches long. A
potted dandelion sulks. I stripped the
seeds from a head in the summer, and
pressed them under the mold in the pot.
They all came up together, a score of tiny
green shoots ; but perhaps because they
crowded each other they stopped at an

122 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

inch. We have few thistles, for the lawn-
mower gives little chance to them, and the
Russian thistle has been frightened away
to the west because of the laws against
it. I wonder why they don't pass a law
against jimson-weed, aphides, and Regi-
nald McGonigle. I 'm sure they need it.
But most likely it would never be enforced.
Some barrister would lend himself to an
opposition, and would cite acts of King
Stephen or the Virginia colonizers to prove
that these offenses had received a special
sanctity. If chosen to the legislature, he
might change his heart and his mind. Such
things have been heard of, you know, as
paying a lawyer a state salary to frame or
pass laws in the legislature, and discover-
ing him in court afterward in heated argu-
ment against the validity of his own laws.
Late fall and early spring are good sea-
sons for the study of geology and mineral-
ogy, as the vegetation is light, and the
character of the ground may be seen.
And our yard, in common with the other
yards of this town and some thousands
of miles of unyarded country, has had an

AUTUMN 123

interesting history. Had I stood 18,000
years ago where I stand to-day when I
weed the hydrangeas and stir the earth
about the "pinys," I should have been
facing a wall of ice, the receding glacier
of the last Ice Age. And I and certain
millions of others live on the debris of that
glacier. This enormous mass, over a mile
thick, moving sluggishly but irresistibly
southward to its melting-point, brought
with it millions of tons of sand, soil, gravel,
and boulders, and dumped them into the
Atlantic, building up from the bottom of
that sea an island 120 miles long, and leav-
ing parts of its moraine at other points
between here and the Rockies. A conjunc-
tion of exterior planets had pulled at the
earth by gravitative force, elongating its
orbit, so that for some years the winters
on the side slanted from the sun were
lengthened and the summers shortened.
The southern half of the globe will be
frozen up in about 75,000 years, when the
conjunction is repeated.

And in the light of such portentous
events the back yard becomes important.

124 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

I know the locale of certain fragments that
I find there — speaking now of minerals
and rocks, instead of the commoner rags,
boots, bottles, and other materials of " made
land." The green mica I know comes from
Fort George, New York ; the green feldspar
from a mile or two south of that point ; the
basalt from the palisades of the Hudson ; the
jasper from a now extinct reef of it which
may be traced beneath that river ; the ser-
pentine from Hoboken ; but mixed with
these are specimens from the Hudson
Highlands, the Adirondacks, the Connecti-
cut hills, the Green Mountains, perhaps
from those oldest hills of all, the Lauren-
tians — a noble range, no doubt, that the
glacier wore down to mere roots and stumps
of its old self. When we record or guess
upon these things, man and his work ap-
pear too trivial to think about, and time,
space, mass, force, too great for his under-
standing. There is too, in the passing of
the autumn, some hint of the cold death
that must overtake the race of humankind,
the world it lives in, and the solar system
in which it moves. It is too vast and

AUTUMN 125

lonely a theme for the imagination. By
potting the plants for winter blooming,
tearing up the faded annuals, setting bulbs
that are to flower in spring, and mulching
the beds against the coming of cold weather,
one can forget these grandeurs, and his
mind is comforted.

VIII
FLOWERS AND INSECTS

DID it ever come into your head that
you were going to like something from
merely hearing its name ? When I was
convalescing from an illness in my youth
it occurred to me that I wanted a charlotte
russe. I had never seen or tasted one of
those confections ; 1 hardly knew it from an
oyster; but I longed for it — because I did.
Invalids have that privilege. My parents
went to a baker and had one made. It
was one quart in content, and I ate it
greedily to the last crumb, and have never
cared much for charlotte russe since.
Sometimes this gustatory exploit recurs
to me when I find myself desiring with an
equal ardor of sympathy or curiosity to
own some object of natural interest or

beauty. There was a crystal of epidote,

126

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 127

for instance, that had to be got for my
little group of minerals. Why epidote
more than rhodonite or dioptase, I do not
know, unless it be that the name happened
to be remembered from seeing a labeled
specimen in childhood.

And so it was with the trillium. I had
never seen one, yet I cared a good deal
more for it than for a lilium. As I was
more than forty years old before I saw
one, there should have been a lack of en-
thusiasm in getting it ; but the exuberance
of youth came over me at the moment,
and I never coddled anything into health
with more care than I did that waxen flower
and its broad, frank setting, after I had
lodged it in a shady corner of my city
yard. Was it the name that made me like
it ? Trillium ! There is music in it ; there
is a sense of wildness ; it ripples on the
tongue ; it has cadence, and somehow it
suggests the woods. As in all spring
flowers, there is refinement in it, a delicacy
and modesty ; but, unlike most of the blos-
soms of its season, it has dignity and sub-
stance. Its petals are large for the time.

128 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

If it belongs to the rank of floral infants,
it is at least one of those big, healthy, com-
posed infants that are born at an advanced
age and are advising their elders at five.
What is of moment, it blooms and flour-
ishes in the wild corner of our yard.

Rather opposed to the trillium, with its
choiceness and aristocracy, is the mustard.
This cheap and frequent plebeian riots in
the mean places of the town — the empty
lots, the littered street sides. Just as the
summer had opened I found a black mus-
tard (why black ? for the Brassica nigra
has n't a bit of black about it) that had
sported, as the florists say, producing white
instead of yellow blossoms. Undeterred
by recent failures with wild clover, some
ferns, and some violets, I transplanted the
weed to the yard. Sharp differences of soil
no doubt kill these things, where breaking
of the roots may not, and when the mustard
collapsed I supposed it was done for ; but
in a week or two it put out buds, though it
did not straighten from its wilted attitude
for a month, and after a little it flowered
copiously. It is surprising what a number

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 129

of things get in your way when you look
for them. Since finding the white sports
on mustard I have looked for others and
discovered them by dozens. This sporting
is not uncommon, though there is always a
tendency to revert to the original type after
gardeners have succeeded in turning the
freak into a seeming permanence. Our
chrysanthemums were never truly fine but
once, and that was when they came from
the conservatory. Since then they have
been made small and unreliable.

A red petunia paled on my hands, and
on some of the other petunias there were
freaks of doubling. One whole plant of
this species threatened for a time to sport
into the double variety, for its stamens
thickened into petals, white and plainly
visible in the purple throat of nearly every
flower. The dianthus was unaccountable.
It sent up an extraordinary variety of
bloom — single, double, red, pink, white,
nearly black, in all patterns and shades.
Our nasturtiums, too, raised from the
seed of last summer's plants, show new
colors since last year. Our early chrysan-

130 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

themums — feverfew, or " featherfew " as a
florist calls them — are full of sports, singles
and doubles, yellows and whites, growing
on the same bush.

If we are surprised by atavism in the
human species, there is at least as much
reason to be puzzled by the pranks of
heredity in plants. Here is a pansy be-
low our window that bears blossoms of
a royal purple throated with gold. Ex-
plain, if you can, why it yields one
morning a blossom of white edged with
sky-blue. Has some ancestral cross in
fertilization, or some parent type, asserted
itself again ? The azalea often — indeed,
usually — sports into foreign colors, the
red issuing a dozen white blossoms, and
vice versa. A double petunia that I got,
with a noble, rose-like flower of crimson
velvet, turned its blooms into magenta
banded with white after getting into our
ground, and finally settled into that form.
One of our irises, which we soak at the
roots in spring to make them remember
their marshy habitat, petaling in mauve
and white, carried a stalk of deep purple

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 131

blossoms. Again, how is it accounted
for?

Equally curious with the sports are the
exhibitions of plant intelligence. Climb-
ing vines generally exercise a good caution
as to the way they will support themselves.
They act almost as shrewdly as animals.
But now and then they are fooled. A
sweet-pea in our yard caught a loose end
of string that was fluttering from the fence ;
but finding, after one of its tendrils had
taken about five turns at the very end
that it had no stability, it lengthened
and strengthened the tendril into a kind
of stem that held this string at arm's
length, so it might delude no other branch.
And the satisfaction that a plant seems to
feel when it gets where it wants to be must
extend itself to the beholder. A lantana
that I bought of a huckster as a common-
place bit of greenery spread into a bush
five feet wide and full of bloom in a
piece of dry, poor, sun-heated soil. And
I can't help thinking that men would be a
good deal like our lantana, only they hate
to leave their greenhouse, — the city, — and

132 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

stand the sun and wind, even with a prom-
ise of flowering into genius. The mass of
us dread change. We don't want our
roots disturbed. Even with our commu-
nistic tendency, we are so fond of ourselves,
even the worst of us, that we would think
twice about swapping places with other
people. As to exchanging personalities
— never ! We might want their advan-
tages, but would prefer to have them with-
out the penalty of assuming their bodies
and minds. But what a confession of help-
lessness this communism is ! One Thoreau
is worth twenty of us, for he dared to
live his own life. Specializing of indus-
tries has made us dependent on each other,
and society is become an exchange. But
why should I give fifty per cent, of my
effort for fifty per cent, of some other
man's? Why not keep my hundred per
cent., especially as I keep my personality
with it ?

Let 's see: where was I? Oh, yes; my
lantana. Ill-smelling, rather, and thorny,
but showy, clean, and reliable. With the
waning of the season it began to be im-

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 133

portant, and arose to a certain arboreal
dignity. Its clusters of yellow and orange
blossoms always drew the eye from the
window — the back one, of course ; for
there 's a big difference between the front
and the back view, even when the yard is in
its winter burial of manure and snow. The
front view bespeaks artifice, restraint, and
the maker of them — man. The back view
is just a peep at the page of nature. We
cannot cut the leaves, or get the covers wide
apart in the yard, but we can read a com-
forting sentence or two. We can't raise
anything in our strip of front yard : Mrs.
Mulcahey's goats from the next street
don't allow it.

Every year's experience with plants con-
firms one in respect for their courage, reso-
lution, and vitality. They ask only half a
show, unless they are pampered children
of the tropics. I put out our sick arau-
caria to die, for it had been hurt by the
carelessness of a servant and was dropping
its branches. I was assured that there was
no help for it. Pulling it out of its pot, I
thrust it negligently into the nearly worth-

9*

134 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

less soil at the back of the yard. It began
to brace up. Then I put it into better
earth, where it was shaded in the afternoon,
and it grew and became a respectable tree,
barring its lost branches.

The golden-rod, too, is a determined
plant. When a stalk of it finds that it can-
not reach straight up to the sunshine, it
lies down and works along sidewise until
it is clear of obstruction, when it turns an
angle and stands up. It does other queer
things. I took off half of a tall stem ; this
amputation affected the half that was left
only in that it doubled its foliage, putting
out fresh leaves in the axils of the old.
Many plants make up for docking or in-
terference by a continuous or extra output
of leaves or flowers. Our hollyhock was
kept in bloom unusually long by picking
off the flowers as they went to seed. The
spike that bore the blossoms kept growing
longer as the lower flowers were cut away,
until it was perhaps seven and a half feet
high, and it kept blooming until frost. A
dahlia stripped to the stalks by caterpil-
lars recouped after a little, and at the end
of the season had a finer, glossier coat of

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 135

green than our neighbors' dahlias. A
horse-chestnut in our town whose leaves
had been destroyed by the tussock-moth
began life over in October, and put out not
only fresh leaves, but blossoms.

Picking off a double white petunia that
had faded, I was surprised to see, through
a rent in its petals, what seemed like a
flower. Pulling off the corolla, this seeming
was found to be true. A folded blossom,
as large as two peas, lay within the petals
and stamens ; and one of the petals of this
infolded flower was the pistil of the outer
one. Nor was this instance unique, for I
found a flower within a flower on the same
plant afterward. Equally odd was a per-
formance of the bellis as it was going out
of bloom in late July. One of its blos-
soms put forth two minor ones, not from
the stalk, but from the disk, or base of the
disk, itself. A sepal, in that case, became
a stalk. Another sepal had enlarged and
had developed imperfect leaves. One of
the calendulas repeated this trick of the
bellis, no less than three flower-buds grow-
ing from the edge of one of its flowers.

Plants may have wens and warts, too,

136 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

besides those galls and swellings made by
stings of insects. Our smallest flowered
petunia put out a runner near ground ; and
as it had been planted near the stone walk,
the runner rambled out upon the flagg-
ing. Where the weight of it came upon the
stone, a callous tumor, or corn, was formed,
as large as the end joint of a man's thumb,
and studded with dwarfed or aborted leaves
so thick that they were like moss. Work-
ing among the sweet alyssum once, I turned
back a mass of long stalks, which flower
incessantly until the cold, to let in the light
on a patch of seeded earth ; and after thus
turning it several of the stems were found
to be thickened and enlarged where they
had rested on the ground.

A white weed which we call the daisy,
the bellis being the English daisy, has like-
wise demeaned itself queerly. It is a plant
rescued from a dusty, vacant lot and made
to increase and improve. Turning back a
mat of its new growth, a sturdy shoot was
disclosed beneath it ; and this shoot, almost
a branch, terminated in a star of over thirty
young leaves, most of them on stalks a

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 137

couple of inches long. In the heart of this
rosette was a stemless flower-bud.

Where do all these things come from
that pop out of the earth while your back
is turned, and that, too, after you have
browsed through the yard for weeks, pull-
ing up with trowel and fingers every sus-
picious thing? In one of the beds thus
attended I found a self-heal, or prunella;
and, being there, I let it flower, and eke
encouraged it. Though a country-loving
plant, it thrives in town on neglected streets
and among the cast-off bed-springs and
dry-goods of vacant lots. It is a frugal
flower, for it does not lavish its blossoms
in a day, but puts out alternate flowers
in alternate rows. The blooms are like
dragon-heads, but of a more intense purple
before opening than afterward.

Dead leaves have many pranks. You
find them caught and impaled on trees
they never grew upon; and finding them
thus misplaced, and carelessly assuming
that they belong and were green there, you
make a note of the apple-tree with chestnut
leaves and the elm that grows like an oak.

138 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

One amazing patch of ground, not far from
our house, is grown over with cat-brier;
and after a gale all the waste paper in the
county seems to have blown there and
caught in the thorns of it, so that from a
distance the waving and fluttering are as of
an army with banners. On a windy day
in early spring I found a dead leaf spinning
like a windmill. Ordinarily a leaf will turn
a few times, then turn back ; but this whirli-
gig kept on endlessly in the same direc-
tion. I looked at it closely. It was an
elm leaf blown from a distant tree and
caught by the stem in a cat-brier tendril.
It had freedom of rotation, but a swell
in the stem prevented it from falling out,
while a curve in the leaf gave the wind a
purchase on it.

But these antics and occasionals are of
moment only as they enforce notice to the
steadiness, order, and beauty that are every-
where— qualities that escape us because
we take them for granted. For the best
is the cheapest, and the very best costs
nothing. Air, water, room to move, friend-
ship, love, these have no money value.

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 139

The beauty of nature, that is constantly
offered and frequently spurned, is always
there for the looking and smelling and
hearing. But we prize best what is bought
with some cost of human muscle, blood,
sin, virtue, or cash — especially cash. If
dandelions were made in Birmingham at
£i los. 6d. a gross, many ships would
be laden with them every spring. If they
were tin ones made to look like real, they
would have a good sale, anyway. In fu-
nerals it will be noticed that the importance
of the man in the coffin is usually in in-
verse ratio to the number of the carriages
that follow him. In life it is noise and
difficulty that advertise some men. Flow-
ers would be more admired if they barked.
It is not the exception that is wonderful:
it is the steadfast. Yet perpetuation and
duplication, which to us are order, are per-
haps a proof that nature proceeds along
the lines of least resistance. It is easier
to imitate than to invent. The flowers,
the crystals, the planets, the water-drops,
are orderly in form and conduct. Look
at a mullein leaf. Its velvet is a crowd of

140 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

stars. In very soft leaves these stars have
branches. The insect wandering among
them should know a delight as wild as that
of a man in a jungle.

Oh, yes, we agree that the insect goes
to the flower to feed; but why is the flower
made beautiful for him as well as savory ?
Has the insect an esthetic sense ? If so,
it means more than ours, for color to him
is life. The guide-lines in the flowers are
ways to the honey. And look through a
magnifier and see into what palaces the
fly is bidden. With your eye at the lens,
you are a fly yourself. Take the tiny
nettle. What a hall of pearl and ame-
thyst ! What purple frescos, what rich,
dewy, nectarous translucency ! We could
not in a home of porcelain environ our-
selves like that ; but perhaps we shall try.
A dining-hall of rose and yellow, for ex-
ample, with no windows, but walls and roof
soft shining, full of fragrance. Will man
ever be kind and fine enough to fit such a
place ? Can he ever live as gaily as the
bee ?

That reminds me that I had the family

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 141

out the other day — a raw morning in early
June — to look at the grandfather of all
bumblebees, who had alighted in a blossom
of the pale yellow iris. He was not fertil-
izing it, because he was under the petal
that bears that delicate brush of stamens,
so we thought he was probably boring for
nectar through the petal, or sucking it
through some tiny aperture we could not
see, as his abdomen was working strongly.
On lifting the petal and even touching him
with a pencil, he showed no sense of dis-
turbance. His wings were closely folded,
and the flower was heavy, cold, and wet,
as everything was in that chill morning.
Perhaps he was a little benumbed. At
last a prod with the pencil angered him,
and swinging down from the flower, he
bumbled off through the yard, finally
alighting on a peony.

Occasionally bees wrangle over the right
to a flower, and two such I found in a
regular wrestle. They were not so de-
termined but that they could fly a little,
yet with obvious lack of mutuality in pur-
pose, falling to the ground, rolling over

142 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

and over, and clawing the grass with their
hind legs to secure a hold. They were
locked in such a hug, face to face, that
they endured some ducking with the hose
before they broke away, and were so ex-
hausted they could hardly fly.

Could it have been a worker that had
followed a drone into our premises to ex-
terminate him at the time of the annual
massacre ?

Doubtless we are illogical to take such
displeasure at humble creatures in their
larval state, while we joy so greatly in their
completed form ; but so long as flowers
and foliage are fairer than grubs, it will be
so. Though I wage war on caterpillars
that I find consuming our floral pets, I
confess that now and then I remit the
penalty in the case of some big and well-
marked fellow, for the promise he has in
him of being a handsome butterfly. I toss
him over the fence, because our neighbors
don't care as much for flowers as we do.
Odd creatures, some of these larvae ! The
limacodida that I found under maples in
Connecticut and oaks in Georgia is a flat,

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 143

green object with moss-like fringe in place
of feet; it moves by inflations. I put it on
its back, and by these same inflations, be-
ginning at the tail and running upward
toward the head, it arched itself more and
more until its balance was destroyed and
it tipped over, right side up. It is a nota-
ble simulator of a leaf, and might easily be
concealed by its color in vegetation.

Men, also, take on more shape and color
from their diet, their work, and their sur-
roundings than we realize. There is still
some granite in the New England charac-
ter, some heat in the tropical temperament.
Sometimes, though, it does n't improve
one to become an adult. He is better in
the larval stage of youth. Life mocks us
when it reverses a promise. I used to
know a juvenile phenomenon. At sixteen
he played on the piano uncommonly well
— with his fingers. His music lacked soul.
" Never you mind," said his father, with a
wise nod ; " all that Nicodemus needs to
finish him is to fall in love. Then you '11
hear expression. Then you '11 find warmth.
Then you '11 get soul." Nicodemus fell in

144 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

love. He played better. Nicodemus mar-
ried. Nicodemus is finished. He does not
play at all.

Evolution sometimes becomes involu-
tion in the human specimen, even when
nothing is gained by it. With the insect
there is little change, except for advantage.
The safety of certain moths that look most
like leaves or bark has made a tendency
of their type toward this imitation. Mem-
bers of the family that missed the likeness
were eaten. Certain butterflies have suc-
ceeded in looking so like another and un-
palatable species that the birds let them
alone.

Peskiest of all our minor plagues are
the plant-lice, or aphides. The poppies,
though they bloom freely and gorgeously,
are marvelously beset. (I want to men-
tion our servant's regard for these flowers
— the few that she takes a little pains not
to walk over when she is hanging up the
clothes. "Why, they 're just as pretty as
paper flowers," says she.) Running a
poppy leaf between thumb and finger, I
often slay a hundred of these aphides.

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 145

Are they of varying species on different
plants, or is it their diet of differing juices
that makes them seem different ? On the
golden-rod they are blood-red and are
lively — for aphides. On house-plants I
have never seen them other than green.
On one camomile that stands against a
fence in the sun they are pale brown or
buff, nearly colorless in young specimens;
and on another in rich, damp earth in a
shady corner they are lead-colored or
black. In the middle of June the young
shoots on these plants are crusted with
them. Ants were busy milking the lice
on the shaded plant; but I saw none of
them on the camomile that had the light

There are no closer ties between our
present day of hope and original sin than
these aphides and Reginald McGonigle.
The aphides are a little the worse, because
they are silent and sneaking in their habit,
whereas Reginald commits his misdemean-
ors with yells and howls and snorts and
stones and shocking language, and can
therefore be traced. Whatever may be
alleged against Reginald and his compan-

146 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

ions, they do not steal along the under
side of the poppies, tapping their vital
juices and, one would suppose, indulging
in opium drunkenness. Hardly any plant
is secure against the aphis. His fat little
body, moving almost as slow as a snail
even after he has begotten wings, — a thing
I am sure Reginald will never come to, —
sprinkles itself alike over leaves and stems,
and occasionally the flowers, of chrysanthe-
mums, roses, lilies, ivy, golden-rod, and oxa-
lis. The hairy defense of the zinnia does
not trouble him, and neither heat, moisture,
dryness, nor fetor makes him lose his grip.
If he should let go of anything, the cater-
pillar and beetle and grasshopper are just
behind and have good appetites. He
breeds with amazing rapidity, multiplying
almost before your eyes. Often he de-
velops into a pest overnight. He is the
cow of the red ant. The ant scales the
stalk where this dull-witted, fat, slow-
bodied creature is guzzling the sap, and
pats and strokes its belly. The aphis
gives up something of the sap, and the ant
regales upon it. This enables the aphis to

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 147

hold more, and he applies himself to nurs-
ing with fresh vigor. Better to be en-
couraged than the ant, in such a case, is
the lady-bug, for she feeds on the young
of aphides. All of the lady-bugs we find
we carry to our yard, where we could find
work for a thousand.

Do you suppose these " critters " talk ?
I am sure that some kind of understanding
exists among them. They seem a peace-
able lot, and when I have watched them
through a magnifier have never found a
riot going on. Their antennae seem to be
telling things to each other. That they have
audible speech I doubt; for if they had
they would use up more energy in it.
Speech has been called incipient action;
but it is n't. It is the best preventive of
action that ever was invented. It is the
safety-valve through which force discharges
itself — the force which, if kept back in si-
lence, would set engines throbbing, and
rend away the crusts of custom. If an-
archists had the public squares for their
meetings, there would be no throwing of
bombs. Peaceful drinking of beer would

148 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

be the only sequence. Don't make silence
compulsory. Never fasten down the lid
of a pot filled with boiling water. You
only make a man think Damn harder when
you try to dam his speech or thought.
Yet, oh, what inanities of action in speech !
I used to be visited every day by a man
who wanted to be told what the weather
was likely to be next morning.

Bats are said to live on insects, and
probably it is our wealth in the latter that
brings so many bats flitting about the house
in twilight. One of them got indoors on
a July midnight and waked me with the
whirring of his wings. As all our windows
had screens in them, he must have come
down the chimney and entered an up-
per room through the fireplace. He flew
about at such a pace that I could not at
first tell what he was, and might have
thought him to be a swallow if we had
such birds. He made no cry. After I had
lighted the gas he circled around and
around the room at the top of his speed,
the eye hardly following him. No doubt
he was bewildered, and wanted to get out.

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 149

Without the least intention of doing a hurt,
and meaning only to stop his flight so that
I could seize and put him out of doors, I
struck at him with a cloth. Either he was
tender or I struck harder than I knew, for
the blow killed him.

Bats or no bats, there is no let up to the
life of the yard. It is gay with butterflies,
moths, bee-flies, bees, — honey and bumble,
— wasps, and what not. The butterflies are
eager creatures, and when they alight on
a new star in the crown of a zinnia they fas-
ten to it as if they had the thirst of a week
to slake. One of the busiest that I saw
had a half-circle missing from his wings,
the gap fitting both as he folded them to-
gether. Evidently the missing parts had
been bitten out by a cat — a fifth of their
substance gone. But he did not seem to
mind it.

Our jimson-weed grows apace with the
summer, and is eight feet high, ten feet
wide, and filled with flowers. In the twi-
light its blossoms are visited by the night-
moth, who drops in his immensely long
proboscis — a good four inches, one would

ISO NATURE IN A CITY YARD

say — and pumps at their honey with many
a pull and hitch as he hovers above them
on seolian wing. He has eyes only for his
supper, and has passed within half a foot
of our hands and has sucked honey so close
under our eyes that we had to move back
to see him. Could any one abuse with
capture a confidence like that ? This busy
reveler in the dark is so like a humming-
bird in size, mode of flight, and way of life,
that when I first saw him against the sky
I was sure that he wore feathers.

There are other visitors to the same
weed : trig spiders, miniature tigers who
flatten themselves against the leaves and
spring out on flies bigger than themselves;
butterflies of the day, fair as blossoms; and
two fat and loathly green grubs — tobacco-
worms they are called — so like rolled leaves
that they run a chance of being handled
by looking like that. One of these grubs
I took indoors and stabled on a stra-
monium leaf, covering him with a glass
dish, slightly raised, to admit air. He was
a tight sticker, and on every attempt to
move him uttered an angry objection —

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 151

a clicking noise like the gritting of teeth.
Probably it was his mandibles striking to-
gether. In the evening he had a hundred
cocoons fastened to his sides and back. The
larvae of the ichneumon wasp that had
been preying on his muscles, having grown
from eggs deposited by that parasitic crea-
ture beneath the caterpillar's hide, had
eaten their way to the surface and spun
their cases. The fellow grew thin and died
in a couple of days. His mate went through
the same experience — grubs, cocoons, and
death.

Hardly less beautiful than the butterflies
are the dragon- flies with soap-bubble colors
on their wings. I found one of unusual
size with a broken wing in the yard. His
best color was in his eyes, which were like
cabochon sapphires, very large. On at-
tempting to fly, he would fall to the ground,
or cling to a leaf and lift his tail in a half-
circle as if trying to sting. I found him
dead on the walk in the evening.

A colored man brought to me one of
these handsome dragon-flies, or " devil's-
darning-needles " as they used to be called

152 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

in my boyhood. He had struck it in fear,
and the creature was all but dead. " Oh,
they Ve got a terrible stinger," said he, as
he cautiously delivered the fly into my out-
stretched palm. And he was surprised and
half incredulous when I told him that the
poor thing was not only harmless, so far
as we are concerned, but that it was one
of our best friends, as it preyed on the
mosquito. It has been a theory of mine
that a few patent facts ought to be taught
in the primary schools. Here is this dragon-
fly. In my childhood I was seriously told
that if I allowed one to alight on me it
would sew up my ears. That scared me
so that it did not at once occur to me that
perhaps it was n't necessary to sit still and
be sewed. In New York City a panic oc-
curred in a public school because a dragon-
fly came in at an open window. Several
children were hurt in the rush for the stairs.
Yet I suppose all of those boys and girls
could have figured out one of those useful
and instructive problems about what is the
price of potatoes in Schoharie County if they
are selling in Putnam County for I lyf cents

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 153

a peck, and the price in Schoharie is -^ of
6% per cent, higher than it is in Putnam.
The farmers seemed to me to be gifted with
absolute mathematical genius when I read
about them in the arithmetics. Perhaps
degeneration has set in among them since
my school-days. Perhaps they don't hold
out now for a forty-seventh of a cent on a
potato trade. Perhaps —

There 's that McGonigle boy trying to
stamp down our new rose-bushes ! I must
pause for a moment to kill him.

No; he has escaped, and is at this mo-
ment uttering gibes from the stronghold
of his own yard. I fear that Reginald
was born with a desire to rule. He has
chosen the wrong time and the wrong land
to do it. Most people do like to rule, if it
comes to that ; but see how unfair it is to
the other people, because they want to do
the same thing. There is one thing worse,
and that is to be ruled. Still, in our cities
we cannot complain, for there we are sel-
dom governed : we are merely taxed. It
will make Reginald quite unhappy, when
he grows up, to realize how little restraint

i$4 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

we need from outside. Rhode Island had
no constitution until fifty years ago. Few
knew it, and nobody was the worse. Eng-
land cannot prove that she has one at this
day. A man who is sure of $1000 a year
is above government. He can afford to
watch with a careless eye the struggles of
Reginald's father to get city contracts.

I turn with pleasure from the contempla-
tion of Reginald to the fire-flies. We en-
joy their mild pyrotechnics in the evening.
It is another rural pleasure that may pertain
to a city lot. One evening a visitor spryly
caught one in his hand — a proceeding that
I disapprove. In a trice he had pinched
off the creature's abdomen and crushed the
rest of him. He explained : " The scien-
tific sharps have told us that the light dies
with the animal. It does n't, as you see."
He caught a second and served it in the
same way, only he slashed open the abdo-
men with a knife. I put both of these
remnants between the lenses of a double
magnifier for safe-keeping, and set them
away. At midnight, four hours later, the
one that had been cut open with the knife

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 155

had faded, though it still gave out a little
light ; but the sac which was whole glowed
as brightly, for aught I could see, as when
the animal wore it. Had I been a true
observer I would have sat up with those
relics and recorded the hour when the glow
disappeared. But I have a living to earn
for my family, and must sleep. In the
morning the remnants were taken to a
dark closet for inspection, but their fires
were absolutely cold.

There was a tragedy on a daisy disk.
One of the fire-flies, or lightning-bugs (it
is not a fly, and its shine is not a bit like
lightning, so why not glow-bug?), was
eating or drinking when a large yellow-
brown spider pounced upon him, and so
an end. The fire- fly was lying on his back,
dead, in the grasp of the spider, who with
his hind legs seemed to retain his hold on
the flower while I shook it, keeping his
fangs buried in the abdomen of his victim.
I lifted the fellow to the window-sill, and
without relaxing his hold for an instant he
trotted off with the fly, as a dog will some-
times carry an object of nearly his own

156 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

size, or as an ant will carry one larger than
himself. The spider retired into a crevice
behind the sash to finish his meal at leisure.
Other spiders, large, healthy, lithe, black,
marked with bright yellow on the back, have
nested in the iris. Another, a brown fel-
low, has made a bag of his web, running it
around several leaves with its surface par-
allel to the ground ; but the black ones
spin theirs vertically between pairs of leaves,
with extra-strong webbing in the center,
where they stand much of the time. On
an alarm these cobs will vanish; but if any-
thing drops into their web they pounce on
it like cats. I put some small caterpillars
into one web. Instantly the spider was
upon them. He would put his feet on the
fuzzy body of the animal, as if hesitating
whether to kick him out or eat him, but
really I suppose he was preparing to spin ;
then, with remarkable facility, he would roll
him around and around, so that in a few
seconds the caterpillar was incased in a
shroud of web, and the spider resumed his
patient watch for flies. Evidently this kind
of meat was rank for his taste.

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 157

But in each case the caterpillar worked
his way out of the bag and tumbled down
among the roots of the iris ; so perhaps
the spider merely tied him up to save the
web.

One caterpillar crossed from leaf to leaf
on a strand of web, as deftly as if he had
been an habitual rope-walker. My oldest
boy fed insects to a spider, and reported a
capacity on the latter's part of fifteen flies
an hour, and you could nearly see the spider
swell. Yet once, when I gave a small
white caterpillar to our biggest spider, she
rolled her prey in web, as usual. Then I
blew upon her. She may have suspected
mischief from that breath, because she
ran into a lower corner of her house ;
whereas the shaking of iris leaves by the
wind had never bothered her. Soon the
caterpillar freed his head and began to
work his way out. The spider was after
him once more, and this time remained,
eating him, as it seemed, through the cover.
This cob eats her own kind, too; for we
found the remains of another species of
spider in the web. There must have been

158 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

a fight. Sometimes a spider will eat her
own husband. That morning, too, a new-
comer, a child, had taken up her residence
in the same web, and was living on friendly
terms with its builder. It may have been
the cats, or the Monday wash, or Reginald
McGonigle, but twenty-four hours later
that web was gone. The elder cob had
set up a new establishment four or five
inches nearer to the fence, and the young
one had started her abattoir in another
part of the iris clump. A month later our
champion spider disappeared, and a leaner
one occupied her place. We had fed her
liberally with insects, and perhaps she had
burst. Before her heir followed this ex-
ample of disappearance — mayhap from the
same cause, for she was a spoiled child —
she had hung a papery bag — of eggs, I
presume — from one of the iris stalks. We
found these bags in the iris in the dead of
winter.

City sounds grow dull; the perfume of
the lilies, most luscious of odors, comes on
a stir of air. There is a chirp of crickets
under the balsams. A heavy bell a couple

FLOWERS AND INSECTS 159

of miles away is striking twelve. It brings
back memories of bells in New England,
where the hour sounds with a slower stroke
and an older tone than here. An old moon
rises in the clear sky, and the yard takes
on a mystery through which the mind's
eye reads the way to fairer, greener spots
that some long, long day hence it may see
with the eye of the body. Or must it be
with the spirit eye alone ?

THE SOUL OF NATURE

THE Greeks had little to say about na-
ture, but they lived closer to it than
we do, in spite of our habit of painting,
describing, and gushing over it. Carlyle,
no doubt, would have said, from their very
silence and unconsciousness, that nature
was a part of their lives. They did feel
and love it. We need no other proof than
this : that they endowed it with godhood.
They felt what science knows and the poet
and preacher hope : that our relation to the
universe is wide-spreading, though unfath-
omed. What is behind this mask of form
we are not resolved, yet every primitive
people realizes that it is a sign and an
emblem, and the speech of this realization
is poetry. The Indians of our Northwest
are Greeks in their faith ; they people the

160

THE SOUL OF NATURE 161

woods and waters, the mountains, the gey-
sers and the glaciers, with supernatural
beings, and the legendry of that region is
full of the action, baneful and heroic, that
is worked by those forces. Later philos-
ophies, in prose and verse, thrill with a
hope that is faith, already, among these
tribes.

" Manfred" is a wild dream, is it not? the
summoning of spirits from other worlds —
absurd ? Yet they tell us that a responsive
vibration goes through the world when-
ever a thing is done, as widening circles
spread from where the stone falls into
water; that, as thought is deed accom-
panied by motion in the brain, the working
out of that thought affects, be it never so
faintly, the gravities and substances of
farthest suns. Is this a forecast of the
energy that shall one day blaze from the
mind of the race to lighten those chasms
of cold that gulf our world in, and send
messages of divine equality and brother-
hood to the planets that roll about Sirius
and Aldebaran? It tells, at all events, the
oneness of creation, the refinement of mat-

162 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

ter into mind. We are the spirits of the
universe, emanations in fleshly guise. In
our best moods we approach that larger
soul of nature and try to read it or impress
it. Some instinct to create or command
seems to work in us whenever we meet it
face to face.

The growth of science and the literary
and artistic use of landscape prove a present
interest in nature that hardly seems to have
belonged to our grandfathers, to whom —
honored pioneers! — it was a task-master
rather than a friend. To them it was raw
material to subjugate, to use, but not to
study or to love. Yet man is but a piece
of the world, and we must read his environ-
ment to know his relations and understand-
ing. Our liking for brevities and essences
we acquire from our preference for men in
the presence of nature ; for men are na-
ture personated, crystallized. So we watch
the light from the cabin shining on the
mountain, rippling across the lake, or gleam-
ing out at sea, and we forget the darkness
and majesty that it illumines, and that more
solemn shining of the god-lights in the sky.

THE SOUL OF NATURE 163

Certain of us huddle into cities to shut out
the sight of woods and hills, saying : "A
god is there. Eternity is symbolized yon-
der. Let us get together and deal with
our affairs, of which gods and eternity are
not yet part."

Yet we are compelled back, every now
and again ; for it is food and breath and
physical life that we have out of nature,
even where there is no joy or brightness.
Like wine, it can exhilarate and debauch ;
but, unlike wine, we cannot live without it.
Every normal temperament pines for the
earth at times, and art is only a form of
this longing, so far as it concerns itself
with landscape. The painter tells it on
canvas; we hear it in the Waldweben of
Wagner and the "Pastoral Symphony" of
Beethoven ; among modern writers Thack-
eray is almost alone in being without it —
he preferred the streets ; but it is voiced
in clear and beautiful tones by Thoreau,
Emerson, Wordsworth, Blackmore, Bur-
roughs, Black, of Scotland; White, of Sel-
borne; Miss Thomas, and Miss Murfree.
Hawthorne exclaims: " Oh, that I could run

164 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

wild ! that I could put myself into a true
relation with nature, and be on friendly
terms with all congenial elements ! " How
many have echoed such a wish, for the
mystery of the world is on the hills, and a
subtle friendship broods in the wood. At
times the mystery seems about to be re-
vealed to us ; yet, though we look and lis-
ten, the sphinx lips are closed, and we cry :
" Let us know this secret."

Still we must not peer too closely, nor
lose the larger view of things. Men are
great, generous, beautiful only in their
obvious aspects ; so let us heed our books,
songs, pictures, cathedrals, and other works
of our kind. Must we know the chemistry
of soils and leaves to see heaven on earth ?

We have come to that time when we
begin to feel as well as to see in the pres-
ence of woods, hills, oceans, and stars ;
there are hints and portents in them that
a new consciousness tries to read. There
is an invitation to conquest that makes us
delight in peril and seek it in the deeps
and on the alps. If eased of our flesh,
we would ride on the storm and bathe in

THE SOUL OF NATURE 165

lightning. And what analogies there are
between nature and man's work and ex-
perience: illusion, elusion, suffering — qual-
ities that make art. Men overdo before
they learn to do; nature teaches reserve,
order, accomplishment, economy. Have
you thought how nature fits herself to every
human mood — that is, how the mind dis-
covers answering moods in nature — as
well as sustains us in every corporal need ?
All seems open for our view into the heart
of the world ; but, as we look, a spell is
thrown over us, and the green brightens
with Turner's gold or pales into Corot's
mist of silver; or in the hills, and oftener in
the desert, on a few lucky days of a life,
rise towers of gold and crystal gemmed
with sapphire and topaz and backed by
peaks of opal. Our hard and searching
glance is baffled by these splendors. The
kindly sun, the free wind, balm-laden, the
grateful color, the tinkle of brooks, the lilt
and whistle of birds, the toss and sough of
boughs, the spring of turf, the beat of waves,
placate, yet encourage and rejoice, and
create or fill our worthiest moods. We

166 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

feel our avatar and almost see the hand
that offers it. Fears of the ennui of eter-
nity leave us, for we find that existence can
be a joy. Nature will not press us back
to savagery so long as we keep in touch
with the striving spirit that animates all
things, that has given wings to the reptile
and let man evolve from the monkey.

There is deep truth in the allegory
of Hercules's opponent who regained his
strength whenever he touched the earth,
and was not vanquished until he had been
held in air so long that his power had left
him. Simple forms, like the jelly-fish, that
keep near nature and are elementary, have
powers of creation and recuperation that
make us ridiculous ; and the trees, also,
draw life right out of the soil. Why might
not we do so, too, instead of taking what the
trees have taken — we parasites of parasites?

The life that was potent in cosmic dust
and chaos flame inheres in silence, and
those of subtler sight and hearing com-
mune with it. We need to go back to the
fields to renew mental and spiritual strength,
to cool our brains after they have been

THE SOUL OF NATURE 167

heated by the excitements and intemper-
ances of social life, to rest our nerves after
the jarring of coarse utilities. The repose
of the earth, the sky, and the waters is val-
uable, if only to show how much may be
told and done without fretting and without
speech ; and little of our talk is needed.
In politics alone, what words ! what fric-
tion ! what rivalry ! what hatred ! Suns,
and clouds of suns, wheel through space,
perhaps around some pivot of intelligence,
and make no sound ; but the choice of a
man to do a little work for us fills the land
with babbling and strife. Is not this much
ado about nothing to speak of enough to
drive a man to the woods, there to cast
about for facts and affections that are
worthy of him ? There he is among ob-
jects that are idyllic, or that, at least, do
not obtrude their functions. They are
notes in a harmony, colors in a prism; they
exist for an occult purpose which, in our
present development, we only and vaguely
recognize as beauty. Though we are apart
from them, they follow us, and their charm
is tender and alluring in their absence, be-

168 NATURE IN A CITY YARD

cause memory is an artist, and paints a
better picture than the retina. When we
turn from the actual scene we seem to know
it better, and to find a higher promise and
beauty there. So does art soften detail,
suppress, select, and try to give us the
substance, perhaps the soul, of things.

A spiritualizing process is beginning in
letters, art, music, color, life. " The world
is too much with us," but men are getting
away from the base world of needs to the
world of meanings. They progress as they
realize beauty, and the constant inference
of beauty is design. Can the fire of the
diamond, the tenderness of the flower,
the loveliness of the opal, the grandeur of
the mountain, be accidental ? Are they
not part of some great scheme for the all-
beautiful and all-good ?

Nature piques, then eludes us; rejoices
us, and will not tell how or why. We
find her a mystery, and we are ever trying
to get behind that mystery, even though
what is fair in distance may be unlovely
and unprofitable at close hand. It is not
enough that we master inert physical na-

THE SOUL OF NATURE 169

ture, that we make her give us food and
house, that she turns mills and propels
ships for us ; love and questioning of her
mean more than that : they signify an effort
spiritually to envelop her ; they prove an
aspiration in the soul of man toward uni-
versality — toward godhood. That is their
drift. To what will it lead ?

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