In Portia's gardens

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\

In PORTIAS
GARDENS

WILLIAM SLOANE KENNEDY

KNIGHT AND MILLET

BOSTON, MASS.

, ,1 • •
>9 inutile' case of some of Ruskin's book-titles, an
ollnretnent of mystery has been given to the title of this
volume by the perhaps Intentional omission of the author
to give his readers the key-words "Belmont" and
»' Merchant ot V^enioe." And even those who partly
guessed the secret were in doubt whether Portia might
not stand for the mistress of the cottage that is pictured
in the title-page vignette, remembering, as they did,
Bassanio's words,—

" In Belmont u a lady nchlff l^ft ;
And she is fair, and, fatrer than that word,
Of wondrous virtues."

Bat we have the author's word for it that *' Portia's
Gardens " is simply a poetic synonym for the Belmont,
Mass., landscape, out of the heart of which the book
was written, as indeed might have been guessed from
t4ie allusion, in the Preface, to Portia's exclamation,—

" How far that little candle throws his beams ! "

which, with other hints in the play, show that Shak-
spere thought of her hall as surrounded by extensive
grounds, or gardens.

Copyright, 1897, By Bradlee Whidden

I

no

r>

4

** But sing' high afidalopf^
Saf* from tht wolf*s Naek jaw and tk* dtdlats** hoof**

Bbn Jonson, Underwoods.

'* Bt tanquam in $pectda ^siins, ritUr* mectmt soUo**

BuKTONf Anat. of Melancholy.

" Gentle Reader /

"Z^, here a Camera Obscura is presented to thy view,
in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited
canvas, aud magnified into apparent life / If thou art
perfectly at leisure for such trivial amusement, walk
in, and view the wonders of my Inchanted Garden,'*

Darwin, Loves of the Plants.

331775

PREFACE.

Imagine a huge wooded ridge of trap and gravel,
fronting the rising sun and the sea, some three miles
long and between two and three hundred feet high,
bearing upon its broad back orchards and farms and
villas, and bird-haunted meadows and groves, lazily
turning windmills, springs of sweet water, and old
winding lanes full of mints and flowers, berries, wild
cherries, and ferns, — a natural pleasance in which
that gray aborigine, the woodchuck, the crafty red
fox, the red and gray squirrel, the sooty crow, and all
the songster birds find their homes and fight their
battles for existence.

Think of this broad ridge as connected by a lonely
country road, nine miles long, with the town of
Emerson and Thoreau, and as sloping down southward
through an old forest to cool its heels in a pretty brook,
that, after its leap over the rocks, ripples along by
the foot of a glacier kame, or " horseback," out of
which tower gigantic oaks that were trees of goodly
size before the landing of the Pilgrims.

For outlook ocean ward and Europe-ward, picture
to yourself in the foreground a rolling plain, diverg-
ing, fan-shaped, to the sea, the segment of a mighty
circle whose chord is the ridge, whose arc sweeps a
curve of twenty miles, from Longfellow's Nahant
to the Blue Hills of Milton. The spread of landscape
within these bounds is threaded by winding rivers and

VI PREFACE.

alluvial plains, is dotted by blue lakes, and crossed by
city-sprinkled ridges. Burnished with the silver sun
of morning, the lakes seem holes in the green earth-
crust through which the white fire breaks from under-
ground ; or is the world-floor but a many colored flying
carpet, with the sunlight shining through its rents?
By night, instead of Portia's candle, sending its pencil
of light afar, you shall see the imprisoned lightning
flaming in a thousand lamps, whose combined radiance
at the distance of ^ve or six mUes is just about equal
in power to that of the moon at the end of her first
quarter. It splashes the tree-trunks with silver and
hangs above the sleeping cities a delicate veil of pe-
numbral light, hailed with joy by the belated pedes-
trian in the country long before the city itself sparkles
on his sight.

If, now, you will conceive of a little red gabled
cottage high up on the aforesaid ridge, and peeping
forth from a verdurous earth-wrinkle thereof, — a sort
of Liliputian farm that is steeped in profound silence
from New Year's Day to New Year's Day (bating
the distant noise of trains and the voices of squirrels
and birds), and whose live stock consists solely of said
squirrels and birds, with two or three hundred thou-
sand spiders and ants and such small game, — you
will have a tolerably fair notion both of the birth-
place of these chapters and of the poetic aspects of
this rustic landscape, — gardens where the richest roses
bloom, upon whose banks of violets the moonlight
sleeps as sweet as ever Shakspere saw it ; and where
the lawns and copses are haunted, if not by Italian
nightingales, yet by birds as rare or blithe of song :
the wood-thrush with his tender hymn ; the . loud-
carolling mock-thrush ; the meadow lark with plain-
tive-sweet whistle ; the wren with bubbling song ;
the shy and hidden veery, making the silent marsh-
groves ring in the gloaming as he utters his tremu-

PBEFACB. vii

lous cry ; and that master of flute melody and clashing
cymbals, the incomparable bobolink, lord of the sminy
meadow.

My notes on this region, covering many years, with
their accretions of suggested topics, have grown into
a book, which resembles a box of kineto-phonographic
records in that it contains views and voices of living
things, — rooted, a-wing, or afoot, — each section inde-
pendent of the others. And let the initial chapter on
sweet odors be as a grain of ambergris or musk to
perfume the whole, so that it may be said,

" The box-lid is but perceptibly open'd, nevertheless the per-
fume pours copiously out of the whole box."

For all the illustrations in the volume, except the
title-page vignette, I am indebted to the courtesy of
Mr. W, L3rman Underwood. They are reproduced
from photographs taken by him. The owls, squirrel,
young humming-birds, and muskrat are from an origi-
nal collection of photographs of animal life he is
making. One of the curiosities of his work this sum-
mer were negatives of a female yellow-throated vireo
taken near its nest in a neighbor's apple-tree, the bird
perched on the proprietor's hand or eating from a little
box on his head.

In the Appendix, dealing with bird songs and calls,
I have attempted to supply some of the numerous and
annoying deficiencies of the books in this matter. By
the aid of my tabular list alone, a beginner ought to
be able to identify many a bird ; though of course he
wiU want his ornithological hand-book, too, and the
Appendix may serve as a supplement to that

July 17, 1897.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PAOK

Sweet-brier and Wild Cherry 1

CHAPTER n.
Back into the Sunshine 18

CHAPTER ni.
The Enchanted Forest .41

CHAPTER IV.
Flowers and Birds 80

CHAPTER V.
High Noon op the Year Ill

CHAPTER VI.
The Sere and Yellow Leaf 138

CHAPTER VII.
Lengthened Shadows 159

X CONTENTS.

PAGS

CHAPTER Vm.
HuNORT Crows and Saucy Jats 174

CHAPTER IX.

FOLTPB OF THS AlR 190

CHAPTER X.
By Fountain and Stream 203

APPENDIX.
Some Bird Songs and Calls 219

A Final Word on the Wolf Spiders . 227

Index 229

I •

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

To face page

Wise Men op the Wood ...... 8

Early Spbing in the Forest 18

The Wao op the Tree-tops 39

Hummino-bird's Nest with Youno .... 107

Hating Time 114

A Down East Muskrat 130

A Woodland Lane 150

Waterpall in Winter 213

IN POETIA'S GAEDENS.

I.

SWHBT-BRIER AND WILD CHERRY.

To pack as much sunshine and happiness into
each twenty-four hours as is consistent with the
exercise of every virtue and every duty, — do
you know a better guide for the conduct of life
than that? Goethe said to Eckermann, " In my
seventy-fifth vear I may say that I have never
had four weets of genuine pleasure." And the
Caliph Abdalrahman of Cordova wrote (I find
it in Gibbon's fifth volume, fiftynsecond chapter)
that, after having diligently numbered the days
of pure and genuine happiness which had fallen
to his lot, he found they amounted to only four-
teen. One could imagine a ruler might have
little real happiness, but that a poet could ex-
tract only four weeks' happiness from a lifetime
is impossible. Indeed, Goethe contradicts him-
self ; for in the very next sentence but one he
says, "What really made me happy was my
poetic mind, my creative power." So Landor
confesses that in writing his works his pleasure

^ I

2 IN pobtia's gabdens.

was in the conception and formation : " Excite-
ment, not hope ; interior glory, not external, —
animated and sustained me.'*

What Goethe meant by happiness was doubt-
less that super-essential attar of joy which is
inhaled so seldom by the sensitive idealist. The
days, weeks, months, years, of most of us, are
mottled pretty uniformly with a tolerable article
of pleasure, which we are very glad to get and
no questions asked.

To be happy, one must be guileless and recep-
tive. "I must inform you," cries Landor's
Messer Francesco, " that Father Fontesecco has
the heart of a flower : it feels nothing, wants
nothing ; it is pure and simple, and full of its
own little light."

Now, after many shrewd brushes by the way,
and some pleasant acquaintance with nature by
mountain, stream, and sea, I have for the nonce
come to the delicate plain called Ease. But, as
you remember, Bunyan says that plain was but
narrow, and so they were soon got over it. I
will, then, at once fortify myself with the loaf
of bread, bottle of wine, cluster of raisins, and
other viands now in the cupboard, and buckle
down to the business in hand. My task shall
be to imitate the old Schildbiirgers, who, it is
jestingly said, attempted to carry darkness out
of a house by capf uls and empty it into the sun-
shine, which they brought bacK to fill all the
rooms with. They were not such fools after all,
— those German wise men of Gotham.

I suppose the two most exquisite things in
the world, as joy-begetters, are natui'al perfumes

SWBET-BBIBB AND WILD CHEREY. 8

and birds* voices, set (both) against a foil of
twilight or dawn. For perfumes and bird-songs
are sweetest and most intense at set or rise of
sun. And all three groups of things are tangled
together, — the jangle of voices and the threads
and wafts of incense from the flowers rising and
mingling in the world's revolving aureole of
sunsets and sunrises that ever edges the hemi-
sphere of night with a ring of cloud-tableaux
shot through with purple and crimson and gold.
To be up among the roses at five o'clock on a
dewy morning, "long erst ere pryme rong of
any bell," is to have a sip from the cool fountain
of Trevi; that is, you are sure to return for
another draught.

Sweet odors are closely affined to the soul of
love in us, and noxious smells and poisonous
exhalations to the soul of hate. Perfumes are
the breath of the gods. The woodsy freshness
of the mayflower, or epigsea, as you gather it,
suggests the breath of a sleeping dryad or of the
Greek youth Narcissus or Hyacinthus. It has
pungency and earthiness as of a new-tumed
furrow. But it is too near the primitive essence
of things to be compared with anything else.
Were you ever up at three o'clock in the morn-
ing to catch the rich dewy wafts of odor from a
field of ripe wheat in some great river-bottom
ranch of the West ? Have you drank in again
and again at the nostrils the smell of the just-
tasselling Indian com or the airs blowing from
oflE a field of deep red clover ?

What a luxurious life that of a bee on a Nile
honey-boat, in the season of springing life! —

4 IK PORTIA'S GARDENS.

floating slowly down from Upper Egypt day by
day, and every day the excitement oi new scenes,
infinite store of ever new flowers, exploring a
thousand fairy bowers, hanging in scented bells
or ranging through delicate azure air over fra-
grant meads, and at night safe in the busy hive.
And so on and down, the boat sinking deeper
and deeper into the water from its weight of
honey, until it reaches its goal. Who wouldn't
be a bee to have such a voyage as that? To
this a berth on a Cunarder is like a fosse of
Malebolge in the City of Dis.

It must be delicious and invigorating to live
in the vicinage of Nlmes, Cannes, Mce, or
Grasse, in the sunny valleys of Southern France,
and inhale the air blowing off of square miles
of lavender, rosemary, thyme, and roses in the
summer months.

We always knew that fragrances were health-
giving, and an Italian scientist has recently told
us why. He finds that hyacinth, heliotrope,
mignonette, lily-of-the -valley, cherry, laurel,
cloves and lavender, mint, juniper, lemon, fennel,
and bergamot are especially healthful, for they
contain a deal of vitalizing ozone. The sprink-
ling of the essence of cedrat in a sick-room has
restored dying persons to health. In a bad
season bees will resort to poisonous and ba^-
smelling flowers for nectar, but never in a good
season. (It is a curious thing that bees smell
with the ends of their fingers.) What we get
of most value in the country, physicians say,
are the sweet odors and the pure air. " Odora-
ments to smell to, of rose-water, violet-flowers,

SWEET-BRIER AND WILD CHERRY. 5

balm, rose-cakes, vinegar, etc.," says old Robert
Burton, author of the "Anatomy of Melan-
choly," "do much recreate the brains and
spirits"; and his namesake, the late Oriental
scholar. Sir Richard, says that the Egyptians
believe that the rich-scented yellow-white blos-
soms of the acacia, or mimosa, are a fosterer of
love, and from them they prepare an aphrodisiac
perfume. Robert B. goes on to say that "it is a
question commonly controverted in our schools
an odores nutriant^ whether odors nourish or
not," and tells of his model Democritus, the
laughing philosopher, who lived for several days
by the smell alone of bread. Odors do indeed
nourish, for it is known they are made up of
solid particles given off from the fragrant sub-
stance.

I should say that persons living in the vicinity
of chocolate factories, and inhaling the delicious
fragrance streaming around, must receive, day
in and day out, very considerable nourishment
into the blood through the nostrils by absorp-
tion, although the separate particles of odor are
often less than the millionth part of an inch in
diameter.

" One day a friend of mine," says Saadi, " put
into my hand a piece of scented clay. I took it,
and said to it; ' Art thou of heaven or earth, for
I am charmed with thy delightful scent ? ' It
answered, ' I was a despicable piece of clay ; but
I was some time in company of the rose: the
sweet quality of mj'^ companion was communi-
cated to me ; otherwise I should have remained
only what I appear to be, — a bit of earth.' "

6 IN pobtia's gaedbns.

What mysterious stimulus to the nerves does
the rose give, that it so delights us above other
flowers? Anybody can smell a rose properly,
our cultivated varieties have such an abundance
of odor ; but few know how rightly to inhale
the perfume of the more delicate flowers. The
idea should be to capture "the fine fugitive
first of all" aroma by the slightest and most
delicate possible of inhalations. The sensory
nerves of smell can be dilated and contracted at
pleasure, like those of sight. If you linger a
fraction of a second too long, or jam your nose
down into the petals, you will rue it ; for you

f^et, usually, the rank scent of the petals or
eaves, — a very different thing from the deli-
cious essence secreted by the glands at the base
of the stamens and pistil. Besides, it is too
bad to rob the flower of all. Can we attain the
delicacy of soul of Landor (I confess it is diffi-
cult for me), and say, —

** The violet's head
Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank,
And not reproached me; the ever-sacred cup
Of the pure lily hath between my hands
Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold " ?

Some people have no sense of smell at all, —
not to speak of. Non euique datum est habere
nasum^ — It is not given to every one to have a
nose, — runs the old saying. In others the
faculty is venr keen. A Wilmington (N.C.)
postK)ffice clerk could, by the sense of smell alone,
pick out of a pile of hundreds of letters every
one that had a bank-note in it. Blumenthal tells
of a man, with otherwise normal sense of smell,

SWBET-BRIBE AND WILD CHBRHY. 7

to whom the mignonette had no odor. We
read of a priest who was insensible to aU odors
except those of the cabbage and the manure
heap I Montaigne says he knew a man (Quercet,
secretary of Charles I.) "who fled from the
smell of apples quicker than from a cannonade."
It would not have done for this gentleman to
"chum" with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who so
loved the smell of rotten apples that he always
kept a supply under his nose in hia study-table
drawer.

There are, again, people who are unable to
endure the smell of roses or strawberries.

The likes and antipathies of different people
in flowers are hard to explain. I know a per-
son who has a violent dislike of the peony,
dahlia, marigold, nasturtium, and every flower
that has a rank, weedy smell ; and it is difficult
for that individual to believe that I, on the con-
trary, feel an exultant pleasure in all flowers
and weeds. I like the musty fragrance of
hound's-tongue, the rank smell of tansy and
even the Symplocarpus of the swamps. Among
weeds I have an especial fondness for those
hardy and showy weeds of regal port, the violet-
colored Vernonia (iron weed), and the purple
Eupatorium, slandered with that baker-like and
plebeian name of Joe-Pye weed. These two
mighty weeds have swept, like armies of splen-
did Goths and Huns, over nearly the whole con-
tinent. I have seen them up to the horses'
necks on Western prairies, and everywhere en
Schelon along the lanes, railroads, and turnpikes
of New England and the Middle States. I sup-

8 m pobtia's gardens.

pose Vemonia got its name of ironweed from
the color of the faded corymbs in autumn, but
the name fits aptly the stubborn hardihood of
the creature and of its brother, Joe-Pye.

As hinted in the preface, I am writing from a
hill-croft a few miles from the golden dome of
Boston, by bumble-bee air-line.

("Like trains of cars on tracks of pliuh
I hear the level hee.")

Longfellow once said that, if he were kaiser,
he would build a hunting-box here. Without
being kaiser and kaiserin, or desiiing to be, we
have built a hunting-box, and the game we
hunt is not foxes or hares, but ideas, character,
and joy. On an old-fashioned terraced estate
adjoining southward once lived a famous painter,
and in its roomy, high-ceiled house painted his
mellow-toned pictures ; on our eastern border a
Scottish artist has established his lares and
penates, and set up his easel; on the crag
above in another direction was written part of a
digest of the decisions of the Supreme Court of
the United States; and "endelong" the ridge
to the north, t'other side of two meadows, lived
and wrote a delineator of New England life
who tried in vain to remain a dilettante, but
ended by drifting into the moral heroic, the
arena of manly ethics. The grounds and bosks
around are filled with birds, with an occasional
visit from the whippoorwills, quails, herons, and
night hawks ; and in midsummer moonlight the
eldritch whinnying laughter of the pretty little
gray screech-owl is heard. The yellowham-

W18B Mk» or Tua Wuou,

SWBBT-BRIBR AND WILD CHERRY. 9

mers often wake us with a reveille on the
shingles. The red squirrels, woodchucks, chip-
munks, mice, seem to think the place belongs
to them. And of course it does : they are the
aboriginal inhabitants, not dispossessed by us.
Indeed, the saucy chipmunks once established
grand-trunk lines for "running in" winter
stores of hickory nuts into the house, and kept
us awake nights gnawing these under the floors,
and playing tag over the ceilings, — until, un-
awed by our mighty thumps, they cuddled
down, when it pleased them, by the huge fire-
place-chimney and went to sleep.

Into the lawn and garden the mistress of the
cottage admits none but sweet^melling flowers,
— mignonette, sweet-peas, hyacinths, jonquils,
dafifodils, honeysuckles, lilies- of -the- valley, sweet
alyssum, sweet geranium, and roses. At the
back of the house is a tall hedge of red and
white lilacs planted by the master nearly three
lustrums since. . The freehold includes part of
an old tarnpike, — now a wild lane, and held
by one individual at least in high honor, because
it is full of barberries, cornels, oaks, cedars,
blackberries, wild strawberries, showy wayside
weeds, wild cherries, wild grapes, and the
sweet-brier rose. The last-named plant is the
eglantine of the poets of Europe, whence it
was introduced here. It does not seem to flour-
ish in our dry climate as it does over there.
The time to catch the drifting fragrance of the
sweet-brier is just after a gentle shower in June,

" When the lilly leaf and the eglantine
Doth bud and spring with a meny cheere."

•a^.

10 IN POBTIA.'S GABDENS.

The fragrant cells are on the under side of
the leaves. It is delightful to inhale them at
close range; but the rarest perfume is got by
accident as you are walking by. I suppose it is
too shy of cultivation for us to have whole
hedges of it, as they do of the Cherokee rose
South. It flourishes best, too, in a semi-shade,
as all roses do. It will have to look to its
laurels, or the lush Wichuraina from Japan,
with its long, creeping, shiny stems — thorny,
like the eglantine, and deliciously perfumed —
will drive it out.

The poets early made the acquaintance of
this shy dryad, the sweet-brier. Arviragus in
" Cymbeline " says, addressing Imogen, —

"The leaf of eglantine, whom*not to slander
Outsweetened not thy breath."

Was there ever a more delicate simile? show-
ing, too, Shakspere's accurate knowledge, in the
specification of the leaf as the source of the
fragrance. Probably Milton in "L' Allegro"
confounds the eglantine with the honeysuckle,
as was sometimes done. At any rate, he speaks
of the sweet-brier and eglantine as separate
plants :

" To hear the lark begin his flight

And at my window bid good-morrow
Through the sweet-brier or the vine
Or the twisted eglantine."

(It is not from the root of this bush, but
that of JErica arhorea^ or white heath, in South-
ern France and Corsica, that brier-wood pipes
are made. And glad I am that my delicate

SWEET-BBIEB AND WILD CHEREY. 11

brier need claim no company with that curse of
mankind and womankind, — filthy, poisonous
tobacco.)

To return to the lane. In my sentimental
moods I call it " Sweet-brier Lane,'* after that
one in old Puritan Boston centuries ago. And
with right, for sweet-briers are abundant in it
and about it. There is one whose long liana-
fingers reach thirty feet as it climbs up
and out toward the light, and another has
climbed to the top of a young wild cherry where
every spring it flings out its little pink-tinged
pallid roses on the air. There are others around
the huge rock Ton the hillside) that once stood
immovable in tne weltering glacier flood (such
is my belief), and formed the eddy which
churned out our hillside thwaite, or croft. All
this was long ago in the gravel age. The age
is gone, but the gravel is here yet.

The wild cherries are generally throwing their
honey-smelling fragrance (like that of life-ever-
lasting) around the lane about the last week in
May. When other fruits are scarce, these trees
are alive with the noise and flutter of robins,
jays, yellowhammers, and cuckoos, who begin
on them so early that one wonders they don't
get the colic. The birds hang around for many
weeks till the last cherry is gone.

Curious habit, that of the robins and jays,
of alwajrs flying off to another tree to eat the
cherry they have picked,. You would think
father or mother robin might eat just that one
on the bough where it grew. No, sir ! Away
he or she scuttles to the nearest tree, and back

^ I

12 IN PORTIA'S GAEDENS.

again soon, to do the same thing over. It re-
minds you of a dog with a bone or a chicken
with a worm. Perhaps it is inherited custom
from the time when, if an ancestral robin got
anything to eat, he had to go oflE with it, if he
would eat it in peace.

As for the purple lilac, with its " heart-shaped
leaves of rich green," and "many a pointed
blossom rising delicate," don't despise it, and
call it a plebeian flower. It is a good demo-
cratic blossom, the " laylock," and fascinates all
sybarites of color and perfume. No purple
poisoned flower of Rappaccini's garden is the
lilac blossom. A bunch of white lilac blooms
would grace the fair hand of Beatrice in Para-
dise, and perchance such the lovely Proserpine
let fall as she was borne away in gloomy Dis's
wagon. What a beautiful sight it would be to
see in rural towns every spring processions of
young girls, clad in spotless white, and carry-
ing branches of lilac in their hands! As it
hangs in globed masses and great drifts of bloom
over yon old wall, it seems a lovely shrub to be
growing over one's tomb, — which, indeed, has
been the thought of others : witness those antique
lilacs thrusting their blossomy branches out
over the old mossy red-sandstone tombs of King's
Chapel in Boston. What strength, tenacity,
aboriginality, in the lilac ! You can scarcely
eradicate it when it gets a fair start, and it seems
to have no enemies.

The same appears to be true of the scores of
foreign varieties now growing in our arboretums.
The lilac scent is most delicate at night or after

SWEET-BRIER AND WILD CHERRY. 13

a shower. In a room it is too strong ; but stand
on the lawn at night, and catoh now and again
the faint musky odor exhaling from its myriad
little scented vases and drifting around like mist
or incense, and sweet as hamadryad's breath !

Emanuel Kant made the unfortunate remark
that it is not worth while to cultivate the sense
of smell, and some one else has called it " the
neglected sense." Judging by what I call the
greatest miracle in nature, — a dog's nose, — it
is a lost sense. Watch that setter on the full
lope, thorough brake, thorough brier, this way
and that, in search of a trail. When he strikes
it, he stops short, as if he had run against a rope
or a wall, and wheels and follows. It has been
stated as probable that a dog taken from home
in a closed box or wagon finds his way back by
drawing on his memory for a train of scents
noted on the way. Would it do for aesthetic
man to have such a nose? Wouldn't the torture
from ill odors outweigh the pleasure from deli-
cious ones ? Even as it is, our sense of smell is
the keenest and best developed of all. Papillon
has pointed out that the tongue reports only four
sensations of taste in eating, — sweet, sour,
bitter, and salt, — and that the greater pait of
what we imagine to be the taste of things is only
the perception of their odors. If you hold your
nose, you can't tell the difference between a lime
and a lemon, or between different kinds of nuts,
cheese, or meat. Bernstein says that even spec-
trum analysis, which can recognize the fifteen
millionth part of a grain, is far surpassed in
delicacy by our organ of ismell. And man's ol-

14 IN Portia's gardens.

factory sense can be cultivated by persistent
effort in noting the odors of flowers, plants,
and animals, and practice in recalling them in
the memory. Indians and negroes can tell in
the dark to what race a man belongs, and blind
people often identify their friends by their char-
acteristic odor. Not only each species and
variety, but each individual plant or animal, has
its distinctive odor. Nature never repeats her-
self. Even a tree h^ls a variety of scents, —
those of root, bark, leaf, blossom, seeds, — all
distinct. It was with fine insight that our an-
cestors named the perfume of a flower its essence
(that is, life, from esse^ to be) ; fox that is the
very core of its nature, its inexplicable and dis-
tinctive gift. It is a curious fact that some of the
tiny flattened and colored sacs called scales on
some of the male butterflies are " scent scales,"
filled with delicate perfumes of flowers, musk
and sandalwood. Those scales often have curious
shapes, different from the ordinary scales on the
same butterfly, — shapes as of Indian clubs,
shepherds' crooks, battledores, whip and lash, etc.
But to return. As we are not likely to get,
even by cultivation, a ver^ much better nose
than the one we have, we might see what can be
done about getting more aesthetic pleasure from
that. Perfumers have come to understand that
the nostrils can apprehend harmonies of odor,
just as the ear harmonies of sound. A skilled
perfumer is one who has an intimate knowledge
of the whole gamut of odors, its chords and dis-
cords, and can ideally unite these in harmonious
combinations. Even if each component part

SWEET-BRIER AND WILD CHERRY. 15

smells well by itself, it won't do to mix parts
hotch-potch. In planning his odor-chords, he
recognizes, for instance, that rose and rose gera-
nium are a semitone apart; certain others are
flatted if mixed with this or that. In truth, he
plans a new bouquet of perfume as a musician
plans a new piece of music.

The language of the great world of perfumes
is almost as vague and immense as that of music.
No mere words can express the inarticulate
meanings and suggestions of either. Perhaps it
is this fact that has suggested to Mr. Henry T.
Finck the idea of a perfume piano (what shall
we call it? — a florichord?) Mr. Finck may
have been reading G. W. S. Piesse, who has
worked out the aesthetics of perfume harmonies.
He affirms that fragrances accord in octaves.
Vanilla, almond, heliotrope, and clematis, e.g.,
harmonize perfectly. Citron, lemon, orange-peel,
and verbena form another octave in a higher key.
Piesse thus forms gamuts of odors, and mixes
his essences as painters blend their tints. I sup-
pose the perfume piano would be utilized in
some such way as this : first, as a crude begin-
ning, suppose the performer wished to compose,
or play, an odor-sonata on the seasons : he would
begin with pulling out the stops for violets
and wood-anemones and the like for the low
preludings, touching at the same time those that
would emit a pungent savor of the cool forest;
then coming in with the pedal for the strong
lilac and hyacinth tones and the smell of grow-
ing grass and leaves; then, in order, all the
sweet roses and honeysuckles and flowers of hot

16 IK POETIA*S GAEDENS.

midsummer, not forgetting a discord of a few
moments for the rari smell of wayside weeds,
such as tansy, the camon-flower, the nicotic
blooms ; and ending with the warm aromatic
flowers and the asters and the goldenrods of
autumn. It seems rational to suppose that some
future Wagner may think a musical drama un-
finished without rare perfumes stealing through
the house in harmony with each great motif of
the work. Or why not introduce perfumes as
subtle motifs themselves ? For instance, the
fragrance of which the orange-flower is the type
and key-note is widely distributed and constancy
recurring among flowers. It can be detected in
crab-apple, sweet-pea, white-clover, and grape
blossoms. Now, in your drama of " Tristan and
Isolde," we will say, there is a love scene asso-
ciated in the senses with the orange-blossom
fragrance. Whenever in the drama there is an
allusion to or reminiscence of this scene, let the
motif be either the orange fragrance or a variant
of it, which will suggest it. An audience could
soon be educated up to this subtle and de-
lightful art-sense, which would always of course
be no more than a subordinate part of the whole
work, but would strengthen and enrich it. I
remember how the exquisite odor of magnolia
blossoms sprayed into the air of a Boston theatre
during a scene in a Southern play heightened
the pleasure of the audience. It was no clap-
trap device, but, in my judgment, true art and
true refinement of thought that dictated it. In
a great art production none of the senses should
be ungratified. If it were possible (and why is

SWEET-BRIER AND WILD CHERRY. 17

it not ?) to conceal behind the frame of a pict-
ured bunch of lilacs an imitation of the lilac
fragrance (in a form as sublimated and perma-
nent as that of a bit of ambergris or musk), it
would add immensely to the value of the picture,
— not as art of course, but simply as increasing
its power to gratify, which is about all mere
flower painting can attain to, anyway.

It was stated a few pages bact that odors are
solid particles of matter floating in the oxygen
of the air. But from the fact that a single tiny
grain of amber has perfumed for forty years a
bundle of papers and a film of air a foot in thick-
ness, and that its odor fills a large room in its
every part, a scientific writer, Mr. R. C. Ruther-
ford, has broached the theory that odor is a mode
of motion; that there is an odoriferous ether,
like the luminiferous ether, and that different
sensations of perfumes are simply the feelings
excited by differing rates of vibration of the
odoriferous ether. For how, says he, is it physi-
cally possible for a tiny grain oi amber or musk
to fill a great room with actual solid particles of
itself for so long a time ? The thing makes too
great a strain upon our belief in the divisibility
of matter. It must be that the grain of perfume
sets ether waves in motion, which report them-
selves to the nostrils as sensations of smell.
One would think this might be tested. It does
not seem to harmonize with the nourishing
theory of odors. Democritus or Charles Lamb's
sassafras-tea boy could not have been nourished
by ether waves. Tyndall did not indorse this
theory of Rutherford's.

11.

BACK INTO THE SITNSHINB.

Fair, but wofuUy chilly yet. Marian's nose is
red and raw, and coughing drowns the parson's
saw. It is still unsafe tor cits and amateur
horticulturists to be out and digging in garden
or flower beds. It is pretty hard for the sun to
warm up the atmosphere permanently, when
mighty blocks of snow-chilled air are railroaded
down from the north every night anew. It is
dry enough for ploughing, though; and, as I
trundle in to the city over the rails, I see a
farmer turning over with flashing coulter the
black furrows of the celery ground, now sugared
over with thinnest sprinkling of snow. Higher
up on the slopes are green lawns striped with
white and set in a framework of black spruces.
March is now nimbly footing it toward the goal
on his last lap.

There has been a stirring among the cold roots
of the Symplocarpus for some time in the marshes,
and its purple-striped spathe is already thrust up,
fresh and glistering, amid the oozy sponge and
gray debris of the marsh-side, where as yet green
is barely the dominant color ; while, ostensibly
as if to celebrate these quiet parturitions (or
apparitions) around him, but in good sooth for

BACK INTO THE STTNSHINE. 19

private matrimonial reasons of his own, the
innocent little hyla frog inflates his throat and
fills the dim vault of night and the blue urn of
day with the shrill music of his two-noted flute.
The songs are not in unison, — like those of the
green tree-hoppers of August, when the air pul-
sates as if itself vocal, — but perhaps all the
gayer for that.

Among the very earliest heralds of spring are
the bright-red pestles and spathes of the sturdy
old garden rhubarb or " pie-plant," as they call it
out West. But to the impatient gardener old
ruby is a terribly obstinate and conservative
chap, who ought to be up and doing long before
he shows his head. The hyacinth whispers,
" Spring is near ! " and the crocus and lily cry,
" Hear, hear ! " but old grandpa Rhubarb sleepily
mumbles that it's too early to be up yet. " We
shall have snow yet, ye fools," sajrs he. But
you can coax him out by putting an old half-
barrel or frame of boards around him to focus the
sun's rays.

But the grass is not to be outdistanced, and
has long been struggling upward out of the
brown sod with its little swords of fluted green,
— always bowing, bowing, in the sunshine, and
whispering its pretty nothings all the day. The
warm, scented robe of the mother, — and we
children hiding our faces in it as we play about
her knees. And then, in its larger growths, pur-
veyor of milk and bread and sugar to man (the
sugar-cane is a grass). Enswathing the globe
with its garments of green and gold, buojdng
whole nations on its billows of verdure, first to

20 IN Portia's gardens.

welcome and last to see us go: we roll in it
with delight when young, and it tenderly un-
curls and ripples above our graves at the
end.

The profanation and ruin of grass is in the
too free use of the scythe or lawn-mower. The
horror of seeing a bit of woodside grass, a mira-
cle of beauty with its tangle of wild strawber-
ries and crumpled-dainty ferns and its butter-
cups, where you were wont to admire the
iridescence of the early dew, and where you
were hoping to gather the pretty little strawber-
ries in June, — to see all this mowed off to an
ugly stubble, in effect something like an Irish-
man's bristly head with protruding ears! I
always try to keep a bit of unmown grass, a
piece of springing wildery that na blade of steel
may touch. I don't care how thick and sere
and tangled it is: it will take care of itself; and
in the spring you will see the green slowly, but
surely, out-tingeing the brown, until it waves
triumphant over the last year's stems.

This is not to deny the pleasures of mowing,
— the sweep of scythe in morning dew as the
" lusty angels " bear down upon the rich burthen
of the sward, with steady timing of their strokes,
with swish and swing throwing up the lengthen-
ing swaths, and ever and anon the meny ring of
the stones on the blades of steel as the mowers
stop to whet. This is glorious: I've tried it
myself on the slopes of the Alleghany Moun-
tains and in the meadows of Ohio. All I say is,
Don't mow all your grass, but keep a patch for
beauty's sake.

BACK INTO THE SUNSHINE. 21

Get out in the spring, as soon as a warm day
comes, for a tussle with last year's leaves. It is
astonishing how a hard all-day battle with rake
or spading-f ork will brush the cobwebs out of
the mind and smooth the wrinkles of the brow.

You uncover youi* bulb-beds, and find that
the hardy hyacinths have fought their way up
through the unfrozen mould under the leaves ;
Proserpina is moulding the gold-wax cups of the
cool crocus down in the earth, and fashioning
with cunning fingers the fretted diadems of the
dandelion, — a flower imhonored by the mob,
but loved by the gods and their friends.

Wild geese are harrowing the sky ; the rain-
crow calls you before you are up; the sleepy
old toad that you annually resurrect in the as-
paragus bed seems just as thunder-struck, yet
patient^tupid, as always of yore at the sudden
explosion of dirt that prematurely flings him
into the sunlight.

The spring seasons of 1894 and 1895 were
both phenomenal. In '94 Spring was a month in
advance, and in '95 Summer by a forced march
of many parasangs arrived three weeks before
its time, rudely dislodging Spring and shoulder-
ing her into the laystall of forgotten things.
The first three weeks of March, '94, were one
unbroken balmy May. In '95 May was hot
June. Weather prophets were imfashionable.
The goose-bone shrivelled under the scornful
glances bestowed upon it. The first week of
March, in '94, boys were playing leap-frog on the
grass and marbles on the dry mud ; butterflies
were floating, bees humming, lilac buds swell-

22 IN PORTIA'S GARDENS.

ing, and hylas piping in the marsh. And the
ground captured in this fine charge on time and
space was stubbornly held. The buds and blos-
soms came bravely on. On May 8 a white lilac
bush was in full bloom that in '92 gave its first
blossom on Decoration Day (May 30), and was
picked the next day to celebrate the birthday of
the poet who has made this flower immortal
(he had died two months before). By May 29
the crickets were cheeping and the fireflies were
swinging their golden lanterns high and low
over the meadows.

Who can forget the heat squall of May, '95?
To the horticulturist it was what a squall at sea
is to the sailor. As it rushed down upon him,
the amateur gardener had to run now to this
rope and now to this sail to trim the ship to the
mounting waves of vegetation and the billows
of pelting heat surging up from the south. Now
peas must be planted; then rose-beds must be
edge-trimmed and manured ; next away rush'^d
Monsieur Adam to weed currants; and before
the bewildered good man knew what was the
matter the grass was beyond the lawn-mower's
power, the asparagus was popping up as if it
would be all done in a week, hyacinths and
daffodils were dropped out of sight, jonquils
appeared all in a clump, cherry-trees burst into
great masses of bloom like gigantic balls of pop-
corn, the copses suddenly filled with latish birds,
— orchard and Baltimore orioles, brown thrasher,
and all; while to the unheard but powerful
fiddle of the god of heat the leaves of each for-
est tree and the blossoms thereof hastened by

BACK INTO THE SUNSHINE. 23

one " prompt-entrance " or another to assume
their proper places on the stage of the annual
drama, and play their part to the satisfaction of
the omnipotent leader.

A special delight with me in garden-making
time is watching the blue smoke curl up from
the burning rubbish of my own and neighbors'
gardens, — as if we were offering sacrifice to
Priapus (the god of gardens) or to Pan.
Mirage-like through the heat-waves from the
burning leaves the landscape reels; from out
the flames of yon crackling pile of green and
winter-seasoned brush comes tenuous and shrill
a plaintive long-drawn whistle (P jiff en) ^ the
weird out-sighing of the life of the dying stick.
And presently the rich wallowing flames, noise-
less above the crackle below, ascend to heaven
and the white smoke rises high in the air.

I have in vain searched literature, both in
books and periodicals, to find an aesthetic study
of the forms of smoke and steam. Curious,
when one considers how universal, how obtru-
sive, they are ! Watch the puSing steam escap-
ing from a vent in the side of yonder old build-
ing. See how it glorifies the surrounding
ugliness, with its endless transformations and
ever fresh improvisations, — the dainty Ariel,
the mocking Undine, tantalizing you, filling
your mind with regret and even despair over the
perpetual wreckage of its prodigal inventions.
See how the wayward sprite, the wind, seizes
with its deft fingers the endless streaming
threads, wreathes and twists and twines and

24 IN POETIA'S 6ABDENS.

blows, fretting the soft sun-mist into faintest
fleece, — a miracle of clair-obscure, full of
craterous glooms, ashen and pearly lights, and
silvery lustres ethereally pure against the azure
sky.

A swirl of vapor, a pu£E of smoke, — these
are the very type of evanescence : nothing else
in nature so formless, weightless, capricious.
Yet the solid globe itself and these watery
bodies of ours are but a conserve and solidifica-
tion of vapors, and to vaporous fire-gold destined
to return.

Smoke and steam are opaque, like clouds.
But clouds have angles^ smoke and steam have
the softest curves in nature. Clouds are always
edged on the side of the wind. Cirrus clouds
are often parallel and striated, with delicate de-
cision of edge. Not so steam or smoke. Clouds
have some strange morphic or cohesive quality
that keeps them in serried ranks when smoke or
steam would be torn to tatters by the attacking
wind.

What is smoke ?

Chiefly carbon, or soot, carried up by warm
gases into a denser and colder medium. The
fantastic contortions of escaping steam are due
to the impact of light gases upon colder and
heavier ones. Smoke escaping from a tall chim-
ney on a quiet day rises with a slow and stately
movement because unforced ; but steam, when
propelled violently outward or upward, gets im-
mediately into a state of unstable equilibrium,
and either slides hastily downward around its
vent, with umbrella-shaped curve, or is torn into

BACK INTO THE SUNSHINE. 25

fantastic spray as it shatters itself against the
ceiling of the air.

A locomotive with its plume of mingled smoke
and steam reminds you of Longfellow's north
wind, Kabibonokka, hurrying over frozen fens
and moorlands, —

" And his hair, with snow besprinkled,
Streamed behind him like a river,
Like a black and wintry river,
As he howled and hurried southward."

Sit by a car window and study the endless
coil of water smoke, — its ever changing mounds,
its convolved opalescent masses rolling and
twisting, shot through, like Geissler's tubes,
with intermittent light, a coil of vapor that un-
coils before you can fairly observe it, snuffed
out like a candle before you are out of sight.
Seen at a distance, the inky or snowy globes of
the train-plume show like a chain of Greek O's.

Smoke is the ensign of trade and oriflamme
of war; helmeting the mountain tops ; rising
forever in pillared pomp out of the earth's vol-
canic spiracles; striating the globe with the
snowy trails of the railways; far out on the
high seas breathed from the lungs of the great
oceaners; and stealing up from a myriad happy
hearths in every land.

Speaking of blue garden-smoke in spring
why 18 the smoke of wood often blue in color ?
Now don't run to the learned books to find out,
for your search will be in vain. None of the
works on physics or chemistry so much as touch
on the topic. The cyclopaedias are full of talk
about patent smoke-consumers, but have never a

26 IN PORTIA'S GARDENS.

word on the aesthetics or science of smoke. As
for telling you why smoke is blue, that is too
ridiculously trivial a matter for learned men to
consider. So we are left to our own devices.
I am doubtful, but offer a suggestion or two.
In the case of imperfect combustion, wood
smoke is white or gray, owing, of course, to a
certain amount of unconsumed carbon and hy-
drogen carried up into the air. Now, in a clear,
rain-washed atmosphere the draught is good,
and the soot or carbon is nearly all consumed.
Does what is left (carbonic acid and water,
chiefly) form with the other gases a kind of float-
ing mirror reflecting the blue of the sky above ?
Either this, or the gases of the smoke are of
such a nature that they absorb all the colors of
the spectrum and reflect only blue, irrespective
of the sky color. If you can see blue smoke on
a cloudy day, that will settle it. (The very next
day after writing this I did " settle it," by ob-
serving in a woodland an upburst of delicate
blue smoke from a fire of sticks made by bojrs ;
and the entire sky at the time was covered with
gray mackerel clouds,^ Subsequent watching
of the smoke issuing from a locomotive funnel
has confirmed in me the conviction that it is un-
doubtedly chiefly the vapor of water that causes
the blue tint of smoke, — the vapor mingled in
a certain proportion with the gases of the com-
bustion.

I remember one experience in my life in
which I got smoke more than enough. I would
gladly have seen less blue smoke curling up
from burning wood that spring when, as a boy.

BACK INTO THE SUNSHINE. 27

I helped at the heavy work of burning up the
prostrate timber of a ten-acre wood lot. Oh,
the smarting eyes, the dry and burnt skin, the
backaches, thirst, and smutched face of those
days! Yet it was exciting, fascinating work.
The idea was to keep a-going, by means of
chips and brush, as many fires as you could
around stumps and log piles, and " nigger-off "
as many lengths as you could of the big trunks
for rolling into piles. As fast as the minor
logs became separate from the heap, you kept
rolling them back with tough sapling spikes
(cant-hooks were unknown) on to the red-hot
mass. To nigger-off meant to bum into lengths,
— so named from the black color of the charred
ends. You had to flax around in pretty lively
fashion to keep your "riders" burning across
the big logs that were niggering. With acres
of fires going at once, and dense strangling
smoke everywhere, and intense heat, it may be
surmised that forest-clearing was no joke. (I
have taken a hand in every phase of the virile
sport of pioneering, but know no work quite so
exhausting, although binding over-ripe bearded
barley in a dusty field after a reaping-machine
is about as disagreeable work.) At night sev-
eral hands would join in placing huge riders on
the logs that would last all night. And there
in the midnight silence and dew the sacrificial
fires smouldered and glowed, and the smoke
curled slowly heavenward, forming a scene
grim indeed, but with a suggestion of primitive
strength in it that satisfied. It is a majestic
sight to see at night a forest afire far up on a

28 IN Portia's gardens.

mountain side, as you pass on the railway, —
the long red, ragged line eating its way up and
along with uncontrollable fury ; but the forest
clearing, if less sublime, pleases more, for it is
serving man's interests rather than injuring
them.

From a porch overlooking the city of Boston
you may often watch, in summer, the wrestUng
of the city's smoke with the tangled skein of
a passing August shower. Yonder it comes
creeping up from the south-west, and to my fancy
the scene shapes itself to this :

A whisper of conspiracy among the clouds :

Fetching their stealthy compass far around,

The hulking water-dogs enclose the town.

Down drops their bell-net to the ground,

And in a hollow threaded globe of tremulous-dun rain

The spires and gilded dome are caught.

The breath of chimneys all a-blur,

A yague blottesque of efreets huge and storm-banshees.

In fierce m6Me their forces clash ;

Now this way and now that the victory inclines, till —

Presto ! the noose slips ; with draggled net

Away fly baffled water-sprites.

Twice pierced with the gold tongue of the sky-snake,

Bellowing, their gray beards blown about their heads.

Walt Whitman has a few realistic bits of
smoke-painting. How full of New England
associations the following lines are ! —

" Luird and late is the smoke of the First-day morning.
It hangs low over the rows of trees by the fences,
It hangs thin by the sassafras and wUd cherry and cat
brier under them."

Thoreau, so far as I can discover, is the only
writer in the world who has written poems of
any merit on smoke ; namely, his

BACK INTO THE SUNSHINE. 29

" Light-winged smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thj pinions in thy upward flight,"

and the " Smoke in Winter " :

" The sluggish smoke curls up from some deep dell,
The stiffened air exploring in the dawn," etc.

Let's see. We ran o£E the track ^ in talking
about garden-smoke in spring, or we should ere
this have been out searching for the rathe
hepatica and cowslip, — the earliest flowers, per-
haps. It would be in order to touch on the
violets here (those "blood-drops of the beauti-
ful youth Atys"), but Burroughs has ex-
hausted the subject; and I will simply quote
(apropos) an exquisite simile I came across in
old Achilles Tatius, where he is telling of the
paintings he saw in Sidon, among others that of
Europa and the bull, — his masterly and minute
description of which, by the way, Tennyson has
copied. Tatius speaks of the painting of a
girl whose ^^eyes were tempered hy a languor
such as is seen in violets when they begin to
fader

It was in allusion to the Greek custom of
twining crowns of this flower that AlcsBUS
called Sappho i6wXoK\ — " violet-weaving." When
poets and artists speak of violets, they think
naturally of light-blue color. But only half
of our twenty varieties of violets are blue:
the rest are purple, yellow, white, lilac, and one
even of a green tint. The cultivated Viola tri-

*■ ** Digressions," says Laurence Sterne, " are the Btmshine, they
are the life, the soul, of reading." Take them out of a book, and
" one cold eternal winter would reign in eyery page of it." Jean
Panl'8 Extrchblatis are sometimes the choicest parts of his books.

30 IN pobtia's gardens.

color ^ or pansy "freaked with jet," is more pop-
ular with the mass of people, I notice, than is
the violet proper. But the pansy has lost its
perfume ; and I always find myself laughing at
the scowling little oil portraits of troll men its
petals seem to form rather than passionately
admiring the flower, though in sumptuousness
of color it has been made to attain marvellous
results.

Ruskin says that in summer he reads nothing
but "the dt aC on the flower inscribed with
woe," referring to the pretty myth of the death
of young Hyacinthus accidentally killed by the
discus when playing quoits with Apollo. From
his blood sprang the flower, with dt (alas !^ on
its petals. Now, on our modern hyacinths there
are no such pencillings, nor on the wild hya-
cinths, which only in Shakspere's day began to
be cultivated. What the Greeks meant by the
hyacinth admits still of some doubt. Ovid says
it was shaped like a lily and was more splendid-
shining than Tyrian purple. Virgil speaks of it
as suave rubens^ " sweetly blushing," and as fer-
rugineus^ and as possessing /i^i^or, flaming splen-
dor. Old John Martyn, botanical professor of
yore at Cambridge, England, in his fine illus-
trated edition of the Georgics, writes that the
flower was the red lily with recurved petals
called the Imperial Martagon. Its spots he has
seen take the shape of the letters AI ; and they
so appear in his illustration of the flower, which
he renames Hyacinthus poeticus.

Every spring, when the hillsides around and
beneath us are white with billowy seas of apple

BACK INTO THE SUNSHINE. 31

blossoms, I ask myself why we let the little
Japs outdo us with their cherry-and-plum-tree
festivals, — why we cannot have an Apple Blos-
som Day in the spring as well as an Arbor Day.
The cherry and plum blossoms in the tea gar-
dens of the suburbs of Yeddo attain the size of
a rose, and both exhale a faint delicious fra-
grance. The headquarters of the cherry-bloom
cult are at Yoshino. The plum blows in Febru-
ary, and the cheiTy in April; and during each
period the Japanese daily newspapers print de-
spatches from the gardens, so that their lovers
may come out to see and enjoy the white, pale-
yellow, and rose-tinted plum olossoms and the
blazing canopy of pink cherry blooms. Beneath
the trees walk enthusiastic maidens and young
men, conversing, or composing poems on love
and flowers, which poems they suspend from the
boughs, as if with the pretty idea of sharing
their pleasure with the trees, while artists with
lacquered coloivcases are painting the blossoms
for screens. At Yoshino every paper lantern
has cherry blosaoms painted on it, and your
very tearcakes are blossom-shaped.

Other *' nimble musicians of the air breathe
sweet loud music out of their little instrumental
throats," but none is quite so sweet to me as the
song of the Bluebird in spring. Maurice Thomp-
son speaks of the " almost savage tenderness that
quavers from his throat as he pounces upon the
dislodged worm." That description is close to
the fact. I have often had the blue-coats
domiciled in my boxes. In the severe win-

32 IN pobtia's gabdbns.

ter of 1894-95 the cold made great havoc with
them. In the region west of Boston, swept by
a twelve-mile radius, only two bluebirds' nests
could be heard of in the spring of '95, and only
one in that of '96 ; and a lady wrote from Helena,
Ark., that, after systematic investigation, only
three families of the birds could be found in " a
very wide circuit of Arkansas territory," while
everywhere their lifeless bodies were found in
the little houses put up for their use. She says
that on January 28, during a heavy snow, four
of them were seen to take shelter in a martin
house, and a month after were found there dead.
Reports from Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and New
York told the same story. However, John
Burroughs told me in the winter of '96 that
there was some mistake, he thought, for he had
that winter (February) seen thirteen bluebirds
near his place, and had heard of them as found
in Florida in goodly numbers. Undoubtedly
they will in time recover their former status.
In the spring of '97 great flocks of them were
seen in Washington; and hundreds, perhaps
thousands, passed through Eastern Massachu-
setts. I believe it is rare to hear a bluebird's
note in the neighborhood of Boston so early as
February 28; but in an old Cambridge diary
of mine I find a record to that effect.

A sign of spring that is unmistakable is that
wedge of wild geese far aloft. Probably, or
i-ather undoubtedly, Bryant's solemnly beautiful
" Lines to a Waterfowl " were really lines to a
wild goose or a wedge thereof ! The explana-
tion of the wedge is simple enough, though I

BACK INTO THE SUNSHINE. 33

searched books in vain to find it in print. I
suppose it has occurred to many. It is this:
say that two geese attempt to follow their leader.
Now, in order that their wings may have room
to play, they will naturally tail out and form a
small wedge to start with. Then a fourth bird
lines along behind the one on the left ; and a
fifth, in the desire to get as near the leader as
possible, takes after the one on the right. And
so they keep on, forming wedges of such vary^
ing length and irregular triangular shape as we
see. Joseph E. Chamberlin, of Boston (" The
Listener "), writes of two interesting groups of
these wild fowl observed by him in April, '96.
One was a fine, orderly, harrow-shaped goose
brigade, with a pilot well in advance, then the
apex goose, and the long diverging lines, all
steadily honking, flying high and in good order.
The other set seemed to have lost their leader
or got demoralized in some way. They were
flying very low, in great disorder, " their honk-
ing not measured, but tumultuous," " all scold-
ing at the top of their voices,'* and finally dis-
appearing in a disorderly flight northward.

What a mysterious, almost awesome thing is
this migration of birds (and of butterflies, too,
the milkweed butterfly migrating to the north
every spring by thousands, and south in the fall).
Some of the latest and most elaborate researches
into bird migration are by Heinrich Gatke, who
lives in Heligoland, — the curious island, for-
merly England's, lying directly on one of the
grand-trunk routes of bird migration in Europe.
But in his huge book, now translated, he con-

34 IN pobtia's gardens.

fesses himself baffled as to the cause of the
habit with birds and the method of guidance
they have, when twice each year, in spring and
autumn,

** Intelligent of seasons, they set forth
The aery carayan high over seas/'

J. A. Allen and Maurice Thompson have
written interestingly on this topic (the latter
in Alden's Library Magazine for 1885) ; also
Charles Dixon in " Migration of British Birds "
(1895). The two former explain the southward
range of birds by climatic changes coming after
the Tertiary, — the melting of the glacial ice-cap
of the temperate zone and the extension south of
the warm polar summer, etc. Dixon accounts
for migration by the shifting range-bases of each
species due to oscillations of climate and subsi-
dence of land in early ages. Land sunk so grad-
ually that it was not noticed by the birds ; and,
when it had all disappeared, they still stuck to
the old route, the young being piloted by the
old each year.

There is a touch of the bobolink's note in that
of the red-winged blackbird, — the gurgalee or
okalee bird. One morning in early spring, in
the light of the just risen sun, a flock of these
birds near the house held a grand consultation
on the state of the weather. They were all
speaking together. 'Twas much like the creak-
ing of silver wheels of fairy wagons straining up
hill over a snowy road, or like the pattering of
water at the foot of a fall. On April 21, '96,
there was the most remarkable concert of these
fellows around me. It was a raw day. The

BACK INTO THE SimSHINB. 35

ground was green, but snow was falling. I was
alone in the house, and from rise to set of sun,
as the globe rolled round, I was as if besieged
by a gay, jesting army of serenading birds. As
I cautiously peered out of the windows on various
sides of the house and listened to the infinite
musical clang going on all day in the great tree-
tops that almost touched the roof, I had a vague
queer f eeUng that I was a kind of bird im-
prisoned in a glass cage on the ground and these
fellows outside were the free lords of the earth.
I The trees were black with them ; and the slant-
' flying snowflakes that spotted the new green of
the foliage seemed, as they drifted down through
the trees, like the notes of the birds falling in
showers to the ground.

The third notch I cut in my stick in spring,
anent birds, is when the brown thrasher arrives,
and floats his loud carol from the tip of this
tree or that as he flies about the bosky orchards
and rocky copses near the house. When these
mocking-thrushes come, we always feel, here
near Boston, that spring is comfortably steadied
on its legs. In 1896 it was not until the 29th
of April that through an opened door early one
morning the high, aristocratic, familiar melody
rang in loud and clear amid what seemed now
the miserable, little peepings of sparrows and
other small fry whose voices we had been sub-
sisting on for weeks. After a little song on the
part of the male the distinguished travellers,
husband and wife, sat near by each other for
some time, resting after their night flight over
the city-blazing landscape of Connecticut and

36 m PORTIA'S GARDENS.

Massachusetts, having luckily escaped the bale-
ful torch of the Goddess of Liberty in New
York Harbor, as well as the silent-winged birds
of Athena, the owls, — birds that ought to have
been dedicated, one would think, to Hecate or
to Gorgonian Medusa. One year the thrasher
did not reach our neighborhooa until Decoration
Day; and loud and triumphant, "liquid and free
and tender," seemed his carol for the ashes of
all dead soldiers. And somehow with his song
came to me the thought of reconciliation, —

** Word over all beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time

be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly
softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world."

The brown thrush sometimes sings among the
wild-grape tangles of Northern Georgia a low
crooning, dreamy song in the night, as I have
heard the Carolina mimic (or cat-bird) in Ohio
in the daytime.^ One of his Northern words,
by the way, is very plainly " Georgy, Georgy."
I have not heard him in the South, but think I
have just heard that crooning sound amid the
medley of his mimickry. I have been standing
motionless for twenty minutes (May 6), listen-
ing to a brown thrasher who, seeing me close by,
but not minding me, has been singing loud and

^ I know not whether It has been suggested by any one else to call
this bird after his Latin name, Mimtbs Carolinenais, At any rate, I
suggest Carolina mimic as a pretty name. It is only a translation of
theXatin. At present this Jaunty, beautiful songster would have a
good case against man in the courts of law for injurv received in the
nickname given him. What if he does mew occasionally, and once
in a long while steal another bird's egg ? Would you like to have your
friends call you Mr. Growler because you are occasionally irritable,
— have that for your legal and street and epistolary name? (More
about the Carolina mimic in the next chapter.)

BACK INTO THE SUNSHINE. 37

sweet all his stock of tunes, among which I
recognized notes of the robin, song-tlSush, blue-
bird, Carolina mimic, and the Virginia cardinal,
-— the latter awaking memories of my boyhood
home in Southern Ohio, where the cardinal built
in the porch every year. What need of travelling
South to hear birds, when you have the brown
thrush to gather them up for you over hundreds
of square miles (like a winged phonograph),
and come and tell you all about it in your
Northern home ?

Speaking of mocking-birds reminds one of
Maurice Thompson's " Song of the Mocking-
bird," published in the Oenbury magazine some
years ago. I think it the finest bird poem in
literature. It is the fruit of long and enthu-
siastic study of the MimuB polyglottus in its haunts
about Tallahassee and in Georgia. Here is one
stanza : —

'' And, when Night's Vkst and shadowy urn
O'erbrims with dreams,
I stir the vales of sleep with my nocturne.
Slowly, tenderly
Outflow its rippling streams
To blend with Night's still sea of mystery j
The pungent savor of the dewy buds,
The coolness and the languor of old woods
And the slow murmur of the darkling rills,

My art distills
Into a subtle philter, wild, intense,
Of tenuous melody
And slumbrous harmony,
Blown round the dusky hills,
Through fragrant, fruity, tropic thickets dense.
Lingering and lapsing on
And lost before the dawn."

How well the phrase " languor of old woods "
describes the warm, sunshine-flecked, grassy floor

38 IN pobtia's gabdbns.

of certain Ohio and Indiana woods only those
know who have frequented them. The phrase
doesn't apply at all to forests this side of the
Alleghanies. But it does to Southern ones, and
to those of Southern Ohio, and of Southern
Indiana, where Thompson has always lived.

The earliest bird to build nests is the English
sparrow. A warm day even in January sets the
males a-sparking. The sparrows on Boston Com-
mon have a pitiful struggle for the few knot-
holes in tree-trunks to be found there. The
first warm day or so in March starts them at
nest-building, their object being apparently to
get the best places early. I witnessed one day
a hard battle about a coveted knot-hole. The
females were nearly dead with the fatigue of the
combat and dizzy from being pecked about the
head. Occasionally one would seize her oppor-
tunity, and pop into the shallow cavity, but, un-
able to work for fear of an attack in the rear,
would incontinently face about and come out.
The males also were excited and interested par-
ticipants. This little tragi-comedy took place
right beside the great stream of humanity that
flowed past all day, but the birds scarcely noticed
the existence of the passers-by. Twice warring
couples flew down and alighted between my
feet, so that I was near picking them up.

If the English sparrow is likely to eat us up,
I don't see but what we shall have to take
Falstaff's course, and snap at him: he makes
good pot-pies. The Japanese take advantage of
the belligerency of the males to sharpen their
bills till they are like needles, and then employ

BACK INTO THE SUNSHINE. 89

them in cock-sparrow fights. But we shall not
imitate this, one hopes.

The Anglo-American sparrow recognizes his
enemy in our American squirrel, just as his for-
bears did in the English one. One morning we
heard a terrible rumpus being kicked up by some
English sparrows, and discovered the cause in
the shape of a red squirrel squatted on his
haunches on a horizontal limb, with his back
against the tree-trunk, gnawing a nut with
entire sang-froid. He looked so much like a
little Chinese idol or mandarin that I could not
help laughing. He seemed to be saying : " I
hear you, you little wretches. Just you dare to
build one of your huddles of nests in my domain,
and I'll soon settle your case. In the mean
time nuts are plenty, and I scorn ye I " More
fortunate in the memories of his fellow-citizens
than the introducers of the English sparrow into
America in 1851 and 1866 was the late Frank
Dekum, of Portland, Ore., who imported from
Germany, his native country, great numbers of
song-birds, — thrushes, skylarks, nightingales,
chafl&nches, and goldfinches, — and, having cared
for them until they had become acclimated, set
them free ; and now the woods of Oregon, it is
said, resound with their songs. But the news-
paper account lacks confirmation. We (yught
to have the European skylark and nightingale.
England would be only too glad to exchange
some for a few of our humming-birds. A seven
days' voyage would not hurt either humming-
birds or the English birds, I presume. But the
best way for us to get larks and nightingales

40 IN PORTIA'S GARDEKS.

would be to import the eggs, and have them
raised in the nests of similar birds, as was done
in the case of nightingales in Scotland (Yarrell,
" British Birds, vol. i. p. 319), though in this
case the young nightmgales faUed to return to
their foster-parents, the robins, m the spring.
The experiment should be tried here on a large
scale in the Southern States.

i

III.

THE ENCHANTED FOREST.

In the folk-lore of most nations there are
stories of certain persons who by some gift of
the gods or fairies receive the power of under-
standing the language of birds. And then to
them the familiar forests and fields suddenly
become strangely changed. The spring when I
first put on the ring of Canace and learned to
know all the birds of the locality in which I was
studying them I always had the feeling, when
invading the hushed precincts of the grove or
desertea orchard or the meadows, that I was
entering upon enchanted ground. My eyes
had been anointed with a mystic coUjrrium or
euphrasy by which a new world was revealed.
It was the old world beautified by the discovery
in it of hosts of gay and shy winged inhabitants
I had long read of, but had not seen and learned
to know by their songs and coats. After a month
of hard daily walking and observing I could
say, with Thoreau,

** I hearing get, who had hut ears,
And sight, who had bnt eyes before."

Many persons have, as I did, a knowledge of,
say, some twenty-five or thirty of the more com-

42 IN POBTIA's GARDBaiTS.

mon species of birds, but don't exactly know
how to go to work to find the shyer birds of
wood and field they read of so much in these
days. But all that is necessary in learning to
know the birds and their songs is to buy a good
manual or two and an opera glass with wide eye-
pieces, take a walk or two with a bird student,
if convenient, to get a start, and make a visit or
so to a museum to get an idea of groups and
general characteristics. Chapman's color-keys
L now the best aad simplest for identifying
birds.

A musical notation of a bird's song will help
identify it, if you can carry the notes in your
. head. One May day, in an old road, bordered by
apple-trees, I heard what seemed to me, a begin-
ner, to be the song of a new warbler. It was so
energetic, so rapid, so prolonged, delivered with
so much verve, like the house wren's gush of
melody, that I was instantly on the alert to
identify it. After a while another bird very
kindly chased out my bird to a point where I
could see him and hear him singing hi& te-tee^
yu-^K fee', which he repeated, with the modifi-
cations that characterize nearly all birds' songs,
some half-dozen times before pausing, and end-
ing always with a high-up tweet. Any New
England oird student knows at once that I am
describing the very common warbling vireo.
But I thought then that my bird, with the gray-
white coat and absence of wing-bars or other
markings, might be the rare Tennessee warbler,
described by Mr. Torrey in " The Footpath
Way." But in looking over Wilson Flagg's

THE BNCHANTBD FOBBST. 43

"Birds and Seasons" I found I had not yet
identified what he calls the brigadier bird. Car-
rying his musical notation of that bird in my
mind, I saw at once when next the supposed
Tennessee warbler made himself heard that it
was the warbling vireo, or brigadier bird. Flagg
makes the last notes end in hrigdte^ indicated by
two notes carried up two lines above the staff.
My bird's tweet was very high, too ; and, further,
he was always found in tall wayside elms or
other trees, as the warbling vireo is known to be.

Seek the brooks of running water, and you
will find the birds there. They are epicures in
water as well as you, and with their excitable
nervous organizations need a good deal to drink.
Write down in the field a description of the
colors of the bird. And don't carry a gun. I
would just as soon shoot the neighbors' children
as breat the heart of a pair of pretty songsters
just beginning housekeeping. Of what use is a
dead bird ? If you are patient, you can learn to
know every bird with the opera glass ; and, if
you don*t kill them, you can enjoy their life and
wayB, and avoid also injuring the farmers and
gardenei-s by destroying their friends, and hard-
ening your own heart. Kill all the murderous
cruel birds — crows, jajrs, shrikes, hawks — you
can, if you must shoot, but don't for shame
stain your hands with the blood of a harmless
gay little songster just because you are too im-
patient to identify it by its colors and song when
on the wing or in the tree.

My first book-identification of a bird was one
of the earliest spring arrivals, — the White-

44 IN Portia's gabdeks.

throated Sparrow, called in Canada la siffleur
(the whistler), in the United States the Peabody
Bird. One might call him the Little Jinnee,
from his whistling.i I did not hear the bird's
song for a few days, but one morning was awak-
ened by a new six-noted fluting under my win-
dow:

m

P 1*

m

r

'^^

Sometimes the stave had only three or four
notes. But the next morning the solution came.
It was the white-throat ; for, after a few more
broken bars and experiments, came clear and
sweet the Sam Peahody^ Peahody^ Peabody of
his delicate little quill, repeated again and again,
as if the bird were proud of having discovered
his song and wanted to repeat it till he was
sure of it.

But what on earth did the daft little bush-
fool mean by his " Peabody " ? What's Peabody
to him or he to Peabody? The members of
that family that I have known in different parts
of the country are pious, clean-bodied and clean-
souled, eminently respectable, starched and
whaleboned people. Conformity, convention-
ality, and stubborn conservatism are the family
traits. The bird is shy : they are the reverse of
that.

What spring note so cheery as that of the
song-sparrow, coming as he does among the
very first arrivals? I heard one on the place

1 The Arabians sav their genies. or Jinn, have roand holes for
months, imd that their speech is a kind of whistling.

THE ENCHANTED FOBBST. 45

March 6 this year (1897), and with him were
fully a hundred redpoll linnets and a dozen
cedar-birds.

One morning at five o'clock, as I stood listen-
ing to a song-sparrow who had for several days
in the same place been pouring forth his varied
songs, — one of which always ended with one
or two comical little falsetto pips in a lower key,
like an unintended squeak of a flute, — suddenly,
out of the air, everywhere and nowhere appar-
ently, but close by, came a soft, dreamy peahody^
pedbody^ peabody^ peabody. Thinking at last to
catch him in the song and see how he looked, I
began to peer about. At last, happening to
apply my opera glass to a pair of disconsolate
English sparrows nearly overhead, who were
sadly and silently contemplating the wreck of
their nest in a broken electric-light fixture at
a cross-roads, I suddenly discovered that what
I had taken to be an English fellow-mourner
close by them was their American cousin, Mr.
Sam Peabody. And steadily the unconquerably
gay song-sparrow kept up his attempt to cheer
the disconsolate, as did some other members
of the sparrow tribe, the chippies, who were
blithely clicking their Lilliputian reaping-ma-
chines close by. The white-throat I notice (but
the books do not) scratches hen-fashion, like the
fox-sparrow and towhee. So does the song-
sparrow, who also imitates his English emigrant
brother in not disdaining to scratch for grain
among roadside horse-droppings.

In walking through the fields one often stum-
bles upon the nests of song-sparrows, containing

46 IN pobtia's gabdbns.

four or five brown-speckled eggs. The birds
will not leave the nests till you are in danger of
stepping on them. They are often rifled by
crows, jays, and boys, owing to their exposed
situation. I remember one that was set in a
most idyllic spot, — a little round earth-bowl
about two feet across, all shaded with running
blackberries and nodding grass and chased with
all sorts of dainty herbs besides. It was well
hidden, but sometimes the nests are exposed to
the sun.

A characteristic bird of spongy April is the
Coffee-headed Bunting (as I call it), or Cow-
bird. Its notes to me are all very musical.
Mr. Frank Chapman affirms in his '' Birds of
Eastern North America " that " no joyous song
swells the throat of the male," and to him
it seems as if the "guttural bubbling" were
produced "with apparently nauseous effort."
H. D. Minot gives a fuller and better account
of the bird ; but he, too, calls his cluck-see " un-
musical," and says " it is painful to hear him."
I don't understand: to me every note of this
bunting is pleasing and musical, — from the
tinkling gurgle of his courtship, uttered with
ruffled feathers, outspread wings, and a kind of
convulsive movement, to the plaintive-sweet
quadruplet of notes (^peeu'-stiddy) he utters when
on the wing or perched on the tip-top spray of a
high tree. The latter notes correspond to the
te-e-e of the red-shouldered blackbird. Each of
these species has, besides the gurgle, a cluck ;
and the bunting I have also heard talking in a
kind of low conversational pip-pip when spark-

.4

THE ENCHANTED FOREST. 47

ing the female. The Italian-Irish phrase of the
coffee-head, piil-Btiddy ("more steady"), is as
dainty-pretty as the tinkle of a glass bell in the
air. It makes you laugh to hear the male cry
" more steady," as he follows some coy and im-
passive female in drab (whom he has been per-
secuting with abject gallantry for a long time
and driving to the very end of the branch on
which she was perched), as much as to say,
"I'm off, I'm after her; but look out, old
boy, and don't lose your head. More steady
there ! "

The foregoing is all that can be said in favor
of the " cow-bird " ; for, as everybody knows,
the males are polygamous and the females para-
sitical, corresponding to the European cuckoo,
these two alone of the bird species making a
business of laying their eggs in the neste of
other birds and shirking entirely the cares and
declining the joys of motherhood.^ It is said no
birds but those disgusting little tramps, the
English sparrows, will associate with the cow-
bird ; but I have seen others feeding with them
in pastures.

May 6, '96. — Yesterday was oppressively hot,
an ideal bird day, trees in blossom and covered
with young leaves, orioles shouting in the apple-
trees and Drown thrushes singing loud in old
pastures. But to-day a terrific cold wind blows
straight from the north, mercury nearly at the
freezing point, fires built, and overcoats and
gloves in order. Every air-train is bringing

1 A few breeds of domestic fowl, snoh as Leghorns, Black Spanish,
and Hambnrgs, have had the habit of inoubaung their eggs breeded
out of them by man's interfereuoe.

48 IN PORTIA'S GARDENS.

new birds north in full dress to open the court-
ing concert under the greenwood trees ; but how
can the fun begin in such weather as this ? Yet
a bird's break&st must be got, anyway ; and I
noticed the warblers working among the tossing
willows' gold blossoms as hard as ever. They
found the fattest worms on the southern side of
the southern row of willows, and exploited only
that.

May 8. — Warm and balmy day. My light-
winged air troop (it spoils a good bird pun that
the Greek "hopUtes" were the Aeavy-armed)
passed gayly before me in review through the
half-mile avenue of huge antique willows, their
evolutions, strange to say, consisting largely of
standing on their heads. It took about twenty
minutes for the procession to pass a given point,
going up or down the row.

After a hard battle in the field (aching neck,
dazzling sun, flashing and criss-crossing of new
varieties in bewildering numbers, and a tussle
with bird keys at home in the evening), the hot
and tired student of the warblers proper, about
the middle of May, say, will conclude that the
study of these sylvan fairies with wings is at
once the most exasperating, delightful, and
fatiguing subject in ornithology.

Delightful because of their gayety, their
variety of songs and beauty of coloring, and
their jaunty elegance of cut. You never regret
the time spent in studying them, — your chas-
ings down the long wooded hillsides or up the
shady glens or round and round the cedar or elm
or apple tree where they live their happy lives.

i

THE ENCHANTED POBBST. 49

When all is said for the black-and-white creep-
ing warbler, the silver chips of sound let fall in
a tiny shower by the pine warbler high up some-
where in the solemn grove of pines, the constant
pleasure given by the abundant roadside yel-
lows, the cheery song of the chestnut-sided
(dubbed by me " Little Breeches," from his last
two notes), the lazy, wheezy zwee^ zwee of that
sumptuous idler, the black-throated blue, or the
beseech^ beseech^ beseech ye of the common Mary-
land yellow-throat, or the sharp cicada-like notes
of the flashing nervous redstart, — when all is
said of these that can be said, it still remains to
be affirmed that the peachblow vase of warblers,
the one who bears away the bell from all com-
petitors, is the Black-throated Green, that con-
stant companion of one's walks in spring and
summer, that cheerer of the underwoods, the
gayest little Mark Tapley of them all. At
home, in the cedars, you hear him in the morn-
ing, at noon in the still forest of pines, at even-
ing in the cedars of the pasture, — everywhere
these golden-cheeked clamberers, winding their
little silver bugles, — see^ see^ see^ see, «ee, or
pee^ pee, pee^ TWEE, twee^ — the tinkling laugh-
ter of the air, the gayety and sunshine of
spring embodied in a voice. Perhaps the bird
is so happy because passing his life wholly amid
the fresh, fragrant cedars, where he is safe from
birds of prey. (I have thought that perhaps so
many of the other songsters get their plaintive
notes from the continual terror their ancestors
and they have lived in.) Sometimes you will
hear a black-throated green with an amusing,

50 IK Portia's gardens.

slow, asthmatic drawl, — low-pitched, as if
greeny had a bad cold in his head. It then
seems as if he were still trying real hard to be
gay, and his " Oh, I'm so hap-pj " has only a
slight tone of despondency. Sometimes, though
not often, they have silent spells, and occasion-
ally utter a whispered, dreamy version of their
song. I remember that once, as I was passing
through a great lonely orchard, one of them flew
along beside me from tree to tree, evidently en-
joying human society.

This spring I watched a Prairie Warbler build
her dainty cup of a nest in a small cedar. It
lies now before me, lined with softest white hair
and an abundance of tiny feathers. She was
quite horrified to discover me ambushed behind
a tree, and pointing my opera glass at her just
as she was fitting a straw into the nest and
scratching around with her claws to give the
nest shape. This was in a little secluded natural
park, or paradeisos, scented just then with apple
blossoms, green with grass and cedars, and sur-
rounded by forest trees, the city lying dim and
silent in the distance. Calling from day to day,
I at length ventured to peep in during the
absence of the owner, and found a clutch of
tiniest eggs blotched with cinnamon. From
among them I removed a huge sooterkin of a
cow-bird's egg that would have ruined the brood.
(But I might as well have left it, for either
crows, jays, or boys soon rifled the nest.) I
had scarcely concealed myself after hurriedly
abstracting the intruded egg, when, as the
" Arabian Nights " stories say, the winged genie

THE ENCHAKTED FOREST. 51

arrived: did she notice the absence of the fo3>
eign egg ?

By May 8 some speckle-breasted Oven-birds
had arrived, and were making the woodlands
ring. John Burroughs's capital mnemonic catch-
phrase for their energetic song — teacher, teacher^
TEACHER, TEACHER, TEACHER I— is faulty
(for birds in this locality, at any rate) in one
point : the last note is almost always teach^ and
not teacher^ like the others. See Appendix.

The cedars and oaks were full of restless
Black-and-white Creepers, almost comical in
their little Sing Sing coats, or mourning jackets,
and their eternal cry of Jwsy, busy^ busy^ bust/ ;
busy^ busy^ biz. They are good company in the
lonely woods where few other birds are to be
founa. I have met them far in a desolate tree-
swamp, where the stagnant waters moistened the
roots of huge ferns and marish mosses, and the
only other signs of life besides trees and plants
were the mosquitoes and the sudden silent de-
paiture of a great hawk disturbed by the crack-
ing of a dry twig under my foot. In this place
a pair of creepers were imitating the motions of
the earth, — the revolution on its axis, and the
forward range through space; for they were
spiralling about the tree-trunks, and also swing-
ing around the orbit of the swamp. I once
timed the song of a creeper, and found that, when
he wasn't eating something, — which was pretty
often, — the notes came out with the regularity
of a machine by the time I had counted from
thirty-four to thirty-eight. Once, when he was
devouring a moth, the time for his song came ;

62 IN Portia's gardens.

and he uttered it as well as he could. He wsts
an intermittent geyser: when the fountain of
song in his breast rose just so high, the valves of
his voice had to play, whether or no.

During the spring of '96 I discovered and
watched from time t^time the neste of five pairs
of brown House Wrens. AU were located in old
apple-tree limbs, and entered by small knot-holes
or by the holes made by woodpeckers. Besides
most jolly singing there is usually good fun to
be had in watchmg the skirmishings and con-
flicts of the nervous and mettlesome little male
wren.

The first to arrive in the abandoned apple
orchard near me, which has been for years one
of their favorite breeding-places, was a male, on
April 26. Others dropped in from Florida, and
in a few days the females came. By May 8 they
had all paired off ; and one of the little Bubbly
Jocks, especially, was running over with joy.
The wife was part of the time peering into
holes in the trunks of the lichened apple-trees,
and part of the time looking for nice pupa-
cocoons in the old stone wall. The very second
that Jenny would begin in a low voice to say
something, Jackie would interrupt with an ex-
cited ecstatic remark : —

Jackie. — Oh, I'm so happy, oh, oh, oh ! What
a fine morning I Yes, yes, yes : you are quite
right in what you are going to say, my dear. It
i% a glorious old abandoned sunny orchard, oh,
oh, oh !

Jenny. — But, my — [Jackie as above] foolish
husband — [Jackie ditto] , you know — [Jackie

THE EKOHANTED FOREST. 53

do,'] I must — [J. do,'] get food — [J. do.] to
feed — [J. do.] the eggs — [J. do J] I am —
[J. do.] going to lay [J. do.]

Jackie quite upset my gravity by his delirious
joy, and apparently conquerea the phlegmatic
mood of his spouse. She seemed to say, " Well,
there's no getting rid of this silly little husband,
so I might as well go to housekeeping. Come
on, Jackie, let's hunt for a tree-hole."

One day, after the nests had all been selected
and the females were brooding the eggs, I paid
a call on a certain pair, in going my rounds
among the nesting birds. I found the male in
a great state of commotion over a downy wood-
pecker, whose head was sticking out of Jackie's
window. The valiant and nervous wren was
flashing back and forth in front of the hole, and
giving it to downy with a vengeance, though he
stood just a little in awe of him, owing to his
superior size. But he stuck to him, downy pop-
ping his head in and out, in his vain endeavor
to avoid the wren and yet give him a Roland
for his Oliver. Jackie would sometimes slip
slyly around in the rear of the limb behind a
projecting piece of bark, and, when downy's
head emerged, flash at him, and give him a
tweak. The bird in the hole at length came
out, whereupon there was a change of rfiles, —
the now suddenly silent wren doing the dodging
and the other trying in vain to get near him.
Before this game of tag began, and while the
wren was making such a fuss, the tree was
visited by an inquisitive chippie, who hopped
about, and seemed to say: "Is it a snake?

54 IN Portia's gardens.

What is it, brother wren? Can I be of any
assistance ? " Then came a male yellow warbler,
a male indigo bird, a king-bird, and, finally, a
redstart, all attracted by the commotion. Pres-
ently the wren flew off ; and the downy perched
on a dead branch, wiped his bill (a bird seems
to wipe his bill as a woman licks her lips with-
out knowing why), and preened up his feathers,
as much as to say, "Lively fun we've been
having; and I whipped him, too."

Three or four days afterward I found the
male wren carrying cocoon-titbits in to his mate,
announcing his coming every time by a little
burst of song, as if to reassure her nerves before
he descended the dark hole at the bottom of
which she sat. He amved with food once every
two minutes, by the watch. After a speU of
work he took a rest of ten minutes, singing all
the while, and then started off again for food.
A few days after this I found all desolation and
silence. I smelled boy at once, and fresh
" sign " was revealed every second, until on
rounding the tree my heart sank at seeing a pile
of fresh chips ; and, looking up, I saw the hole
chopped by the little wretches, and the sticks
of the nest protruding.

The two other pairs of wrens in this orchard
raised their young successfully. One of them
had a narrow escape, though, from a big friend
of theirs. Finding so many nests robbed,
and finding all silent about this nest No. 2, 1
climbed the tree, in a sort of blind rage, to take
a look down the end of the dead limb in which
it was. What was my horror when the limb

THE ENCHANTED FOREST. 65

broke in my hand I and, to add to my discom-
fiture, the eggs which I rolled out were warm.
I hastily and carefully returned the eggs, and
thrust the piece of wood containing them down
perpendicularly in a bunch of twigs beside the
remaining portion of the limb, and tied it with
a string. The wrens were absent and did not
discover me, and probably, after puzzling over
the matter on their return, concluded that some
natural earthquake or other had played the trick
on them ; for repeated anxious visits on the part
of a certain guilty, hulking mortal showed, to
his great joy, that the nest was not abandoned.
In fact, I often watched the carrying in of food
to the young, and saw that they were safely
launched on the aerial ocean, their future home.

I am convinced that there is no positive an-
tagonism at all between wrens and English spar-
rows, and that, if the wrens have retired from
the towns (as they have), it is simply because
the sparrows outnumber them ten to one, and
a month before their arrival take possession of
the few available knot-holes and boxes. The
wrens are crowded out, in the terrible struggle
for the few places that are provided. But there
is no help ; for, if the sparrows were given all
the boxes they wanted, they would multiply so
fast that the wrens would still have no chance,
and the sparrow nuisance be but increased.

In proof of the entire absence of antagonism
between English sparrows and wrens I would
say that I made repeated visits to an old lane
where English sparrows raised broods close by
the apple-tree domicile of a pair of wrens ; and,

56 IN PORTIA'S GARDENS.

although the sparrows were all around the latter,
even in adjoining trees, I never saw the least
sign of disagreement between them. There was
room for all, and all were happy. The wrens
could roll up their sleeves and polish off Johnny
Bull at any moment : the Johnnies had found
this out, and there was peace.

On May 9 arrived two resplendent scarlet
Tanagers, with their meek olive-green wives.
The males made the wood ring, as they traversed
it high up in the tree-tops, with their far-calling
and far-answering shout oipeeu^peeu^pee-a'te tu
you\ peeu\ which one could fancy caught from a
vanished race of the cities of Yucatan, where
these birds have always wintered. Other tana-
gers that followed them varied the phrasing very
much. As will be seen when I speak of my
discoveries among the bobolinks, it is evident
that members of the same brood or near rela-
tives in any single species will have very similar
notes, while others will differ from them. As
for the first arrivals just mentioned, coming as
they did before the new leaves were fairly out,
one fancied that they might drop fire on the dry
leaves as they passed. No wonder they are
rare ; for what a mark for the gunner and the
hawk the males are ! — these " flame-colored
prisoners in dark-green chambei-s, who have only
to be seen and heard, and Death adjusts an
arrow." A bird does not like to have an opera
glass pointed at him, any more than a human
being does ; and one of my tanagers expressed
his opinion of my manners by repeatedly saying
to himself. Take care (or tip-where')^ tip^ tip.

THB BNGHANTED FOBEST. 57

The females I have heard at other times utter
an alarm call of tip-where.

Two of our common birds have the extreme
elegance of high breeding and noble blood. I
mean the bird of the dark slaty coat and ink-
black eye, the Catbird (or Carolina Mimic) and
the wax-wing Cedar Bird or Cherry Bird. Both
have the quiet reserve and low tones of the
drawing-room. The black-eyed mimic's voice
contrasts strongly with the loud tones of almost
all the other birds of about his size around him,
— the robin, jay, tanager, cuckoo, oriole, and
flicker. It sometimes seems like a soliloquy or a
reminiscence. It is like an air sung by a gentle
lady to the accompaniment of a low-toned flute,
" an accent very low in blandishment," the song
purling on like a stream running over mossy
stones and turning many an angle as it goes.
Sometimes the Carolina mimic gives you the
brown thrasher's very notes, as if imitating that
thrush, and not the birds that the thrush himself
imitates ; for at such times his voice approaches,
if not equals, the loud serene tones of his brother
mocker.

Again and again, when looking up into some
tree-top for other birds, you will be surprised to
see there a little silent group of the wax-wings,
or Cedar Birds, dressed in neat-fitting drab and
mauve silks, and cuddled close together. You
think of Charles Lamb's "party in a parlor,"
" aU silent and all damned." Ovid would have
said "metamorphosed," and made them silent
for some such reason as was Philomela, whose
tongue Tereus cut out, so she could not inform

9

58 IN PORTIA.*S GABDBNS,

against him for his crime against her. She was
aiterwards changed into a swallow. As you
think of it, the mystery grows why such beauti-
ful birds should be so exceptionally voiceless,
save for a very faint lisp or a soft muffled sneeze,
which contrasts curiously with the loud whistles
of the Baltimore oriole, who often hobnobs with
them in the blossoming apple or cherry, tree.
The mistakes one sees in newspapers about birds
are amusing. I recently read in one the com-
munication of a person who said he or she had
''been hearing the high notes of some cedar
wax-wings." Mrs. Olive Thome MiL j speaks
of a pair of chats as having " removed their in-
fants," " hurried them out of the nest as soon as
they could stand." Her chats mig^ t have been
cunning, but they were not quite such cunning
chats as to carry their kittens off in their mouths.
She of course meant they enticed them away by
calls.

Of the four interesting vireos heard in our
tree-tops in spring and summer (the warbling,
or tee tu wuh tbbt bird; the yellow-throated,
with his Oheer upf I'M here; the audacious
little white-eyed ; and that gliding ventriloquist,
the red-eyed), the last two are by far the most
attractive. If a student of birds finds himself
awakened some June morning by a loud, ring-
ing, distinguished whistling or carolling that
he can't identify, and rushes out half-dressed,
and has an exciting chase to identify a bird that
he is sure must be a foot long, he will laugh on
discovering that it is that wag of old lanes and
swampy bosks, the White-eyed Vireo, or white-

THE ENCHANTED POBEST. 59

eyed greenlet, as he used to be called. His song
is often loud and energetic, like the rose-breasted *
grosbeak's, and its vehemence quite astonishing
for such a mite of a bird. The white-eyes are
great mimics, and I believe no two of them sing
alike. I have heai^d one say chut-^uh-whee^ tee-
tee-tee\ twut; chut mew\ the last sound being
the cat-bird's mew. Another made the echoes
ring and ring again with startling vehemence as
he whistled tip where^ tip where^ then changing
to tip er *';^e', tip er whee^. It is this little joker
who is soi sarcastic on the newspaper men by
tearing up one of their productions, when he
can get it, to line his nest.

The " Red-eyed Vireo " is poorly named, for
the red iris Cannot be seen a few feet away.
Wilson Flagg called it "the Preacher Bird,"
because to his ear it seemed to say, " You see it

— you know it — do you hear me? — do you
believe it?" etc. But American preachers don't
exhort in any such staccato fashion. I should
call the bird (and do so call it) the Parlez-
vous Bird;^ for, if ever a bird spoke French
(and of course the oiseaux in France all do),
this one speaks it. It is^ well that one bird at
least should remind us of our indebtedness to
thetbrave French pioneers in the settlement of
the continent. The inflections and abrupt snappy
tones of the " red-eyed vireo " can't be worded
in any other language. He says: qui est? —
hien — c^est Men — oui, oui^ oui — tout de suite

— qu ^est ce qvbe c^est ? — je prie vous —pas si

* That every nation hears its birds speak its own language is illus-
trated by onr whippoorwill, which winters in Brazil, where to tile
Portuguese it says Joam carta p4o (John out wood).

60 IN pobtia's gaedbns.

vite — sHl V0U8 plait. These phrases, at any
rate, I wrote down from the bird's dictation;
and they can be verified by anybody.

The X ellow-throated Vireo has the same rising
inflection in the first part of his song and a fall-
ing inflection in the last : Oheer up ? I'm here.
I have heard individuals of this species sing,
See U9f Three ofuB^ the latter half uttered
in a lower tone and with the falling inflec-
tion.

May 15, '96, was the Baltimore Oriole's day
(the Orchard is very rarely seen about here.)
AH day the elms and apple-trees were ringing
with his liquid-sweet cherry talk. How the
blood leaped to the heart when from some tree-
top his startling jiotes first rang out, so distin-
guished in tirmre^ or tone-color, so brave and
sweet, as if he were afraid of no one, and the
world was but his ox-heart cherry to plunge the
dagger of his bill into : Ke-cheWry^ cherry sweety
ke-che'rry. Or, again, cherry^ cherry^ sweet
cherry. Then presently : cherry^ cherry, Til
eat you : cherry, cherry, Pit eat. And eat he
and his brother Orchard do, with a vengeance
(curious that the Baltimore oriole should be-
tray himself by incessantly talking about it),
sticking their bills into hundreds of cherries out
of pure wantonness. They are veiy dainty
about their eating. I have seen the Baltimores
eating the wild cherry, first macerating it with
their bill, with wonderful dexterity in not letting
it fall, and then tucking it away under one claw
while they eat the flesh, never swallowing the

THE ENCHANTED FOREST. 61

stones, as do the golden-winged woodpeckers,
for example. These two species of orioles spoil
whole vineyards of grapes in New York, getting
drunk on the sap, and going through the vine-
yards row by row, puncturing the whole lot just
for fun. But their fun is turned into mourning
by the sharp crack of the guns of the enraged
viticulturist and his men. The orioles are great
mimics. Nuttall gives several of their songs
which are quite different from mine. I have
heard orioles say : You see, you see ? Teteer-
Peter ; punkin eater ^ eater. Joseph E. Chamber-
lin tells of one who said Jupiter\ Jupiter\ Jupi-
Jupi" Jupiter\ and came back every year to say
the same. My cherry sweet birds formed a rather
limited group. I would occasionally hear others
of the family in different parts of the town.
Several miles distant I heard another soliloquiz-
ing as follows, while he exploited an apple-tree :
Ohurry^ churry^ ehu-peep'-^p^ pee-up', pee-up\
never varying from this form. Such a variety
in the notes of a species make you think there's
something in bird talk more than we understand.
No wonder early races have always believed
birds could talk.

The rusty red of the orchard oriole will not
compare with the gaudy orange coat of the
Baltimore, — the golden robin, or hang-bird;
and his song is inferior to the unctuous con-
tralto of the latter, lilted out amid the apple
blossoms, — his Talte care^ take care^ quick.
The Baltimore's carol is like that of the rose-
breasted grosbeak, — loud, triumphant, with an
unmistakable ring of sincerity and strength.

62 IN PORTIA'S GARDENS.

Nuttall says he never heard the orchard oriole
in Massachusetts. Neither am I conscious of
having seen or heard it. My eyes are excep-
tionally long-sighted and hearing normal, and
there would have been no trouble in identifying
this bird with his tint of brick-red, nervous
activity, and rapid, unanalyzable concatenation
of song. Nuttall travelled much in the South,
and says the Baltimore oriole gets his cherry
notes from the Carolina wren.

As the orioles dash in upon the blossomy
North in early spring, hot and fiery from the
South, and take possession of our orchards, they
seem to remind the Yankee farmer that his
orchards are for something besides hard cider
and vinegar and rye-an'-injun apple-betwaxt.
They hint of the regal abundance of the lands
of the sun in Central America where the orioles
winter, and by their sang-froid in appropriating
the orchards remind those of us who have lived
South how every man's orchard there is free to
his neighbor to enter and eat his fill under the
trees.

It is quite a difficult thing to secure a fresh
handsome nest of that American weaver bird,
the Baltimore oriole, hanging, as they do, high
up on the tips of the elm branches. I made
three trips and worked for two hours before I
succeeded in snaring one. My blood was up;
and I was determined to have one if it took all
summer. On the first two trips I failed miser-
ably, and got nothing but a red face and a huge
perspiration, but finally succeeded by — On
second thought I won't tell how, for fear boys

THE EKCHAKTED FOREST. 63

will take my method to rob the nests, instead of
taking a disused nest as I did.

The nest was a marvellously strong yet flexi-
ble piece of work. It was made of the tough
silken floss of the inner fibre of the common
milkweed (^Aselepias cornuti) ; that is, of ma-
terial got from the last year's stalks. It was
rendered stiff and non-collapsible by an inter-
woven lining of horsehair. (I find smallish
proportions of the milkweed floss in nests of the
indigo bird and the prairie warbler also.) There
was a kind of welt around the mouth, the ma-
terial wound round and round, as if hemmed
overhand style. This welt is useful to the
parents in entering and leaving, and to the
young birds, who perch there, when half-grown,
to be fed. The bird found an abundance of
horsehair in the next field, so she had fairl)'-
quilted the whole interior of the pensile pouch
with it, stitching it in and out in a perfect maze
of woof and interbraiding. I should say that
there are five hundred floss and hair stitches in
that nest, and it accordingly looked as pict-
uresque as a stocking-heel that has been darned
again and again by thrifty Dame Durden. How
can the bird, albeit its black bill is so long and
sharp, do such delicate work? Nuttall gives
the key to the mystery, probably. He had a
tame oriole that was used to feeding from his
hand. If the closed hand was presented to it,
the bird would use its bill as a pair of compasses
to pry it open, and would try to open a person's
lips or teeth in the same manner. "In this

64 IN PORTIA'S GABDEKS,

way," says Nuttall, "by pressing open any
yielding interstice, he could readily insert the
threads of his nest and pass them through an
infinity of openings."

Both males and females do the building. In
the case of the nest I am describing it was the
female. A favorite device of the little scold of
a seamstress is the loop, by means of which
she forms a kind of back-stitch, one loop of a
long horsehair overlapping another as it is carried
around the inside. (The bird has been known
to get strangled by one of these loops while
working head downward in the nest, and the
distressed male bird helpless to save her.) In
many cases I see actual single knots in the hair.
Coiled around the lower half of the interior, for
final finish, is a thick swirl of the all-useful and
much valued horsehair. The mystery is where
the birds (so many of them) get enough horse-
hair for all this cross-wattling and lining. What
hunts they must have, and what keen eyes!
They wiU, as is known, appropriate colored
yarns scattered about for them ; and a friend
tells me of a nest into which had been worked a
bright Japanese paper napkin. It is the Balti-
more oriole, or golden robin, whose nest has just
been described. The orchard orioles of New
England also build pensile nests, though not so
deep. But Mr. Ernest Ingersoll has collected
testimony showing that in Southern New Jer-
sey they have entirely changed the ancestral
style of architecture, building nests directly on
the boughs, and using flexible grasses and pine
needles as material. In the more Southern

THE ENCHANTED FOREST. 65

States orioles often build pensile nests entirely
of the long tree-moss, Tillandsia usnsoides ; and
there they construct them on the cool north
side of the trees, while in the Northern States
they usually select the warm eastern or southern
side. The orioles, as has been remarked, make
no attempt at concealment of their nests from
man. But the Baltimore always builds under
and in a bunch of leaves to avoid the glance of
overflying crows or jays ; and, although the
swaying cradle is built deep to guard against
upsetting in a wind-storm, yet it also usefully
serves the purpose of almost completely hiding
the brooding bird. The leaves also shed rain
and fend from the sun, and the nest is usually
waterproof. The only American birds whose
nests bear even a distant comparison with the
orioles are those of our two pretty marsh wrens
(bottle -shaped nests) and the elegant purse of
moss and hair made by the little California
bush tit.^

A slight study of birds' nests and watching
the creatures in the act of building somewhat
lessen the mystery of the thinff. The spherical
shape is given by the body of the bird as she
turns round and round and builds the nest
around her. So even the marvellous nests of
the Phillipine weaver birds (Ploceus) are con-
structed, although one of them builds first, from
a bough overhanging the water, a solid rope,
which then expands into a cup or hollow ball
for the nest, and is further prolonged downward

1 A cut of the last is given in Davie's <* Nests and Sggs of North
American Birds," p. 482.

66 IN PORTIA*S GARDEKS.

into a long tube by which the birds enter and
leave, like the vaulted safety passages of ancient
castles or of the palace of Nisabic in the story
of Habib. So also build our oven-bird, the Eng-
lish bottle-wren, and the social grosbeaks of
Africa, whose grass-woven tree nests are built
in huge coral-like colonies, two or three hundred
of them in a bunch, looking like an umbrella or
a native hut of grass. As a house is built around
a chimney, as an Eskimo ice-hut is built around
the man by his own hands, so a nest is built
around a bird. She is going to rear a family ;
and so she makes her bed, lays down her mat-
tresses, and pulls the coverlets snugly around
her, that is all.

As I look out of the window where I write, I
see a humble little Chippie (social sparrow, or
hair bird) carrying a mouthful of soft brown
material to line her nest with, there in the
spruce. These birds deserve respect for the
trust they impose in man, as well as for their
long winter journey to Florida and Mexico.
They are only a trifle larger than the strong-
winged milkweed butterfly which makes the
trip with them. They all know well the Ion?
trail through the air. The chippie family proved
to be a constant pleasure. About five o'clock
every evening the little red-capped husband
could be spied brooding the eggs while his spouse
went to get a bite to eat and take exercise.
They reared five young, the nest being so chock
full as to look quite funny. The old ones had
to work like Jehu from dawn to dusk to keep
those crying mouths full. (Birds in a nest are

THE ENCHANTED FOREST. 67

fed in regular order by the parents. At least, I
have seen bam swallows so feed their young,
beginning at one end of the row of mouths at
the edge of the mud nest, and each trip feeding
the one next to the last fed. This seems abso-
lutely necessary in order that all the young may
live and thrive. (In a succeeding chapter it will
be seen that my robins fed their young in the
same impartial way.) First chippie egg May
12 ; began brooding May 16 ; on June 6, as I
peeped into the nest, a chippie bomb exploded,
the young birds flying screaming in all direc-
tions. One flew clear across the yard. I got
two of them back into the nest. But they knew
better, and wouldn't stay there five minutes.
Had exactly the same experience with another
nest later. The young clearly regard a nest
once discovered as a dangerous place. The old
ones in the second instance feigned they were
wounded, etc. ; but after I had returned the birds
to the little cedar-tree, although they couldn't
tell whether I had not put them up my sleeve
or in my pocket, they stubbornly refused for
over ten minutes to go and see. I was far
off, watching them through the glass; and it
was only when I turned to stroke some horses
near by that, seeing my attention withdrawn,
they visited the nest. The question is. Were
their curiosity and anguish of the same de-
gree and quality as those of human parents ? If
so, the Red Indian could not have shown a
firmer stoicism and self-control. When I next
peeped into their deserted nest, two weeks
afterward, I found a spider had spun a web

68 IN Portia's gardens.

over it, and made of the nest a palatial banquet
hall.

During the past spring and summer we be-
came well acquainted with the Indigo Birds
through the chance of three pairs raising broods
right around us. One pair (or rather the female)
selected, at first, the currant patch as a desirable
location, and finished, almost to the last hair,
a pretty cup on a spray of one of the bushes.
The branch, however, sagged so with the weight,
and thereby became so open to the sky, that the
bird abandoned it for a four-feel>-high oak sap-
ling in the shade of a great hickory in a rocky
copse not far from the aoor, but ridiculously ex-
posed to my gaze every time I passed ; but she
trusted me implicitly. The young chippies,
close by, little brown fuzzy mites, were squeak-
ing vigorously all day and lifting up their wide
mouths as their parents fed them, which perhaps
stimulated the maternal instincts of Sefiora
Indigo, and may have partly led her to make
her choice of a site where all seemed so charm-
ingly domestic and retired. Her delay threw
her a week behind the other birds, who got their
broods out and away that length of time before
she did. So she was in a great nurry, and worked
industriously at her nest under my very eyes ;
yet she would not slight her work, but made it
to her mind, finished in every particular. The
male was a cheery, animated bit of azure, and
even on a depressing rainy day, when other
birds, except the robin, thrasher, and wood
thrush, were silent, kept warbling bravely and
sweetly through it all. He had a favorite perch

THE ENCHANTED FOREST. 69

on the tip of a high cedar, and all day long he
was there singing his whee^ whee^ whee^ ; chu,
chu, chu^ whee' ; whee^ whee^ chee^ chee. In his
more impassioned carols the last notes were a
lisping, husky sweetsie (he was calling to his
mate below, I guess), which seemed to come
from way down in his throat, and as if he were
exhausted or out of breath, as, indeed, he might
well have been ; for this smale fowle became, I
am sorry to say, at times an almost unendurable
nuisance, through the iteration of his song sev-
eral thousand times a day. He began always at
orange dawn (about half -past three) on my side
of the house, and gave me a matin in indigo on
a saffron background of sky ; kept it up all day,
when he was not eating ; and closed with a noc-
turne in green and azure and indigo as he sat
outlined against the sky on his cedar-tree perch.
I even saw him singing with a green worm dan-
gling from his bill. There was a lull in his song
while the young were growing up ; but in mid-
July he began again and kept it up for a couple
of weeks more. I lost most of my morning
sleeps for a month; for closing windows and
putting fingers in ears was only a partial remedy.
During the day I had to move writing materials
and books to the other side of the house, or fly
sometimes to a city library to work. I am con-
vinced that, if Carlyle had had an indigo bird at
Craigenputtock, we should never have had " Sar-
tor Resartus " — unless this Sir Morose had de-
vised waxed-cloth plugs for his ears, or invented
a bunting-proof study, like the " rooster-proof "
one in Cheyne Row. One can understand the

70 IN POETIA'S GARDENS.

feelings of the lady who (a neighbor tells me),
when asked if she was interested in birds, replied.
Yes, she was : she would like to wring all their
necks, for she was unable to sleep a wink any
morning after three o'clock, owing to their noise.

Sefior Indigo from Yucatan appeared to be a
rather shiftless husband, did not seem to under-
stand his duties as his neighbor, the red-capped
hair bird, did. He never brought his silent,
bright-eyed wife a mouthful of food while she
was brooding her eggs, nor relieved guard while
she went for food. "JSTe shift a trencher, he
scrape a trencher I " No, indeed. After the
style of the Indian brave, he seemed to say,
" Mv woman attends to all that drudgery." So
all day long the little swashbuckler did nothing
but eat, and sing a sweet defiance at that rivid
up on the neighbor's crag, the two sometimes
gradually approaching each other through inter-
vening tree-tops and engaging in pretty vocal
challenges while the eggs of the females were
getting alarminrf^y cold, and domestic interests
all neglected. They were just two indolent
little Spaniards, with gay blue capas and som-
breros, sauntering in the shade and tinkling
their guitars.

The indigo bunting would be horrified if he
had to perform the duties required of the male
cassowary, emu, or ostrich. To the last-named
the female leaves the entire task of incubation.
He, however, dodges a part of his job by letting
the sun keep the eggs warm in the sand during
the daytime, only brooding them at night. The
indigo would not like to shake claws, either,

THE ENCHANTED FOREST. 71

with the shrewd African hombill, who, m despair
of keeping the eggs safe, takes heroic measures,
and, with the consent of his spouse, plasters up
the entrance to the nest with mud, leaving only
a small aperture through which he conveys food
to the prisoner during the entire time of her
incubation, she growing fat and he starved to
skin and bone. But these two cases are excep-
tions ; and among nearly all other birds (be it
said in exculpation of my indigo bird) the male
is not in the habit of helping to incubate the
eggs. Among the sparrow tribe, to which the
chippies belong, the males do more or less help
in this task. Moreover, Mr. Turveydrop Indigo
redeemed his character a little when the young
were hatched. As soon as he found it out, which
was not for some twelve hours, he exhibited a
little curiosity and a commendable paternal in-
terest, bringing food in his bill two or three or
four times a day (he was closely watched). Once,
when the female flew away for food, he hopped
down (he had been waiting patiently with a
tit-bit in his mouth), and took a good look at
his progeny, pecking softly once or twice at
them, as much as to say : " Be good children, and
obey your mother. Good-by. I must go and
sing." When the young left the nest, he devel-
oped much more interest, and did more in get-
ting them food, and in scolding cats, and ex-
hibited a truly normal affection. (I noticed this
in several other cases of the indigo the same
season.) So that perhaps, after all, in the early
stages of the breeding time he " keeps shady "
by wise instinct ; for his bright color might call

72 IN pobtia's gabdens.

attention to the nest. The male tanagers, as
well as the brilliant cardinals, keep away from
the nest until the young are hatched, when they
are very assiduous in helping to feed them.
Burroughs says that the enlarged fac-simile of
the indigo bird — the blue grosbeak — is in
habits also like his small brother, and lets his
wife toil for the young while he sings.

The song of the Bobolink is a musical sky-
rocket struck by lightning. It is typical for
bird-jpy, and is the characteristic song of the
New England summer. The bobolink has too
long been regarded in the light of a mere
humorist: it is time to recognize our priceless
treasure in this bird before he is exterminated
by Southern gunners. I believe no two bobo-
links in the world sing the same notes.^ Com-
pared with the molten music of the bobolink,
even the brown thrush's carol sounds a little
like a rustic plain-song. You must hear the
two actually singing at the same moment to
realize this. The bobolink's song is like the
music of a Wagner drama, — long unbroken,
soaring harmony, with no see-saw cadences let-
ting you down every few bars.

" Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain'd
Without a break, without a fall.
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical."

And this is not to say that the brown thrush's
song, lilted out in full-throated ease, is not

> BurrougbB notes (** Birds and Poets," p. 121, Edinburgh pocket
ed., 1884) that the bobolink does not sing the same in different locali-
ties,— New Jersey, the Hadson Talley, and central New York, for
example.

THE ENCHANTED FOBBST. 73

serenely beautiful, heard alone in early spring,
or from some trfee-top at morning or evening.
Yet of the strains of even the sweetest mocking-
birds one soon tires, they are so monotonous.
The same is true of many of the warblers. I
met a little yellow warbler this morning who
did nothing but sing wee^ wee^ wee^ wee^ tsvhitscha-
tschitscha wee^ with a monotony that would soon
drive one frantic.

The bobolink gets his name from the opening
notes of his spasm or shatter of song, — the ko-
link notes, or variations of that theme. The
love carol of this muncce doctor^ when he gets
on his gold hood at Commencement time in May
or June, and launches his song over the deep-
grassed meadows sprinkled with buttercups,
resembles a sky-rocket in more ways than one.
You may compare the distinctly enunciated,
fluted prelude of the strain to the rise of the
rocket into the sky, — then a pause, a turn, and
shattered into a rainbow of color the fiery music
spray falls to the earth. (And, curious to note,
the bird, like the rocket, drops into the grass
with a distinct hissing sound.) Or it is as if
the sound of an orchestra of tambourines, violins,
and silver triangles, should come to you through
a screen of intersecting walls and streets ; or as
if there were borne to your ears through wind-
ing valleys and past jutting crags the Christmas
chimes of a distant city, ringing out by night,
when snow is falling thick.

No human ear can follow, and therefore no
musical instrument imitate, all the song of this
bird, any more than you can count and repro-

74 IN PORTIA'S GARDENS.

duce the sounds made by effervescing cham-
pagne. That hearty old New England musician
ana bird lover, S. P. Cheney, who reduced all
our birds' songs to musical notation, records
that the bobolink was too much for him. He
only gives a fragment or so of its song. An
English lark, says Burroughs, that mimicked all
the birds around it, maintained strict silence in
the presence of the bobolink. As a physiologi-
cal fact, this minstrel of England's hawthorn-
bordered meadows hasn't the vocal organs to
imitate a bird that has a chime of bells and a
waterfall in his throat. One of the mysteries of
the music is that it is almost destitute of distinct
vowel sounds. It is as a bird's song might be
in Houyhnhnm land, if the birds there sang as
the inhabitants talked. Sometimes this little
king of the meadows pulls but one rope of his
chime, — the ko-linkj h<hlinh^ ke-chee^-e-e^ a most
human-like melody, as if he had stolen tiie open-
ing notes of a flute score.

I spent an hour, the first dav I became inter-
ested in bobolinks, sitting flat on the grass
(with a half-dozen of the male birds floating
and gliding about me), and trying in vain to
take down that delirious inarticulate bubble and
rush of sound that follows the opening flute
notes. Pronounce the ch^s in the following as
in child^ and speak, whistle, or play on the
flute the whole without a pause as fast as ever
you can, and you will get a very faint idea of
a sonff that is a tumult of gurgles and flutings,
like the working of silver pumps in fairy wells
or the tinkle of water-drops falling into a cis-

THE ENCHANTED FOREST. 75

tern, or the babble of a swift brook through
obstructing stones : —

Ko-linV^ ko-link' ke-ehee^-e-e ; aeeble feeble
thimble rig phew shew^ chi-cht-ohi^ chu-wich'-chvr
we^ chyrW^ch^-^huHmcV-chv^^ee^^ chv^^ieV-^Urwichy^
ttvutter^ tvmtter^ spink^ spink^ spink.

It must frankly be confessed, however, that
this is not so authentic or personal a record (I
have introduced three of Wilson Flagg's words
into it) as the following one which I got next
day, when for half an hour I interviewed a soli-
tary bobolink, singing all that time very close
at hand. I got his song down by taking it in
sections, and noting each again and again, pay-
ing no attention for the nonce to the other por-
tions. When all was done, I compared the
whole as he sang it off, and can vouch for its
accuracy in (approximate) number of syllables
uttered, — or what we may call liquid consonant
syllables, — and for its general identity with the
original melody, although it is but a miserable
skeleton of that, to be sure. The inventive or
improvising powers of the bobolink must always
be kept in mind. The full budget of tintinnab-
ulation of my bobolink was as follows : —

K<hhee^o^ ko-hee'-e^ ; quit «w, quit see^ quit see^
tweetu^ tweetu, gurgle gurgle^ twitter^ twitter^
twitter^ spink^ gpink^ spink.

Occasionally, I'm sorry to say, though not
very often, he ended with a couple of discordant
notes, like a robin's scream, or a kind of harsh
gr-r-r gr-r-r. The word gurgle stands for a rich
guttural sound, like the splashing of water.
Tmtter is unsatisfactory, but neither a nor u will

76 IN POBTIA'S 0ABDBK8.

exactly serve as the first vowel. The prornin-
ciation a Roxburghshire Scotch fanner, with a
rich burr in his throat, might give to the word
tfvaekter is a better approximation to the sound
than twitter* The section from e-^ to the first
gurgle is a froth-geyser of sound which it m
impossible to analyze or accurately give the
clang-tints of. I tried it often, and gave it
up.

Going on with my bobolink studies, I met
with remarkable proof of the bird's improvising
and inventive genius. On May 19, reaching a
rustic summit-house in the midst of a meadow
yellow with buttercups, I discovered that I had
invaded the precincts of another set of bobolinks.
As the first one's song close by reached my ear,
I saw at once that none of his notes or phonetic
groups of sounds resembled those of Monsieur
Kolink or of Herr Koheeo, either. His opening
lilt was peeo^ peeo^ link ; then came a water
gurgle, the usual melange or shatter, and finally
peelo pee^ tttmtter twutter twutter^ chew-we^
chew-we^-chee. On my left at the same time
sang one whom I instantly dubbed Sir Knight
Kolin'sky from Poland. He began with two de-
licious liquid gurgles, and went on with wo-hee^"
(hkee\ ding-oAing [melange], holiniki. We
have now reached No. 6, who began with a A« -
e-e-e-o (a penetrating sound, like the hiss of
green wood burning, which he seemed to have
stolen from the red-winged blackbird), and con-
tinued with chu ting-oAing^ kolinskij etc.

All described in the foregoing paragraph
were in meadows remote from each other, and

THE BKCHANTED FOKEST. 77

two or three miles from the abodes of Kolink
and Koheeo, respectively.

Some three miles distant I found a group
with a family resemblance in their song : they
all belonged to the spink^ apank^ spink clan;
and these syllables were very plainly uttered,
whereas before I had heard only spink^ spink^
spink^ and that not very plainly. It was clear
to me at once that Bryant and Wilson Flagg
had happened upon one of the spink^ spank^
spink family when writing their poems " Robert
of Lincoln" and "The O'Lincoln Family/'
respectively.

I give here a conspectus or syllabus of the
initial flute notes of fifteen bobolinks, premising
that neither vowels (except long e) nor conso-
nants are to be considered as being so distinct
and clear as in human utterance. One might
think from the table alone that Bobolinkese was
a language like the Hawaiian, — all vowels
nearly ; but it is not so : —

No. 1. Ko-link'', ko-link^ ke chee'-e-e.

2. Ko-hee'o, ko-hee'-e-e.

3. Peeo, peeo, link.

4. [Two gurgles, then] wo-keeVkee.

5. Ke'-e-e-e-o.

6. Ting, tong, tong.

7. Ping.

8. Eeo-link, ko-link, kee-kee''-uh.

9. Who-o', whee'-o, whee'-uh.

10. Ko-lee", ho-quee'-e-e.

11. What cheer, Kolinski ?

12. Ko-link, ko-lee',

13. Ke-ding, ko-link.

14. Wolikink-o-wo-kee'o.
16. Queela, queela, quee.

Every precaution should be taken thjat the

78 IN Portia's gardens.

race of bobolinks does not become extinct
through thtf work of hunters. For, under the
name of "reed bird" in Pennsylvania and
Delaware, they are shot to feed those monstrous
disciples of Heliogabalus, the Philadelphia gas-
tronomes; in the Carolinas, where they work
fearful mischief with the rice fields, under
the soubriquet of ** rice bird," they are shot and
spitted for the fire; while in Jamaica, under
the appellation of " butter bird,'* they probably
run the gauntlet of another fusillade. Whether
they are shot in Brazil, beyond the Amazon,
where they winter, T do not know. They show
remarkable good temper under such trying cir-
cumstances, and are not a very shy bird.

The habits of Robert of Lincoln are as inter-
esting as his song. Bob seems to be continually
bulljdng his wiie, as much as to say, "Why
don't you keep down there out of sight? " The
female consequently wears a sort of dazed,
scared look ; but, as she is swifter of flight, she
dodges Mr. Bob every time, or, if taken at close
quarters, pops down in the most ludicrous way
into the tall grass, where she is never pursued.
Mr. Conquedle scorns to go into a hole for the
little brown minx. With their handsome rela-
tives, the red-«houldered blackbirds, the bobo-
links always fraternize perfectly. The cousins
resemble each other in manner of flight and
general habits.

Are bobolinks telepathic? At fixed times,
moved as by a common impulse, they will sud-
denly rise from all over a great meadow, and,
wheeling around and about for a moment in

THE ENCHANTED FOREST. 79

an ecstasy of song, flying heavily and slow as if
loaded with gold, sink in a long steady glide,
with motionless outspread wings, until they
drop into the grass, — not beside their mates, as
the sentimental poets always put it (they would
not betray the nest in that way), but simply to
feed on the insects and seeds that form their
food.

IV.

FLOWBRS AND BIRDS.

** Then oame the jolly Sommer, being dight
In a thin silken oassoek coloured greene.

That was nnlyned all, to be more light;
And on his head a girlond well bcieene

He wore, from which, as he had chaoffed been,

The sweat did drop." — Spenser.

In the good old days at Yale (consvle Planco^
of course, — the phrase is a trifle frayed) we
used to time the arrival of summer by the ap-
pearance of President Noah Porter's panama
hat. What cautious delays he exercised, as the
season of hot weather approached, in putting by
the tall silk hat for the dignified Derby-style
straw I It was apparently the same old summer
panama of years before, costly to start with, but
rejuvenated each year by the hatter. The
president's straw hat and the solar system were
correlated. He had a sympathetic understand-
ing with the sun, and that dread monarch never
played him false. There was no longer a
shadow of doubt about the propriety of sporting
your straw when " Prexy*s appeared. And it
never did appear until nigh upon the joyful,
late-in-June days of alumni reunions and din-
ners, and brass bands, and Commencement fes-
tivities, when the smile of the genial-grim face

FLOWERS AND BIRDS. 81

under it seemed brighter and pleasanter than
ever, if possible, by virtue of that light and
cheerful old white straw.

Everybody smiles in June (or ought to), be-
cause it is the pleasantest season of outdoor life.
We are troglodytes in winter: in summer we
emerge from our caves, and live. The brain
has been alive, it is true, but at the expense of
the muscles and liver. Now the balance shall
be redressed.

The wonderful cui*es of sick people effected
by Father Kneip at Woerishofen in Bavaria,
through a regimen of water and outdoor exer-
cise and barefootedness, give us the hint very
plainly as to what is the matter with us. Bare
feet and naked sun-baths in summer would
make big holes in the doctors* incomes. On
your own lawn, at least, you might get the cool
feel of the lush dewy grass to bare Feet (I have
systematically done so this summer), or on the
smooth sand of the seashore. But, if too fas-
tidious for this, why could we not adopt the
sandal, — the open shoe, the leather sole
strapped to the leet by thongs? My English
authorial friend Edward Carpenter sends me
cuts of two handsome sandals he has invented.
Mr. Carpenter is an English Thoreau, who lives
close to the bone on his fruit farm in Leicester-
shire, and practises what he preaches. Shall
the smart Yankee be beaten by an English-
man?

Outdoor life and plenty of fruit, — you can't
be miserable if you have these. The first fruit
to ripen in our Northern gardens is the Currant.

82 or pobtia's gardens.

Nothing prettier than a great patch in full red
fruitage. I remember some in old sunken
gardens in Marblehead and other Essex towns
that fairly reddened the ground where they
grew: they somehow gave to the grounds an
air of oldf-fashioned elegance and homespun
beauty.

A health to the currant in a glass of its own
delicious wine 1 How prettily the golden and
blood-red clusters show amid the leaves, or
pendent high in air from some aspiring central
stem I The currant is the grandest irrigator of
your biliary tract extant. The Devil made a
bad liver, and the Lord checkmated him with
the currant. That may be antiquated theology,
but it has a basis of truth. After a few days of
currant-eating the severity of my jud^ents on
the wicked world mollifies perceptibly: the
critical barometer rises several degrees. It was
Giant Despair who fell into a fit when a sun-
shiny day came. Bunyan says so; but he for-
got to tell us that Monsieur Giant had also,
probably, been mousing currants in the garden
behind the castle.

As soon as your currants are fairly red (or
straw-colored), you will sally out in the cool of
the morning in July, with old clothes on and a
big panama flapping about your ears, and, sit-
ting down on the mulch of leaves and dried
grass, proceed to strip off the acidulous globe-
lings. If you spy (as you often will) a wasp's
nest pendent from some branch by its slender
but strong and tenaciously glued stem, don't in-
spect it too intimately, lest old Dangle Legs,

FLOWERS AND BIRDS. 83

the parent, may dash up, and give you a souve-
nir you will never forget.

As you leisurely fill your basket, you see far
off the city winking through the heat, the sky
peeps through the trees in patches of blue that
couldn't be beaten by a Japanese napkin. Here
close at hand towers up the mighty banyan
forest of the asparagus bed, — as high as the
Cologne Cathedral to the buzzing swarms of in-
sects among its blossoms. The honey bees are
busy among its little drooping bells, their pro-
bosces rarely reaching to the bottom, and half
the head poked in, to boot: from flower to
flower they flit, working their toes industriously
between whiles, like old ladies knitting as they
walk and talk.

Where will you find a prettier or more
vacant-soothing task than picking over currants ?

** Phoebe, idle Phosbe, on the doorstep in the sun,
Drops the red-ripe currants through her fingers one by one/'

A shapely woman's hand may reveal all its
elegance in this work. The moulding of bread,
too, will give litheness and flexibility to a lady's
fingers. To bake a good light loaf of rye or
whole-wheat crusty bread, and cut it up to feed
the hungry, is the crowning grace of a woman.
The "new woman" is forgetting this, — forget-
^ ting that the new must not displace the old, but
be an enriching and broadening of it. When
each sex has learned its own peculiar tasks, it
may superadd as many accomplishments of its
opposite as it has the power to acquire.

But to return to our muttons. Mrs. Lydia

84 IK pobtia's gabdiens.

Maria Child, when she and her husband lived
in Wayland, Mass., near Boston, had a glorious
currant garden by the sleepy Sudbury River.
Having no children, they had reduced life to its
most satisfactory terms by doing their own
house and garden work. Mrs. Child possessed
the art (inimitable by others, I think, for I have
tried it, and failed) of putting up raw currants
in clusters right from the bush, in sealed bottles,
and so keeping them far into the winter I She
would select, I am told by one who knew her,
the driest and sunniest day possible, — and the
middle of the day, too, — and drop the ripe
bunches into perfectly dry wide-mouthed bot-
tles, and then seal them with wax. Perhaps
she dipped the ends of the stems, too, into wax.
Anyway, her fruit kept for months. And how
coiQd it help doing so at the request of so
sweet-natured a lady ?

As the season rolls on, the currant is followed
by the Cherry. The great fun in cherry
time is in picking the black or red globe-
lets off of the tree yourself and popping them
into your mouth as you pick, or dropping clus-
ters far down to a waiting friend below. The
poet Thomson was right in eating his peach
off the bough where it hung (you remember you
told that story in class one day over twenty
years ago. Professor Beers). Live fruit is the
only kind fit for eating.

But you are up in the tree. Aha I what a
prospect I The tree, say, is a gigantic one, semi-
wild, " escaped,'' as the gardeners say. You are
at the very top, of course, where the dead-ripe

FLOWKRS AND BIBDS. 85

black-hearts hang. Beneath and far around lies
the green landscape, spotted with clumps of
trees. You realize now how air navigation would
enlarge the vision of that poor worm, man ; and
— heavens! what was that? It is a toss-up
f whether you are more startled or the bird: it
was a robin, who never dreamed of finding an
animate scarecrow up in Mb domain, the air;
and with a flash he darts off on a side tack.

One of the earliest flowers of summer, cover-
ing almost exactly the month of June, is the
wild Rock Columbine (Aquilegid). How grace-
ful and rare it looks in its rocky crevice ! Air-
hung like a tropic orchid, pendent on its curved
stem, down-rushing, its five horns of honey cast
in one piece and tossed carelessly out of the
blue concave, nature's moulding foundry, some
time in the myriads of years ago, it is a lovely
flower to see, but too fragile (is it not?) for a
national symbol. Yet its mere symbolism of
names peculiarly fits it for that: columbine,
from columba^ a dove, reminds one incidentally
of Columbus, while aquilegia — perhaps from
aqua and legere^ to draw water, but in popular
belief from aquila^ an eagle — reminds us of
our national bird. The leaves of the plant are
e plurihus unum^ and the spurs in some species
. look like little liberty caps. The spurs of Cana-
densis, it is true, look something like the eager,
outstretched neck of a dove or an eagle, but,
alas! to tell the bitter truth, much more like
the long neck of a wild goose or swan, while the
flaring petals far back form the spreading wings.

86 IN PORTIA'S GARDENS.

The columbine in respect of these flaring red
petals reminds me of the Lobelia cardinalis
with its sumptuous depth of red (the despair,
this, of a word-painter} and its ashen tints, I
call the cardinalis the rhoenix Flower, — rising
from the ashes of its nest. The tall stems of
the columbine and the phoenix flower should be
picked close to the ground, and displayed, only-
two or three at a time, in a slender vase. To
all flower butchers, makers of vast cabbage
bouquets, skinners of the dells and meadows, that
exquisite and familiar sentiment of Landor in
the FsBsulan Idyl (which I have in part quoted
before, — "for 'tis and ever was my wisn and
way to let all flowers live freely," etc.) should
be commended. Children might be taught that
it gives a more elegant appearance to gather
three or four flowers with a spray or two of foli-
age than it does to strip the shrubs and meadows
bare.

Next to roses I don't know but the lustrous
satin texture of the poppies yields most gratifi-
cation to our sense for color. I tried them here
in my hill-croft with great success; but they
failed to seed themselves, as it was told me they
would do. The flowers are all silk and dazzling
flame. As Ruskin says, the poppy is the abso-
lute stainless type of a flower, — all flower, all
color, and robed in the purple of the Caesars.
Unpack a full-grown bud, and you find the
flower there, to be sure, but the satin crumpled
into wrinkles, folded up like a bee-nymph in its
waxen cell ; and crumpled the flowers seem to

'^

PLOWEBS AND BIRDS. 87

remain to the end of their life. Yon might
fancy them Qneen Mab's silk dresses unpacked
from little winter trunks. In the crimson
Oriental poppy, with its great hibiscus-like
blooms, there is a strong perfume of opium, and
a kind of hauteur, as of some splendid Phryne,
that seems to say, " Admire, but beware I "

It must be a pretty sight in the arctic regions
to see the ground covered with immense sheets
of the golden poppy of that region. One would
think that its fragility and intensity of color
make it appropriate to the warmer climes only.

One of Homer's finest similes is that of the
poppy in the lines on the death of Gorgythion.
Old Chapman's version of these lines surpasses
the Greek in everything except the sonorous
roll of vowel sounds, in which no language has
ever equalled that : —

" And as a crimson poppy-flower, surcharged with his seed,
And vernal humors falling thick, declines his heavy brow,
So, a-oneside, his helmet's weight his fainting head did bow."

To substantiate the statement that this sur-
passes the Greek in beauty, the lines are here
given in the original, followed by a translation
as literally word for word as I can make it : —

M^K6)v d* (if hipoae Kopij /3aA^v, ffr* hi /cjttt^,
KapKQ PpfBofievfi vorriyai re elapivyaiv.
*^Qj hepua* rjfivae Koptf TnfhjKi pctpwSev,

" And as a poppy lets fall to one side its head when in the
garden it is weighed down vrith fruit and the rains of spring,
80 to one side he bowed his head heavy with its helm/'

Virgil, in the JEneid, imitates this simile, and
adds touches of his own, — color, for instance ;

88 IN Portia's gardens.

and his metaphor of the tired neck, how true
to the fact of the slender hairy stem bent to the
ground during rain I He is speaking of Eury-
alus, who lies on the ground dying, —

" Purpureas veluti cum flos, succisus aratro,
Lanj^escit moriens ; lassore papavera coUo
DemisSre caput, pluyia cum forte grayantur."

" Ab when a purple flower, cut from imder by the plough,
withers, dying ; or as when poppies droop the head with tired
neck when they are heavily burdened with rain."

Notwithstanding a few noble passages like
this in the ^neid (I have read it all in the Latin,
and speak advisedly), one is obliged to confess,
when reading Virgil, and especially the minor
poets of antiquity, that the poesy of Greece and
Rome is vastly surpassed by modem works.
As Fielding says, " The ancients have been con-
sidered as a rich common where every person
who hath the smallest tenement in Parnassus
hath a free right to fatten his muse." In other
words, there has been a kind of exosmose going
on through the ages, until now the sweet of
ancient literature has all been filtered into our
own. Their lion's marrow has long ago been
extracted, and their quintessential wine drained
to the lees. Hence our disappointment when
we drink at these time-worn fonts. I came late
to Virgil's Georgics and Eclogues, but had been
for years anticipating a great treat. I was bit-
terly disappointed, as I have been also in most
of the Elizabethan dramatists. They are nearly
all trash and smut except Shakspere and Jonson.
There are not more than eight or nine lines in
the whole of the Eclogues and Georgics worth

FLOWERS AND BIRDS. 89

memorizing. The only passage at all equal to
thousands in Tennyson and our other poets, not
to mention German poesy, is this, — and it is
only a pretty, quiet genre picture : —

" Fortunate senex, hie inter flumina nota,
Et f ontes sacros, f rigus captabis opacum.
Hinc tibi, quae semper yicino ab limite saeped,
Hyblaeis apibus florem depasta salicti,
Ssepe levi somnum suadebit inire susurro.
Hinc alta sub rupe canet f rondator ad auras,
Nee tamen interea raucae, tua eura, palumbes,
Nee gemere aeria eessabit turtur ab ulmo/'

" O fortunate old man ! here amongst weU-known rivers
and saered springs you shall enjoy the cool shade. On one
side the hedge that bounds your farm, where the Hyblaean
bees are always feeding on the flowers of the willows, shall
often invite you to sleep, with a gentle murmur. On another
side the pruner under the high roek shall sing to the breezes.
Nor in the mean time shall the hoarse wood-pigeons you de-
light, nor shall the turtle-dove eease to moan from the lofty
elm."

It is astonishing to find how eviscerated and
dessicated by the lapse of time, how thin and
childish, these Georgics and Eclogues are. Their
early reputation has outlasted their merits. They
are more like a farmer's almanac of a higher
grade than anything else. Their wealth of
mythological allusion gave them a poetical in-
terest for the ancients which they can never have
for us. The scientific value, too, of Virgil's
description of bees and bee-keeping is nil. He
swallows, for example, the belief that new stocks
of bees could be generated from the decaying
putrescence of the carcass of an ox, and thinks
bees carry gravel stones for ballast 1 His work
is full of similar foolish superstitions.

Of Ovid, too, there are only, say, a dozen lines

90 IN poetia's gardens.

one cares to quote or remember. What is true
of him is true of almost the whole body of
Greek and Latin poetry, except Homer, Horace,
Aristophanes, jEschylus and Sophocles, and a
few fragments of Sappho and Theocritus, and a
few lines here and there of Martial and Proper-
tius, — say four or five volumes that have drifted
down the dark, indifferent stream of time with
all their pristine perfume and beauty.

But the best Greek and Latin prose writers
are immensely entertaining still, — Cicero,
Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, Herodotus, Lucian,
Apuleius (and Plato and Aristotle to special-
ists).

" Now turn againe my teme, thou jolly swayne,
Backe to the furrow which I lately left."

I am going to vault deftly back again to my
theme of summer flowers via Apuleius and his
entertaining classic (cribbed from Lucian),
" The Golden Ass," — a book, though, blem-
ished, as are the stories of Boccaccio and Ban-
dello, by frank obscenity or voluptuous and
sensual alescriptions. Lucian tells how a young
man, by anointing himself with some salve slyly
pilfered from an enchantress, was metamorphosed
into a little donkey, and after many tribulations
was changed back into a man by eating rose-
leaves. Such power had a rose to turn a little
donkey into a young man. But is not the con-
verse true ? Does not a red rose on the breast
of a fair girl often turn a young man into a little
donkey ?

Yet we admire the joyous abandon of that
Persian who, when the time of roses came,

FLOWERS AND BIRDS, 91

struck work, dressed in rose-colored garments,
and gave himself up to the enjoyment of this
queen of flowers. And was it not another Per-
sian (Saadi) who plucked in Paradise a lapf ul
of roses to bring back to earth, but was so in-
toxicated with their perfume that he let them
fall from his robe, and so lost them ?

Herodotus writes that King Midas had a gar-
den at the foot of Mt. Bermion, in Asia Minor,
in which grew spontaneously roses of sixty petals
and of extraordinary fragrance. Was mis our
hundred-leaved rose or an ancestor of it? It
was in this same garden that sleepy old Silenus
was wont to come and doze and nod and inhale
the perfume of the roses. They caught him by
mingling drugged wine in the fountain from
which he drank, and then forced him to prophesy.
So runs the story wrapped in its languorous
Oriental atmosphere.

Renan, in his brilliant little philosophical
drama, " Caliban," represents Ariel as exhaling at
death into the pure elements. He is going, he
says, in taking leave of Prospero, to mingle with
all that is pure and sweet, — the azure of the
wave, the blue of the glacier, the purity of a
maiden's heart, and the perfume of nowers.
He will bloom with the rose, lurk in the green-
ing myrtle, in the spicy fragrance of the carna-
tion, and in the delicate pallor of the olive leaf.
This is as pretty a conceit as that which gives
us the origin of the fragrance of the rose. The
story runs that one day, at a feast in Olympus,
Eros, while executing a light and gay dance,
overthrew with a stroke of his wing a cup of

92 IK pobtia's gabdens.

ambrosial nectar, which, spilling over a rose,
gave it its delicious odor. Now, a rose is al-
ways a rose, to be sure ; but, as there are seven-
teen diflEerent varieties of rose scents, — moss,
brier, musk, tea, etc., — suppose we improve on
this story of origins by saying that these differ-
ent tones and semitones of odor were caught
from the sweet breaths of nymphs and hama-
dryads in the cool forests of earth in the long
ago?

What I call the first rose season — that of
greenhouse blooms — comes in the end of
March and in April. These roses of the glass
house far surpass in flawless leaf and spiralled
petal the hardier outdoor roses of two months
later, when numerous other admirers of the
queen pay court to her in the shape of bugs and
beetles that sadly fret the leaves and buds.
Glass greenhouses were thought until recently
to be one of the luxuries of modern days. But
the Romans had both greenhouses and hot-beds.
The execrable Domitian (Suetonius has writteli
his life with those of nine other imperial Caesars
who are the supreme scoundrels oi the human
race) had early cucumbers, raised in baskets of
manure covered with plates of mica in lieu of
glass, and taken indoors over night. So the
gardeners of that monster the Emperor Tiberius
had raised beds made in frames set upon wheels,
by means of which the cucumbers were moved
and exposed to the full heat of the sun ; while
in winter they were withdrawn and placed
under frames like our hot-beds, only glazed
with sheets of what is popularly called ising-

PLOWEBS AND BIEDS, 93

glass, — i. e., mica, or " mirror-stone,'' lapis
specularia (Pliny, Nat. Hist. xix. 23: 5). And
Martial, speaking of the garden at the country-
seat of his friend Entellus, says (viii. 68) that,
in order that the malicious frost might not nip
the purple clusters of the grape, he had them
protected under a roof of lapis specularis^ " care-
fully covered, though not concealed. Thus
does female beauty snine through silken folds,
thus are pebbles visible in the pellucid waters."

Martial also compliments Domitian on his
winter roses, " Psestan rose-beds " (vi. 80).
These, however, were perhaps not grown under
glass ; for, as Virgil says (Georgics, iv. 119), the
roses of Paestum bloomed twice a year, like
some of our hardy teas. But Becker, in his
"Gallus," rightly finds elsewhere in Martial
(i. e., xvii. 127) allusion to forced roses in the
expression "festinatas coronas." In 1874 a
room of the Villa of Mecsenas was imcovered
which Mohr has proved was a Roman green-
house. The tiers of stages on which the flower-
pots were placed surrounded the walls, in which
were niches beautifully painted as garden
scenes with flowers and foimtains, as if each
recess were a window looking out into the open.
There were no windows, but light was admitted
from the vault above through a large lunette
covered with crystal plates.^

Our modern glazed greenhouses are only a

As shown in the Bulletino delta Commissione Archseo. Mvmdpale
rRome, 1874), which prints excellent engravings, and says, " Molti
frammenti di grosse lastre [sheets] dl cristallo antioo sono stati
rinvenuti f ra le macerie [rubbish] e le terre cayate f uori dair interno
del luogo.**

94 IN pobtia's gabdens.

hundred or two hundred years old, probably
cominff in with the introduction of steam into
general use. Governor Oliver Ames's orchid
houses — a bit of the tropics transplanted to
bleak New England — would have made the
Emperor Augustus green with envy, if that
meeching inmvidual had cared anything for
nature. But let the Romans pass, as Dekker
would say. What need has sunny Italy, the
land of roses, of anything grown under glass ?
Italy herself is a beautiful conservatory under a
high sun-filtered roof of lapis lazuli, where amid
dark leaves the gold oranges glow and myrtle
blooms. — But the greenhouse rose, though per-
fect in form, is not the typical rose: it lacks
the right fragrance. You have a feeling akin
to affection for that delicate potted tea-rose you
have bought, as it swings to and fro and nestles
against your face ; but the Peris, who derived
their nourishment solely from the nectar of
roses and honeysuckles, would have detected at
once the difference between this exotic and the
hardy richness of odor of an outdoor Jacque-
minot or Gabriel Luizet.

One can't analyze the pleasure given by
roses: it can only be recalled to the memory.
Can you describe in words the faint perfume of
the sweet-brier after rain, or the rustic chasing
of the fragile moss bud, or distinguish the fra-
grance of the damask or musk rose from that of
the blood-red Jacqueminot or the ashen-rose La
France? How convey an impression of the
superb morbidezza of texture of the Baroness
Rothschild and its Alpine glow of color, or of

PLOWBBS AND BIRDS, 95

the dark crimson of the RosiSre (named from
her who in France was the queen of the rose-
bud garden of girls), or the honeyed fragrance
of the dark-rich, many-leaved, and long-lasting
Carrifire, or give a form-impression of the bud-
ding breasts of the whorled spirals of Catherine
Mermet or the Gloire di Dijon?

I have heard an eminent rose-grower state
that La France is absolutely the best rose in the
world, and 1 agree with him. It is hardy,
blooming steadily until frost, and after, with a
marvellous profusion of blooms. I have had
them from bushes on the lawn late in Novem-
ber. In this trait of perpetual blooming it dif-
fers from all the other hybrids, or hardy roses.

It is worth a journey to see the acres of
Wichuraina roses annually in bloom by the
Valley Gates and elsewhere in Franklin Park,
or on the banks of Riverway and Fenway parks,
in Boston. To stand on the lee side of that
great artificial hill, in Franklin Park, shoaled
with myriads of these little white blooms, and
drink in wafts of the delicious perfume, is a de-
light so keen that an hour slips by before you
can tear yourself away. Thousands of bees,
wild with excitement, — humble, bumble, honey,
and Liliputian, — are rolling in the enormous
wealth of pollen spread out for their use.
These cunning chaps know by a touch whether
a bloom has been rifled or not. If it still has
some nectar left, they all take the same course
to get it with the least expenditure of time;
namely, by walking right round the stamens

96 IN pobtia's gabdbns.

until they have encircled the flower, when off
they dart with zip and zing, the old bumbles
ballooned out as to their thighs with cuisses of
pollen, — that look a bit like burgomasters'
breeches, too.

A wonderful tenacity and opulence of life in
these roses from the Flowery Empire. In four
years after their importation they had stormed
over the hill on which they were planted, capt-
ured its other inhabitants, and either strangled
them or so walled them up with meshing and
interpleachment of their long succulent liana
fingers that only the tiptops of the rhododen-
drons and double-flowered blackberries, for in-
stance, were visible. One would say that this
bush was to be the rose of American wild roses.
Like its fellow emigrant, the Japanese Ro%a
rugosa^ its rich gloss of leafage ranks it above
our sweet-brier. Place the two side by side, as
I have seen them, and you will find our brier to
be a shockingly shabby, meagre, brown, and
lack-lustre affair in comparison. The latter has
one point, though, and a weighty one, in its
favor: its leaf and wood have perfume; those
of the other have none, although perhaps to
most persons its abundance of sweet-scented
blooms would more than make up for this. But
even the Wichuraina has its enemies : it is
often badly eaten by "rust," and somewhat
injured by unfavorable winters.

By the middle of May the old lanes are
swarming with birds, all engaged in the task of
destroying noxious worms. In attempting to
exterminate the gypsy-moth caterpillars that had

FLOWERS AND BIBDS. 97

got into the trees, I found I had a very good
helper in the rain crow, or Cuckoo, with its
solemn, dazed-looking eyes and furtive ways.
It is an erratic, ghostly, ill-balanced bird, yet
, the farmer's best friend. The cuckoo arrives
about the middle of May with the first hot
wave, floating up with the south wind in his
favor; and suddenly from some leafy covert
you hear this: hak-kuk^ kuh-hik^ kuk-kuk^
kuk'kuk; cluck-cluck-^luek^ cluck-cluek-cluck ;
cow^ cow^ cow^ eow, eow^ cow! The bird also
has a plaintive cooing that is quite musical, and
reminds me of the mourning dove whose note
— the most pensive-sweet sound in the bird
world — I used often to hear out West, but
have only heard once near Boston. I call the
yellow-billed cuckoo, with his drab and butternut-
colored coat, the Quaker Bird. My gypsy-moth
cuckoo was so excited over his feast of cater-
pillars that he allowed me to approach within a
few feet of him while he bent his head know-
ingly down, and pulled the grisly worms out
from under the burlap neckties around the trees.
A neighbor who knew Mr. Trouvelot tells me
that, when he introduced the gypsy moth into the
neighborhood of Boston for the purposes of silk
culture, the cuckoos showed such a fondness for
his plump, juicy Ocnerias that he had to cover
them with netting and shoot the marauders
with guns. How would it do for the State of
Massachusetts, instead of supporting an army
of men to fight gypsy moths, to have a cuckoo-
breeding aviary? It costs immensely less to
breed a cuckoo than it does to support a man ;

98 IN Portia's gardens.

and the cuckoo, black-billed or yellow-billed, ie
worth a good deal more for the business of ex-
termination than the man.

Who invented the lawn mower ? Cyclopsedias
and dictionaries know nothing about it. The
Robin owes the unknown inventor a series of his
best evening songs, for the enormous increase of
smooth-shaven lawns makes an excellent feeding-
ground for the Merula migratoria The tomato
colored bird is not at all times a favorite of
mine by any means ; yet his evening song atones
for his loud impudent screams during ttie day,
for his waking you up at three or four o'clock
in the morning, and for the torturing monotony
of his love-song in breeding time. One of a
pair that built within earshot of the house yelled
steadily for a month or so " we tole you, we tola
you, we tole you," till we nearly went mad.
The same one came back the next year, but was
only heard for a week or so at a distance. The
robin is a tolerable mimic. I heard them this
spring mock the yellow-throated vireo, the whip-
poorwill, and the chewink. When I see a
robin on the lawn, straddling over an unwilling
angle- worm that he is pulling from the ground,
I am reminded of an amusing remark of the late
Rev. Dr. Hedge, of Harvard University, who
was opposed to the actual eating of the bread
and drinking of the wine in " the Lord's Sup-
per " ; for, said he, in his deliberate manner,
"the act of deglutition is not an edifying
sanctity."

It is a pretty difficult thing at first to detect
the running^ one foot before the other, of the

FLOWERS AND BIKDS, 99

robin and his fellow-thrushes. But run they
actually do, with an occasional hop, too, as is
the way also of grackles, black buntings, and
crows.

One summer a pair of robins built in a small
tree just six feet from my window in Cambridge,
Mass., the nest being two feet lower than the
window-sill, thus affording the best possible
view of their proceedings. (Curiously enough,
as I write these lines, August, '96, in Belmont,
the same thing, a second or July brood, too, is
being repeated after an interval of sixteen years ;
for I can look up from my paper to watch a
robin building in a little pear-tree close by the
window.) Any half-dislike I might have felt
for the robin has been softened by these little
housekeeping scenes. The building of the nest,
the rearing of the brood, with the maternal de-
votion, were irresistible arguments in favor of
the unconscious plaintiffs. Here is the record
of the Cambridge brood : —

July 21. — Yesterday and the day before she
built up the framework of coarse straws. To-
day she has lined it with mud, and covered the
mud with a lining of soft grass. It now looks
quite elegant. Hurrah I I wish I were a bird
myself to try it. It must be a rare pleasure to
build your own house, — not in the orthodox
carpenter fashion, but out of your own head,
with materials selected by yourself out of the
woods.

I envied Burroughs this winter as he told us
with enthusiasm how he had got l^s*carload of
slabs up in the Catskills, and built, ^k&lj with

100 IN Portia's gardens.

his own hands, a goodlynsized rustic growlery
on picturesque wild land, laying himself the
stone for the chimney and fireplace, lining the
interior with birch saplings, etc. In buUding
your own house, you are the shellfish that con-
structs its own shell and then lines it with
nacre to suit itself. Most houses are not indi-
vidual : at least, the outside is what some one
else thinks our shell ought to be, and we are
dictated to about its lining. Even the poor
caddis larve of the brook has the privilege of
constructing its own rustic house out of the
rubble and mts of bark it can find, and the re-
sult is something pleasing.

What is it that tickles us so, when we see an
old horse-car dismounted and resting amid the
grass and shade of private grounds for the use
of tennis-players ; or a steam railway-car turned
into a residence for Michael beside the track :
or an old canal-boat used for the same purpose ?
Partly the novelty of finding a familiar object
adapted to new purposes, but chiefly the seeing
how a man has outwitted the wooden-headed
carpenters, and, Diogenes-like, got himself a
unique dwelling, — found one ready made, and
walked off with it, like the hermit crab with his
old periwinkle shell, or a wren nesting in an old
boot or the sleeve of a coat. We have the
pleasure in it that a boy does in his wigwam :
he built it himself, that's the secret of ms joy
in it; and we sympathetically partake of the
pleasure of the Irishman, and his sense of power
in his donricile, so cheaply acquired. I enjoyed
that stiidj^ I: built, largely with my own hands,

FLOWEBS AND BIRDS. 101

years ago out in Ohio far more than I should
have done otherwise.

I occasionally pass by an old Peggoty dwell-
ing, the abode of a small ship-and-boat repairer,
that pleases me hugely. It consists of the upper
works of a steamboat, located on the side of a
slope, so as to afford room for rude workshops
below. With this exception the house is all on
one floor: there is a fine roof-parlor made by
the ship's railing which runs around the whole.
All sorts of quaint, cosey devices have been
adopted to make the dwelling comfortable.
Grape-vines trail over its side ; the porch at the
front door is overrun by a Malaga grape-vine,
and a kind of narrow look-off platform, two feet
wide, runs along the front, battlemented as to
its margin with a long whitewashed box, crim-
son with phlox. From auger-holes in the front
of the box hang gaudy nasturtiums, mask-
ing the wood almost entirely and edging with
their red and yellow the crimson of the phlox.
Below, in a little sunken garden of blackest
earth, grow asters, roses, sweet-peas, mignonette,
heliotrope, and gladiolus. An old dory is en-
tirely filled with petunias, that spill over its
sides and drift their pungent essence, or life-
spirit, out upon the air. Enchanted, you linger
long and dream of the shy, demure little dame,
sweet-gowned and golden-haired, whom you are
sure must be the fosterer of these little dumb
ministers, — the fairy godmother of the garden,
to dress it and to keep it. Alas for poor human-
ity ! You should have but glanced and fled ; for
out crawls a frowzy woman, in a sunbonnet, with

102 IK fobtia's gardens.

a panful of sooty with which she proceeds to
sprinkle every plant in the yard. She remarks
that she was " cleanin' " out the stove and
thought she would put the "sut " on the plants,
for the green worms " was gettin' on 'em all."

But the robin's nest. The modus operandi
of Mrs. Robin is this : she first places a mouth-
ful of straws in the place selected for the nest,
then another and another. After a while she
tucks up her feet, gets down into the straw, and
works her feet behind her as backward-operat-
ing hands to fix the straws in place and give
them shape. By turning around frequently,
she thus fixes and interweaves the material with
her claws, and smooths and rounds it with her
breast. The mud is treated in exactly the same
way.

Atifftcat 6. — During my absence four green
eggs have been laid ana brooded upon. The
younff ones are now hatching out. The male
bird brings worms and insects which he puts
into the bill of his spouse, and she in turn puts
the same into the ludicrously big mouths of the
young ones. She herself occasionally flies
down near at hand and gets a worm for wiem.

August 12. — To-day the male bird decided,
after long pondering, to try the feat of sitting
on the nest. It was laughable to see how awk-
wardly he did it. He nearly trampled the
young ones to death, and was soon driven off,
quite crestfallen, by the indignant mother,

AugvM 19. — The last of the young robins left
the nest to-day.

The pear-tree robin's nest of '96 was built en-

FLOWERS AND BIRDS. 103

tirely by the female, and she alone brooded the
eggs. A moment ago, while writing, I saw her
fly oJBf, when the male bird at once flew up to
take a look at the egg treasures. He stood by
the nest for three minutes, until the female re-
turned, occasionally giving a little peck at the
nest. When she returned, he at once de-
camped. Had he been standing guard? I
saw him do the same thing on another day.
He occasionally comes to visit his spouse, either
to feed her or to stand close by the nest and
look at her. In a flock of birds, or a colony
building nests together, as swallows or the social
grosbeaks of Africa, how do the different pairs
recognize each other? Probably by voice and
gesture more than anything else. The pear-tree
robin took just five hours in giving birth to her
fira^ ©gg* She took to her bed at eight A. m.,
and at one o'clock, without any noise of cack-
ling, slipped awa', leaving a green egg behind,
as 1 ascertained by inspection. She had a queer
habit of shrieking or squeaking, both while on
the nest and during the entire season. It was a
sort of Mrs. Gummidge wail, I made up my
mind. Sometimes it was quite loud when she
was brooding and I was standing close by,
under her eye. It seemed a cry to her mate in
her loneliness, part of the "sweet pain of
mothers." In the case of a bird so active as
the thrushes all are, it must be harrowing to sit
still day and night for a fortnight : it made me
sympathetically tired to look at her sitting
there, with her biU wide open from the heat.
When the sun was too fierce (she had little

104 IN pobtia's gardens.

shade), she would sit partly off the nest to cool
her breast.

She began brooding when the second egg was
laid ; and thirteen days after the first egg was
hatched. It was most serious business to feed
those young, and themselves, too. Both birds
toiled at it from early dawn to late dusk.
Sometimes the female would give one of her
whistles of dismay as she contemplated that
group of always-open yellow gullets. I sup-
pose she herself was nearly starved.

When the youngf were about ready to fly and
had begun to spill out of the over-full nest, —
the old story, — and lie helpless on the ground,
I tried an experiment with them. A cage was
constructed out of a small salt box, 6 X 14
inches, wooden slats being nailed across the
sides and top. The young squabs were then
transferred to this new home, and hung up in
the pear-tree just below the nest, amia heart-
rending cries from both parents. If I had not
felt that I was probably saving the young from
cats, I should have repented on seeing the con-
sternation of the old birds. I chiefly regretted
their loss of trust in me. However, this was
not of long duration. They "caught on"
pretty quick (or the female, at least, did), and
made scarcely any fuss the third time I ap-
proached the new-fangled aerial robin-coop for
the purpose of removing a couple of slats from
the top, so that the old birds might enter the
box to clean it (an indispensable requisite).
This I was pleased to see they did. The open-
ing at the top was also designed to give the

PLOWBBS AND BIEDS. 106

young opportunity to escape as they grew large
enough. When they got used to it, the parents
seemed well pleased with the pen in which
their babies were confined; for it kept them
safe from premature straying and out-tumblinj
But for some ten minutes, at first, both bir(
continued to scream and dash past, and almost
onto, the cage, which they evidently thought
was a kind oi dragon that had swallowed their
darlings. But very soon the female had ac-
cepted the situation (she was always the tamer
of the two, would allow me to talk to her and
almost stroke her when on the nest), and was
feeding the young through the slate; i. «.,
when the male did not startle her away by one
of his dashes of bravado at the box. The poor
fellow had worked himself up into a fever of
excitement, his mouth was open with heat, and
he continued to think it incumbent upon him
as the defender of the family to dash at that
box, survey it with up-cocked eye from the
grass below, and in every way express his in-
oignation at a contraption which had interfered
with his domestic affairs in so unheard of a
way. A kingbird, ajiother male robin, and a
pair of red-eyed vireos flew close around the
robin-coop, and tried to see if they could assist
in any way. In about an hour the big-crested,
ruddy-breasted papa had taken his cue from
mamma; and from that time they worked
quietly on in unison, feeding the prisoners
tiirough the bars, carefully putting into each
saffron cavern of the row emergent from the
box ite due proportion in rotation.

106 IN POBTIA^S OABDENS.

Eight hours after the box was put up youngf
freshman Robbie No. 2 flew up to the outside of
the box, where he perched the rest of the day,
trying his wings, like a man waking up after a
nap and stretching. (How long had the robin's
nap been between his incarnations?) He got
plenty to eat, usually intercepting the old ones
as they were on the point of hopping down into
the box. When too full for more, he would
get a gentle pecking on the back of his head to
make him open his bill, which perforce he did.
It was his brother No. 1, brought up by hand
by a lady friend, who, not content with swal-
lowing his forty feet of angle worms, — or its
equivalent in egg and grasshoppers and meal
worms, and putting the kind lady in " such a
canaries," — tried also to swaUow the spoon
with which he was being given water. Robbie
No. 2 launched forth about dusk into the un-
tried ocean, the air, amid great excitement on
the part of the old birds. Thereafter the male
bird had to care for the remaining squabs, the
female devoting her attention entirely to her
second bom.

The robin brought up by hand was fetched
back after a week, the owners not being able to
get, by proxy or personal labor, enough worms,
grasshoppers, ants, etc., to satisfy its cravings.
It was handsome, and very tame, a loud chirper,
and soon attracted the attention of its mother,
who thought at first it must of course be one of
her familiar brood. But a funny sight was
soon seen : the robin kept loudly chirping, and
the mother, thrown into great nervousness, kept

I

FLOWERS AND BIRDS. 107

flying up with food in her bill, and closely in-
specting him. He, however, had forgotten his
parent, and, instead of opening his bill and cry-
ing for food, kept an obstinate silence when she
came close to him. This astonished the mother,
who would fly away with the food, but be con-
stantly drawn back by the vociferous cries of
her eldest son. Presently he left his perch, and
by nightfall I noticed that he and his mother
had a complete understanding : she had become
the slave of her child with the peculiar note,
and was feeding him "rum cherries" very
assiduously.

What a pity that only one — the Ruby
Throat — out of the four or five hundred species
of humming-birds of Tropical America come
north to visit us I (In the East, I mean. West
of the Mississippi there are fifteen species,
ranging as far north as Alaska.) Yet we are
profoundly grateful for that one bit of animate
lightning with sightless wings, although we
can't imagine why the rest of this great family
of Peris haven't taken it into their heads to
come as well as he. And I am profoundly
grateful also to an ornithological friend for
showing me that humming-bird on her nest, —
a delicate lichened cup on the bough of an old
apple-tree, the daintiest thing the bird world
can show. When the Duke of Argyll was in
the United States a few years ago, he saw the
Ruby Throat but twice ; but he was so delighted
that he said that alone paid him for coming
over. He must envy those of us who have

108 IK PORTIA'S GABDBNS.

them about our porches every summer, sipping
the blossoms of the red-flowering bean and the
honeysuckle. There are no humming-birds in
Europe ; but, as they will live a few weeks in
confinement, why would it not be possible to
capture a nest and its young, with the mother,
if possible, and try taking them across the
ocean to liberate in Europe? I see no reason
why they might not live through a pleasant six
days' voyage in summer. It is surely worth
while to try it. They could be fed on sugar-
water and a supply of live insects (spiders, etc.)
prepared beforehand. The question is. Would
they know how to find their way south when
the winter came ?

It is fun to see how they will distance a
bumble-bee, when attacked. Bumble stands no
show at all in wing speed. They may run from
a bumble- bee to get rid of his sting, but they are
astonishingly pugnacious and brave in attack-
ing even quite large birds. Humming-birds
actually perch a great deal and are only a short
part of the time on the wing. This makes sad
work of the popular idea. Was it Howells or
Gosse who wrote a poem on the rare phenome-
non (as it was thought) of seeing Ruby Throat
alighted? — in this case on a clothes-line.

Did you ever notice how the humming-bird
is apparently swallowed up by the air as he
departs ? One's wonder is not less at the twen-
tieth repetition of this bit of enchantment than
at the first sight of it. With the swiftness of
lightning the humming ceases, and the bird
seems to melt into the air, snuffed out of sight

FLOWERS AND BIRDS. 109

like the flame of a candle blown from its
wick.

A neighbor and his wife, who cultivate flow-
ers, assured me they had often seen a baby hum-
ming-bird with the old one. The man captured
it, and then let it go. He said it was about as
big as a bumble-bee I Of course, it was one of
the Sesiae, the humming-bird moths, — probably
the Sphinx or Hawk moth. Some of these are
day-fliers as well as crepuscular, and have the
power of producing a humming sound. The
brilliant hummingbird moth, called by the

{>eople sometimes the "lady-bird," is a little
arger than the bumble-bee, of an olive-green
color (like the Ruby) on the back, and a broad
band of brown underneath. The breast is white,
and lower parts brown, wings transparent, and
tail fan-shaped. When not on the wing, they
look like a round brush made of bright feathers.
They are specially fond of petunias and the
sweet phlox, which they visit in July and
August. When poised upon rapidly vibrating
wings above a blossom, they look curiously like
a humming-bird. Indeed, the unscientific smile
incredulously, when you assure them they are
not the Trochilus coliAris^ but moths.

The crepuscular sphinxes are not so brilliantly
colored, of course, as the day-fliers. In the dusk
of an August evening, while you are sitting and
listening to the electric clicking of the ka^dids
(a combination of that and a buzz-saw) in the
woodbines and honeysuckle, suddenly out of
the darkness appears the sphinx moth, and
poises himself on noiseless wings, with leisurely

110 IN PORTIA*S GARDENS.

elegance, over the scented tubes of the white
honeysuckle, from which, although it is a second
table at which the bees and humming-birds have
been feasting all day, he seems to draw abun-
dant sustenance of nectared sweets. The noise-
lessness of wing motion of the sphinx moths,
which seem quite fearless, is startling : it seems
as though their wings must be beating in a
vacuum. The sphinx is named from a habit it
has of getting up on its posterior end, and remain-
ing motionless for hours in a position which
gives it some resemblance to a sphinx. A favor-
ite allusion of Jean Paul is to the night moth.
The earth itself he likens to a great moth, which
flies around the sim, and finally sinks into it
and is consumed. As for men, they are " the
fluttering particles of dust on the moth " : they,
too, have their little day, and cease to be.

V.

HIGH NOON OP THE YEAB.

July and August are somnolent months.
Time and space, life and death, seem quite as
they should be. The struggle of animal life for
existence is robbed of its terrors. Anarchy and
proletarianism, and the trusts (ironically so
called) of Shylock & Co., don't seem half so
menacing to society. The roadsides are lined
with sheets of blue succory and bugloss, the
crimson loosestrife and the goldenrod and tansy ;
and crates, cars, and wharves are cumbered with
delicious watermelons with their f oison of nectar
and crimson flesh, lolling in heaps everywhere,
like dropsical old Dutch burgomasters with
aching sides, too fat to move. In the dolce far
niente August evenings, with the moon throwing
quiet arabesques of shade around the lawn, of
course you are not foolish enough to read, nor
do you even feel like thinking very deeply.
You are very much in the mood of the school-
master and scholars of that sleepy little kinder-
garten that had a bed in the room for the sleepy
pupil, and of which the master discourses as
follows : —

" And sometimes it wiU happen on a warm and pleasant day,
When the little birds upon the trees go tooral-looral-lay,
When wide-awake and studious it's cfijfficult to keep,
One by one they'll get a nodding till the whole class is
asleep !

112 IN Portia's gardens.

** Then, before they're all in dreamland and their funny

snores begin,
I close the shutters softly, so the sunlight can't come in ;
After which I put the school-books in their order on the

shelf,
And, with nothing else to do, I take a little nap myself."

Drifting on through the slumbrous day^, you
half imagine that men and animals all have been
eating of that sonmiferous grass reported from
New Mexico, the properties of which are such
that cattle and sheep, after eating of it for half
an hour or so, lie down and fall asleep, then
wake up and go to feeding again : the horses of
the traveller, having eaten of this papaverous
grass, go to sleep while on the way and are with
diflSculty aroused, and pasturing horses sleep
standing in the field. So a newspaper says, and
the Daily Sewer, the glorious Aristides of morals,
the censor and the tribune of the people in one,
cannot possibly tell a lie.

It would seem as if, with seven million pores
in our skins and twenty-eight miles of perspira-
tory tubing attached to it, we ought to be able
to Keep cool even in August. But this is a hot
and an arid country. Phoenix, Ariz., is one
of the hottest towns in the world inhabited by
white men, — an oasis reclaimed from the desert
by canals of water, where the temperature in
June is from 112** to 118** in the shade, where
people sleep in hammocks or cots on the veran-
das among palm, pepper, oleander, and fig trees,
drink water filtered from porous ojo jars, cover
their streets with wooden roofs, and hang the
sides of the same with canvas curtains, and yet
even then, and maugre the sprinkled pavements

HIGH NOON OF THE YEAR. 113

and the running water in the gutters, wUt in
the heat, and men are frequently brought in
from the surrounding desert crazed by the flam-
ing-hot sunshine.

This of course is exceptional. But there are
the droughts of the Middle and Western Middle
States. I have lived through a good many of
those droughts, and never want to see any more
of them. " Baked heads," with wet cloths on
them, in the day-time, and wet sheets hung up
in the chamber at night, while you toss restless
and feverish and wakeful, shivering^ with the
heat ; the roads ankle-deep with white dust, the
hot grass scorched to a brown and red or
shrivelled away, not a spear of green in it ; the
sun like a ball of copper in the sky ; the green
leaves withered and blowing away in the hot
gusts; creeks dry, their beds covered with
decaying fish; wells polluted or empty; corn-
fields beds of dust, with stunted yellow stalks
bending over them; raspberry bushes loaded
with crops of fruit hard as shot and as small ;
fires starting everywhere in the woods, — such
are the features of a Western drought. And
we had one something like it right here in the
East (Eastern New York) in '96.

But on the Atlantic coast all this is mercifully
tempered by the sea. After the heat of the
day a mighty suspiration of tired Nature draws
in the cool air from the ocean. It takes about
two hours after sunset for this regular evening
breeze to reach us, fifteen miles in from the
coast, and seven from salt water in the harbor

1 My friend Joseph B. Chamberlin'g word for the phenomenon.

114 IN PORTIA'S GAKDBNS.

of Boston. But a cool, in-driving fog makes
much quicker time than that. One June even-
ing, I remember, the black flies were biting
the face as in August, the heat was like that of
July, and vegetation was in a high-jinks state
of excitement, when suddenly I saw a gray fog
drifting in from the sea, wiping out as with a
sponge the spires and gilded dome ; and in ten
minutes it had reached the place where I stood,
having travelled at the rate of a mile in a little
over a minute.

The approach of a September thunder-shower
in a hayfield, as you are gathering up the last
load, — were you ever of it, not as an amateur
in city clothes, but as a boy to the manner bom,
in your shirt-sleeves, with tattered old panama
on your head, and mighty for pulls at the corn-
cobnstoppered water jug in the shade that guggles
out " Good, good, good I " as you drink. How
the pitchfork handles strain and bend with their
loads, and how the perspiration trickles from
the brow I The old gentleman-farmer, with
white vest and stout gold chain, is almost buried
on the load by the forkfuls tumbled in on him.
The big, wild-eyed steers clash nigh and off
horns fearfully together as they stride lumber-
ingly along, goaded by the driver. " Ha ! here
she comes!" cry the boys, as the great balloon-
ing black clouds far up bring on a semi-twilight
and an advance gust seizes a wisp of hay, and,
tearing it into fragments, bears them on and
aloft out of sight. But the old hands know
that they have yet a little time, and that that

HIGH NOON OF THE YEAB. 115

low-flying green rack on the horizon, from which
comes a distant bellowing, contains the rain.
And in good time, as the steers trot up the old
meadow lane, here come the first delicious drops,
driving a cool gust before them. Fast, faster,
the patter increasing to a roar as the wagon
drives into the barn, while the boys hold their
old panamas under the eaves and drink the cool
stream that gushes from the spout of their im-
provised pitchers.

July and August are the months of the quail.
Bob White is a Westerner, ©ar excellence. The
books call it " common " about Boston, as they
do the meadow lark. But in our suburb there
are onlj'- four or five meadows where larks are
found, and only one or two pairs to a meadow.
One pair raised a brood on the extreme out-
skirts of the town in '96. The young of this
pair, in their fresh gold and black coats, were
not nearly so shy as the old ones, who never
liked to be within gunshot of a man, and yet
kept foolishly crying out all day, " ITere^ d^ye
%ee f " Some one says the meadow lark sings et
Bee de ah. Some do so sing, but I hear most of
them sing a clear-sweet plaintive Sere d!ye 9ee-e^
or sometimes Her-r-re^ do you see-e-e^ rolling the
r's in a kind of tremolo.

In the days of August, when the hot locust
"spins his Zendic rune," birds are moulting and
mostly songless; and then insects form an
attractive study, — all but one, the confounded
blood-sucking mosquito, whose origin Erasmus

116 IN Portia's gabdens.

Darwin sings through his nose in the following
quaint pennyrial-hymn style : —

** So from deep lakes the dread Mosquito springs,
Drinks the soft breeze and dries his tender wings,
In twinkling squadrons cuts his airy way,
Dips his red trunk in blood, and man his prey."

A member of his family being unable to be
in the open air at all after dusk (living on the
edge of a forest), a waggish suburbaner, who
shall be nameless, has planned a machine which
he calls "The Mosquito's Despair." He is
going to have constructed of common wire-
screen a "perambulator," like a gigantic bee-
hive on wheels. It is to have a door, and be
propelled by means of two simple handles at-
tached to a light aluminum rib running around
it, and having a cloth-netting fringe to sweep
the ground. Under this screen the lady wiU
walk about her lawn at leisure, open a little
wicket to, pick a rose or water flowers through a
garden hose entering at the bottom of the
perambulator. To use the lawn beehive will of
course require some courage at first, and may
cause the death of a few small boys from exces-
sive laughter. But all innovations cause laugh-
ter. When first used by Jonas Hanway in
London about a hundred years ago (1786, to be
precise), umbrellas seemed just as ludicrous.
Wordsworth thought them unmanly, and in one
of his sonnets speaks mournfully of " the um-
brella spread to weather-fend the Celtic herds-
man's head" as an indication, among other
things, that ancient manners were " withering
to the root." The hackmen and sedan-chair

HIGH NOON OP THE YEAB. 117

men were all down on umbrellas, and the people
yelled "Frenchman!" — i. «., in modern par-
lance, *'dude." The sister of a London foot-
man was compelled to quit his arm one day, we
are told, owing to the storm of abuse excited by
the umbrella he was carrying. I myself saw a
modest, pretty girl, with her well-dressed beau
(a lad), actually driven from the lake in the
Public Garden of Boston, where thousands of
children were skating, owing to the crowds of
silent guyers who surrounded and followed her
because they had discovered under her girl's
jacket a boy's sweater (invisible except to the
closest inspection), perhaps her brother's, which
a kind mother had coaxed her to wear to keep
her warm.

More attractive insects than the mosquitoes
are the grasshoppers (or locusts) and the
cicadas.^ The latter are not nearly so common
in New England as I used to see them in Ohio.
One could imagine the hot midsummer noon to
have itself found a voice in the annual or the
thirteen-year or seventeen-year cicada, as he
reels oflE his shrill music in some tree. In the
pretty story of Daphnis and Chloe, in Helio-
dorus Longus, the " grasshopper'* of the Eng-
lish translation should be tettix^ or cicada. The
story runs that, as the charming young Chloe
lay sleeping one day, a cicada flying from a
swallow fell into her bosom. " The swallow

1 The ** locusts" of the Bible were our grasshoppers. In America
we have misapplied the word '* locust '' to the cicada. The so-called
*' seventeen" or '* thirteen " year locust is a sapHsucking cicada, and
is not related at all to the bitmg locosts, or grasshoppers.

118 IN Portia's gardens.

was unable to take its prey, but hovered over
Chloe's cheek, and touched it with its wings."
She screamed, started, and then, seeing Daphnis,
rubbed her eyes, and laughed. "The cicada
chirped from her bosom, as if in gratitude for
his deliverance. At the sound Chloe screamed
again. At which Daphnis laughed, and, avail-
ing himself of the opportunity, put his hand
into her bosom, and drew the happy chirper
from its place, which did not cease its note even
when in his hand. Chloe was pleased at seeing
the innocent cause of her alarm, kissed it, and
replaced it, still singing, in her bosom."

I confess to an interest in another class of
insects, — the snare-weaving spiders, though I
detest their cruelty. They are now known
to be immensely useful to us in killing myriads
of flies and noxious aphides. I once had the
good fortune to see a spider — Epeira vulgaris
— weave its round web. A lamp was held
quite close to it for half an hour, but it was so
intent on its work that it did not seem to notice
the light. Spiders almost always weave their
webs at night, so as not to attract the attention
of their enemies. My Epeira, when discovered,
had laid her spoke-lines, and was carrying
around the wide-spaced, non-viscous, circular
lines, the measure being the length of her own
body with legs stretched each way to the ut-
most. After the spider had dropped her initial
radius, or spoke (it * should be said\ she
stretched the others by running along No. 1,
and spinning another, holding it off with one
claw so as not to interfere. When she reached

HIGH NOON OF THE YEAR. 119

the outer circumferential line of her hexagon,
she ran along it, still holding spoke No. 2, until
she reached a certain distance^ when she fas-
tened it to the circumference. And so on. A
spider's silken thread (it is true silk), as is
familiarly known, is compound, being composed
of many distinct strands (five in the case of
Epeira), exuding in a viscous state from the
spinnerets, and immediately hardening on being
united into the silken thread. Having finished
the first series, she turned squarely gJbout, and
began to fill in the finer and viscous circular
lines, moving now in a direction the reverse of
her former one, accurately spacing by means of
the third pair of legs, moving on by means of
the foremost and second pair, guiding the silk
by the fourth or hindmost pair, and touching
each radial spoke-thread with the spinneret as
she passed ta fasten the circular one to it with
the viscous material that is secreted by special
glands near the silk glands. The whole work
was performed with surprising rapidity and
elegance. My lamp attracted insects, of which
some were caught in the new web when it was
nearly finished. The spider could not resist the
temptation to leave her exhausting work to kill
and devour one for a luncheon, having first
paralyzed it with her poisonous mandibles,
doubtless blessing her good iuck as she ate.
She turned over on her back to kill the fly,
holding on to the web by one claw.

Epeira occasionally tears down her old web
by bits, putting in new threads as she goes
along, chewing up the old one and dropping it

120 IN pobtia's gabdens.

in pellets to the ground. It is known also tliat
she bites off the first series of non-viscous spirals
as she goes back toward the centre with the
second series, and leaves the ragged ends of the
first hanging to the cross, or radial, strands. I
did not notice this, but am pleased to find that
my observations, made twenty vears ago, corre-
spond exactly with the book descriptions as I
read them today. McCook counted the viscid
beads (or rather counted a piece, and then cal-
culated the rest) in the snare of Epeira, and
found they numbered one hundred and forty
thousand.

When Epeira has finished her web, she finds
herself at the centre of her stronghold, where
she usually has a den. Some spin the den a
little way off, in a nook, and carry a door-
bell line to it, to apprise them by the pull when
a victim is caught. Whereupon they rush out
to the attack, and feel the threads at the central
point to see which one the insect is on.

Every year three or four huge brownish-black
tarantulas, or wolf spiders (Lycosa), construct
their tubular dens on the lawn or in the lane.
These are the creatures Topsell speaks of:
" Others againe be meere wilde, lining without
the house abroade in the open ayre, which by
reason of their rauenous gut, and greedy de-
uouring maw, haue purchased to themselues the
name of wolfeB and hunting Spyders." 1 have
just been out to measure the diameter of the
tube of one of these miners : it is three-fourths
of an inch, extending down at a steep angle for
some inches, then bending obtusely and again

HIGH NOON OF THE YEAR. 121

descending, tliis time vertically. The mouths
of two of the holes are smoothly lipped with a
dead leaf or two, and arched partly over with
dead grass and living white-clover leaves. (Your
spider has a great weakness for your dead leaf,
especially when curled over so as to form a little
funnel in which she may house.) All are on a
sunny, dry slope fronting south-east, just the
locality these spiders like. The smoothened lip
of the tube — a little glutinous silk web being
used to make all compact — serves, I suppose,
to make more easy and inviting the descent of
insects that happen along that way, and say to
themselves, "My, what a nice little retreat!"
But faoilis deseenms Avemi^ sed revoeari — there's
the rub. It's easy to get into Hades, but how
to get out? It being our duty to kill scores of
rose-bugs, I took occasion to tie a thread to the
hind leg of one, and let him down into the awful
dragon's den. The black monster was lurking
at the angle of the tube, just out of sight, and
instantly pounced upon the bug. I pullea and she
pulled ; but, when me bunched lower four of her
eight eyes began to glare greenly up out of the
dark tube, she saw me, smelled mischief, and let
go her hold. I lowered again ; and again she
grappled the bug, whom I now left to nis fate.
In half an hour or so I pulled up the string ;
and the dangling leg, if it could have spoken,
would have said, with Tom Hood's sailor, " The
hjilf that you remark is come to say his other
half is bit off by a shark," for the body was
ffone. These wolf spiders have bodies fully an
mch long, and would measure three inches from

122 IK PORTIA'S OABDKNS.

tip to tip of legs. The tube-builders are the
females; and they only use the tubes during
the process of raising young, for the sake of
greater security. As soon as these are hatched,
they leave the dens, and roam about, seeking
their prey. The males after impregnating the
females are killed by them, sucked dry, and
even the remains chewed up in the form of a
pellet I The females in breeding time are ex-
tremely shy, and it was only with great difficulty
that I could approach ^em without seeing
them slip into their holes quick as thought.

One evening, about from twelve to twenty-
four hours before No. 1 appeared with her egg
sac, she exhibited the most remarkable fearless-
ness, absolutely refusing to go into or be poked
into her den, although surrounded by a company
of ladies and gentlemen on the lawn. I suspect
it was extreme hunger and the maternal in-
stinct that made her so bold. She was ex-
hausted by the process of elaborating her eggs,
probabl}^ and had come out for food.

When the egg sacs were completed and at-
tached to the abdomen, the proprietors would
come out and stand, head toward the den-mouth,
to sun them. Doubtless the heat of the sun is
essential for the maturing of the eggs. No. 1
stayed within two nights and a day while con-
structing her egg sac. Lycosa naturally shows
great attachment for this, seizing it again and
again if it be taken from her.

The mouth of Lycosa No. 8's tube is the en-
trance to an exactly vertical well (vertical, that
is, until the elbow is reached) with a funnel of

HIGH NOON OF THE YEAR. 123

cobweb and dead leaves flaring out and up
among the grasses. I should hate to be the
insect to fall into this frightful well, with a
hungry, green-eyed monster at its bottom. I
notice the ants are too circumspect to do more
than peer gingerly about.

The hearing of spiders is known to be very
acute. Even when their heads were out of
sight in the tube, they detected my distant and
most stealthy approach, seeming to prove what
has been guessed, that the hairs on their legs
are org^Joi hearing. The spidex. are all yely
cleanly, and may be seen brushing and cleaning
their foreheads and eyes with their hairy palpi
as a cat does with her paws.

^ My wolf spiders are close cousins of the
tower-building kind described by Mi*s. Mary
Treat, at various times from 1879 to 1890, in
the American Naturalist and in Harper's Monthly.
Instead of building a funnel, as mine do, hers
build a little pentagonal pen of sticks above the
mouths of their tubes, like a rail fence around a
pig-pen. Her Tarentula turricola corresponds
mark for mark, color for color, with my Lycosa
tarentula}

Magliabecchi — the dusty, snuffy old Floren-
tine bookworm, who never wrote a line as the
fruit of his studies, but lived all alone, close to
the bone, in a house full of books, and cared not
for looks — had a house infested by spiders.
When his friends visited him, he would cry out: ,
" Don't break that spider's web I Look out for
that spider ! " Wedged in between two rows
of books, with charcoal warmers fastened to his

1 See Appendix, last two pages.

124 IK POBTIA^S 6ABDBKS.

aims in winter (on which he often hnmed him-
self), he read and read and read. He kept his
eggs and bread and money in a drawer, ^^ danced
with the cat, made tea in his hat," and never
went but twice from home in his life. As Ed-
ward Lear might have put it, —

There was an old man of Firenze

Who loved spiders and musty scienze :

He ate little hat eggs, and had monstrons thin legs.

And merer went out of Firenze.

Certain spiders are expert aeronauts. On a
fine sunny day, when desirous of a ride, they
get atop of a fence or bush when a gentle breeze
IS blowing, and, turning their abdomens up in
the direction of the wind and head down, spin
several threads. As soon as they feel by the
pull that the thread is long enough, they let go
and drift away, immediately weaving a litue
mesh, or balloon-basket, in which they ride
safely whither the wind carries them. Darwin
during his voyage with the "Beagle" found
them floating out at sea, six miles from land.
On fine days one may often see the air full of
these gleaming threads. McCook thinks that
they may have the power of lowering themselves.
For he carefully observed one oay how one
secured her descent by " pulling in the floating
lines until they gathered in a minute white
pellet above the mandibles. As the lines short-
ened, the buoyancy decreased " ; and the spider
sank until she reached the grass (" Tenants of
an Old Farm," p. 198). The pulling in of the
threads corresponded to the aeronaut's throwing
out of sand ballast.

HIGH NOOK OF THE YEAB. 125

After a refreshing half-hour in the heayy dew
one morning, observing those little pieces of
spider mechanism, the fairy napkins of the lawn,
I figured out a sum by which it appears that, if
one man could in a night weave out of his own
*' innards " a pleasure tent three hundred and
fifty feet in diameter, and stretch it over the
trees of a forest, fastening it securely to the
ground and tree-trunks by cables, he would be
doing no more than the Liliputian lawn spider
does over night, in proportion to its size, in
flinging its web over its six square inches of
grass spears. Pretty good job for the little
spiracle-breathing athlete ! The countless num-
bers of these webs astonish one. Your lawn
may be covered with napkins of dew ; but, if
you look close, you will find hundreds and hun-
dreds between these, so small as not to be seen
but by close inspection, and at the bottom of
each a tiny black spider. From my observa-
tions I calculated that an acre would contain
250,000 of them.

Daddy Darwin (to borrow one of Mrs.
E wing's titles), or Darwin pire^ has a fine steel
plate in his "Botanic Garden" of a South
American Cypripediuni orchid, the flaring petals
and sac of which look like a bottle-paunched
spider. Erasmus D. affirms that probably this
mimickry is to scare the humming-birds off, so
they won't steal the orchid's honey. This must
have been amusing reading to his illustrious
grandson, Charles, who gave so many years of
his life to the study of nie cross-fertilization of
flowers by the aid of insects. But, to be

126 IN PORTIA*S GARDENS.

absolutely sure of my science, I first hunted
up Charles Darwin's work on the fertilization
of orchids, and got no light there; but in
Ernst Krause and Charles Darwin's '^Life of
Erasmus Darwin " I find (pp. 168, 169) that this
theory about Cypripedium is an error of the
doctor's, most oi whose theories turn out to
be remarkable anticipations of his grandson's
discoveries. Krause, I may mention, finds that
Erasmus Darwin was the first to construct
"a complete system of the theory of evolu-
tion."

It was some years after we had been growing
the ashen-white La France rose before an ele-
gant large white spider, with ashen-reddish
streaks on his side and a gold spot on his head,
found us out. I suppose they might have
drifted up to the hill-croft in their silk balloons,
or come in from the milkweeds in the fields.
They are remarkably handsome fellows, and try
to hide under the rose or between its petals,
when observed, or else drop to the ground, pay-
ing out a silk rope from their spinnerets as they
go, so as to have a ladder ready for climbing
up again when the danger is over. (When a
spider's house gets afire, he need never burn up,
like the lady-bug's famous children, for want of
a ladder.) The interesting point about these
rose spiders is their protective color-mimickry :
they are almost the exact tint of the rose on
which they perch. Their plumpness would
make them a delicious titbit for the birds ; and
they would suffer, were it not for their color.
I notice a similar spider on the white blossoms

HIGH NOON OF THE YEAE. 127

of one of the viburnums and on the Asclepias,
or milkweed. There are Javanese spiders that
exactly imitate in form and color a bird's drop-
ping, on a leaf. Flies are often attracted to
such things: imagine their surprise when the
supposed bird-dropping develops terrible poi-
soned pincers, that grasp them, and fill them
with instant torture !

For some years, in summer, until, alas! he
was killed by the neighbor's bulldog Caliban,
we enjoyed the society of a gray old woodchuck,
whom we dubbed Vanderbilt ; for he seemed to
have several residences. In order to reach an
adjoining clover field, and yet not get so far
away from his cave under the old stone fence
that the dog would head him off, he was obliged
to dig an outlying subterranean fortress among
the semi- wild grape-vines on the hillside close
to the house. He carried out by night several
wheelbarrow loads of alluvial gravel, which was
utilized by his human fellow-inhabitants for
walks. Often, on dewy mornings, looking out
of my window at five o'clock, I would see him
standing on his hind legs in order to get a good
view, eating clover blossoms and looking fear-
fully around between bites. The cat, Mrs.
Gummidge, and he were seen eying one another
suspiciously; but they were never known to
come to an encounter. Vanderbilt was re-
garded as the tutelary divinity of the croft.
The last of the aborigines is the woodchuck, out-
lasting the red man, holding his own stoutly in
almost every farm of New England, the habitan

128 IN pobtia's gabdens.

of the picturesque stone fence with its clamber-
ing vines.

I don't wonder Thoreau liked the animal,
and liked his woodchuck cap. The only won-
der is that he didn't have a whole suit made of
the skins, like that emigrant who arrived in the
United States wearing a coat made of about a
thousand mouse-skins. (He must have been a
very Pied Piper of Hamelin, or lived near the
Mouse Tower of the Rhine, to get so many.)
Mr. Joseph E. Chamberlin thiiis the wood-
chuck might well be regarded as the tutelary
animal of all New England, and, apropos of my
woodchuck, writes that the animal " comes a
great deal nearer to being the really typical
national universal ' critter ' of this North Amer-
ican Continent than any other living thing,
four-footed or winged." And we must agree
with him. As for its bodily make-up, I tmnk
the bright black eye and delicate pretty little
ears and vegetarianism of the animal show re-
finement, and offset its shambling gait and
pudding-bag of a trunk.

The scientists call this marmot the "bear-
mouse" (^Arctomys)^ and the Canadians the
Siffleur^ in allusion to his shrill whistle. Al-
though these troglodjrtes sleep in their burrows
most of the day, they are yet fond of a sun-bath,
and will occasionally climb a tree and bask
there in the warmth, or sometimes will lean up
against a tree-trunk in the sun, eyes closed in
sleep, paws hanging down, and head inclined
on breast. When the leaves fall and the frosts
get sharp. Old Pudding Bag hies him into his

HIGH NOON OP THE YEAB. 129

den, having first carried into the central cham-
ber a goodly supply of bedding in the shape of
dried grass. This is some twenty-five feet long
and about three feet under ground. Here, roll-
ing themselves up in the hay, the woodchuck
family lie absolutely torpid until March, eat-
ing nothing the while. The main entrance is
blocked up with earth to keep out intruders
and the cold air; but a second minor exit is
always tunnelled, with a very small opening
amongst weeds or stones. This is for a way of
escape. The animal always leaves the burrow
by this entrance in spring. Sometimes a skunk
takes possession of the me underground abode.
The litter of four to eight young woodchucks,
when old enough, play at making burrows for
themselves, as boys build wigwams and girls
doll-houses. These little burrows are, however,
never occupied by the new members of the
family when they finally separate and marry off
with neighboring " chucks/' Audubon in his
" North American Quadrupeds " gives mighty
interesting (because true) narratives about
" thawing out " torpid woodchucks.

Foraging about blindly, one morning, in the
search for the amphitheatre, or earth bowl, that
lies about a mile from the ruins of " Leif Eric-
son's House" at Gerry's Landing, near the
James Russell Lowell residence, suddenly,
lying at full length by a lonely pond-side, I
came upon the mate of Thoreau's Elisha Dur-
gin, in the shape of a shoeless, bareheaded, un-
shaven man, with red hair, pipe, and trousers

130 IK PORTIA'S GABDEN8.

rolled up to the knee, displaying red, hirsute,
and blotched feet and a pair oi superb calves.

** I've been trying to catch some gold-fish, but
haven't had much luck," he said. ''You see
that kingfisher out there? There! watch
him."

Just then the bird, that had brought up in
mid-flight, beating his wings rapidly while he
gazed downward with piercing glance, shot
down quick as a flash, poised himself a foot
from the water for the fiftieth part of a second,
then plunged her-chug ! a foot under water, and
emerged bearing a gold-fish in his beak. What
sumptuous fare for nim it was ! It was droll to
see with what ease the despised bird, with its
little brain, so outwitted the man. And you
didn't see why the kingfisher was not as much
entitled to the golden oeauties as his wingless
fellow-animal on the bank, who growled at him
so bitterly.

" That's the reason fish is scarce," said John.
" There's five or six o' them fellers around this
pond. I'd 'a' shot that one if I'd 'a' had my
gun. I saw a loon here yesterday. He's down
at Fresh Pond now. I once shot twenty times
at a loon on this pond, and got him at the twen-
tieth shot. Loon is hard to hit. This fellow'd
dive at every shot, at the flash of the cap, dodge
the bullet, and come up away at the other side
of the pond.

" Last year I caught three hundred and sixty
mushrats and eight mink. Mushrats is fond of
celery. Their fur is no good in summer, when
they are breeding. I trap 'em in winter. The

HIGH NOON OP THE YEAH. 131

fur is SO thick you can't shoot 'ein to kill unless
you hit 'em in the head. Then they turn over
on their backs, and float dead."

John then branched off on to the water-lily
business. I learned that he did a regular trade
in water-lilies and gold-fish with Boston florists.

While we were talking, something happened
that neither of us had ever seen before. There
flew by, across the middle of the pond, a snow-
white bird, a little smaller in size than the
robin, pursued by a swarm of persecuting Eng-
lish sparrows. It alighted on a tree at a dis-
tance, looking like a bit of pure snow against
the green. But its enemies kept up a persistent
attack. Poor thing ! It paid dear for its singu-
larity.

Albinos among birds are not so rare as might
be supposed, although they are so in comparison
with the myriads of birds that exist. Boston
newspapers for only two years record the follow-
ing, which I clipped and filed away : —

A white sparrow appeared in Philadelphia in
the neighborhood of 22d Street and Columbia
Avenue. He proved, it was said, to be a recon-
ciler of two warring factions into which the
birds had been divided. In California a mud-
hen, two quails, and a young jay were found to
be partial albinos. The jay was discovered by
a little girl in Yuba County. She brought it
up by hand, and it continued to be white when
full-grown. For three years a half-white robin
appeared every spring on Asylum Hill in Hart-
ford, Conn. She raised three broods, none of
which were white. A white kingbird was de-

132 IK pobtia'8 gardens.

scribed by the Norwich (CJonn.) BuUetin^ July
15, 1880. A white sw^ow was reported in
1880 as seen in Hertfordshire, England. In
the same year the Chicago Audubon Club em-
ployed boys to capture, by trap or snare, a
white crow near the mouth of the Kankakee
River. His neck and part of his head were coal-
black. The Boston Ih-anseripfs ♦•listener'*
gives. May 8, '97, interesting descriptions of
partially white robins, one of them \ntii a white
stripe down the back.

To the foregoing these may be added : —
On Dec. 26, '79, a white bluebird was killed
in New Haven, Conn., bv R. H. Morris. A
pure white crow was caught on Taxada Island,
B. C. Tabout 1894). It was taken from a nest
in which were several black crows. It is inter-
esting to note in the museums that the large
African crow (^Corvtis icapulatus) has a snow-
white breast and white collar on back. The
crow of North-eastern Europe, too, is gray.
Ovid and others say the crow was originally
white, but that, when sent by Apollo for water,
it dallied by the way to eat some figs, and was
turned black and punished with everlasting
thirst. Chaucer gives, in the Maunciple's Tale,
an old mediaeval version of the crow myth : —

"Now had this Phebos m his hoiu a crowe,
Which in a cage he f ostred many a day.
And taught it speken, as men doon a jay.
Whit was this crowe, as is a snow-whyt swan."

It knew how to speak as well as a man. It
told PhoBbus of the infidelity of his wife, which
it witnessed. He thereupon slew her, and after-

HIGH NOON OF THE YEAR. 133

wards, filled with regret, hated the crow, and,
depriving it of speech and song, turned it black,
and flung it out of doors.

In January, 1880, a milk-white raven was re-
ceived into the great Berlin Aviary, to the con-
sternation of the other birds, none of which
would eat or drink, they were so frightened.
They probably thought it was a white owl or
hawk. This raven was a pure albino, with' pink
eyes. He was taken from a nest full of black
ravens in the top of an old tree in the Ge'orgen-
thal in Thuringia. Perhaps he was a brother of
Edward Lear's " rural runcible raven, who wore
a white wig and ran away with the carpet
broom." Yellowish-white ravens are occasion-
ally found. Shakspere (" Love's Labour's
Lost," iv. 3) says, " An amber-colored raven
was well noted." White ravens are mentioned
by Aristotle, Athenseus, Juvenal, and Lucian.^
They showed the white feather thus early.
Ovid tells that ravens also were all formerly
white, but were turned black for babbling what
they should not (Bk. 11. 8, 9).

To close up the albino story, we may recall
Lord Arlington's English "white farm," on
which there were two or three hundred white

1 "A Glossary of Greek Birds" (1895), by D'Arcy Wentworth
Thompson, gives me this item. It is a soholarly work. See under
Kopax (crow). By the way, I disooyered the etymology of Kopax in a
curiotiB manner. I offer it as an emendation to Liddell and Scott's
Greek Lexicon, which in the latest edition says the root of KOpax Is
from the onomatopceio word Kpa^o, But I heard a crow say plainly
(close by me, one day, when all was quiet and a fog hid me from
view), KcHToa^t in quite a matter-of-fact, conyersational tone. I at
onoe saw where the bird got its Greek name : it told it itself.

134 m POBTIA*8 GARDENS.

pigeons, a white peacock, snow-white geese,
txirkeys, goats, horses, cows, pigs, sauirrels, a
white doe given by the Queen, and rats and
mice by the Prince of Wales. Even the cat
and the cockatoo belonging to the farm-keeper
were white. All of which sounds like a story
from Grimms' " Fairy Tales," but is yet true in
every detail.

Midsummer is the time for studying the
beauty of skies, and especially sunsets and the
moonlight. Winter is practically the best time
for sunrises, for the simple reason that we and
the sun rise nearer together then. True, it is
better to hear the laK [robin] sing than the
mouse cheep (motto of the Douglases of the
Border), ana we agree with Dante that

" Seggendo in piuma
In fama non si yien, nb sotto coltre."

That is, you can't attain fame in easy-chairs
nor under bed coverlets. But five o'clock is
early enough for most of us. If you are a
thinker, you get vour clearest thoughts before
rising. You awake, and there lies your idea,
lucid and bright, floated up out of the ocean of
the unconscious, like a sparkling bit of sea-
weed or a starfish stranded in the ebb tide.

What gorgeous effects were given by the
"red sunsets" of 1883-86, due to the dust of
the Krakatoa eruption in Sunda Straits, by
which thirty-seven thousand persons lost their
lives ! Every clear evening for three years the
sun set blood-red in a crimson Indian-summer

HIGH NOOK OF THE YEAR. 136

sky. If, as was a fact, the eruption was so
awful as to be heard three thousand miles away
and over an area equal to the thirteenth part of
the surface of the globe ; and if 200,000,000,000
cubic feet of dust and vapor were hurled to a
height of twenty miles above the surface of the
earth, — it is easy to see how the dust would
drift around the globe, borne on the wings of
the great trade-winds, and so produce the phe-
nomena we witnessed.

Not everybody is aware by experience that iu
many sunsets there are three distinct after-
glows. If you are patient, you will see them.
The intervals between them are somewhat long.
In the first the colors are brilliant; in the
second, cool grays and apple-green appear min-
gled with the reds and purples; and, finally,
there is a faint phantom flush, reflected from
far-up cirrus probably, which lasts but for a
moment. Shall we call this last the palingene-
sis of the faded rose, the sun, — the phantom of
itself glowing in faint cramoisie far up against
the lucent crystal sphere ?

People who have only seen the tame skies of
the North think the sunset in Turner's " Slave
Ship " exaggerated, untrue. But his color
palette is not extravagant to those who have
seen the sunsets of our South or of Italy. Those
who think it is, turn to the moral in the picture,
and think that the chief thing. It is true that
Turner painted the labor and sorrow of men,
and there is a profound and touching moral in
" The Slave Ship." But, if the attention is be-
stowed exclusively on this, and is occupied

136 IN pobtia's gardens.

with the negroes' limbs and the fetters of iron,
or even with the impossible great fish bursting
out of the foam on the right, the intention of
the painting is missed, which is to show in the
restless dazzle and splendor of its color, its torn
clouds, wind-lashed waves and the depth of its
mighty wine-colored sea-troughs, a nature-poem,
a sunset sjrmphony in gold and crimson and
pui-ple and blue. The picture is to be viewed
from a distance.

To the lover of the beautiful and to the gar-
dener a summer moomise presents different as-
pects. One can complacently regard it from the
point of view of both. When my day's work is
done, and I look off over a twenty-mile land-
scape and see through the trees in the fore-
f ground the full red moon hanging over the sea
ike one of those fiery domes of tne City of Dis
in Dante's poem, and watch it, as it rises still
higher, assume a golden color, dinted with all its
spots like one oi Schliemann's old Mykensean
gold masks, and pouring its spokes of delicate
vitreous light into the (fim bosks and cavernous
interspaces of the forest, while an amethystine
mist half hides the landscape and softens all its
outlines, I am in one mood. And when I am
thinking of the changes of spots in the goose
bone as a sign of weather changes, and am con-
sidering the light of the moon as a good time in
which to plant peas, I am in another mood.

About the dark of the moon and all that, —
the farmers and simple folk are right after all.
Dr. Robert Mann, of Scotland, perhaps the first
of living meteorologists, has as good as proved

i

HIGH NOON OF THE YEAR. 137

it. It appears that the dark moon does actually
chill our eaiiih, in this way: in the dark of
the moon — L e., when no sunshine falls upon
it — the temperature of the satellite's surface is
219 degrees below the freezing point. The
heat radiated from its surface in producing this
frightful degree of cold melts the clouds in our
upper atmosphere, and thus enables the earth to
radiate its heat off faster into space, and conse-
quently get chilled itself, thus making it better
for tender germinating plants to be started in
the light of the moon.

It turns out, too, that there is truth in the
old British idea that, when the new moon is
seen with the old one in her arms, — that is,
when the entire orb is covered with faint adum-
brated light, — bad weather will follow. For
the faint luminosity of the dark moon is simply
our earth-shine reflected on it. When our
atmosphere is cloudy, more light will be re-
flected, the clouds serving as a kind of reflector.
But in Great Britain the cloud-area is almost
always to the west, whence most of their storms
come. So, when the adumbrated light of the
moon is seen to be brighter than usual, it shows
that rain clouds have probably formed in the
west, down beyond the horizon-rim of the
ocean.

\ri.

THE SBEB AND YBLLOW LEAP.

The characteristic fniit fragrance along the
suburban country roads of Boston in September
and October is that of the quince. Its pungent,
subacid perfume is always grateful to the nos-
trils, whether you pass it hanging on the bough,
or inhale it in the sunny room where it is matur-
ing ita golden flesh. One can well believe that
this Cyaonian fruit was, as the rabbins say, the
fruit that tempted Eve in the garden of Eden ;
for in the Orient it is as soft and mellow as a
pear, and is eaten from the bough. It was the
emblem of love, and was dedicated to Venus.
Some say it was the dragon-guarded apple of
the Hesperides. The perfume of the Persian
quince is said to be so powerful that, if there is
but a single one in a caravan, its odor becomes
known to all the company.

You catch also, these autumn days, along the
roadsides wafts of soothing and pungent fra-
grance from fields of celery in the lowlands.
The tender, delicious part of celery is the white
heart that grows in the darkness after it has
been taken up and stored under cover with its
roots intrenched in earth. Out of the darkness
and sorrow of its gradual death is born the rich-

THE SERB AND YELLOW LEAP. 139

est product of its life. The sweet perfume of
the ambergris is the product of disease in the
whale ; the most fragrant woods are those that
are decayed; leaves and blossoms often yield
their sweetest incense when crushed; Scott's
"Bride of Lammermoor" was dictated from a
bed of acute pain and composed in a kind of
trance of suffering. Yet suffering must not
utterly crush. Ruskin is right in saying that
all suffering per se is loss, and not gain.
Deeper sympathy and strengthened moral fibre
are a compensation for this loss, but an over-
sensitive or delicate nature may not experi-
ence the elastic recoil necessary to restore the
moral and physical fibres to their normal tonic
state.

To a boy, autumn would not be autumn with-
out the pleasure of hunting for wild fruits and
nuts. IJndoubtedly, it is a part of the Indian-
wigwam-making stage boys all pass through.

The chief pleasure of the thing is the dis-
covery, the getting something for nothing. The
gratification is like that of our dreams, when
we pick up whole handfuls of coin some one
has dropped. If you should present a boy with
a bag of nuts just as he was starting out joy-
fully with stick and bag for a day's pleasure, he
would feel that he had been defrauded, though
perhaps not exactly knowing how. Or, if my
distant neighbor J. T. Trowbridge were to keep
bushels of chestnuts as presents for the mickies,
their desire to climb and appropriate the fruit
of the noble chestnut-tree in his front yard.

140 IN Portia's gardens.

glistening with its brown and glossy half -opened
burrs, would be as ardent as ever.

Even as men and women, we are not averse
to a nutting or berrving stroll. That glorious
old boy, Chaucer, knew all about it; for his
wicked Pardoner says the souls of those he had
buried might go a-blackberrying in the other
world, for all he cared : all he wanted was their
pence, and their shades might then wander at
random here and there in Purgatory, like the
thin ghosts of Hades, for all of him. That
wandering at will, carelessly, and the joy of
discovery, are the kernel and sweet heart of
berrying. And I rather think, of all berryings,
a blackberrying, maugre the thorns, yields the
most solid pleasure. The fruit piles up so clean
and firm and fast that your pail is soon full.
You pick usually in the shade, and don't have
to broil in the sun for hours, as in picking
huckleberries or blueberries or strawberries;
and there is no hulling or picking over required.
Only you must be where the fruit is abundant.
Near " The Knobs " of Central Kentucky,
twenty-five years ago, I saw large rich black-
berries, gathered in the fields and woods, sold
at ten cents the gallon pailful.

Wild autumnal fruits are scarce in New Eng-
land compared with their abundance in the
Mississippi Valley region. Along the river
bottoms of Ohio we boys used to pick the
squshy pawpaws when we went swimming in
" the creek." They were rather sickening, un-
less you were used to them, but good to the
taste of a hungry boy. The pawpaw looks like

THE SEBE AND YELLOW LEAF. 141

an abbreviated sausage. It is not hardy north
of Cincinnati, though^t is grown as a cariosity
in a sheltered place in Central Park, New York
City. The taste is a cross between a May-apple
(Podophyllum peltatum) and a banana. Like
the persimmon, the green pawpaw is only fit to
eat when blackened by frost. It never gets
yellow as it ripens, but black. It was a great
favorite with the aborigines, who found it where
it loves to grow to-day, along the streams where
the soil is rich and tiie frosts of autumn late.
Maurice Thompson once sent a box of pawpaws
to a Boston author, but they were caviare to
him. Thompson was much disappointed. I
verily believe he would, at a pinch, find skunk
cabbage and Indian turnip a rare relish because
wild.

Wild grapes are a pretty evenly distributed
autumn fruit. I have found them in all sec-
tions of the country east of the Mississippi. In
Ohio we used to get beech-nuts, chinquepins,
and black walnuts in abundance. Black mul-
berries, too, growing on the river bottoms,— oh,
how ripe and sweet they tasted I

" Humble as the ripest mulberry
That will not hold the handling/'

says Shakspere, probably thinking of those on
his own tree, cut down by that donkey preacher
— what's his name? — that owned New Place.
Mulberries are crushed by their own weight,
with only a few in a basket. Shakspere, as
usual, is right in his field note. As for mul-
berries, they flourish in New England. There

142 IN pobtia's gardens.

are a score or more in the neighborhood of Bos-
ton, and might be thousands of them.

On the prairies of Illinois we used to gather
wild plums by the barrel, and wild crab-apples
were as abundant and went to waste as freely
as did cultivated peaches there. In the woo(&
surrounding the prairies were shag-bark hickory
nuts, and along the borders thereoi the little yel-
low persimmons (JHospyros Virginiand) were to
be had. A Minnesota Congressman some time
ago remarked in the House that admitting iron
ore free of duty would have about the same
contractive effect on the American market that
eating a green persimmon has on the mouth.
The Easterners present would not have imder-
stood that by experience. But the Southerners
and prairie men there knew well the awful draw-
ing pucker the unripe persimmon gives the
mouth. Whew I Your jaws cleave together as
if held by shoemaker's wax: there's nothing
like it. But how nice the soft and withered,
and now bluish-black pulpy American figs (call
them) were, when, after being mellowed by a
few smart frosts, they had been picked and dried
for winter use I To a boy they tasted almost as
good as dates, which they resembled when dried
(another name for them is date plum), though
they never quite lost their astringency. The
possums don't mind that, though, and get fat
on them in the fall. The yeUow persimmon is
about the size of a small plum (although Japan-
ese persimmons grow as large as Bartlett pears),
and in shape is like a sagging bag, or a sea

THE SERE AND YELLOW LEAF. 148

cucumber : the thick lozenge-fihaped calyx lobes
adhere to the fruit. The fruit begins to be
edible in Southern Ohio as early as the middle
of August.^ Walt Whitman notes in his *' Spec-
imen Days " that the persimmon grows wild
near Philadelphia ; and at Cambridge, Mass., in
the Botanic Garden there are two fine specimens,
one male and the other female, the latter fruit-
ing abundantly. What sense was there in nam-
ing the fruit " Diospyros," — ''^ grain of Zeus " ?
Perhaps the seed-stones, which are like those of
dates, suggested it. The tree is our only north-
ern tree belonging to the ebony family.

There were other attractions than wild fruits
in those two years of prairie life I had as a boy.
My grandfather, who had lost his fortune in
railway investments, had gone out there from
Hudson, Ohio (John Brown's town), to engage
in farming. The natives from whom he bought
his land were as wild as the razor-backed
" shoats " of the prairie. They made their own
butternut suits, — from the sheep's back and
the hemp to the dye of the vat ; boiled out their
own syrup from the sorghum or the maple-tree ;
and raised their own grain and meat, occasion-
ally driving via ford and forest to the town, six
miles off, for luxuries for the women and tools
for the men. Paint was practically unknown.
I can see the grain and knots and steins now of
those old sheathed verandas, with seed-corn sus-
pended from the ceilings by the husk, together
with long-necked, slender gourds (used for dip-

1 In '96 1 received a box of persimmons on Aug. 10 from my friend
Chambers Balrd, of Bipley, Ohio. They were picked rather green,
bat had ripened on the way. A little later came a box of pawpaws.

144 IN poetia's gabdens.

f>eTS), bunches of herbs, fishing-rods, and the
ike. Many houses had all the rooms sheathed
instead of being plastered, and in the store-rooms
and garret were old beehives, hunks of bees'
comb, dusty spinning-wheels (dusty part of the
time), cradles for babies and cradles for grain,
and such gear.

The prairie, which was about six miles in di-
ameter, was surrounded by woods, spotted here
and there with clumps of wild crab-apple trees,
the brooks edged by persimmon-trees, plum-ti-ees,
and blackberry vines, and the ground densely
covered with prairie grass and ironweed as high
as a horse's back, and all perpetually hovered
over in summer by slowly circUng buzzards far
up in the zenith. It was a wonder-garden to
me. In the spring huge flocks of cranes would
alight on our more distant winter wheat fields.
In winter, when we were husking com in the
field, with piles of it at our backs to fend tho
wind, it was my duty to pursue, and summarily
execute by stamping upon them, the rats and
mice which had harbored in the " shock," and
which scampered away when we overturned it.
I remember I felt no compunction at all (no
boys do") at turning those fellows into raspberry
jam unaer my country cowhides, although later
I shed tears over a robin I shot, — the first and
only song-bird I ever killed.

One of the horrors of my boy life on the
prairie was the ploughing up of black snakes
and their white "eggs" (or young). I was
barefooted, and remember vividly the mighty
saltations I gave when I spied, or thought I did.

THE SERB AND YELLOW LEAF. 145

snake sign beneath the tearing coulter just ahead
of my feet. I spent a large part of the time
occupied in each " round " in balancing on the
plough handles, heels in air ; and the result was
numerous " balks " in every " land." We had
two oxen whose previous owner had named
them Rum and Brandy, to the horror and amuse-
ment both of my good Scotch-Irish grandparents.
It was necessary for me in "breaking up" a
field to apply pretty frequently to the alligator
hides of Rum and Brandy a long hickory goad
that I trailed after me ; for neither of these good
broad o' brows seemed to stand much in awe of
a driver who was but a trifle higher than the
plough handles, and one of them actually rushed
into a peach-tree in fly time, and brushed said
driver and his water-jug ignominiously into the
angle of a " worm " fence. It was one of my
duties on bad days in winter to yoke up an ox
to a rude wood-sled, and, mounted on the back
of the animal, convey my aunt to the district
school which she taught. On the Sabbath

frandfather conducted a little Sabbath-school
ere, and I can see him now kneeling on the
hard floor beside a rude chair, and praying with
deepest earnestness and faith to his anthropo-
morphic Brocken-spectre ; and he was nearer the
truth than the materialist of to-day. Yet I
cherished a grudge (long since gone) against
my good foolish aunts for refusing to let me
take home " Ivanhoe " from the little cabinet of
books nailed high up on the wall. They argued
that it was not Sabbath-day reading. Never-
theless, I managed to smuggle it out of the

146 IS pobtia's gardens.

building and into the wagon, and deyonred it
«in secret.

One of the pleasanter tasks of the atitamn,
after the harvest of grain, hay, broom-corn, and
tobacco, was the making of sorghum molasses.
The smell of the sorghum leaves when touched
by frost is slightly sickening, but the great
brushes of shiny black seeds of this cousin of
the sugar-cane are quite beautiful. It is custom-
ary to strip the leaves from the standing canes,
wedgine them down between them in bunches,
for fodder for the cattle. My grandfather con-
structed a crushing-mill of his own invention,
with wooden cylinders. We used to get up at
four o'clock in the morning, and, hitching a
mule to the beam, feed in the long, cool, green
canes, which emerged on the other side of the
rollers in the form of begasse, letting the juice
run down into great pans, where, by fires built
beneath, it was gradually converted into amber-
colored syrup. Here endeth the excursus on
prairie life.

The first book ever written, so far as known,
— a papyrus roll 4,400 years old, — is by a man
whose theme is the degeneracy of his age and
the superiority of former times I But I scorn to
plead precedent, and do here let loose my belief
that, with serious abatements, this age, as a
whohj is superior in everything, except litera-
ture and the graphic and sculpturesque arts, to
any that has come and gone.

It's a tine age for physical comforts and for
science. And a good sign of the times is the

THE SBBE AND YELLOW LEAF. 147

increase of outdoor locomotion. Even the bicy-
cle is good for long distances and for lazy-
people. Anything to get people out of doors.
As steel centaurs, the bicyclists, by the way,
form a class apart. Wheel and man seem one.
A rider will bend over till he seems a tire to
his own wheel, as he certainly is to our eyes.
Aristophanes, in his Birds, tells of the Skiapods,
Shadow Feet, who dwelt in the hottest parts of
Libya, and used their big feet as sunshades
when reclining. ' The man-wheel of to-day
throws the Skiapods into a deeper shade than
their plantigrades afforded. His feet have be-
come circular, and he himself is turned into a
whizzing projectile.

Your real travel begins where your old-fash-
ioned stage-coach or tally-ho stands with horses
harnessed, or where your yacht lies floating on
the blue brine, or where your travelling house-
boat or common canal-boat lies moored under
the green trees, or where on your cycle you can
take a spin of a hundred miles or so through
the country. There are plenty of stage lines in
America still, — in the Alleghanies, along back-
country New England routes, in Kentucky and
Tennessee, and other Southern States, and in
the undeveloped regions of the Rockies. I re-
call with keen pleasure a stage trip (outside
seat, of course) made, when a lad, over the
winding perfect roads and among the verdurous
hills of tiie thrice beautiful Blue Grass Region
of Central Kentucky, with its thousand springs
issuing from dripping mossy ledges and caverns,
its blue vistas, the groaning bins of yellow

148 IN Portia's gardens.

maize, and the lawiis, sometimes a quarter or a
half a mile long, sweeping up to the great pil-
Lired mansion. We saw the bullet-marks on
Muldraugh's Hills where Forrest's men had
fought (it was three years after the close of the
war), and the red sides of scores of old army
wagons in one place used for fences. Heigh-
ho 7 tally-tally-ho ! how the sweet peal of the
driver's horn sent its meny echoes through the
hills and through our tired brains I

Did you ever have a canal-boat ride ? If not,
you still have before you the possibility of a
delightful experience. Select such a pictur-
esque canal as that of the old Delaware and
Hudson, which coils through the hilly region of
Eastern Pennsylvania and Northern New Jer-
sey. The winding, umbrageous vistas, the
mossy old locks into which you sink, the blue
curling smoke far ahead among the trees where
the captain's wife on another boat is preparing
a meal for the hungry men, the songs of birds,
and, above all, the entire absence of hurry and
of noise make a canal-boat trip strangely rest-
ful and interesting.

But, after all, no kind of travel is so full of
zest as walking, especially in a picturesque
mountain region.

Roads are an index of civilization and a sym-
bol of progress. But to get somewhere is not
of so much importance as to get something on
the w^y or at the end of your journey.

If a man never leaves home in his life, he is
still travelling. He is engaged in three kinds
of going, — (1) by the turning of the earth on

THE SERE AND YELLOW LEAP. 149

its axis, (2) by its movement forward along its
orbit, and (3) by the ranging on through space
of the whole solar system.

Leave horse and electric cars in the city to
weak-legged gentlemen, pale clerks, and sick
women, and banish the wriggling wheel except
for long distances. There is something servile
in the bicycle : a man becomes his own coach-
man, engineer. He is turned into a treadmill
animal, — like an unhappy dog churning butter.
One can't quite agree with the witty dictum of
Mr. Bliss Carman, that the moment a gentleman
puts his leg over a bicycle he becomes a gent :
the statement is too sweeping. Yet there is
food for thought in it ; and you are inclined to
believe it — until, of course, you yourself are
seduced into bestriding the fascinating wheel !
Apart from the reason assigned there is still
a deeper and unsuspected one why a man looks
ridiculous and weak on a bicycle: he is in a
helpless situation, his only weapon being his
ability to take to his (circular) heels in
cowardly flight. But a man's glory lies in his
strength, in his ability to fend and foin in de-
fence of family or nation. This he is in a situa-
tion to do when planted squarely on his two
legs or bestriding a horse. As for woman, she
becomes the bicycle very well: invalid chairs
and other wheeled vehicles seem more appropri-
ate to her frequent infirmities. Let women
drive or be driven, but men should ride (for
pleasure).

Then no naturalist wants a wheel. Imagine
Thoreau on a bicycle for his daily nature study 1

160 IN Portia's gardens.

You can't cut across fields 'on a wheel to find
the rare punctual flower or study the warblers
in their chosen haunts or get the distant view
from the hill-top. The quiet, meditative charm
of the green foot-path, "of mintes full and
feimell greene," is not for the bent victim of
the wheel on the vulgar highway. We have
not as yet, and perhaps never shall have, in
America such foot-paths, or meadow thorough-
fares, as they have in England, with their opu-
lent lush grasSy ever rain-besprinkled, their rich,
flashing buttercups and daisies, and wayside
haws in bloom. Our climate is too dry for that.
Yet our mountain paths and moist meadow
paths are full of attraction. We might have
many more than we have.

There are thousands of cross-meadow and hill
paths, in New England at least. And especially
common (in f act» universal) is that farm feature
which fully matches in picturesqueness the
English path, — the old grassy lane. I live on
one of these old lanes, or disused roads, myself,
and have seen them by the hundreds in various
parts of New England. Scarcely a farm is
without them ; and, although they do not form
a continuous thoroughfare, yet in a nature-
ramble they can be taken advantage of so often,
and are frequently so long (sometimes half a
mile or more), and are so attractive with their
green-tangled grass, wild roses, sumachs, wild
cherries, locusts, raspberries, blackberries, ferns,
mosses, shade trees, birds, buttercups, — the list
is endless, — that, the more you think of it, the
more you are convinced that they are a full

■Ill

ill

THE SERE AND YELLOW LEAP. 151

equivalent of the English and German path.
That the Middle and Western and Southern
States lack these old lanes is their loss, and
New England's gain; but they might exist
everywhere. Burroughs is right : they do not
exist now west of the Hudson. At least, I
have never seen them ; and I have seen much
of the rural sections of New York, Pennsylva-
nia, Ohio, Illinois, and Kentucky. Burroughs
says : " In all my acquaintance with the coun-
try — the rural and agricultural sections — I do
not know a pleasant inviting path leading from
house to house, or from settlement to settle-
ment, by which the pedestrian could shorten or
enliven a journey or add the charm of the seclu-
sion of the fielos to his walk." (" Pepacton,"
essay on Foot-paths.) I take it this is partly
due to the circumstaiice that the rich lands of
the Middle and Western States are so much of
them seeded to grain and other cultivable
crops. Distances, too, are greater ; and people
have to ride more there.

Thoreau said he had to walk four miles a
day, at least, or be ill if he did not. He could
walk, he affirmed, from twenty to a hundred
miles (starting from his own door-yard) without
crossing a road or passing a house. He might
have added that around every town in the land
there are vast solitudes of forest or plain. He
rarely used a road, unless it were a disused one
run to the wild. He was cynically pleased to
see how little place man and his affairs occu-
pied in the landscape. His lecture on " Walk-
ing " is the play of " Hamlet " with the part of

152 IK Portia's gardens.

Ilaralet omitted: it is a tonic defence of wild
over civilized life, bat contains veiy little about
walking per se. His posthumons essays were
carelessly edited; and this one should have
l)een headed "Praise of the Wild." All his
Tx)oks are on walking. His whole life was one
long walk ; and, if there are Elysian Fields, he
is doubtless walking there still, — not in his
friend Walt Whitman's " processions along the
grand roads of the universe," but in the solitary
by-ways of that blessed realm, studying its life
and still thinking noble thoughts, breast set
bravely forward and " faring there as here."

An all-round, normal married man, who has
in no sense cut loose from society nor thrown
down the gage of defiance at its feet, — although
having instincts for the wild in him that often
beat their wings against the bars of convention,
driving him forth into the forests and fields, —
is John Burroughs. He presents sharp points
of contrast with Thoreau. He has abundance
of humor: Thoreau had very little. Thoreau
is ever pounding the pulpit : Burroughs never
preaches, — except by indirection, which is the
best way, after all. He has little of the %(Bva
indignatio of the brave Concord thinker and re-
former; 'but you feel that in the make-up of
this gay angler and forest roamer, bird-lover
and horticulturist, there is an ample supply of
that moral fire hidden somewhere out of sight,
— shown, for example, in his lifelong and splen-
did apologia for his and our prophet-bard, Walt
Whitman. His Scotch blood tells. If he wears
the thistle in his cap, he carries the rose on his

THE SERB AND YELLOW LEAI^. 153

breast. Under his steel-chain hauberk beats the
tender heart of a woman. He has the shrewdest
horse-sense on practical subjects, and, if he falls,
alights on his feet. The eye of a hawk and the
scent of a greyhound for facts he has. A keen
critic if he chose : see how he handles Emerson,
and lays bare the limitations of his and our
revered thinker. His critique of Emerson, fol-
lowed up by Walt Whitman's searching esti-
mate a few years later, made the Concord
knight reel in his saddle. It was all in
knightly courtesy. Burroughs wielded the
lance of Ivanhoe, and Whitman hurled the
mace of a Coeur de Lion against the Emersonian
shield. The service was needed: the spell of
idolatiy was broken. But, after all, Emerson
had only a few feathers of pride and haughti-
ness shorn from his helm. The man still tow-
ered in unassailable strength, and will forever
so stand, a protagonist and leader of all daring
Childe Rolands seeking the secret of existence
and all Sir Galahads in search of the Holy
Grail of a pure life. But the chief service of
Burroughs is to cheer. He makes you in love
with life : Thoreau makes you dissatisfied with
it. The effect upon your system of an after-
noon with John Burroughs is just about that of
a delicious plate of strawberries. This fruit, he
says, makes those "faithful handmaidens, the
liver and spleen, nudge each other delightedly."
So a page of the "Lambish quintessence of
John '* will take all the kinks out of your head
and send a thrill of good feeling down your
spinal ganglion, and clear to your toes. TTiere

154 IN pobtia's gabdens.

isn't a despondent thought — not one — in all
his works. They are sunshine in preserve, an
electric battery of brave, cheery thoughts^ to
say nothing of their choice nature-lore, set down
in English limpid as a mountain stream. He is
booked for a long journey down the roads of
time.

To return co our theme of walking from this
excursus on Thoreau and Burroughs. I enjoyed
three walks in picturesque hilly country, when
a lad, which I would not exchange for all the
car or boat rides of my life, — two hundred
miles with a friend over the old, disused, grassy
stage route to Mammoth Cave ; a walk in the
Catskills and beyond for fifty miles; and one
of two hundred miles in Pennsylvania, mostly
in the Alleghany range.

Can we doubt that Shelley and Mary Godwin
and Jane Clairmont got immense enjoyment out
of that tramp from Paris to Lausanne ? (even if
the women, poor things, did wear kid shoes and
silk dresses and stays I) De Quincey calculated
that the poet Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy
walked 170,000 miles in their lifetime. They
made nothing of thirty or forty miles a day.
(Wordsworth's legs, that served him in such
good stead in walking, were certainly not orna-
mental, remarks De Quincey, having been con-
demned by every female connoisseur. But it
doesn't necessarily take fine legs to write
poetry, so they need not have complained.)
James and Harriet Martineau, in their Scotch
tour, walked five hundred miles. Robert Brown*
ing and his sister Sarianna were famous pedes-

THE SERB AND YELLOW LEAF. 155

trians. Stuart Mill and Charles Lamb were
fine pedestrians. Kit North was a prodigy in
walking. Some of his feats were : walking
seventy miles to be present at a Bums festival,
where he electrified the audience with a before
unheard of eloquence ; walking from Liverpool
to Elleray, a distance of eighty miles, within the
twenty-four hours; and stepping over (as an
uncle of mine who had the same ambulatory
habit used to say) from Kelso to Edinburgh,
forty miles, to attend a public dinner. Then
there was William Hutton, of Birmingham,
England, who, one day in his eighty-third year,
walked thirty-two miles, and in his ninetieth year
walked ten miles at a stretch, remarking that,
when he had his full vigor at eighty, he could
walk forty miles a day. Charles Dickens had
a walker's cable-steel legs. He would get up at
two in the morning, after a vain attempt to
sleep, and " walk thirty miles into the country
to breakfast " (his own words). He described
himself as " always on the road," either in town
or country. But he lamed himself for life in
'65 by over-walking in the snow with wet shoes.
What keen pleasure »uch fellows as Gold-
smith, Bayard Taylor, Ralph Keeler, and our
recent Lee Meriwether extracted from pedes-
trianism their books can only faintly hint! It
is the wayside flowers, the sunrises and sunsets,
the continual flow of good spirits, the oxygenated
blood, the very mishaps experienced, the com-
panionship of your friend, the fine appetite,
strengthened muscles, the restful fatigue, the
sound slumber, the pleasure of discovery (you

156 IN PORTIA'S GABDENS.

never know what fine scene awaits you around
the next curve), the talks and meals with the
farmers, the excitement and uncertainty about
your meals and lodgings, the learning that it
won't kill you to sleep in the open air if put to
your stumps, nor to go hungry a few hours at a
pinch, the feeling of self-reliance, of doing things
yourself, of direct contact with the brown earth,
and, finally, the curious atmosphere of domes-
ticity and cosiness belonging to a country road,
— these are the sources of the walker's pleasure.
James Russell Lowell envied the tramp at the
foot of his garden. Poor fellow! (Lowell, I
mean, of course), smothered in the dust of his
dignities and conventions.^ Why didn't he
have the courage of his convictions, and, taking
a wallet and cane, set out on a tramp himself ?
As long as you pay your way, what do you care
what you are taken for ? Wear the knee-breeches
of the bicyclers as a kind of semi-uniform (if
you will feel better), and get up into the moun-
tains : tramps are too lazy to climb there. A
few words and a taste of your purse set you
right with your farmer. Small things don't
annoy an earnest walker. During the battle of
Lake Thrasimenus, between the Romans and the
Carthaginians, there was a heavy earthquake;
but it was not noticed by the combatants.
A long walk on an empty stomach is a bad

1 1 am sorry to record that it was he who boomeranged himself so
badly in the eyes of posterity by omitting the Good Gray Poet's name
from the list of bardB to be carved on the Boston Public Library, when
asked to draw up the list which now appears there. To Lowell, Walt
Whitman's lines were doubtless but as long black hairs combed out of
the tail of Antichrist : he wasn't Orientalist enough to understand
such vigintipedalian verse.

THE SERE AND YELLOW LEAF. 167

thing — for a grown person. But Diodorus (I.
53) says that Sesostris, when a boy, was obliged,
with his boy companions, to run every morning
before breakfast a little jaunt of twenty-two miles.
Seems incredible ; but Red Indians in our day
could do it, or a Peruvian runner with a kola
nut to chew, or the Mexican native mail carriers.
Trained and dieted boys can stand a good deal.
Besides, we don't read that Sesostris didn't
have a bite before he set out. Even an un-
trained, ordinary healthy boy has the endurance
of India-rubber. A gentleman in Pittsburg put
a pedometer on his boy, and found that during
his play he walked, on an average, nine miles a
day. A pedometer put in the dress pocket of a
lady of my acquaintance, supposed to be a semi-
invalid, showed that she was walking five miles
a day in her house. Our South American Ind-
ian carriers' feats (and those of our own ath-
letes) fully match the performances of the an-
cient Greek runners, — such as Pheidippides,
who ran from Athens to Lacedsemon in two
days, a distance of one hundred and forty-two
miles; or (still more wonderful) Philonides,
the courier of Alexander the Great, who ran
from Sicyon to Elis, one hundred and fifty
miles, in one day. Amystis accomplished the
same feat. This is at the rate of six and a quar-
ter miles the hour for each of the twenty-four.
These runners (I suggest) probably had the
same gait that our Indians have, — a kind of
lope or gliding jog. The Indian does not walk
with a swing, or plant his foot down with a
shock, as we do : he peels his foot off the ground.

158 IN PORTIA*S GARDENS.

and settles it in place before the weight comes
on it, and so glides noiselessly and tirelessly on.
It is not a handsome gait, but it makes the

Cond spin away behind him most marvel-
dy. I have discovered, by the way, that
one can gain just a step out of every seven by
lengthening his stride. This kept up would
enable one to gain a mile in every seven. With
the bicycle, however, on a level road, you
measure sixteen feet with every step on the
pedaL

VII.

LENGTHENED SHADOWS.

Emerson's "tumultuous privacy of storm"
applies to the outdoor as well as the indoor
aspect of a storm. In one of our Eastern " bliz-
zards," or driving snow-storms, you will be
pretty sure, as an observer of wild nature, to
enjoy a monopoly of alfresco life for a few hours.
See how it thickens the air as you look at it out
of the window. On with ulster, storm-cap, and
gloves, and out into the open to enjoy the
game I What metaphor shall paint this hori-
zontal hurricane of snow and wind ? Shall we
say that the wind gods are pelting the bowed
cedars with viscid cream-candy, every clot
of which sticks? Perish the base commercial
trope. Say, rather, that an army of sightless
couriers of the air, with a one-thousand-mile
front, are rushing out of the north, and sowing
a mystic grain over the whitened world. There
lies your tree-and-shrub-fringed sunken road all
blottesque and blurred, with the level gale of
snow-smoke driving across it. Even a certain
row of folk-houses are passed without your usual
irritated feelings. Nature has softened even
their angularity a little. "Tros Tyriusque,"
etc., is her cry to-day. "Fair play for alll"

160 IN Portia's gardens.

roars the ruler of the cloudrjinn. Look at that
old apple-orchard, — one vast crinkle-craDkle of
articulated and reticulated branchery, snow-
smit, blown through by an endless stream of
white fireflies. Those Austrian pines look like
hoop-skirted, brocaded dames at court, standing
primly in row. The half-buried stone fences are
roches moutonnSeBy their rounded backs thick
with soft fleece, like the turfy rocks of England.
Everything is fairly smothered with the fluffy
element. Yon old dilapidated, undulating lath
fence around the fowl-yard is a fine cheval^e-
/rise ; and a piece of fence-netting edging the
same looks, for all the world, like the skm of the
sea-serpent hung up to dry. Clean across the
road the courtier birches bow, till their fore-
heads humbly touch the ground before the storm-
gods, whose wind-whips are whistling around
the heads of the rebellious pines and lashing the
flanks of the cedars and oaks.

What is the secret of the joy one feels in
being alone with nature in a snow-storm? I
stood a long time motionless in the height of
one this morning, looking into a little fairy
bosk, waiting for the myriad-handed Apparition
to whisper the secret, watching for an unguarded
movement or a door ajar but for the space of a
lightning's flash, that might reveal the mystery.
Walt WTiitman touches the matter to the quick
in his "toss, sparkles of day and dusk"; and
Emerson grazes the goal in his "tumultuous
privacy " of the snow-storm. Thoreau is on the
ground, too, more than once in " Walden." But
they don't analyze the feeling. Here are the

LENGTHENED SHADOWS. 161

ideas (fragmentaiy and unsatisfactory as they
are) that 1 drew feom my fairy dell hung with
the eerie light of snow curtains : —

First there is the color ^ a something rare and
pure, satisfying one's hunger for ideal perfec-
tion; then purity supreme; next lights every
twig thrown out into strong and unusual relief ;
then form^ stems and trunks accentuated, sculpl>-
uresque ; and, finally, solitude and silence, you
yourself the only living thing in sight. Not a
sound, save that of the wind, breaks the dead
silence, and that makes among the muffled twigs
only a faint rustling, as of silver-stiffened robes ;
not a cock-crow, not a dog-bark, no shriek of
locomotive (it is Sunday), no lowing of cows or
cackling of hens or blackguardism of Hibernian
mickies. All this has vanished, and you stand
as if in some Platonic realm of perfect types
beyond the primwm mobile itself. You have a
strange pantheistic feeling of kinship for that
little shrine from which all deformity and decay
have been removed. Is it that I have passed
that way before ? Surely ; for man was once a
part of the unorganized elements. We are two-
thirds water now ; and snow is frozen water.

In the entirely peaceful evening which suc-
ceeded the storm, when the moon came and
peered over the hill into the stereoscopic wild-
ery of the old lane, it looked into a cabinet of
winter rarities like the crystallized poetry of the
Alhambra or the Taj Mahal. The curving
branches of the barberry and other bushes bore
fruit of refulgent diamonds, the splendor not
blinding as in sunlight, but gleaming with a

162 IN PORTIiL's GARDENS.

pure lambency such as in stunmer nights flashes
in white flame from the glossy leaves of fruit-
tree tops. And here again, in the silver silence
of the night, the weird seizure comes upon one,
— the thought of identity.

There was something in this bit of sylvan
scenery — its soundless calm — that recalled
lines in a poem styled " Nocturne," by Katharine
Lee Bates, —

" Beneath the brooding mist abide
Soft flows of mormarous sound,
That Silence hath no heart to chide
From off her magic bomid."

This is a stanza almost equal in beauty of
sentiment to a passage in " Comus " I never tire
of reading and admiring, where the mountain
shepherd, while his flock is browsing the dewy
knot-grass in the night, listens to noises floating
up from the far-down valley, —

" Till an unusual stop of sudden silence
Gave respite to the drowsy-footed steeds
That draw the litter of close-curtained Sleep ;
At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound
Rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,
And stole upon the air, that eren Silence
Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might
Deny her nature, and be never more,
StiU to be so displaced."

The soft silence of the snow recalls also what is
perhaps the finest stanza of Cardinal Newman's
poetry, —

''Like snow those gentle pleadings fall.
As soft, as bright, as pure, as cool.
With gentle weight and gradual,
And sink into the fererish soul."

i

LENGTHENED SHADOWS. 163

Even the streets and sidewalks of the city are
for a few hours purified of all their unutterable
filth by a heavy fall of snow. Old Herr Winter,
with his icings and plasticoings, is a great decora-
tor and garnisher of landscape. In the city
familiar scenes are transformed, and a strange
silence reigns. Has the heart-beat of " the many-
headed beast " stopped for a moment ? Snow
swirling from high roofs in Vedderesque spirals
and mist-clouds ; sliding in fluffy avalanche on
the pedestrian's head ; turning drivei-s into dusty
millers, and driving the newspaper-venders into
their sentry-boxes, where, through a window-hole
with a frame of snow, only their heads can be
seen far in ; anxious sparrows lost in wheel
gulches and horse tracks of slush, their dinner
looking problematical to-day ; on Boston Com-
mon two joyful setters making the human pedes-
trians envious by a tremendous frolic in the
snow, traversing the entire length of the field
many times, barking vociferously, rolling in the
powdery element, tossing it up with their noses,
eating it to cool their hot blood, — in short,
acting like healthy boys (just), and as we poor,
weak-kneed mortals would act if we were as
glad and iron-sinewed as they. Presently, when
the snow had become sleet, it seemed as if the
bronze statue of Sam Adams in ScoUay Square,
with its folded arms, was hinting at this very-
matter, and pointing a moral — and adorning
a tail, too; namely, his own coat-tail, which
drooped gracefully downward with its white
load from the two buttons in the back. Upon
the shoulders was a comical little cape of

164 IN Portia's oabdens.

ermine. Of his face, only the dark tip of the nose
and two black holes for eyes were visible through
the mask of snow ; and the whole attitude seemed
to say, with a defiant, ^^ cocky" air to the seeth-
ing, lobster-faced, sleet-peppered stream of hu-
manity passing by : ^' Look at me, I am bearing
this infliction as it ought to be borne. Do you
see any signs of wilting in me ? "

We had here in Boston about nine o'clock on
February 11, '96, a queer little Tom Thumb
snow-storm, or duodecimo blizzard, that seemed
exactly like a practical joke of the sky ; and his
beaming smile after it was all over helped to
make it seem such. The wind had been softly
trundling along from the south-west since
sun-up, and the sky was clear. Suddenly, out
of the midst of it, whirled together like a sand
pillar of the desert, the waggish efreets of the
air shot forward and along close to the earth a
vast mass of dun cloud at the rate of forty-one
miles an hour, as the wind-gauge attested. It
came with a roar, and like an explosion of smoke.
Rooms became almost as dark as night. In the
city, horses were frightened and stopped short.
Women fled, panic-stricken, for shelter. There
was a sudden drop in the mercury ; and for a
few minutes (five to eight) the snow fell fast,
whitening the ground. From my window I
saw a disconcerted crow beating his way in the
teeth of the gale as, through the whirling mix of
gray cloud-smoke and level-driving snow, he
sought shelter in a bunch of cedar-trees, — like
Caliban's scudding raven, in Browning, who
whispered that poor wretch's defiance in the ear

LENGTHENED SHADOWS. 165

of Setebos. Then almost in a moment tne cloud
drew away out to sea, and Sun and Earth smiled
at each other again. This little snow bluster
brought to mind Burroughs's criticism of Emer-
son's poem on Snow, — that the snow does not
come "announced by all the trumpets of the
sky." But (begging my friend Burroughs's
pardon) it does, though, sometimes, does it not ?
And just such blustering, blizzardy storms, ac-
companied by our heaviest snowfalls, produce
the effects Emerson depicts. The storm comes
with a tremendous bluster of wind, driving the
snow across the landscape and beating it on to
the trees. Later the wind may or may not fall,
but the snow goes on falling or driving. When
Emerson says,

" The fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Kound every windward stake or tree or door/'

he is not describing the silent snow that simply
caps with fluffy snow-pillows the fence posts
and kennels, but the kind that is carved and
curved ; and it is the wind alone that does that
work. Almost all snow-storms do come pre-
ceded by a lull, as Burroughs says; but there
are exceptions.

The etchings of the artist Giannino Ghiaccio
are an endless study, if you are curious in that
kind of art. He is a myriad-handed fellow, the
embodied art-genius of nature. There are mill-
ions of him, in fact. This winter I captured
one of his incarnations, and have kept him shut
up in the cold parlor, where he etches brave
window etchings for me. In the morning the

166 IN POBTIA's 6ABDENS.

stupid sun, like Buffalmacco's ape, sweeps his
big red and white brushes a few times over the
ghws, and my picture of the evening before
18 gone. But it all inures to my advantage, for
I get a new design from Giannino every night
to add to my cdlection. I have just been out
to the veranda window, and f oimd the invisible
artist working inside ; but by close watching I
could see his silver crumblets getting cunningly
laid on. He was working on a group of sea-
anemones, their little spiral hands reached out
for food ; and around them, spotting the pane,
were dabs of sea-moss. Long lines of railways
branched out over the design; and here lay
anemometer charts, and maps showing network
of railways. There were what looked like aim-
less-darting thread lines, but the removal of one
of them would have spoiled the artistic asym-
metry. In the corners of the great pane were
micrometric meshings of spider-webs. The lower
left-hand comer was a mimic astronomic map,
full of frosty stars ; the right comer occupied
by flowery meadows and hills. There were tree-
ferns and palmettos of filigreed silver, giant
Sequoias ; in short, a perfect tangle of tropic
life, — palms, bamboos, trailing lianas, and birds
of paradise. Evidently, my Giannino is the
ghost of Cellini himself, or a Chinese ivory-
carver whose astral body has blown about the
pendent world, and crept into my auherge. Are
the artist's designs laid on with a kind of plan-
chette having a hollow silver pencil attached,
through which the pigment is drawn out? I
should think so, judging from their capricious-

LENGTHENED SHADOWS. 167

ness. I only know that the work would have
cost me a pretty penny if man had made them.
And now I am richer than a Rothschild in silver
plate, and yet no robber molests me or casts so
much as a contemptuous glance at my treasures.
One day last winter we had a shower of gems,
the work of other artists unknown to man by
name. It was toward the end of February, —
the 18th, — and the inflowing, high up, of quan-
tities of warm vapor from the sea on the wings
of one current of air, and in the very face of
another sliding on from the north-west, proved
favorable, with the glass at zero, for the forma-
tion of stars and wheels of snow, which kept
falling in countless showers all day. They were
nearly all six-rayed (some crosses) and fre-
quently with side processes, — no two of all the
myriads alike. So all day long the silent work
went on. And ever, as the gliding continents
of cloud met and mingled, the serried hosts of
the sky, fairy Hephsestoi, spirits of heat and
cold, seized upon the particles of vapor, and
fashioned in friendly rivalry a million starry
gems, ethereal- white and light as filmiest down,
and fast and faster tossed them aside to fall in
showers on the dark earth, where musing mor-
tals, walking amid showera of such miracles,
held their breath in secret wonder, letting their
thoughts beat against the adamantine limits of
mind, if so they might catch but a glimpse of
the mystic All at work behind the veil, — the
Maker of the makers of these wheels, the vast
Ananke, or Fate, that globes the circling
planets, gives them their centre-seeking pon-

168 nr pobtia's gardens.

derous weight, and in their veils of mist en-
tangles the soul of beauty shrined in crystaUine
law.

To this day, in spite of the brilliant investigar
tions of such crystallographers as Haiiy and
Mohs, science is unable to explain the why of
ciystallized forms. What is there in the ulti-
mate structure of molecules that, when on a
cold winter day you rub oflE a window-pane with
a wet cloth, will at once cover the whole with a
spread of curving frost ferns ? Why does the
water crystallize in curves f Why not in cubes,
as dried mud does ? Why do the atoms of the
birch catkin's scales take the exact form (as you
see them on the snow) of birds witii out-
stretched wings? Answer: by this form bird
and birch-seed alike best attain their object, —
flight. Their reason for being lies hid in the
abysm of eternity, in the laws of matter. The
molecules of matter, indeed, are "like manu-
factured articles." We seem to surprise Nature
in one of her secrets in the phenomena of the
crystallization of water. This is the prophecy
of the green woodland and the flower garden.
But the why and how are like the why and hoy>
of self-consciousness : crystallization and mind
are imbedded in matter, are a part of the en%
entium, that's all we know. The only secret
that the innocent little atoms "give away" in
their frost pranks is that the foliage of the win-
dow-pane and the pavement is a premonition of
that of the tree and the human body, — life
latent dreaming on life organic yet to come.
The crystals seem to be yearning for the living

LENGTHENED SHADOWS. 169

organism. Do we touch in them the very nerve
of Eternal WiU?

Winter, as hinted, is the time to see the ris-
ing sun throw " his faire fresh-quilted colours
through the sky." Here is a picture of a
Christmas Day sunrise glimpsed from my win-
dow: above the horizon, flakes of crumbling
red gold ; broken bars of the same floating in a
sea of delicate apple-green; rank on rank,
stratum on stratum, of fiery cloud-rack towering
up toward the zenith, where in melting hatchell-
ings and mottlings hung a canopy of cirrus
fragments richly colored. But presently out of
an ashen bank slowly emerged the dull red tip
of the sun's disk, and the rolling of the earth-
kaleidoscope soon brought back the common-
place gray of the day ; but the drench of color
had entered the soul, and there in gradually
dimming afterglows the sunrise lingered all day,
ennobling and exalting.

The last day of 1895 opened with a bell-clear
ringing tone in the atmosphere. The tempera-
ture was scarcely chilled. No snow. Winter
hiding somewhere in the north, his white towers
broken, and he himself "chained howling to
the Northern Bear " ; great guns blowing from
the north-west; the sky after rain intensely
blue ; the sun rising in murrey and cramoisie ;
swift>-flying bunches of cumulus and strata
clouds shot through with delicate orange ; the
myriad-miled roof of the universe all loose and
sliding on and on ; and up from the south-west
the cloud squadrons charging and roaring, like

170 IN Portia's gardens.

an anny of Lorbrulgrud cavalry. At night the
quiet full moon came and looked down upon
tne earth with not a breath of wind stirring.
The thundering cloud-army was by this time
hundreds of miles out at sea. How exhilarat-
ing the whole show had been ! When the sun
began to rise next morning (New Year's Day),
I caught myself in the act of holding out my
arms and balancing my body on the globe, as
one might on a round, rolling rock; for from
the hill where I stood, facing the east, it seemed
as if I could feel and see the earth turning as
the sun touched the horizon, and then passed
from cloud edge to cloud edge as it ascended.

Shakspere's sunrises and dawns are all dis-
tinct, individual. He never forgot anything.
All the dawns he had ever seen hung in his
mind as in a gallery : he had but to select or
combine.

''And look, the gentle d&y,
Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about
Dapples the drowsy east with spots of gray."

Much Ado.

In " Romeo and Juliet " the gray-eyed morn
" chequers " the eastern clouds with streaks of
light,

*' And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
ITrom forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels."

That is the sublimest two-line description
of dawn that exists. These lines alone would
suffice to immortalize their creator. They con-
dense into one short sentence a picture of the
dawn that young Ruskin amid the Alps beggars
the English language of adjectives, and almost

tSSBSf^Knamimgmggjgmi

L'l

LENGTHENED SHADOWS. 171

foams at the mouth, to describe. In " Julius
Cassar," Cimia says that the gray lines that
fret the clouds are messengers of day. A
fretted cloud is one whose surface is rippled by
the light, or striated by long wrinkles, like a
ruffled brow. Then in " Romeo and Juliet " we
have still another image, —

" Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east," —

where (says Ruskin, I believe) the reference is
not to lace-like lines on the clouds, but to the
jagged edges of gray light at the crevices that
part them. How much is connoted by that
word " envious " ! It often means " hating " in
Shakspere, but not here, I think. The con-
scious light is described as emulous of the dark-
ness, its rival, and is steadily and eagerly en-
croaching upon his domain, beating him back
little by little until the whole sky is ablaze with
many-colored light. Loaded with meaning, too,
is that phrase " the drowsy east."

It is pleasant to wander through the market
streets of a great city in the weeks preceding
Christmas, and see the forests of evergreens,
from the size of the little ones that Hans Ander-
sen's rabbit jumped over to the mast-high trees
for church celebrations. They give the streets a
woodsy odor and a kind of Black Forest village
look in general. Mournful and pathetic, though,
to see the dead animals in the gamekeeper's
door, — the great snow-white hares of Nebraska
and the little harmless, berry-eating bears from

172 IN PORTIA^B QABDEN8.

Maine, with thickest coal-black fur, — all hang-
ing head downward, with a sad look in their
glazed eyes.

Still, one feels quite differentiLj with regard
to more cmel animals. Hence it is that I looked
without regret one day last winter at two sports-
men about whom, on the road, capered six fine
fox hounds. The men were trudging along
over the snow, and reported that they had started
two red foxes, but after an exciting chase the
dogs ^^ bulled the job," as one of them expressed
it. Brer Reynard is a hard fellow to tame,
judging by the experience of a Boston lady who
now mourns a pet fox reverted to the wild state.
When she left him to board at a farm which I
often visit, he was an " eeny, weeny 'ittle red
darling," who would kiss her, climb on to her
shoulder, and play contentedly by the hour with
a rubber shoe or ball. When she came out to
the farm to see him, she found that three or four
days or a week of being left to himself had
sufficed to remove the veneer of city life and
manners he had acquired I An hour's work had
no effect: he would none of her. The same
day, during a thunder shower, he escaped from
his box, and, when last seen, was in hot chase
of a young rooster upon a hillside. He and
chanticleer disappeared, the latter never to be
seen again. But the fox joined others in the
neightorhood, and two or three years later I
saw on land of the farmer's what was probably
his foxship cantering along, light as down ; and
others of his brethren were afterwards seen
looking over a stone wall in broad daylight at

LENGTHENED SHADOWS. 173

passers-by, but in a moment, like the wily fox
in the " Arabian Nights," they " arose, and com-
mitted their legs to the wind." Sometimes the
dogs fail to kill a fox, even when they have
cornered it, the "critters" are such gamey
fighters. Their teeth are as sharp as daggers.
Our tame fox, just described, on the approach
of a dog would always flatten himself out in the
grass, and, when the dog came near enough,
make a spring at him: the dog invariably
turned tail, and ran. A young friend of mine
on the farm alluded to tells me a funny experi-
ence of a fox-hunter near by. He was lurking
one day behind a stone wall, waiting for the
approach of a fox whose burrow he knew to be
near, when, happening to peep over the fence,
he saw Mr. Re3mard and his wife and the whole
brood of cunning little foxes having a family
frolic right under his nose I The noise made as
he put his gun-barrel cautiously through a hole
in the fence sent the mother fox scampering in
one direction and the father in another, while
the little ones sought refuge in the burrow.

VIII-

HUNGRY CROWS AND SAUCY JAYS.

Scarcely anybody seems to have much of a
liking for the crow, who wings his melancholy
way as far apart from man as he can get. The
reason is that he is a self-conscious, self-con-
victed burglar and sneak thief. But he is also
the friend of man. Does the good in him over-
balance the harm? There are a good many
pros .and cons^ but the weight of evidence is
in the crow's favor. Yet such are the ignorance
and unreasoning prejudice of farmers that it is
undoubtedly due merely to the fact of the crows'
marvellous cunning in keeping out of gun-shot
and out of traps that they have not long ago
been exterminated. This and the toughness of
the beasts. To eat crow is thought to be such
a bitter and nauseating business that it has fur-
nished a phiuse for any humiliating back-down
or swallowing of words.

The Greeks record some cute things of the
ravens.^ Plutarch tells us it was they who con-
ducted Alexander to the temple of Jupiter
Ammon, and afterward gave him warning of his
approaching death. Shortly before the Athe-

1 D'Arcy W. ThompBon's " A Olossarr of Greek Birds," 1896. On
white crows and rayens, op. antCf ** High Noon of the Year."

HUNGRY CROWS AND SAUCY JAYS. 175

nian disaster at Syracuse the ravens, says Pau-
sanias, flocked to Delphi, and despoiled the
•votive gifts of the Athenians there. Aristotle
says the fox is friendly to the raven, and iElian
that the hare detests its voice (I sympathize
with the hare most deeply). jElian also tells
how in Egypt the ravens beg food of those sail-
ing by in boats, and, if refused, cut the cordage.
In Norse mythology it will be remembered that
Odin has two ravens, Hugin and Munin (re-
flection and memory), which he sends forth at
daybreak every morning to bring him news of
the world. In the time of Hamlet the war-flag
of the Danes was a small triangular banner,
bearing a black raven on a blood-red ground.

Thoreau liked crows because of their abori-
ginal ways. He says they flit about the woods
and clearings like the dusky spirit of the Indian.
Others like the cawing of crows, — Wilson
Flagg, for instance. I think, if the truth were
told, they like it only at a distance. Joe Jef-
ferson has a special fondness for these gentle-
men of the cloth. He has named his Buzzard's
Bay place Crow's Nest, and allows no one to
shoot any of these birds on his grounds. But
Bismarck dislikes them extremely. Lenbach's
famous portrait of the man of iron and blood
— the expression stern and the eyes full of the
lightning of wrath — had a curious origin, says
Mr. Smalley in one of his books. The artist and
Bismarck were walking in the latter's grounds,
when the prince caught sight of one of those
detested crows that eat the eggs and young
of the singing birds he so loves. Out named

176 IK PORTIA'S GARDENS,

his anger ; and the artist caught the expression,
and as soon as he reached home put it on paper.
The Iron Chancellor was right about the crows.
Your anger would rise, too, if you should see
them, as I do when I walk, sneaking out of copse
and grove like great bullies, with the egg of
some small bird in their bill.

In favor of the crow are the extremely valu-
able services he renders in killing mice, grass-
hoppers, cut-worms, grubs, and other small ver-
min of the like kind. Then in the winter
they give one a feeling of companionship, as
they fly through the ruined woodlands or over
the desolate fields of snow. There is some-
thing cheery and brave in their life that gives
us a spur of suggestion. As for their color, you
don't realize how gray even the darkest tree-
boll is until vou see iiie inky plumage of the
crow outlined against it. And what an antique
piece of furniture a crow or raven is 1 A man
might be tottering to his grave at ninety or so,
and yet have in his house, perched on the back
of his easy-chair, a crow or raven as old as him-
self. In allusion to its longevity Shakspere
styles the crow "treble-dated," — three-genera-
tioned he means, calling thirty years a genera-
tion.

Crows, and jays (their cousins), have larger
brains and more wit than any other birds. This
is the opinion of Macgillivray and of Professor
Parker, the first authorities in the world on the
subject. The old feeling of superstitious rever-
ence for the crow and the raven had, then, some
reason for being ; and it has not wholly died out

HtTNGRY CBOWS AND SAUCY JAYS. 177

yet. Crows learn to know their friends mighty
quick. After a month's walking in their haunts
they learn to know me in the spring, make no
fuss at my approach, and often decline to fly
until I am pretty close to them. In the exten-
sive grounds of Wellesley College, where chiefly
girls walk and where never comes the slinking
fool with the gun, crows have become astonish-
ingly tame, allowing the girls to approach
within a few feet of them. It is Una and the
Lion, Beauty and the Beast, over again. The
cunning crow recognizes that the male is the
cruel sex, the killer. Probably, if man should
cease to banquet on the corpses of his fellow-
animals, the birds would come and perch on his
fingers for food at call.

I have said all the good I can for the crows,
but I haven't said that personally I like them.
I don't. They are interesting nuisances, to be
tolerated for the good they do. But, as things
are, you can't feel afiEection for such sad hum-
bugs, such suspicious sneaks, and slumber-dis-
turbers ; that is, if you have been kind to them
and fed them, and consequently have them in
flocks close about your place. To sensitive ears
the cawing of these dirce et obacence voluorea is
disagreeable except at a distance. You are out
in the woods studying warblers, we will say,
and listening to their delicate-gay songs, — per-
haps trying to identify a new one, — when sud-
denly some execrable crow spies you ; and im-
mediately a whole gang of them set up such a
racket that what with that and the deafening

178 IK POBTLA.*8 GABDEN8.

snorts and belchings of incessant railway trains
(if you are near them) you wonder the small
birds are not frightened permanently away.

The cawing oi a parcel of crows reminds me
of a set-to with fist and voice between a crowd
of Irish alley-women in liquor, all stridently
vociferating at once. The crow's guttural spriog-
rattle, which has amusingly been styled his
warble, resembles the attempt of a gaunt
Scotch laborer, with a crack in his voice and a
cold in his nose, to sing one of David's psalms.
It more resembles the last gasps of a tightly
screwed wooden vise or the drawing of a tarred
rail over a fence than a love warble. In the
bird world as in the human world delicacy and
purity of life are nicely matched by delicacy and
purity of voice. Hawks and owls and shrikes
and all predacious birds have as coarse harsh
voices as do coarse bad- men and women. So in
the plant world the more delicately perfumed
flowers are shy and retiring, but the coarse weeds
fairly shout at you along every roadside.

Crows are so extremely suspicious and ner-
vous at the approach of man that it is interest-
ing to see how the cares of maternity can tame
even their wild natures and cause them to ex-
hibit a courage one would not expect from the
bird that so many smaller birds than they —
orioles and kingbirds, for example — whip and *
chase around the sky. One spring, as I fre-
quently passed down an old grass-grown road
in a forest, I used to point my opera-glass at a
crow sitting on her nest far up and out on an
elm branch : she bore the infliction with un-

HUNGRY CBOWS AND SAUCY JAYS. 179

shrinking courage, and never budged, though
eying me anxiously. Her nest proved to be too
conspicuously placed; for, before her young
were hatched, that curse of the farmer and the
bird world, the silly boy "collectors," had risked
their lives by climbing up and knocking down the
nest with a long sapling. The next time I went
by I picked up the nest, which was very know-
ingly constructed, — first of heavy twigs, form-
ing an 18 X 12 inch elliptical structure ; then a
thick layer of soil, matted together with cow-hair
(probably obtained in some yard where cows
were kept over night) ; then a bulwark and gun-
wale of finer sticks and strips of soft cedar bark ;
and inside of all a soft thick bed of red cow-
hair, which with the matted earth formed a cap-
ital non-conductor of heat to keep the eggs
warm during the cold days of April. For some
time after the robbery' I never went down
through the wood in question without being
saluted with curses loud and deep from a flock
of crows who had got wind of the outrage.
They had formerly been on very good terms
with me.

Speaking of the crow's spring call, it should be
said that it is the voice of the male, correspond-
ing to the spring song of the males of other
species. (It cost me no end of work to estab-
lish that fact : it is not in the books.) This
spring we had in the neighborhood one with an
unusually developed voice. This crow uttered
a concatenation of sounds, as if his caws had
got tied together in his throat. It ir^s^^bout
the noise we make when reprehending a naughty

180 or pobtia's gabdens.

baby, — uh — uh — uh — uh — uh — uh — uh
— uh, — onl J more prolonged and uttered harshly
and rapidly. The fellow seemed to be so stung
by fierce desire that, as his ^^ rope and pulley "
warble burst forth, it was like an actuaJ cry of
pain.

The suspiciousness of the crow toward men
is amusing. One day in early spring, when
studying birds for the first time, I sat down by
a little grassy marsh, retired, with living water
running through it and trees around. Half-
amused, I said, ^^ I'U try that kissing-squeak on
the back of my hand, recommended by the
books." At the first squeak, as if it had been
the rubbing of an Aladdin lamp, a black shadow
flitted noiselessly over the grass, then another
and another; and three shiny black crows
alighted silently in the tree-tops. It seemed
a little uncanny, and I half expected to see
them transform themselves into princes or ladies
with beautiful tresses, when out, alas ! they sud-
denly spied me, and winged away in great trepi-
dation, a hasty, broken croak or two floating down
as they went. There is something sinister in this
slinking, suspicious avoidance of man's eye on
the part of the crows. Their sombre coats sug-
gest a former dwelling in the realm of Pluto
and a dipping in the inky waves of Styx. They
seem appropriate to the vicinage of the haunted
mountain castle of a caitiff l^ron in a desolate
land, flying about its splintered crags and dark
tariHsOr painted on the robber baron's shield.

Tte wrens had a curious retaliation on their

HUNGRY CROWS AND SAUCY JAYS. 181

arch enemy, the crow, in one case. A dead
crow had been nailed to a tree. The bold little
wrens coutrived to fasten together the wings of
this black scoundrel, and built their nest within
the skeleton, using the breast for an entrance.
This occurred on the place of Lord Suffolk in
Malmesbury, and the crow with the nest is now
in a glass case in the picture gallery of Charlton
Park, Lord Suffolk's place. These wrens' per-
formance reminds one of that oriole who built
her nest entirely of silver wires pulled from a
soldier's old epaulettes.

Some wee maidens asked me one day for a
story about crows, and received this : —

One day, while wandering in the forest of
Niunluogo, hearing the twittering of many birds,
I carefully parted the branches that shut out
the view of a grassy glade, and saw that a crimi-
nal court of the birds was being held. A pin-
ioned crow had been brought in by four king-
birds, two on a side, before Judge Bobolink, who
of course had his wig on, and was standing on
a grassy knoll, with a small log before him for
a desk and a gavel in his claw. His clerk, the
house wren, stood before another little log table.
The crow was gagged with a tuft of milkweed
blossom to prevent his terrific caws of protest
from drowning the voices of the witnesses.
These were a black-and-white creeper in mourn-
ing and a robin. The creeper testified that this
deep-dyed villain of the massive beak and the
cunning eye had gobbled her young alive. The
robin Tield up one claw and swore that the pris-
oner had cracked her safe, and stolen thence four

182 IN PORTIA^S GARDENS.

lovely blue-green gems of eggs. Then arose
from the audience of birds a wild clangor of like
accusations as loud as that raised by Chaucer's
Assembly of Foules when choosing their mates
on Saint Valentine's Day. Judge Bobolink got
white in the face with spinking and spanking
and pounding with his gavel, and threatened
to send officers Whippoorwill and Thrasher to
clear the galleries uidess order were preserved.
Tlie jury, after being charged by the judge,
made short shrift of Jim Crow, bringing in a
verdict of "guilty of murder in the first degree."
The judge, after allowing him a few incoherent
caws of denial, had him gagged again, and with
shaking claws pronounced sentence, which was
that the prisoner should be held under water
by the sherifiEs until he was dead. (Jubilant
carols in the galleries.) Then the wren put on
his spectacles, and recorded the sentence in his
book of stitched oak-leaves with a feather stylus
dipped in pokeberry juice. His inkstand was a
tiny snail shell that hung from his neck in a
little horsehair pouch. When the audience
broke up, he flew away to deposit the records in
the court safety-vault in a stone fence ; and Jim
Crow was led off by the kingbirds to the nearest
brook, and drowned.

I had a good deal of amusement in the win-
ter of '95-'96 in studying crows from the win-
dows. I attracted them by nailing up meat
bones on a gnarled old wild cheiTy and a hickory
tree that nse from a rocky copse hard by my
thinking and writing shop (say forty feet dis-

HXJKGBY CROWS AIJTD SAUCY JAYS. 183

tant). The crows had often perched in this
copse, yet they did not spy my meat bone till
the day after it was put up. Suddenly, when
the door was opened after breakfast, three great
inky fellows flew up from the bone, and softly
winged away. How silently a crow always
flies off, when alarmed! Not a caw, not the
least sound. Perhaps he is not observed : he is
not going to call your attention needlessly, any-
way. Hunger could not coax my suspicious
wild pets back that day. But the next morn-
ing, when the ground was covered with snow
and all was quiet, I slyly peeped out of the
window from behind the curtain, scratching first
a small hole through the chasing of frost, and
beheld master crow working away sol^ia on the
done, but looking around in the greatest trepi-
dation between bites. He seemed to fear an
ambush: meat bones did not usually grow on
trees in his experience ; and he wanted to know
how in sin that one got there.

These crows may have been winter visitors
from the north, where they are not shot at and
so are tamer than ours. They got so happy and
comfortable over the look of things (in spite of
their first suspicions) around what they regarded
as a very friendly Raw Meat Inn that they
would perch for hours on the "rum-cherry-"
tree in the sun.

When, one day, they caught sight of me be-
hind a window cuitain, they became more cau-
tious, and would not alight until they had looked
all about, swept a wide circuit with many feints
of going in some other direction, and assured

184 IN Portia's gardens.

themselves that I was not looking. I was, how-
ever, in the intervals of writing, — but more cau-
tiously. These crows nearly made a prisoner
of me, and I almost feared to poke the grate or
shut a door loudly.

In a few days, when the bone was picked
clean, mounting by a long ladder, I nailed an
iron pan on the top of the hickory trunk, which
had been sawed off squai-e after suffering injury
in a gale ; and there on that lofty altar I placed
a heave-offering of beef and chicken scraps for
Odin's birds, the dogs of the air. Having no
cat just then, or dog, it seemed a capital sanitary
plan to enlist some aerial scavengers to carry off
the orts. Yet the plaguey crows wouldn't touch
this pan of meat. One of them sat and looked
longingly at it for half an hour. But it might
be poisoned : it looked suspicious, too much of
a got-up look about it. "No," he seemed to
say, " you don't nin that nut-hook humor on me :
I see through that little game, haw^ haw^ haw .'"

When, however, I tacked up another raw-meat
bone, right by the side of the dish, there was a
great commotion. They were much afraid of it ;
but, finally, one reached his neck out as far as
he could, and gave it a peck, and soon he was
hard at work on it. It was frozen so hard that
it took several days to strip it bit by bit. They
were all singularly polite, never attempting,
though wistfully hungry, to oust the one who
reached the bone first. Perhaps this is partly
inherited cunning ; for, if all should eat at once,
and quarrel over the food, there would be no
sentinel to watch. However, one bitter snovTy

J

HUNGRY CROWS AND SAUCY JAYS. 185

and windy day, when a row of them had been
sitting cuddled up close together on a limb, like
so many canary birds, one hungry fellow tried
the following tactics on the crow who had the
innings at the bone : flying above him, he came
right down on his back (the meat was on a
slanting limb), hoping to shove him downward.
He did i^o, but the other scrambled back at once,
and resumed his place before No. 2 could take it.

All during the crow episode, and long before
and after, we were visited every morning by a
flock of eight or nine blue jays, — great, strong,
saucy, splendid fellows, with erect crests and
flashing azure wings, buoyant, cheery, intelli-
gent. It did one good to see their fine daunt-
lessness and health. A queer thing was their
punctuality: at almost exactly the same time,
7.16 A.M., they were on hand every day to get
the soft, friable bits of eggshells in the currant
patch at the top of the garden. They always
came from the same direction, went through
about the same series of short flights of approach,
and flew away in the same direction. A student
of birds soon discovers, as Burroughs remarks
of his osprey at the mountain lake, that they
are creatures of habit, and move in grooves, just
as we do.

On December 6 the ground was covered with
snow. But the jays came just the same, and
seemed so disappointed that I went out, and
scraped away the snow and scattered some pieces
of bread around. They rollicked around among
the cedars, playing tag, their big eyes, black as

i

186 IK PORTIA*S GAfiDEKS.

buckberries, glancing saucily around. They
exhibited the super£U)imdance of vitality, just,
of so many healthy boys, their eyes snapping
with mischief and fun. " Ho, ho I this fellow
in the cellarage or cave yonder has thrown out
some of his bread. Well, I'll take a piece.
Pretty flat stuff; not half the spice to it that
our blue cedar-plums have. Cay^ cay^ cay^
good-day!*^

One morning, glancing out of the window,
I saw one pick an acorn m)m a big oak-tree, f
went out to the spot where he alighted, and
found the ground strewn sparingly with half-
eaten nuts. The grooves made by the strong
bill down the inside of the meat were deep
and vigorously carved. The jay looks very
" cunning " when eating. He holds his bit of
food between his feet, and stoops down to peck
it with regular, pretty, swaying bows, hard to
describe, but all naivete. (And with what in-
describable grace the little living aeroplanes,
when nearing an alighting place, will hold their
wings perfectly steady, and with a long, gliding
upward curve come to a pause on the bough I
It is the very music of motion.) I tasted one of
the acorns, and immediately conceived a great
admiration for the bird's courage and ferity of
taste ; for I could not pretend to emulate him by
swallowing a single mouthful of that bitter
meat.

One jay soon got hold of the idea of my altar-
pan of scraps on the hickory-tree. I chopped
him up bits of fat, which he came for every
morning. The chickadees, little "frost-proof

HUNGRY OBOWS AND SAITOT JAYS. 187

puffs," got crumbs from the same dish, and said
many a chickadee thanks for them. They
hopped around within a few feet of me, their
cheery ways and notes (like those of the dainty
and Quaker-neat juncos and the ruby-crowned
kinglets) doing one good to hear and imparting
a like gayety of heart. I caught one of the
chickadees picking buds from the young currant
stems. But they showed no special fondness
for these, and do no harm.

The jays are not at all on bad terms with
their cousins, the crows ; but they don't vent-
ure to be too familiar. One day, when two or
three jays were regaling themselves from the
pan, a couple of his Satanic majesty's birds drew
near on solemn wing. The blue jays gave way
a bit. But, while the crows' backs were turned
and they were working away on a meat bone in
another tree, an audacious jay slipped back, and
began to eat of the crows' especial and long-
proved property, soup bone No. 1. This jay
had a fine flute note, a single musical-clear
whistle, something distinguished and foreign in
it. The notes of each individual bird were his
own and no other's, as in the case of the bobo-
links described in Chapter III. ; and, as with
the bobs, so with the jays, each individual
varied his own song. One bright sunny spring-
like morning, February 25, while the whole
flock were flashing and screaming around, one
fellow, perched all alone on a tree-top, amused
me much by demurely vociferating for a long
time with metallic clink and gurgle the sylla-
bles k(hU'nky ko4i'nkj (the bobolinks' initial

jl88 IK POBTIA^'S GABDENS.

notes without their melody); and then, sud-
denly dropping his voice away down into his
toes, he would remark, in an entirely different
key, " Stop it^ stop ity'^ in such a resigned, dis-
gusted way that I thought at first it was an-
other bird. The notes of certain jays I have
heard far off in the forest in summer sound
often like a bicycle gong and sometimes ex-
actly like the coarse pumpkin-stalk whistle of
the farmer's boy ; and just the fsurmer's boy of
birds he is. And so all winter these cunning
wags kept the whole neighborhood on the qui
Vive with their practical jokes and screaming
hilarity. The wife of the neighbor up on the
crag fed these jajrs grain all winter with her
chickens. In return two pairs of the birds
built their nests on their grounds. The blues
would also feed on my crumbs of fat let fall by
the blacks as they picked the bone above. Oc-
casionally a crow would condescend to fly down
to the lawn to secure an extra nice piece he had
let drop.

One winter day there was a terrific aerial
riot got up by the jays over some bird they
were mischievously expelling from the neigh-
borhood, the cause thereof unknown outside of
bluejaydom. Chaucer knew the jay well ; and
it talks to us the same language it did to him,
though his speech is sometimes hard for us to
understand. In the Man of Lawes Tale he
describes a drunken messenger as bewraying
" alle secrenesse " by " jangling like a jay."
The Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley, paints
this bird to the life : —

HUNGBY CBOWS AND SAUCY JAYS. 189

t

Mr. Blue jay, full o' sass,
In them baseball clothes o' his

Sportin' 'round the orchard jes'
Like he owned the premises/'

And Thoreau well describes the jay's harsher
notes, — "the unrelenting steel-cold scream of
the jay " that fairly " tears our ears."

In June the jays and crows get ominously
silent. Their cawing ceases, and you wot well
the reason: you know they are engaged in
slyly slipping around, watching the more deli-
cate songsters' nests, that they may rob them.
Don't ever shed tears if you should happen to
shoot a crow or a jay.

'

IX.

POLYPS OF THE AIB.

A TREE is a sort of vegetable polyp colony
or madrepore, throwing out by innumerable
branches its feelers into the circumambient air.
The final cause for being of each separate twig
is the life and welfare of the whole colony.
When I stand close beside a giant tree and
measure my puny weight and strength against
its own, I am always mled with awe. And the
awe changes to wonder as one gazes at the
huge knees of the elm or cypress buttressing up
the enormous weight above them, and thinks
what a grip upon 3ie rocks and soil the broad
reticulated feet must have to enable them to lift
that mighty dome of verdure aloft and hold it
firm against the shoulders of the assaulting
winds ; for usually one of these Briareuses will
sooner lose an arm than budge his foot from its
hold.

There is a kind of awe mingled with pity
excited in one, too, when looking at a vigorous
young tree enwrapped in the sure-enwinding
folds of that boa constrictor of vines, the poison
ivy, and branch by branch yielding up its life
to the parasite. There seems almost a con-
scious diablerie in these Laocoon-snakes. Some-

POLYPS OF THE AIR. 191

times two of them will wind and wind and
intertwist their coils, hard as iron cables and
as thick as your wrist, to the very top of a tree.
It makes you ache with sympathy to see the
unnecessary reduplications of the coils and the
apparently superfluous cruelty of the pressure.
When the tree has dropped piecemeal to the
ground, the ivy has become a hideous sham-
bling tree of itself (so much resembling a tree,
indeed, that the people call it Poison Oak),
and stands there in the autumn triumphant and
menacing with its crown of blood-red leaves
and upas breath, until some knight of the axe
approaches, and deals it its death-blow.

I have seen but one or two perfect pine
groves in my life. By a perfect grove is meant
one in which no trace whatever of man is to be
found, unless it be a few dead limbs removed
from the trunks or picked up from the ground
and a rustic seat constructed around one or
more of the trees. A single piece of newspaper
would be a blemish, reminding you unpleas-
antly of Yahoo picnic grounds or of the venal-
ity, cowardice, and brutality of the daily press,
which has got to be the common sewer of man-
kind instead of its educator and the conserva-
tor of its morals and liberties. If groves are
God's first temples, nothing could be so foreign
to the atmosphere of the place as a litter of
daily newspapers. There is a taint of the
charnel-house about those devil's napkins.
With the austere purity and solemn-sweet
music of the pines they make an unpleasant dis-
cord, and may be taken up with tongs and cast

192 IN pobtia's gabdbns.

into the laystall or cesspool where they belong.
We can do without them. The glorious repub-
lics of Athens and Florence flourished without
a daily press.

Generally speaking, New England can show
no such trees as tower along the river bottoms
of the Western Middle States. Trees that ap-
proach these in size are the English elms, — such
as those giants that line the walls of Boston
Common, with their strengthy limbs towering
up with stubborn buffeting massiveness, limbs
thick as spears around the dead Patroclus, their
masses of foliage and labyrinthine reticulation
of spray leaving not a cubic foot of space unoc-
cupied. They remind one of the sturdy English
body, the sinew and verteber of the nation.
They stand for the Puritan stock, for that which
has made this an Unglish nation. The English
elm makes a sharp contrast with our American
urn-elm, with its large open spaces and thread-
like down-swaying stems. The English elm is
like the English sparrow; the American tree,
like the American bluebird. It was doubtless
the moister, fatter soil of Old England that gave
the English elms their massiveness and wealth
of greenery. Our dryer climate and soil would
not have produced them. The English sparrows
find these huge castles in the air just right for
their nests, their parliaments, domestic quarrels,
and flirtations : tree and sparrow were evidently-
made for each other. There is an unconscious
pathos (a reminder of loyal English-heartedness
in the planters of them) in these aristocratic

POLYPS OF THE AIR. 193

old exiles that appeals strongly to one's historic
sympathies. They remind one of Tennyson's
stanzas on the yew, in the second canto of " In
Memoriam."

The Laird of Dumbiedikes, when on his death-
bed, said to his son Jock, " When ye hae naeth-
ing else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree :
it will be growing, Jock, when ye're sleeping."
Scott was here speaking his own creed, and
many is the tree still standing at Abbotsford
planted by his hand. He wrote to the Countess
Purgstall, " I promise you my oaks will outlast
my laurels, and I pique myself more on my
compositions for manure than on any other com-
positions whatever to which I was ever acces-
sory." No occupation better becomes a gentle-
man than this. What Scottish lord is there in
our days who has planted so many thousand
trees over the bare hills of his estate as Scott
did? It was a nobler thing of Frederick Tudor
to plant ten thousand trees in our little sea
town of Nahant than it is of Gladstone to cut
down the trees of Hawarden (though I do not
deny the value of judicious thinning and prun-
ing, and know that Gladstone's work is of that
character^ ; and such a gift as that of John
Bromfiela of $10,000 to Newburyport, Mass., for
the planting and care of trees in the streets of
that city, deserves more applause than the win-
ning of the battle of Sedan. And there was
poor old Johnny Appleseed, so nicknamed, of
Ohio,— with his lifelong peregrinations as a
planter of apple-trees, his old clothes and old
horae and his riverside nurseries of young trees.

194 IN Portia's gardens.

Old Johnny was not so veiy daft, after all ;
and his memory is cherished on hundreds of
farms in the West where the trees of his plant-
ing are bearing fruit.

It is a nice art to transplant a tree or a shrub.
A tree is a rooted animal, thrusting its legs
deep into the soil and drawing its nourishment
from air and soil both. It has a thousand little
mouths opening and shutting in the air and a
thousand mouths in its feet. As in the case of
the pelagic hydroid, or co-operative colony, to
different members of a tree different functions
are assigned ; but you cannot amputate or bruise
any part of the delicate organism without injury
to the whole. What is needed in transplanting
a tree is patience, and again patience. Properly,
only a middle-aged man can plant a tree : he
alone, as a general thing, can have acquired the
restraining touch and the loving care requisite
to success. Ha, there ! be careful what you do :
don't break off that long-running root ! Follow
it up, tenderly, slowly: loosen the earth in
advance with a spading-fork or trowel. Don't
begrudge the time. You can no more expect
your plant to show vigorous growth if you break
off its feet than your son to make nothing of
having one foot of his right leg and several toes
of his left chopped off, together with one or two
fingers of his left hand, and at the same time to
suffer deep wounds in other parts of his body.
I have a friend who transplanted a Virginia
creeper with such care in following up the
roots that it ran up to the eaves of his twoHstory
house the first year. The vine scarcely felt

POLYPS OP THE AIR. 195

the change. And anybody can do this if he
chooses.

I notice that Virgil says (Georgics, ii. 268) of
the husbandmen in his day that in planting
cuttings taken from their trees " they mark the
aspect [point of the compass, cceli regionem] on
the bark, that every slip may stand the same
way, that it may still have the same position
with regard to south and north ; such is the
force of custom in tender years."

A still more delicate art — the poetry of hor-
ticulture — is grafting. The beginner generally
makes the mistake of not leaving enough of the
old branch on to carry on the growth of the
tree, a safety-valve for the sap. A man who
does not love the smell of the grafting wax and
is not as proud of his firat successful operation
as Shallow was of that last year's pippin of his
own " graffing " is one the cut of whose jib is
not like mine. Scion grafting and budding
were practised much earlier than the time of
Virgil. In his Georgics I find the following
pretty passage on cleft grafting : —

Or, again, the unknotty stocks are cut, and a way is made
into the solid wood with wedges, and then scions are put in ;
and in no long time the vast tree rises up to heaven with
happy branches, and wonders at the new leaves, and fruit not
its own.

Virgil, however, is said to have been an igno-
ramus in grafting, as in so many other agri-
cultural matters. He was too indolent to find
out what the best scientific farmers of his own
day knew, little as that was. He speaks of
grafting the nut-tree on the arbutus, the cherry

196 IK Portia's gardens.

on the elm, and the apple on the plane, or syca-
more!

The ragged arbute is ingrafted with the offspring of the
walnut-tree, and barren planes have borne strong apple-trees ;
chestnut-trees have borne beeches, and the mountain ash has
been hoary with the white blossoms of pears, and the swine
have crunched acorns under elms. (Georgics, ii. 69.)

Just before he speaks of the stony cherry-tree
reddened with plums, prunis lapidosa rubescere
coma. Now in this he is followed by Columella,
who in his book De Arboribus (quoted by Mar-
tyn) gives an elaborate and minute description
of the grafting of an olive scion onto a fig stock
by bending down the scion and uniting it (while
still attached to the parent stem) to the fig stock,
as in cleft grafting. He closes with saying,
"By this method every kind of scion is en-
grafted on any tree." And Pliny the Elder in
his Natural History, xvii. 24, says he saw a tree
that had been grafted in various ways so as to
bear nuts, berries, grapes, pears, figs, pome-
granates, and apples. The tree was, however,
very short-lived. It is thought that Pliny's
many-fruited tree must have been a case of the
mock-grafting, still shown as a curiosity in some
parts of Italy and called greffe-Diane. It con-
sists in splitting the trunk of the orange-tree,
and then inserting slips of various trees, which
throw out blossoms and mature fruit (for one
season, I suppose). As for the graftings of Vir-
gil and Columella, they have been tried repeat-
edly both in England and Italy, in modem times,
and failed utterly. Either, then, we have lost
some trick of the ancients (which seems scarcely

POLYPS OF THE AIR. 197

possible, for Columella gives every detail) or
we must conclude that both Columella and
Virgil were guyed by practical grafters, and
merely repeated what had been told them. It
is possible, however, that they are describing
the mock-grafting process. The Elder Pliny
describes ordinary cleft grafting in precisely
the same terms that would be used to-day (loco
cit,'), and gives an extended and elaborate
r^sum^ of the whole subject, showing that the
Romans took a great deal more pains with their
grafting than we do, and had experimented
with most anxious care. But poets are apt to
be weak in science. Pliny says cleft grafting
was discovered by accident by a peasant who
thrust some sharpened palisades (which he had
cut to surround his house with) down into a
clump of growing ivy-tree ; and the two grew to-
gether, " the stock 01 the tree acting in place of
earth." Our familiar device of grafting the pear
onto the quince is also described by Pliny, who
says it was first done by Appius, a member of the
Claudian family. At least, his " Scandian fruit *'
is interpreted to mean pear by the best editors.

Homer, in the twenty-fourth book of the
Odyssey, describes old Laertes as loosening the
earth about a tree, gloved, wearing an old patched
tunic, leathern greaves, and a goat-skin cap.
Ulysses notices 3iat his father's fig, olive, and
pear trees and his grape-vines have all been well
pruned and otherwise cared for; but he says
nothing about grafting, and we have no proof
that it was known so early. The great fellow
in those days was the topiariuSy or fancy gar-

198 IK POBTIA*8 GARDENS.

dener, who cut your box and evergreens and
deciduous shrubs into figures of animals (bears,
boars, peacocks, etc.), and sometimes formed
the letters of the owner's name, as described
by the Younger Pliny in the sixth epistle of his
fifth boot (Pliny belonged to the upper ten
of those days, was a good fellow, popular and
wealthy, who gives you the impression of being
rather ridden by his wealth, and not over-
endowed with original intellectual power, de-
cidedly given to brageing of all his good things,
especially his four noble villas in different parts
of Italy, all of Vanderbilt proportions, with innu-
merable sunny rooms, baths, fountains, furnaces,
flower and vegetable gardens, and stables, requir-
ing "a mint of money" to keep up, and a host
of slaves and other servants to scrub and scour.)

A tree in winter is in a state of hibernation,
like the woodchuck in his den under the stone
wall. That the tree is alive is visiblv shown
by the strange shrinking of its fibres in a cold
snap. From the window of my study 1 look out
on a hickory-tree which every winter opens
up a fifteen-foot-long cleft, fully two inches
wide. It gives you a curious uncanny feeling
to see so hideous a gash, — as if one of Nature's
moulds were cracked and her germens spilled.
The tree seems to shrivel under the hug of the
frost. It opens its mouth in horror at the glance
of the Gorgon, Cold, but, like a man in a dream,
can utter no sound. If Ariel should creep into
this cleft for a nap, with the coming of the first
warm spell he would find himself pegged in its

POLYPS OP THE AIR. 199

knotty entrails for a longer sleep than he bar-
gained for. In the spring and summer of course,
as well as on warm winter days, the cleft
wholly closes up. But it goes slowly to work.
The temperature must have been twenty or
thirty degrees above zero for a couple of weeks be-
fore Nature has very slowly and cautiously, so as
not to strain or break the fibres, got the lips of the
great mock-wound pulled together again. But
not sewed. She can't do that unless the two
green cambium layers touch, and give her knit-
ting-needles and life-threads a chance to work.

Why can't man hibernate as well as the trees
and animals ? At any rate, get sleep and plenty
of it in winter, that you may cast your old skin
in the spring, and come out fresh and strong
with the new year. Then in summer lie fallow
again, only absorbing material passively in hot
weather, and storing up energy for an exhilarat-
ing dash through the blue and frosty horizons
of the autumn, — one after another, like a
gymnast through his hoops, eyes sparkling fire,
the horse you ride your own brave spirit, and
ambition your spur.

An axe for the hand of man, and a needle for
the hand of woman. A woman is as much un-
sexed in wielding an axe as a man is in plying a
needle. Brave thoughts come with the music
of the flying chips. A tingling vigor steals up
through the axe handle, and toughens the
fibres of body and brain. There is no oil like
hickory oil for the palms. And let me whisper
here a chopper's secret : You will never split
that knot by striking it on one side. Sink the

200 IN Portia's gardens,

blade into the centre of the knot, and you will
find a plane of cleavage that will lay open the
white heart of the mystery. All of which con-
tains- a pretty moral folded up in it.

One summer an August gale snapped square
oflF the perfectly sounc^ foot-thick top of one of
our large hickories. While the storm was still
high, I donned old clothes, and mounted the
tree, axe in hand, to clear away the wreck, lest
the whole trunk might be split up. The work
was a bit perilous, as the tree was straining and
cmcking ominously, and a single slip or mis-
directed blow would have had ugly conse-
quences. When the top had been freed, there
still remained the hard task of getting the
whole entangled mass free of the boughs and
down to the ground, and of sawing off even and
painting the mutilated trunk. I went to bed
that night with one eye nearly blinded with
sawdust and whole body aching and covered
with bruises. It was only after two days' hard
work, at odd times, that I at length got all the
lopped limbage and branchery on the ground,
and stood victorious in the tree with one arm
around a cool tentacle of the giant old air-
polyp. The just perceptible swaying of trunk
and limbs (the sun now shining and the breeze
blowing) imparted a feeling of strength to the
muscles, as in riding a glossy spirited horse.

If you want to measure yourself against nat-
ure, with the unused muscles of yeai-s of seden-
tary work, just undertake to master a hickory-
tree, that's all. A combat with a devil-fish or a
seaH3erpent can't be much worse. You will

POLYPS OF THE AIR. 201

right soon discover what a poor pygmy raan is.
And the splendid exercise will start original
trains of thought, — how the air-envelope of the
globe is ever oxygenated and refreshed by the
vegetation, and the vegetation supported by
the carbon of the air ; what subtle affinities, in
the steady feud of want and have in the aeons
gone, gave the present varieties of tree-fibres
the advantage in the rush to be, so that we
have now such far separated types as the hick-
ory-tree (with the heart of adamant and the
hide of an alligator) and the wind flower of
spring ; and, finally, what a beautiful thing it is
that a tree never freezes in winter nor grows
hot in summer, but maintains its own steady
temperature,^ so that even a forest of deciduous
trees, just by virtue of its living wood-fibre,
must actually warm the air around it in winter
as we constantly realize it cools it in summer.

How deliciously cool a tree-trunk is on a hot
day! A great forest holds enmeshed and
hidden in its masses of twig and leaf ten thou-
sand fountains spraying the air with silver-cool
liquid. All the spring and summer long, with
no charge for water rates, beginning early, as
soon as the chief engineer Heat turns on the
liquid, this quiet and hidden play of leaf foun-
tains, or tree-geysers, is going on. A man's in-
telligence is measured to me by the amount of
veneration he has for a tree. Nothing on earth
so proves a man a donkey as his needless slaugh-
ter of one of these benefactors of the race.

1 Megasoher discoYored that the oonstant mean temperature of a
tree is MP Fahr.

202 IN pobtia's oabdens.

While chopping at my hickory, I found it
necessanr occasionally to use the left hand. It
occurred to me that I had often been ashamed
of that weak and little used left arm hang-
ing by my side. I resolved to better it, as
Goethe practised looking from a dizzy height in
order to conquer his weakness in that respect.
For this purpose I extemporized an outdoor
gymnasium out of a low-hanging limb of what
was left of the hickory (it has since grown a
new head, and is doing well). This amiable,
easy-going limb allowed all sorts of liberties to
be taken with it without a squeak or a growl of
reproach. Twisting a live lion's tail has an
element of danger in it, but you can perform the
flying trapeze on a hickory-tree's proboscis with
impunity. I regret to say, however, that I thor-
oughly lamed my left arm by too severe use of
it at first, and that I consequently let my fine
resolution pretty well sink out of sight and
memory. But I believe it is true that the trunk
and brain would be more symmetrically devel-
oped if we were ambidextrous. For prudential
reasons alone, in case of the loss of an arm,
children should be taught, either in the schools
or at home, to be ambidextrous. I know of a
young man, now twenty years old, whose father
IS left-handed. As a baby, the son began to
use his left hand. When sixteen, he used both
equally well, and had to stop to think which
hand was which. He finds it a benefit to be
ambidextrous, as one arm never gets more tired
than the other.

X.

BY FOUNTAIN AND STEEAM.

** Fountaiiis that frisk, and sprinkle
The mofls they over-spill."

One can well believe in the fountain of
Dante's vision that restored to whomsoever
drank of it the memory of every good deed he
or she had ever done. All springs, but espe-
cially the warm and medicinal ones, are true
breasts of the earth-mother for her children.
When the Anglo-Saxon race learn to love
beauty as they do dollars and sovereigns, they
will carve marble basins for their springs, and
fence them, and set them about with trees and
flowers. At present it is a miracle to find one
in the country that is not surrounded by an
ugly mess of mud and rubbish, with perhaps a
rude cattle-trough, all askew, thrust down con-
temptuously, but no sign of a cup to drink from
or any noble reverence manifested for the gift
of the gods. To show the rest of the world
how not to reverence anything in heaven or
earth seems, as Ruskin says, to be the special
mission of the Americans on the earth. That a
fountain or well is the very source of life to
man we realize perhaps most vividly when we
see one choked up, defiled, or in entire disuse.

204 IN POBTIA'S GABDBNS.

It eives one a dismal feeling of death and deso-
lation. There is a wooded lawn in the town of
Milton, Mass., however, where a disused well
has been turned into a romantic ornament, and
life of another kind given to it for the death of
its waters. For to the summit of the high old-
fashioned wellnaweep climbs a vine rich with
foliage, and the curb is entirely concealed and
smouiered by other vines.

Of course extreme coldness in a spring is due
not only to the dense shade over it, but to the
depth from which the water comes. The great-
est surprise I ever had in this respect was ex-
perienced in a wooded tableland of the Alle-
ghany Mountains, somewhere near the summer
resort kept by a brother of the arctic explorer,
Kane. I passed there a densely shaded stream
of water (fed by mountain springs) so cold
that, although the stream was reslly a rapid
flowing small river, twenty or thirty feet wide
and two or three feet deep, it made one's legs
ache to stand in it ; and to bathe in it for more
than a moment or so in mid- August would have
been dangerous.

The Younger Pliny, describing his elegant
Tuscan villa, up among the hills, some one
hundred and fifty miles from Rome, gives us
the best idea of the way the Romans and Greeks
cooled the air of their gardens and academies
with fountains. Pliny gives a detailed painting
of a great pleasance, almost like the mazes of
the old landscape gardeners, so numerous were
its winding rose-bordered walks, shady copses,
and alleys Dordered by box ; and the negligent

BY FOUNTAIN AND STEEAM. 205

beauties of wild nature were mingled with the
formal clippings familiar to us in the modern
Italian garden. At the upper end of this open
sunny pleasance," says Pliny, "is an alcove of
white marble, shaded with vines and supported
by four small Carystian columns. From this
semicircular couch the water, gushing up through
several little pipes as though pressed out by the
weight of the persons who recline themselves
upon it, falls into a stone cistern underneath,
from which it is received into a fine polished
marble basin, so skilfully contrived that it is
always full without ever overflowing. When
I sup here, this basin serves as a table, the larger
sort of dishes being placed around the margin,
while the smaller ones swim about in the form
of ships and waterfowl." Opposite this was a
fountain which was incessantly filling and emp-
tying, the water thrown to a great height, fall-
ing back into it, and returning to its source to
again be hurled upward. Near by was a sum-
mer-house made oi beautiful marble. Next to
this was a little room, furnished with a couch
and provided with windows on every side, yet
enjoying a cool gloom from the vines that
clambered over it on every side. "Here you
may lie and fancy yourself in a wood, with this
only difference, that you are not exposed to the
weather as you would be there. Here, too, a
fountain rises and instantly disappears. Several
marble seats are set in different places, which
are as pleasant as the summer-house itself after
one is tired otit with walking. Near each seat
b a little fountain, and throughout the whole

206 IK pobtxa's gardens.

pleasonce^ several small rills run murmunng
along through pipes, wherever the hand of art
has thought proper to conduct them, watering
here and there different plots of green, and
sometimes all parts at once.

To get an exact idea of such an ancient estate
as this of Pliny's, one has but to visit the grand
old Villa d' Este at Tivoli, with its hundred
tinkling fountains, mossy statues, immense
trees, and verdurous mazy walks. The Borghese
Villa at Rome used to be typical of the old
classic style, but is much injured now by being
turned into a cheap show-place, and deformed
by trams and shams for the amusement of the
people.

Tennyson generally surpasses the old Greeks
and Romans in the delicacy and richness of his
nature imagery. All that Horace can say of
his "fons Bandusiae" is that it is splendidior
vitro J "shininff brighter than glass," a tame
image; but Tennyson describes sunlight as
glancing upon the surface of water

" In many a shiver'd lance
That breaks about the dappled pool."

The lines of the English poet are unbetterable :
the flashing of light on water has at last got
into words. The whole section in which this is
found (xLViii.) is a delicate study of crisped,
and "tender-pencilled" water. Tennyson de-
lights in the sound of running water and the
splashing of fountains. It is easy to recall the

1 Pliny calls it the hippodromtUt bat this is thought to bo only his
name for a portion of his grounds ; and I hare aooordingly translated

BY FOITKTAIK AND STREAM. 20T

babbling runnel of " Claribel " ; the silver-chim-
ing fountain of Haroun's garden and its "dia-
mond rillets musical," the " many-f ountained
Ida " ; the countless streams and plunging cata-
racts of " The Lotos Eaters " ; the torrent brooks,
falling from craggy hollows and sounding all
night long as they fall through the dell in the
" Dream of Fair Women " ; the rivulet flowing,
softly flowing, by lawn and lea (" A Farewell ") ;
the tinkling rivulet where " in mosses mixt with
violets " the cream-white mule of Guinevere his
pastern set ; " The Brook " babbling on forever
over shingly bars and cresses, past fairy fore-
lands on to the sea ; the fountain *' showering
wide sleet of diamond drift and pearly hail
in " The Vision of Sin." Indeed, it would be
hard to find a landscape poem of Tennyson's
earlier work in which running water is not in-
troduced. Is he addressing lines to a friend on
his travels in Greece, he begins with

" niyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass/'

and says that, as he followed him in his book of
travels,

" For me the torrent ever pour'd

And glisten'd — here and there alone
The broad-limb'd gods at random thrown
By fountain urns ; — and naiads oar'd

''A glimmering shoulder under gloom
Of cavern pillars ; on the swell
The silver lily heaved and fell."

" The Princess " is full of the sound of splash-
ing water, — " the steep up-spout " (in the Pro-
logue) " whereon the gilded ball danced like a

208 m POETIA*S GABBEKS.

wisp"; in the many-gardened streets of Ida's
college domain

" The splash and stir
Of fountains spoutea up and showering down
In meshes of the jasmine and the rose ;

the wild cataract that " leaps in glory " ; and
the cataract visited in the ill-fated ride ; —

" And up we came to where the river sloped
To plunge in cataract, shattering on black blocks
A breath of thunder."

(That last superhuman touch puts Tennyson
abreast of Shakspere.)

In the matter under consideration, "In Memo-
nam " is no exception : everywhere the imagery
of water appears, from the sweet after-showers
of evening shadowing down the flood in ripples
to the sliding of the blue brine of the sea be-
neath the keel that brought him home his dead.
In the "Idyls of the King" and in the later
poems, which deal less with landscape, this pas-
sion is subordinated, though we see in the
veiy opening lines of "Gareth and Lynette"
the hero " in a showerful spring '' staring at the
spate, or flood, and the cloth of gold " shone far
off, ^zzling, as shines a field of charlock [wild
mustard, golden in color] in the sudden sun be-
tween two showers " ; and through " Lancelot
and Elaine " winds the river that carries down
the lily maid of Astolat to Arthur's court.

Tennyson seemed to find in the melody of
flowing water the music that awakened and har-
monized best with the melody latent in his own
soul. So some one has said of Theocritus that
none of his pictures seem complete without the

BY FOXTNTAIN AKD STREAM. 209

presence of running water, whether the wells that
the maidenhair fringed or the bubbling runnel
of the fountain of the nereids where the merles
poured forth their honey-sweet song and the
brown nightingales replied. Or he may sing of
the sweet streams of Crathon or Himeras, or the
water falling from the face of the high rock
green with laurels and myrtles. Here is one of
his fountain pictures, for instance: Two shep-
herds are reclining on deep beds of fragrant
lentisk leaves (resinous and evergreen) in a
sylvan spot. " And high above our heads waved
many a poplar, many an elm-tree, while close at
hand the sacred water from the nymphs' own
cave welled forth with murmurs musical." On
shadowy boughs the burnt cicalas sang, the
ring-dove moaned far off, " and the yellow bees
were flitting round the springs." It is only in
such a place as Sorrento, and about there, in
Italy, that we may to-day see just such scenes
as Theocritus sang, says Symonds, — " huge fig-
trees leaning their weight of leaves and purple
fruit upon the cottage walls," and the "stone
walls and little wells in the cottage garden green
with immemorial moss and ferns, and fragrant
with wadding violets that ripple down their sides
and checker them with blue."

Spenser's enchanted forests are full of foun-
tains. The Redcrosse Knight stops to cool his
brow in a shady wood beside a spring " whose
bubbling wave did ever freshly well"; while
his horse cropped the fresh grass, the wind full

fently played, and sweet bir(£ sang in the green
oughs that circled the fountain. Spenser does

210 IK POBTIA*S QARDEKS.

not name it ; but we may call it the Fountain
of Idleness, for the nymph that dwelt in it fell
out of favor with Diana, because one day, tired
from the chase, she sat down too long to rest
by its side. The goddess thereupon bade the
waters ever after to make faint and feeble who-
ever should drink of it. And so, when the
knight,

" Lying downe upon the sandie graile,
Dronke of the streame as cleare as christall glas,
Eftsoones his numly forces gan to f ayle."

(What a pretty word is that graile! — from
gracilis^ fine, slender ; our word gravel.^

Then Spenser limns what we may call The
Fountain of the Bathing Damsels. The water
flows from a structure carved in material so
translucent that the cool element ^Hhrough
eveiy channel running one might see." It is
overwrought with shapes of naked boys and ivy
of beaten gold colored green, and all the margent
round about is set with shady laurel-trees which
admit to the refreshing gloom within only stray
shafts of light that dapple here and there the
translucent water and the white bodies of the
merry bathers.

A little farther on, in the Bower of Acrasia,
Sir Guyon and his companion hear the sound of
falling water mingled in ravishing melody with
other soimds : —

" Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree ;
The joyous birdes, shrouded in chearef uU shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet ;
Th' Angelicall soft trembling voices made
To th' instruments divine respondence meet;

BY FOTTNTAIIT AKD STREAM. 211

The silver sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmure of the waters fall ;
The waters fall with difference discreet,
!N^ow soft, now loud; unto the wind did call ;
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all."

In Book III., describing an open glade, Spen-
ser sings thus of its stream : nothing could be
prettier : —

*' And in the midst a little river plaide
Emongst the pumy stones which seemed to plaine
With gentle murmure that his cours they did restraine/'

Wordsworth's poetry is everywhere vitalized
and freshened with the murmur of the streams
and the thunder of the waterfalls of his moun-
tain haunts. In the deep vales about his home,
padded with softest turf to their summits, one
continually hears the sound of falling water,
"and, when the ear cannot hear them, the eye
can see the streaks or patches of white foam
down the green declivities." Wordsworth's
passion for living water matches Tennyson's : —

" I love the brooks which down their channels fret."

''The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion."

"For fondly I pursued.
Even when a child, the streams, — unheard, unseen ;
Through tangled woods, impending rocks between ;
Or, free as air, with flying inquest viewed
The sullen reservoirs whence their bold brood.
Pure as the morning, fretful, boisterous, keen.
Green as the salt-sea billows, white and green,
Poured down the hiUs, a choral multitude ! "

He often speaks of day-dreams beside the mur-
muring purling streams, when " beauty — bom
of murmuring sound " — passed into the face*

212 IK pobtia's gabdbks.

Everywhere incidental touches about running
water; rivulets "gurgling in foamy water-
break " or " loitering in glassy pool " ; the spark-
ling foam of "fairy water-breaks" murmuring
on forever; "waters rolling from their mountain
springs with a sweet imand murmur"; the
" torrents shooting from the clear-blue sky ** :
in the Simplon " the sick sight and giddy pros
pect of the raving stream"; and "cataracts
blowing their trumpets from the steep." In
such poems as " The Fountain " and in " Yarrow
Revisited" the preacher dominates the pagan
and pantheist, as in Whittier. But then, in all
great poetiy, landscape is but the setting, the
framework, of the central theme, — man and
eternity. So it detracts not a whit from the
beauty of the following lines as a perfect picture
of a scene in nature that they precede a tiiought
on human life. They were written in Gras-
mere after a storm : —

" Loud is the vale 1 the voice is up

With which she speaks when storms are gone ;
A mighty unison of streams !
Of all her voices one!

** Loud is the vale 1 this inland depth
In peace is roaring like the sea ;
Ton star upon the mountain-top
Is listening quietly."

But no one of the greater bards equals the
prose-poet Thoreau for minute study of the
phenomena of water, crystallized or fluent. Our
American painters (the few great ones) will
in time find his works, especially the four
volumes of his journals, an exhaustive store-

\

BY FOUNTAIN AND STBEAM. 213

house of observations on such things as the tints
of shadows on snow, the iridescence of ice-crys-
tals, the rich colors of a field of ice as a mirror
reflecting the green and amber of sunset, the
facts about mists, and a hundred other subtle
phases (winter or summer) of river and lake, —
so subtle that few painters of landscape have
ever suspected half of them. Ruskin's " Modem
Painters" and Turner's works contain such
studies, but I know not where else you will look
for them in art.

A spring is the emblem of joy and peace, a
waterfall the symbol of resistless strength. The
leaping water is like a wild beast unleashed,
exulting in its new-found power, bounding from
rock to rock, nervous, savage, and free.

To see such a fall as the Caterskill, at its
best, approach it from below through the steep
mossy gorge leading up from the clove: the
sky line then meets the water line, and you get
the rich color-chord of blue sky, water, foam,
and cloud. To secure this effect, stand as near
the fall as possible, and look up. I learned
this at the Falls of Minnehaha. The water
seems to be tumbling out of the sky, falling in
wind-swayed plumes of snow; or drifted snow-
dust, blown into down-pointing wedges edged
with silver, and shattered into creamy lace upon
the rocks below. At the Caterskill from the
curving background of rock spring bright wood
flowers sprinkled with perpetual moisture from
the fall*

214 IN Portia's gabdbets.

One can think of nothing in nature to com-
pare with Niagara, unless it be the colossal
mountain ranges of cumulus clouds in a sum-
mer sky here in the New World. Eternity and
Power are Niagara's word. It baffles, stuns,
crushes. It is a majestic mentor, a mute sum-
mons: beware how any littleness appears in
you ; let every atom of your physical and men-
tal might weigh now, if you would not be jeered
at by your own self. In the calendar of this
giant of the ages it is but a few days or minutes
since the ephemeral manikins who call them-
selves the lords of creation began to creep
frightened about it. The only organic being
that would not make a discord in the sights and
sounds of Niagara would be a really noble Red
Indian with his bow and arrows, and undefiled
by the least touch of "civilization," — a Hia^
watha or Red Jacket, say. And the only poets
who can be read at all in the face of this stupen-
dous scene are Walt Whitman (in his chants of
death and the sea) and Dante Alighieri. The
majestic spirit of Niagara is in Whitman's

" Rise, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier,
fiercer sweep,"

and in " Patrolling Bamegat," but not in any
poems of Shakspere, Longfellow, Emerson, Ten-
nyson, Whittier, Bryant, unless it be "Than-
atopsis " and a few passages from Shakspere's

freatest dramas, and the sublime portions of
Imerson's "Song of Nature," "Woodnotes,"
" May Day," and " Initial, Daemonic, and Celes-
tial Love." It is a bitter and a terrible test

BY FOUNTAIN AND STREAM. 216

to read poetry in the face of Niagara. As for
Dante, there is that in the crushing (zermalmend)
power of the shattered water, and the endless
smoke of its torment ascending up, that reminds
you of the Titanic scenery of the circles in the
Inferno. Those swift up-darting wraiths that
ever rise, like gray-haired Graiai, out of the
smoke of the abyss, — they would not have
been too sublime for Dante's imagination.

Stand directly under and a little to one side
of the American side of the fall. The roar is
like nothing else in nature except continuous
cracking peals of thunder or the noise of a city
or a forest on fire. The confusion and mix are
indescribable, huge volumes of water-smoke
struggling ever upward and as continually
beaten down again by the awful weight of the
descending mass. Steam up into the middle of
the Horseshoe Fall between those high walls of
azure and snow. If you stand alone in the bow,
you seem to become strangely merged for a
moment with Nature herself; or it is as if you
were sailing amid icebergs in an arctic region.
Then in a moment the ship turns and speeds
back through the boiling maelstrom.

A long drought brings home to us upon how
delicate a mechanism we are dependent for the
rain, — how easily it gets out of gear and comes
to a dead stop. At such a time I always find
myself wondering, not why it doesn't rain, but
how it manages to rain at all, how it is that the
rain-buckets keep going up and down, up and
down forever, — forgetting that the sun is the

216 IN Portia's gabdeks.

ceaseless engine and his rays the rods that keep
the wheels turning, if not here, then somewhere
else. Our wonder at the miracle of the rain is
partly based on our consciousness of helpless-
ness to draw one drop from the clouds ; tlmt is,
under ordinary circumstances. A battle may
cause rain, and dynamite balloons seem in a few
instances to have done so. If it should turn out
that man can cause a downpour from the clouds,
Hugo's Gilliatt battling with the sea and the
wind would be a pygmy in comparison with a
rain-maker. What would Solomon's cimeter or
Thor's hammer be to the rain-bomb? Habib's
feats in passing through the seven enchanted
seas would be child's play matched against a
mastery over the clouds. It would make Ben
Franklin's laurels (^c(elo eripuit fulmen^ etc.)
fade at last.

Mighty useful in war would be man's control
of the cloud sluices. If you wanted to dampen
the ardor of the enemy, make them lower their
tail feathers, just pull the cloud plug, — put the
hose on 'em. If it would serve your purpose to
retreat, then send out your uhlans or scouts to
pull the latch-strings again, and by a cloud-
burst make the rivers impassable behind you.
The same device would enable you to ruin your
enemies' crops, if such a lamentable thing had
to be done.

At present, however, we sit in our doorways,
and patiently wait for the blessed spring or
summer rain to descend in its own good time.
And, when it has come and gone, what peace
and joy it leaves behind it, — the fruitful sum-

BY FOXTNTAIN AND STREAM. 217

mer shower ! I recorded one such in the mid-
dle of May. All the fever and fret washed
away from the landscape and from men's lives,
— the choking dust, the bad odors of the
streets, the noxious debris of the great cities and
towns, swept away by the cleansing fluid ; all
the high sparkling lights of the landscape, its
smoke, its winking heats, dissolved (so it
seemed), leaving to the sky a cool, washed-out
steel-blue look, as the clouds passed out to sea
in the quiet-colored evening, and giving to the
green spread of the curving globe a deeper
green, free from the least impurity. All noises,
too (it being Sunday evening), were gone, the
rattle and shriek and whistle gone. Even the
birds had lost their songs, and preened their wet
feathers in silence in the trees, and cooed and
twittered softly to each other, as if afraid to
break the charm of silence. The change from
the hot days that had just preceded was like
the change in a man awaking from fever
and a wandering mind to the peace of perfect
sanity.

The most beautiful lines on the rain have
been written by the prophet-bard of Manahatta
in his " Voice of the Rain " : —

** Eternal, I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless

sea
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely formed, altogether

changed, and yet the same,
I descend to lave the droughts, atomies, dust-layers of the

globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent,

unborn;
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own

origin, and make pure and beautify it."

218 m pobtia's gabdeks.

The whole poem, with its thought of a good
or strong action coming back to bless the actor,
will bear deep pondering. It suggests that,
after all, as the husky-voiced mother, the sea, is
our progenitor, so we are still but a kind of fish
on land, we and the plants and all ; for not a
tree or flower or animal could exist without
copious showers of tears from the sea, and, in
running back our pedigree to the monad, we
pass through, not only hairy savages of very
fishy antecedents, but also through actual fish
Sjpecies that gradually learned to use one set of
mppers for walking and another for arms. And
the tears which the sea-mother still sheds for
her runaways old Adam Earth cunningly uses,
not only to nourish said runaways, but to help
beget shapes of life forever and forever new.

APPENDIX.

BIRD SONGtS AND CALLS.

" Often certain words or syllables vhioh hare suggested themselyes
remhid one better of a bird's strain than the most elaborate and
closest imitation." — Thoreau, ** Summer.*'

'* Oft didst then search the woods in vain
To find what bird had piped the strain:
Seek not, and the little eremite
Flies gayly forth and sings in sight."

, — Emeraont " Woodnotes."

We have, in book form, the birds* songs set down
in musical notation by the late -Mr. S. P. Cheney, and,
if whistled or played on the piccolo or flute, these
give a tolerably good idea of bird music. J?hono-
graphic cylinder records would be better still. Bur-
roughs says that the language of aU birds '< is easily
translatable into the human tongue." However that
may be, it is certain that phonetic equivalents of their
pretty baby prattiiugs are of great help to beginners.
The books are all very deficient in this matter. I
give below a list of verbal imitations or catchwords of
songs, mostly pencilled down by me in the field as the
birds sang them. But they will not apply accurately
to all birds of the same species, because birds are great
improvisers, no two singing exactly alike. The prac-
tised field student of the songsters identifies his hidden
bird more often by the timbre^ or quality, of the tone,
and by the inflections, than in any other way. It

220 APPENDIX.

shouM be remembered, in using the following list, that
eh is always to be pronoonced as in ekikL

Baltimork Oriole. Take earty take e€are, quick;
or there^ there^ there, there, there ; or dear, dearj dear,
dear, dear ; or chippy, chinpy, too-too; or eheer-^heery,
eheer-CHR^Brup ; also ekerry, cherry, sweet, — he-
cherry ; or cherry, cherry, sweet cherry ; or ehurry,
churry, chu-^EKB-up, pee-up', pee-up', etc Be-
sides their scolding talk and sqnealings, the Balti-
mores keep np a bnsj soliloquizing chat while feed-
ing their yoong amid Uie trees, — a contented j^ee-j^eep,
cuhrcuh-cuh, the young answering with why-yit,
whyyii, and all sorts of soft cooings.

Bluebird. Something like a warbled cheer-ke-cheery,
keer-keery, why dan^t you keep it up f

Bobolink. For notes from the '^ glassichord " of
fifteen bobolinks see Chapter III., near end. That
pretty word is Thoreau's. I am glad to find (since
writing the text in the body of the book) in his
<< Summer " a fit appreciation of the bobolink.
'' Such strains," he says, '^ as never fell on mortal
ears, to hear which we should rush to our doors and
contribute all that we possess and are " (p. 9).

Blackbird. See p. 34. Some one spea^ of the
blackbird's "split-whistle." The phrase can't be
bettered.

Black-throated Blue Warbler. A lazy, husky
zwee, zwee; sometimes a shatter of twittering
notes.

Black and White Creeper. No two sing alike,
but they all say something like this that one sang to
me : busy busy busy htisy, busy busy biz,, which is
very appropriate, as no bird devotes himself or her-
self more assiduously to "biz." Sometimes they
have, also, in spring a vigorous and prolonged song,
quite astonishing because unexpected.

Al^PENDIX. 221

Black-throated Green Warbler. See p. 49.
Ordinarily, two songs: a five-noted, cheery pee pee-
pee TWEE, twee (the first three notes rapidly uttered,
the fourth blown as if from a clear-sweet fairy flute) ;
and a four-noted variation in a much lower and
husky tone and with just a touch of the familiar
sweet emphasis on the third instead of the fourth
note. (This subdued song must not be confounded
with the four lazy zwee*8 of the golden-winged
warbler.) A friend called my attention to a num-
ber of black-throats whose five-note song, as I often
hear it, is as follows. The books do not notice this
variety.

I

m ^ ^

Blue Jay. See pp. 186-189.

Blue-winged Warbler. Wee^ cht chi cht, chur
GHEE chur.

Canada Jay. A loud, almost screaming whistle,
resembling that of robin and blue jay both. One of
its notes was pee-vp\ pip, pip}

Cedar Bird. See p. 58.

Chat (Yellow-breasted). I listened in Swamp-
scott several times to the unique human-like whist-
lings of this eccentric bird, which is very rare in
Eastern Massachusetts. You are now reminded of
the tones of the veery or the great-crested fly-
catcher and now of a rapidly struck small mellow
bell; a whistled whe-o, whe-o, and whee-oi (Bur-
roughs's who and tedboy) describe the separate
sounds very well. The voice is loud and strong.

1 Seen and heard by me May 12, '96, at Arlington Heights, Mass.,
moTing high up amid pine-trees and hard- wood forest. OBserTed him
pretty close at hand with glass for some minntes, and wrote in my
field book, ** Dark: drab head, long straight black bill, dark back,
white-gray belly.*' This is the fourth recorded occurrence of the
bird in Eastern Massaohusetts (see Brewster's Minot, p. 474).

222 APPENDIX.

The bird is apt to begin with five whe^% or dog-
call whistles (yery pretty), then giye two or three
tuts or chut* and/njpf (robin-like). I also heard the
hoarse chuckle of the crow and Apee-uh like the
jay's-

Chestnut-sided Warbler. Chee^hee-chee, che wee-

cht ; or venfveryveryglad to meet you; or see-see-

se&^se the BREECH-e« (call him '^little Breeches").
Sometimes he is rath^ closely imitated by the yel-
low warblers.

Chewi^nk (Towhbe). (1) Twtiku^ — he, he^ he^ he,
he (the he standing for a whistle, like the song
sparrow's final triU). (2) T^p-er^^ chee\ Both
strains uttered vigorously and joyously. My birds
say te-wet^ also (whence '' towhee," wrongly pro-
nounced by the dictionaries with the stress on the
first syllable), and chewi^nk. The female towhee is
a quiet demure little Quaker body, with the neatest
of drab bonnets and wimplers, cinnamon dress and
white apron. No wonder the males are joyous fel-
lows with such Dame Durdens of wives.

Chickadee. Besides their />Ae-^ and chic-ordee^ or
day^ day, day, notes and various little bits of con-
versation, their favorite remark is Kyee'-pwrty, — less
often Kyee^ur, though the books (Minot, e.^.)
wrongly get it as being always two-syllabled.

Cow-bird. See p. 46.

Cuckoo. See p. 97.

Field Sparrow (or Bush Sparrow, call it). Usually
a clear trill (plaintivensweet) with a rising scale of
notes, but occasionally with a falling series. Great
variety of song, which generally ends in de-de-de^
de-de.

Fox Sparrow. Song a cross between the oriole's cherry
sweet and the tee-tuh^uhrteet of the warbling vireo.
It is a plaintive-cheery whistle : whee-to-to-whee^ to,
to-wheet^.

APPENDIX. 223

Fligkbb. Has four speeches : his cvJi, cuh, cuh, cuh ;
the pee'too, pee^too, pee' too, pee' too, or Jlicka, jfiicka,
JlicKa ; the shrill kee-yer or peep ; and the come hoy,
come hoy.

Great-ckested Flycatcher. I have heard one
whose toot recalled the quail's first two whistled
notes. But the usual sound is more like the toad's
wMT-T-r ; or say the sound made when we expel
air through the relaxed and vibrant lips with a bub-
bling sound, — the noise often made by fond papas
to make the baby laugh. The call of the great-
crest is of one syllable or two, and sometimes more.

Indigo Bird. See p. 69. Scarcely any two indigo
buntings sing exactly alike, though I have heard
two, probably of the same clan, with precisely the
same notes.

Long-billed Marsh Wren. Begins with one or
two silvery-tinkling notes; then an energetic ex-
plosion like that of the house wren, — a kind of
musical alarm-clock performance, the notes rising
to their highest pitch in the middle of the strain,
and then dropping ofiE into a pretty little scattering
fusillade of tinkles or gurgles, like single drops of
water falling into a cistern. The long-bill's scold-
ing note is tschach, tschack, tschack.

Maryland Yellow-throat. Pe^eep', pe^eep%
joc-PEEP, pee, though Burroughs's which way, sir f
repeated rapidly from two to five or six times, is
nearer to it. Or beseech, beseech, beseech ye.

Meadow Lark. A plaintive, sweet, whistled here,
d*ye SEE-6-« f or her-r-re, do you seel-e-e (the r's
rolled). Often also the form given in the books,
et see'^e-e de vh,

Nashville Warbler. I heard one say pe-pee', tut-
tu, tutrtu wit.

Olive-backed Thrush (Swainson's). Begins with
the two or three opening notes of the wood-thrush

224 APPENDIX.

(in fact, when I first heard it, I thought it was a
wood-throsh who had inherited his tone badly or
was broken-winded!) and goes on in a broken,
characterless way, the song qnite brief, and con-
siderably like the yeerj's, except that the notes rise
from lower to higher instead of the contrary, as is
the case with the yeery. (For an introduction to
this bird I am indebted to the courtesy of a friend.)

Oyen-bird. Thoreau hits the white when he speaks
of "the fresh emphatic note of the oven-bird."
As stated in the text, Mr. Burroughs's "teacher,
teacher, teachbb, T£ACH£B, TEACHER, should
be amended. The birds do once in a while end with
teacher J but as a rule teach is the final sound. Mr.
Torrey tells me that to his ear it is tee, but I think
I detect something like a ch at the close in most
cases. All one summer au oven-bird patrolled the
lane by my home who never ended his song with
more dian one syllable.

Purple Finch. A warbled tee-iuh-wuh-tee^ tihrwuh
tee, with tee, tee, tee, sometimes added. Recalls the
rose-breasted grosbeisik and the warbling vireo. The
female sings as well as the male.

Red-eyed Vireo. Named by me the Parlez-vous
Bird. See p. 51. Qui est? — Hen — c^esthien —
oui, out, out — totU de suite — qu'est-ce que c*est f
— j^ P^ ^oU8 — pas si vite — s*il vous plait, — all
pronounced in snappy staccato style. The querulous
call of the bird is almost the chemnk of the towhee.

Redstart. Wee, wee, wee, wee; cht, cht, cht, — a
cicada-Uke, sharp, cutting sound.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak. He flutes the full round
note : chee-up', chee^ ; chee^p', chee-uh ; jjcc-weep,
pee-uh, pee-^h (in the early morning often three or
four times as many notes). A wallowing, undulat-
ing carol, or continuous warble, of distinguished
tone-color, and (fragmentarily heard) something

APPENDIX. 225

like the tanager's notes in quality of sound. It is
lilted out in the high tree-tops in an aristocratic
devil-may-care style, as if by a gay King Charley
cavalier with upturned moustachios and hat rakishly
aslant. There is an Oriental leisure in the carol of
the rose-breast, as if he had once floated over from
some '^rich ambrosial Eastern isle," his plumage
tinted by one of its refulgent sunsets. He is the
Saadi of birds, too, for he is '^ sober on a fund of
joy " that seems infinite.

Song-sparrow. The two or three sweet and joyous
deliberate initial notes (^' mcdds, maids, maids ")
are followed by a trill often ending with a peculiar
abrupt pip. Great variety in the songs. I heard
one once whose first and second notes sounded like
the resonant ring of a tuning-fork or the prolonged
ring of a silver rod struck on a solid object, — an
exquisite sound. Another said zip, zip, zip^e'-e,
toor-arlooral, don*t speak to me. Thoreau gives
ozit^y ozif, ozitf, psa te te te, tete, ter twe ter,

Tanager. Pee^o', pee-oo' ; pee-ATE, tu you', pee-oo'.
The note of alarm is tip-where, tip, tip. Other
birds differ of course from this in detcdls of the
song.

Veert. Four or five couplets in a piercing whistle,
beginning in a high key and gradually falling:
whee'-vh, wee'^uh; whee'-vh, wee'-yJi, wee'-uh ; some-
times closing with an ascending weird spiral whis-
tle or tremolo, — something like vee-r-r-hu. The
call is pee'-vi. They also say cheefury, chee'ury,
chee'ury.

Vesper Sparrow. Four deliberate initial notes,
rather plaiutive, the third slurred rapidly over ; then
a hurried though brief trill, the whole delivered
many times and with great energy, generally about
the time the robm is giving his vesper song, also
early in the morning, etc. Some folk find the

226 APipmmiix.

« damned iteration" of the vesper's song as annoy-
ing as the indigo banting's. Nil nimts.

Warbling Yirbo. Tee, te/ yu' wh' tee, usnally sev-
eral times repeated and ending with a very emphatic
teet It gives one a carious sensation to see and
hear, as any one may, the males warbling loud and
sweet while sitting on the nest

Whitb-byed Vireo. Ohut, wuh, whee, ti, tt, tee'
ttput, chOt mev/. Another whistied very loud and
vehementiy tip^where', Up er cheef. The scolding
of tiie males is a persistent and harsh Uhew-mg and
Uhachrmg, — one Uhew followed by six to fifteen
tshachs, the whole resembling the scolding of the
Baltimore oriole

White-throated Sparrow. See p. 44.

WooD-THRUSH. A flute-likc yodel, — pee^uhnwee^
uh, twee, now in a low key and now in a higher.
Alarm note when feeding (as I hear it) is chtich,
chuck, chuck, chuck, like the sound made by a wheel-
and-rope well-curb. The severe classic simplicity
and brevity of this bird's song may disappoint at
first But it will be found that its melodious strain
echoes in the chambers of the mind for days at a
time. After writing the foregoing I read in Thoreau
(" Summer," p. 212), " This is the only bird whose
note affects me like music, affects the fiow and tenor
of my thought, mv fancy, and imagination." And
in "Winter," p/78, he says of tiie bu^, "The
truest and loftiest preacher that I know." "Its
strain lifts us up in spite of ourselves." He
speaks of "its cool bars of melody"; records (p.
213) that Ralph Waldo Emerson imitated the wood-
thrush by "Ac wiUy wiUy — ha wiUy willy, — O
wiUy a"

Wren (House). Chich-cht-cht-chi, uh-whuhrwee'-
wuhr^uh, — chichruhrwuh^wee-wee^wee, A bubble of
song given with great energy and rapidity by this

APPENDIX. 227

little neat brown, sweet-voiced stammerer and
haunter of old stone fences.
Yellow-throated Vireo. A leisurely cAce-up, —
CHEErup, — usually the first half with the rising in-
flection, the last with the falling ; often cAti- wip, —
TWEE-eh (the '* twee " uttered vrith wondrous cheeri
ness and energy).

A FINAL WORD ON THE WOLF SPIDERS.

(See Pages 120-123.)

The next season I noticed that by June 5, on the
hillside under a cut-leaved birch, a wolf spider, with
egg-sac attached to abdomen, had built, as an aerial
extension of her subterranean den, a huge cylindrical
tube of spider silk and inwoven grass-blades. It was
just two inches and a quarter high and three-quarters
of an inch in diameter, and looked like an observation
tower of glass, almost as insubstantial as Merlin's
prison of air. Evidently, this spider is a near cousin
of Mrs. Treat's turrtcola, or, more likely, the very
same species, —- hers building pentagonal towers of
sticks, and mine partly angular and partly cylindrical
towers of cobweb and grass, with many horizontal
cross ribs and bits of bark and rubbish woven in. I
caught this Lycosa perched on the top of her aerial
tower one fine day, sunning her egg-sac, though her
favorite position is down at the mouth of the den. In
the case of another specimen, the same season, near
by, there was a similar tower ; and here the angular
form was very noticeable. Curiously, this Lycosa No.
5 (I found after she had abandoned the den) had met
with a stone when her tube was only half an inch be-
neath the surface of the ground ; aod, as the grass was
very high, she remained contented with a house of that

228 APPENDIX.

depth, although the usual depth is from fonr to six
inches. These towers, one saw plainly, were the result
of the environment, occurring not on the close-fihaven
lawn, but in the higher grass, and were intended to
get the spider nearer to the sunlight with her precious
egg-sac.

Three or four days after I first observed one of the
spiders mentioned above, I found she had -woven a
thick and tight roof to her tower (sealed over like a
huge bee cell). This seems to have been done to
avoid the impertinent irruption of insects. After the
young were hatched and clung in a hideous swarm
about her whole body, she paid little attention to the
silk tower, and only used the mouth of the den for
lurking in in the daytime, head downward and only
her eyes and black legs protruding from her clustering
progeny of tiny spiders.

INDEX.

Albino birds, 131-134.
Apple Blossom Day, 31.
Appleseed, Johnny, 193.
Apples, smell of, 7.
Apnleius, 90.

B

Boes, sense of smell, 4.

BicycUsts, 147, 149, 150.

Birds, imported, 39 ; white, 131-
134.

Blackbirds, red-shouldered, 34,
36.

Blackbenying, 140.

Blizzard, a Tom Thumb, 164.

Bluebird, 31, 32.

Blue jay, 185-189; Chaucer^s,
188; Whitcomb Riley on,
188, 189.

BoboUnk, 72-79.

Book, first ever written, 146.

Bouquets, too large, 86.

Brier-wood pipes, 10.

Burroughs, John, 32, 165 ; esti-
mated, 152-154.

Burton, Robert, 6.

Bush tit, 65.

Butterflies, scent scales, 14.

Caliph Abdalrahman, 1.
Carman, Bliss, 149.
Carolina mimic, 36, 57.

Carpenter, Edward, 81.

Cat^bu-d, 36, 57.

Cedar hird, 57, 58.

Celery, 138.

Chamberlin, Jos. E., 33, 11^

(note), 128.
Chats, 58.

Cherry blossom festival, 31.
Cherry picking, 84, 85.
ChUd, Lydia Maria, 83, 84.
Chipmunks, 9.
Chippie, 66-^.
Chopping, 199-202.
Cicada, 117, 118.
Classic writings, 88-90.
Clay, the, and the rose, 5.
Coffee-headed bunting, 44, 47.
Columbine, 85, 86.
Cow-bird, 46, 47.
Crow, white, 132; etymology

of KOfXL^, 133 (note), 174H85;

nest, 179; warble of, 179,

180 ; and the wrens, 181 ;

trial of, 181, 182.
Crystallization, 168.
Cuckoo, 97, 98.
Currant, 81-84.

D

Daphnis and Chloe, 117, 118.

Darwin, E., 125, 126.

Dawn in Shakspere, 170, 171.

Digressions, 29.

Dog's nose, 13.

Donkey, of Lucian, 90.

Droughts, 113, 215, 216.

280

INDEX.

£

Eglantine, 0.
Elms, English, 192.

Farm, life on a Western, 143-

146.
Foot-paths, 150. '
Forest clearing, 27.
Fox hunting, etc., 172, 173.
Fox, the pet, 172, 173.
Fragrances, health-giving, 4;

nourishing, 5.
Fro8t7 panes, 165, 166.

G

Geese, wild, 32, 33.

Goethe, 1.

Gold-fish, 130.

Grafting, 195-197.

Grass, 19, 20; somniferous, 112.

Grasshoppers, 117.

Greenhouses, 92-94.

Gypsy moths, 97. ^

H

Haying, 114, 115.

Heat squall, 22.

Hippodromus, 206 (note).

Homer, 87.

Hottest town, 112.

House, buildinff your own, 100,

101 ; made of boat, 101.
Humming-bird, 107-109.
Hyacinths of the ancients, 30.
Hyla, 18.

Indigo bird, 68-72.

J
Jefferson, Joe, and crows, 175.

Landor, 1, 6.

Lanes, old, of New England,

150, 151.
Lark, meadow, 115.
Left-handedness, 202.
Library. See Public.
Lilac, 12, 13; early blooming

of, 22.
Locust, 117.
Longfellow, 8.
Lowell, James Russell, 156

(text and note).

M

Magliabecchi, 123, 124.

Meadow lark, 115.

Migration of birds and batter-
flies, 33, 34.

Miller, Mrs. Olive Thome, 58. -

Mocking-bird, poem on, 37, 38.

Moon, dark of the, etc., 136,
137.

Moonrise, 136.

Mosquito, 115, 116.

Moth, sphinx, 109, 110.

Mowing, 20.

Mulberry, 141, 142.

Muskrats, 130.

N

Newspapers, the daily, as liars,
112; defiling nature, 191, 192.

Niagara, 214, 215.

Nightingale for America, 39,
40.

Nuttall, 62.

Nutting, 139, 140.

Odor, what is it? 17.
Oriole, Baltimore, 60-^ ; or-
chard, 61, 62 ; nests, 63-65.
Oven-bird, 51.

INDEX.

231

Pawpaw, 140, 141.
Peabody bird, 43-45.
Perfumes, harmonies of and as

motifs, 14, 15.
Perfume piano, 15, 16.
Persimmon, 142, 143.
Phoenix, Ariz., 112.
Piano, perfume, 15, 16.
Pliny, the Younger, 198, 204-

206.
Plum blossom festival, 31.
Poppy, 86, 87.
Pores in skin, 112.
Porter, Noah, his straw hat, 80.
Prairie life, 143-146.
Public Library of Boston, 166

(note).

Q

Quince, 138; grafting of, 197.

R

Rain, summer, 114, 216-218.

Raven, 175 ; white, 132.

Renan's *' Caliban,'* 91.

Rhubarb, 19.

Robin, 98-107.

Roses, 6, 11, 90-96 ; La France

the best, 95 ; Wichuraina, 95,

96.
" Rum " and "Brandy," 145.
Running, 157.

S

Sandals, 81.

SchildbiirgerSy 12.

Seasons of 1894, 1895, 21.

Shakspere's dawns, 170, 171.

Shower, thunder, 114.

Smell, sense of, 6, 7, 13-15.

Smoke, garden, 23; what is
smoke? 24; of locomotive,
25; blue. 25, 26; tangled in
shower, 28.

Snow stars, 167.

Snow-storms, 159-165; Emer-
son and Burroughs on, 165.

Song-sparrow, 45, 46.

Sorghum, 146.

Sparrow, English, 38 ; white-
throated, 4^5 ; song, 45,46;
English, and wrens, 55, 56;
chipping, 66-68.

Spenser's fountains and
streams,. 209-211.

Sphinx moth, 109, 110.

Spiders, 11&-127 ; tarantulas,
120-123; aeronautic, 124;
and Darwin, 125 ; as athletes,
125 ; white, 126, 127.

Spring, early, 21.

Squirrel, 39.

Simrise in winter, 169.

Sunsets in summer, 134-136;
red, 134.

Sweet-brier, 9, 10.

Tanager, 56, 57.

Teacher bird, 51.

Tennyson's water imagery, 206-
208.

Theocritus, fountains in, 208,
209.

Thoreau, 151, 152; studies of
water, 212, 213.

Thrasher, brown, 35-37.

Toad, 21.

Travel by stage, 147 ; by canal-
boat, 148; tliree kinds of,
148.

Trees, 190-202 ; planting of, by
the Laird of Dumbiedikes'
son, 193; by Frederick
Tudor, ** Johnny Appleseed,"
and John Bromfield, 193;
transplanting, 194, 195; graft-
ing, 195-197 ; hibernating,
198 ; constant temperature
of, 201.

Turner's "Slave Ship," 136,
136.