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https://archive.org/details/birdsbeesotherstOOburr

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BY JOHN BURROUGHS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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CONTENTS

I.

Biographical Sketch
Birds.

Bird Enemies .

The Tragedies of the Nests

Bees.

An Idyl of the Honey-Bee
The Pastoral Bees .

II

Sharp Eyes

The Apple

A Taste of Maine Birch

.

.

. 41

Winter Neighbors .

Notes by the Way.

I. The Weather-wise Muskrat

.

.

. 84

II. Cheating the Squirrels

.

.

.

. 88

III. Fox and Hound

.

.

.

. 89

IV. The Woodchuck

.

•

.

. 92

III.

A Bunch of Herbs

.

.

*

. 9

Strawberries .

119673

PAGE

. I

. 7

. 21

. 45
. 66

IV

CONTENTS

A March Chronicle ....... 44

A Spray of Pine 55

A Spring Relish .66

English Woods : A Contrast 83

Autumn Tides .92

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

Nature chose the spring of the year for the time of
John Burroughs’s birth. A little before the day when the
wake-robin shows itself, that the observer might be on hand
for the sight, he was bom in Roxbury, Delaware County,
New York, on the western borders of the Catskill Moun-
tains ; the precise date was April 3, 1837. Until 1863 he
remained in the country about his native place, working
on his father’s farm, getting his schooling in the distinct
school and neighboring academies, and taking his turn also
as teacher. As he himself has hinted, the originality,
freshness, and wholesomeness of his writings are probably
due in great measure to the unliterary surroundings of
his early life, which allowed his mind to form itself on
unconventional lines, and to the later companionships with
unlettered men, which kept him in touch with the sturdy
simplicities of life.

From the very beginnings of his taste for literature, the
essay was his favorite form. Dr. Johnson was the prophet
of his youth, but he soon transferred his allegiance to Emer-
son, who for many years remained his “ master enchanter.”
To cure himself of too close an imitation of the Concord
seer, which showed itself in his first magazine article, Ex-
pression, he took to writing his sketches of nature, and
about this time he fell in with the writings of Thoreau,
which doubtless confirmed and encouraged him in this
direction. But of all authors and of all men, Walt Whit-
man, in his personality and as a literary force, seems to
have made the profoundest impression upon Mr. Burroughs,
though doubtless Emerson had a greater influence on his
style of writing.

2

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

Expression appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1860,
and most of his contributions to ^literature have been in the
form of papers first published in the magazines, and after-
wards collected into books. He more than once paid
tribute to his teachers in literature. His first book, now
out of print, was Notes on Walt Whitman , as Poet and
Person , published in 1867 ; and Whitman : a Study ,
which appeared in 1896, is a more extended treatment of
the man and his poetry and philosophy. Birds and Poets ,
too, contains a paper on Whitman, entitled The Flight
of the Eagle, besides an essay on Emerson, whom he also
treated incidentally in his paper, Matthew Arnold on Em-
erson and Carlyle , in Indoor Studies ; and the latter
volume contains his essay on Thoreau.

In the autumn of 1863 he went to Washington, and in
the following January entered the Treasury Department.
He was for some years an assistant in the office of the
Comptroller of the Currency, and later chief of the organ!'
zation division of that Bureau. For some time he was
keeper of one of the vaults, and for a great part of the day
his only duty was to be at his desk. In these leisure hours
his mind traveled off into the country, where his previous
life had been spent, and with the help of his pen, always a
faithful friend and magician, he lived over again those
happy days, now happier still with the glamour of all past
pleasures. In this way he wrote Wake-Bobin and a part
of Winter Sunshine. It must not be supposed, however,
that he was deprived of outdoor pleasures while at Wash-
ington. On the contrary, he enjoyed many walks in the
suburbs of the capital, and in those days the real country
came up to the very edges of the city. His Spring at the
Capital , Winter Sunshine, A March Chronicle, and other
papers bear the fruit of his life on the Potomac. He went
to England in 1871 on business for the Treasury Depart-
ment, and again on his own account a dozen years later.
The record of the two visits is to be found mainly in his
chapters on An October Abroad , contained in the volume

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

Winter Sunshine, and in the papers gathered into the
volume Fresh Fields.

He resigned his place in the Treasury in 1872, and was
appointed receiver of a broken national bank. Later, until
1884, his business occupation was that of a National Bank
Examiner. An article contributed by him to The Century
Magazine for March, 1881, on Broken Banks and Lax
Directors, is perhaps the only literary outcome of this occu-
pation, but the keen powers of observation, trained in the
field of nature, could not fail to disclose themselves in
analyzing columns of figures. After leaving Washington
Mr. Burroughs bought a fruit farm at West Park, near
Esopus, on the Hudson, and there building his house from
the stones found in his fields, has given himself the best
conditions for that humanizing of nature which constitutes
the charm of his books. He was married in 1857 to a lady
living in the New York village where he was at the time
teaching. He keeps his country home the year round, only
occasionally visiting New York. The cultivation of grapes
absorbs the greater part of his time ; but he has by no means
given over letters. His work, which has long found ready
acceptance both at home and abroad, is now passing into that
security of fame which comes from its entrance into the
school-life of American children. An account of its use in
Chicago schools may be found in the introduction written
by Miss Mary E. Burt, a Chicago teacher, for the collection
of essays, Birds and Bees, published in the Riverside Liter-
ature Series.

Besides his outdoor sketches and the other papers already
mentioned, Mr. Burroughs has written a number of critical
essays on life and literature, published in Indoor Studies,
and other volumes. He has also taken his readers into his
confidence in An Egotistical Chapter, the final one of his
Indoor Studies ; and in the Introduction to the Riverside
Edition of his writings he has given us further glimpses of
his private intellectual life.

Probably no other American writer has a greater sym*

4

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

pathy with, and a keener enjoyment of, country life in all
its phases — farming, camping, fishing, walking — than has
John Burroughs. His books are redolent of the soil, and
have such “freshness and primal sweetness,” that we need
not be told that the pleasure he gets from his walks and
excursions is by no means over when he steps inside his
doors again. As he tells us on more than one occasion, he
finds he can get much more out of his outdoor experiences
by thinking them over, and writing them out afterwards.

This volume contains some of Mr. Burroughs’s best pa-
pers on birds and bees, and his observations of animal life.
The last third is arranged with special reference to what he
has to say of trees and flowers, though it does not, by any
means, include all he has written about them. Bird Ene-
mies and The Tragedies of the Nests appear in the volume
Signs and Seasons , An Idyl of the Honey-Bee is from
Bepacton. and The Pastoral Bees from Locusts and Wild
Honey ; Sharp Eyes is from the same volume, The Apple
is from Winter Sunshine, A Taste of Maine Birch and
Winter Neighbors from Signs and Seasons, and Notes by
the Way from Pepacton. A Bunch of Herbs is taken from
the volume entitled Pepacton , Strawberries comes from
Locusts and Wild Honey, A March Chronicle and Autumn
Tides from Winter Sunshine, while Signs and Seasons
contributes A Spray of Pine and A Spring Belish, and
Fresh Fields furnishes English Woods : A Contrast.

BIRDS AND BEES

BIRDS.

BIRD ENEMIES.

How surely the birds know their enemies ! See
how the wrens and robins and bluebirds pursue and
scold the cat, while they take little or no notice of the
dog ! Even the swallow will fight the cat, and, re-
lying too confidently upon its powers of flight, some-
times swoops down so near to its enemy that it is
caught by a sudden stroke of the cat’s paw. The
only case I know of in which our small birds fail to
recognize their enemy is furnished by the shrike ; ap-
parently the little birds do not know that this modest-
colored bird is an assassin. At least, I have never
seen them scold or molest him, or utter any outcries
at his presence, as they usually do at birds of prey.
Probably it is because the shrike is a rare visitant,
and is not found in this part of the country during
the nesting season of our songsters.

But the birds have nearly all found out the trick
of the jay, and when he comes sneaking through the
trees in May and June in quest of eggs, he is quickly
exposed and roundly abused. It is amusing to see
the robins hustle him out of the tree which holds their
nest. They cry “ Thief, thief ! ” to the top of their
voices as they charge upon him, and the jay retorts in
a voice scarcely less complimentary as he makes off.

8

BIRDS .

The jays have their enemies also, and need to keep
an eye on their own eggs. It would be interesting to
know if jays ever rob jays, or crows plunder crows ;
or is there honor among thieves even in the feathered
tribes ? I suspect the jay is often punished by birds
which are otherwise innocent of nest-robbing. One
season I found a jay’s nest in a small cedar on the
side of a wooded ridge. It held five eggs, every one
of which had been punctured. Apparently some bird
had driven its sharp beak through their shells, with
the sole intention of destroying them, for no part of
the contents of the eggs had been removed. It looked
like a case of revenge ; as if some thrush or warbler,
whose nest had suffered at the hands of the jays, had
watched its opportunity, and had in this way retali-
ated upon its enemies. An egg for an egg. The jays
were lingering near, very demure and silent, and pro-
bably ready to join a crusade against nest-robbers.

The great bugaboo of the birds is the owl. The
owl snatches them from off their roosts at night, and
gobbles up their eggs and young in their nests. He
is a veritable ogre to them, and his presence fills them
with consternation and alarm.

One season, to protect my early cherries, I placed
a large stuffed owl amid the branches of the tree.
Such a racket as there instantly began about my
grounds is not pleasant to think upon ! The orioles
and robins fairly “ shrieked out their affright.” The
news instantly spread in every direction, and appar-
ently every bird in town came to see that owl in the
cherry-tree, and every bird took a cherry, so that I
lost more fruit than if I had left the owl in-doors.
With craning necks and horrified looks the birds
alighted upon the branches, and between their screams

BIRD ENEMIES.

9

would snatch off a cherry, as if the act was some re-
lief to their outraged feelings.

The chirp and chatter of the young of birds which
build in concealed or inclosed places, like the wood-
peckers, the house wren, the higli-hole, the oriole, is
in marked contrast to the silence of the fledgelings of
most birds that build open and exposed nests. The
young of the sparrows, — unless the social sparrow be
an exception, — warblers, fly-catchers, thrushes, never
allow a sound to escape them ; and on the alarm note
of their parents being heard, sit especially close and
motionless, while the young of chimney swallows, wood-
peckers, and orioles are very noisy. The latter, in its
deep pouch, is quite safe from birds of prey, except
perhaps the owl. The owl, I suspect, thrusts its leg
into the cavities of woodpeckers and into the pocket-
like nest of the oriole, and clutches and brings forth
the birds in its talons. In one case which I heard ofs
a screech-owl had thrust its claw into a cavity in a
tree, and grasped the head of a red-headed wood-
pecker; being apparently unable to draw its prey forth,
it had thrust its own round head into the hole, and in
some way became fixed there, and had thus died with
the woodpecker in its talons.

The life of birds is beset with dangers and mishaps
of which we know little. One day, in my walk, I
came upon a goldfinch with the tip of one wing se
curely fastened to the feathers of its rump, by what
appeared to be the silk of some caterpillar. The
bird, though uninjured, was completely crippled, and
could not fly a stroke. Its little body was hot and
panting in my hands, as I carefully broke the fetter.
Then it darted swiftly away with a happy cry. A
record of all the accidents and tragedies of bird life

10

BIRDS.

for a single season would show many curious incidents.
A friend of mine opened his box-stove one fall to kin-
dle a fire in it, when he beheld in the black interior
the desiccated forms of two bluebirds. The birds had
probably taken refuge in the chimney during some
cold spring storm, and had come down the pipe to the
stove, from whence they were unable to ascend. A
peculiarly touching little incident of bird life occurred
to a caged female canary. Though unmated, it laid
some eggs, and the happy bird was so carried away
by her feelings that she would offer food to the eggs,
and chatter and twitter, trying, as it seemed, to en-
courage them to eat ! The incident is hardly tragic,
neither is it comic.

Certain birds nest in the vicinity of our houses and
outbuildings, or even in and upon them, for protec-
tion from their enemies, but they often thus expose*
themselves to a plague of the most deadly character.

I refer to the vermin with which their nests often
swarm, and which kill the young before they are
fledged. In a state of nature this probably never
happens; at least I have never seen or heard of it
happening to nests placed in trees or under rocks. It
is the curse of civilization falling upon the birds which
come too near man. The vermin, or the germ of the
vermin, is probably conveyed to the nest in hen’s
feathers, or in straws and hairs picked up about the
barn or hen-house. A robin’s nest upon your porch
or in your summer-house will occasionally become an
intolerable nuisance from the swarms upon swarms of
minute vermin with which it is filled. The parent
birds stem the tide as long as they can, but are often
compelled to leave the young to their terrible fate.

One season a phcebe-bird built on a projecting stone

BIRD ENEMIES.

11

under the eaves of the house, and all appeared to go
well till the young were nearly fledged, when the nest
suddenly became a bit of purgatory. The birds kept
flieir places in their burning bed till they could hold
out no longer, when they leaped forth and fell dead
upon the ground.

After a delay of a week or more, during which 1
imagine the parent birds purified themselves by every
means known to them, the couple built another nest a
few yards from the first, and proceeded to rear a sec-
ond brood ; but the new nest developed into the same
bed of torment that the first did, and the three young
birds, nearly ready to fly, perished as they sat within
it. The parent birds then left the place as if it had
been accursed.

I imagine the smaller birds have an enemy in our
native white-footed mouse, though I have not proof
enough to convict him. But one season the nest of a
chickadee which I was observing was broken up in a
position where nothing but a mouse could have reached
it. The bird had chosen a cavity in the limb of an ap-
ple-tree which stood but a few yards from the house,
The cavity was deep, and the entrance to it, which was
ten feet from the ground, was small. Barely light
enough was admitted, when the sun was in the most
favorable position, to enable one to make out the num*
ber of eggs, which was six, at the bottom of the dim
interior. While One was peering in and trying to get
his head out of his own light, the bird would startle
him by a queer kind of puffing sound. She would
not leave her nest like most birds, but really tried to
blow, or scare, the intruder away ; and after repeated
experiments I could hardly refrain from jerking my
head back when that little explosion of sound came up

12

BIRDS.

from the dark interior. One night, when incubation
was about half finished, the nest was harried. A
slight trace of hair or fur at the entrance led me to
infer that some small animal was the robber. A
weasel might have done it, as they sometimes climb
trees, but I doubt if either a squirrel or a rat could
have passed the entrance.

Probably few persons have ever suspected the cat°
bird of being an egg-sucker ; I do not know that she
has ever been accused of such a thing, but there is
something uncanny and disagreeable about her, which
I at once understood, when I one day caught her in
the very act of going through a nest of eggs.

A pair of the least fly-catchers, the bird which says
chebec , chebec , and is a small edition of the pewee,
one season built their nest where I had them for many
hours each day under my observation. The nest was
a very snug and compact structure placed in the forks
of a small maple about twelve feet from the ground.
The season before, a red squirrel had harried the nest
of a wood-thrush in this same tree, and I was appre-
hensive that he would serve the fly-catchers the same
trick; so, as I sat with my book in a summer-house
near by, I kept my loaded gun within easy reach.
One egg was laid, and the next morning, as I made
my daily inspection of the nest, only a fragment of
its empty shell was to be found. This I removed,
mentally imprecating the rogue of a red squirrel.
The birds were much disturbed by the event, but did
not desert the nest, as I had feared they would, but
after much inspection of it and many consultations
together, concluded, it seems, to try again. Two
more eggs were laid, when one day I heard the birds
litter a sharp cry, and on looking up I saw a cat-bird

BIRD ENEMIES.

13

perched upon the rim of the nest, hastily devouring
the eggs. I soon regretted my precipitation in kill-
ing her, because such interference is generally unwise.
It turned out that she had a nest of her own with five
eggs, in a spruce-tree near my window.

Then this pair of little fly-catchers did what I had
never seen birds do before; they pulled the nest to
pieces and rebuilt it in a peach-tree not many rods
away, where a brood was successfully reared. The
nest was here exposed to the direct rays of the noon-
day sun, and to shield her young when the heat was
greatest, the mother-bird would stand above them
with wings slightly spread, as other birds have been
known to do under like circumstances.

To what extent the cat-bird is a nest-robber I have
no evidence, but that feline mew of hers, and that
flirting, flexible tail, suggest something not entirely
bird-like.

Probably the darkest tragedy of the nest is enacted
when a snake plunders it. All birds and animals, so
far as I have observed, behave in a peculiar manner
toward a snake. They seem to feel something of the
same loathing toward it that the human species expe-
riences. The bark of a dog when he encounters a
snake is different from that which he gives out on
any other occasion ; it is a mingled note of alarm,
inquiry, and disgust.

One day a tragedy was enacted a few yards from
where I was sitting with a book ; two song-sparrows
were trying to defend their nest against a black
snake. The curious, interrogating note of a chicken
who had suddenly come upon the scene in his walk,
first caused me to look up from my reading. There
were the sparrows, with wings raised in a way pecu®

14

BIRDS.

liarly expressive of horror and dismay, rushing about
a low clump of grass and bushes. Then, looking more
closely, I saw the glistening form of the black snake,
and the quick movement of his head as he tried to
seize the birds. The sparrows darted about and
through the grass and weeds, trying to beat the
snake off. Their tails and wings were spread, and,
panting with the heat and the desperate struggle, they
presented a most singular spectacle. They uttered no
cry, not a sound escaped them ; they were plainly
speechless with horror and dismay. Not once did
they drop their wings, and the peculiar expression
of those uplifted palms, as it were, I shall never
forget. It occurred to me that perhaps here was a
case of attempted bird-charming on the part of the
snake, so I looked on from behind the fence. The
birds charged the snake and* harassed him from every
side, but were evidently under no spell save that of
courage in defending their nest. Every moment or
two I could see the head and neck of the serpent
make a sweep at the birds, when the one struck at
would fall back, and the other would renew the as-
sault from the rear. There appeared to be little dan-
ger that the snake could strike and hold one of the
birds, though I trembled for them, they were so bold
and approached so near to the snake’s head. Time
and again he sprang at them, but without success,.
How the poor things panted, and held up their wings
appealingly ! Then the snake glided off to the near
fence, barely escaping the stone which I hurled at
him. I found the nest rifled and deranged ; whether
it had contained eggs or young I know not. The
male sparrow had cheered me many a day with his
song, and I blamed myself for not having rushed at

BIRD ENEMIES.

15

once to the rescue, when the arch enemy was upon
him. There is probably little truth in the popular
notion that snakes charm birds. The black snake is
the most subtle, alert, and devilish of our snakes, and
I have never seen him have any but young, helpless
thirds in his mouth.

We have one parasitical bird, the cow-bird, so-called
because it walks about amid the grazing cattle and
seizes the insects which their heavy tread sets going,
which is an enemy of most of the smaller birds. It
drops its egg in the nest of the song-sparrow, the
social sparrow, the snow-bird, the vireos, and the
wood-warblers, and as a rule it is the only egg in
the nest that issues successfully. Either the eggs of
the rightful owner of the nest are not hatched, or else
the young are overridden and overreached by th©
parasite and perish prematurely.

Among the worst enemies of our birds are the so-
called “ collectors,” men who plunder nests and mur-
der their owners in the name of science. Not the
genuine ornithologist, for no one is more careful of
squandering bird life than he ; but the sham ornithol-
ogist, the man whose vanity or affectation happens to
take an ornithological turn. He is seized with an
itching for a collection of eggs and birds because it
happens to be the fashion, or because it gives him the
air of a man of science. But in the majority of cases
the motive is a mercenary one ; the collector expects
to sell these spoils of the groves and orchards. Bob-
bing nests and killing birds becomes a business with
him. He goes about it systematically, and becomes
an expert in circumventing and slaying our songsters.
Every town of any considerable size is infested with
one or more of these bird highwaymen, and every

16

BIRDS.

nest in tlie country round about that the wretches caa
lay hands on is harried. Their professional term for
a nest of eggs is “ a clutch,” a word that well ex-
presses the work of their grasping, murderous fingers.
They clutch and destroy in the germ the life and
music of the woodlands. Certain of our natural
history journals are mainly organs of communication
between these human weasels. They record their
exploits at nest-robbing and bird-slaying in their col-
umns. One collector tells with gusto how he “ worked
his way ” through an orchard, ransacking every tree,
and leaving, as he believed, not one nest behind him.
He had better not be caught working his way through
my orchard. Another gloats over the number of
Connecticut warblers — a rare bird — he killed in
one season in Massachusetts. Another tells how a
mocking-bird appeared in southern New England and
was hunted down by himself and friend, its eggs
clutched,” and the bird killed. Who knows how
much the bird lovers of New England lost by that
foul deed ? The progeny of the birds would probably
have returned to Connecticut to breed, and their
progeny, or a part of them, the same, till in time the
famous songster would have become a regular visitant
fco New England. In the same journal still another
collector describes minutely how he outwitted three
humming-birds and captured their nests and eggs, — »
a clutch he was very proud of. A Massachusetts bird
harrier boasts of his clutch of the eggs of that dainty
little warbler, the blue yellow-back. One season
he took two sets, the next five sets, the next four sets,
besides some single eggs, and the next season four sets,
and says he might have found more had he had more
time. One season he took, in about twenty days, three

BIRD ENEMIES.

17

Bets from one tree. I have heard of a collector who
boasted of having taken one hundred sets of the eggs
of the marsh wren in a single day ; of another, who
took, in the same time, thirty nests of the yellow-
breasted chat ; and of still another, who claimed to
have taken one thousand sets of eggs of different birds
in one season. A large business has grown up under
the influence of this collecting craze. One dealer
in eggs has those of over five hundred species. He
says that his business in 1883 was twice that of
1882 ; in 1884 it was twice that of 1883, and so on.
Collectors vie with each other in the extent and
variety of their cabinets. They not only obtain eggs
in sets, but aim to have a number of sets of the same
bird, so as to show all possible variations. I hear of
a private collection that contains twelve sets of king-
birds’ eggs, eight sets of house-wrens’ eggs, four sets
of mocking-birds’ eggs, etc. ; sets of eggs taken in low
trees, high trees, medium trees ; spotted sets, dark sets,
plain sets, and light sets of the same species of bird.
Many collections are made on this latter plan.

Thus are our birds hunted and cut off, and all in
the name of science ; as if science had not long ago
finished with these birds. She has weighed and mea-
sured, and dissected, and described them, and their
nests, and eggs, and placed them in her cabinet ; and
the interest of science and of humanity now demands
that this wholesale nest-robbing cease. These inci-
dents I have given above, it is true, are but drops in
the bucket, but the bucket would be more than full if
we could get all the facts. Where one man publishes
his notes, hundreds, perhaps thousands, say nothing,
but go as silently about their nest-robbing as weasels.

It is true that the student of ornithology often feels

*

18 BIRDS.

compelled to take bird-life. It is not an easy matter
to “ name all the birds without a gun,” though an
opera -glass will often render identification entirely
certain, and leave the songster unharmed ; but once
having mastered the birds, the true ornithologist leaves
his gun at home. This view of the case may not be
agreeable to that desiccated mortal called the “ closet
naturalist,” but for my own part the closet naturalist
is a person with whom I have very little sympathy.
He is about the most wearisome and profitless creature
in existence. With his piles of skins, his cases of
eggs, his laborious feather-splitting, and his outlandish
nomenclature, he is not only the enemy of the birds
but the enemy of all those who would know them
rightly.

Not the collectors alone are to blame for the dimin-
ishing numbers of our wild birds, but a large share
of the responsibility rests upon quite a different class
of persons, namely, the milliners. False taste in
dress is as destructive to our feathered friends as are
false aims in science. It is said that the traffic in
the skins of our brighter plumaged birds, arising
from their use by the milliners, reaches to hundreds
of thousands annually. I am told of one middleman
who collected from the shooters in one district, in four
months, seventy thousand skins. It is a barbarous
taste that craves this kind of ornamentation. Think
of a woman or girl of real refinement appearing upon
the street with her head gear adorned with the scalps
of our songsters !

It is probably true that the number of our birds
destroyed by man is but a small percentage of the
number cut off by their natural enemies; but it is to
be remembered that those he destroys are in addition

BIRD ENEMIES.

19

to those thus cut off, and that it is this extra or ar*
tificial destruction that disturbs the balance of nature.
The operation of natural causes keeps the birds in
check, but the greed of the collectors ’ and milliners
tends to their extinction.

I can pardon a man who wishes to make a collect
tion of eggs and birds for his own private use, if he
will content himself with one , or two specimens of a
kind, though he will find any collection much less
satisfactory and less valuable than he imagines, but
the professional nest-robber and skin collector should
be put down, either by legislation or with dogs and
shot-guns.

I have remarked above that there is probably very
little truth in the popular notion that snakes can
“ charm ” birds. But two of my correspondents have
«each furnished me with an incident from his own ex-
perience, which seems to confirm the popular belief.
One of them writes from Georgia as follows : —

“ Some twenty-eight years ago I was in Calaveras
County, California, engaged in cutting lumber. One
day in coming out of the camp or cabin, my attention
was attracted to the curious action of a quail in the
air, which, instead of flying low and straight ahead as
usual, was some fifty feet high, flying in a circle, and
uttering cries of distress. I watched the bird and
saw it gradually descend, and following with my eye
*in a line from the bird to the ground saw a large
snake with head erect and some ten or twelve inches
above the ground, and mouth wide open, and as far
as I could see, gazing intently on the quail (I was
about thirty feet from the snake). The quail gradu-
ally descended, its circles growing smaller and smaller
and all the time uttering cries of distress, until its feet

20

BIRDS.

were within two or three inches of the mouth of the
snake ; when I threw a stone, and though not hitting
the snake, yet struck the ground so near as to frighten
him, and he gradually started off. The quail, how-
ever, fell to the ground, apparently lifeless. I went
forward and picked it up and found it was thoroughly
overcome with fright, its little heart beating as if it
would burst through the skin. After holding it in
my hand a few moments it flew away. I then tried
to find the snake, but could not. I am unable to say
whether the snake was venomous or belonged to the
constricting family, like the black snake. I can well
recollect it was large and moved off rather slow. As
I had never seen anything of the kind before, it made
a great impression on my mind, and after the lapse
of so long a time, the incident appears as vivid to
me as though it had occurred yesterday.”

It is not probable that the snake had- its mouth
open ; its darting tongue may have given that impres-
sion.

The other incident comes to me from Vermont.
“ While returning from church in 1876,” says the
writer, “ as I was crossing a bridge ... I noticed a
striped snake in the act of charming a song-sparrow.
They were both upon the sand beneath the bridge.
The snake kept his head swaying slowly from side to
side, and darted his tongue out continually. The
bird, not over a foot away, was facing the snake, hop-
ping from one foot to the other, and uttering a dis-
satisfied little chirp. I watched them till the snake
seized the bird, having gradually drawn nearer. As
he seized it, I leaped over the side of the bridge;
the snake glided away and I took up the bird, which
he had dropped. It was too frightened to try to fly,

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS. 21

and I carried it nearly a mile before it flew from my
open hand.”

If these observers are quite sure of what they saw,
then undoubtedly snakes have the power to draw
birds within their grasp. I remember that my mother
once told me that while gathering wild strawberries
she had on one occasion come upon a bird fluttering
about the head of a snake as if held there by a spell.
On her appearance, the snake lowered its head and
made off, and the panting bird flew away. A neigh-
bor of mine killed a black snake which had swallowed
a full-grown red squirrel, probably captured by the
same power of fascination.

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS.

The life of the birds, especially of our migratory
song-birds, is a series of adventures and of hair-breadth
escapes by flood and field. Very few of them prob-
ably die a natural death, or even live out half their
appointed days. The home instinct is strong in birds
as it is in most creatures ; and I am convinced that
every spring a large number of those which have sur-
vived the Southern campaign return to their old
haunts to breed. A Connecticut farmer took me out
under his porch, one April day, and showed me a
phoebe bird’s nest six stories high. The same bird
had no doubt returned year after year ; and as there
was room for only one nest upon her favorite shelf,
she had each season reared a new superstructure upon
the old as a foundation. I have heard of a white
robin — an albino — that nested several years in sue*

'22

BIRDS.

cession in the suburbs of a Maryland city. A sparrow
with a very marked peculiarity of song I have heard
several seasons in my own locality. But the birds
do not all live to return to their old haunts : the bobo-
links and starlings run a gauntlet of fire from the
Hudson to the Savannah, and the robins and meadow-
larks and other song-birds are shot by boys and pot-
hunters in great numbers, — to say nothing of their
danger from hawks and owls. But of those that do
return, what perils beset their nests, even in the most
favored localities ! The cabins of the early settlers,
when the country was swarming with hostile Indians,
were not surrounded by such dangers. The tender
households of the birds are not only exposed to hos-
tile Indians in the shape of cats and collectors, but to
numerous murderous and bloodthirsty animals, against
whom they have no defense but concealment. They
lead the darkest kind of pioneer life, even in our gar-
dens and orchards, and under the walls of our houses.
Not a day or a night passes, from the time the eggs
are laid till the young are flown, when the chances are
not greatly in favor of the nest being rifled and its
contents devoured, — by owls, skunks, minks, and
coons at night, and by crows, jays, squirrels, weasels,
snakes, and rats during the day. Infancy, we say, is
hedged about by many perils ; but the infancy of birds
is cradled and pillowed in peril. An old Michigan
settler told me that the first six children that were born
to him died ; malaria and teething invariably carried
them off when they had reached a certain age ; but
other children were born, the country improved, and
by and by the babies weathered the critical period,
and the next six lived and grew up. The birds, too,
would no doubt persevere six times and twice six timeS|

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS. 23

if the season were long enough, and finally rear their
family, but the waning summer cuts them short, and
but few species have the heart and strength to make
even the third trial.

The first nest-builders in spring, like the first settlers
near hostile tribes, suffer the most casualties. A large
proportion of the nests of April and May are de-
stroyed ; their enemies have been many months without
eggs, and their appetites are keen for them. It is a
time, too, when other food is scarce, and the crows
and squirrels are hard put. But the second nests of
June, and still more the nests of July and Augustr
are seldom molested. It is rarely that the nest of
the goldfinch or the cedar-bird is harried.

My neighborhood on the Hudson is perhaps excep-
tionally unfavorable as a breeding haunt for birds,
owing to the abundance of fish-crows and of red squir-
rels ; and the season of which this chapter is mainly
a chronicle, the season of 1881, seems to have been
a black-letter one even for this place, for at least nine
nests out of every ten that I observed during that
spring and summer failed of their proper issue. From
the first nest I noted, which was that of a bluebird,
— built (very imprudently I thought at the time) in
a squirrel-hole in a decayed apple-tree, about the last
of April, and which came to naught, even the mother-
bird, I suspect, perishing by a violent death, — to
the last, which was that of a snow-bird, observed in
August, among the Catskills, deftly concealed in a
mossy bank by the side of a road that skirted a wood,
where the tall thimble blackberries grew in abundance,
and from which the last young one was taken, when it
was about half grown, by some nocturnal walker or
daylight prowler, some untoward fate seemed hovering

24

BIRDS.

about them. It was a season of calamities, of violent
deaths, of pillage and massacre, among our feathered
neighbors. For the first time I noticed that the
orioles were not safe in their strong, pendent nests.
Three broods were started in the apple-trees, only a
few yards from the house, where, for previous seasons,
the birds had nested without molestation ; but this
time the young were all destroyed when about half
grown. Their chirping and chattering, which was so
noticeable one day, suddenly ceased the next. The
nests were probably plundered at night, and doubtless
by the little red screech-owl, which I know is a denizen
of these old orchards, living in the deeper cavities of
the trees. The owl could alight on the top of the nest,
and easily thrust his murderous claw down into
its long pocket and seize the young and draw them
forth. The tragedy of one of the nests was heightened,
or at least made more palpable, by one of the lialf-
fledged birds, either in its attempt to escape or while
in the clutches of the enemy, being caught and entan-
gled in one of the horse-hairs by which the nest was
stayed and held to the limb above. There it hung
bruised and dead, gibbeted to its own cradle. This
nest was the theatre of another little tragedy later in
the season. Some time in August a bluebird, indulging
its propensity to peep and pry into holes and crevices,
alighted upon it and probably inspected the interior $
but by some unlucky move it got its wings entangled
in this same fatal horse-hair. Its efforts to free itself
appeared only to result in its being more securely and
hopelessly bound ; and there it perished ; and there its
form, dried and embalmed by the summer heats, was
yet hanging in September, the outspread wings and
plumage showing nearly as bright as in life.

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS. 25

A correspondent writes me that one of his orioles
got entangled in a cord while building her nest, and
that though by the aid of a iadder he reached and
liberated her, she died soon afterward. He also
found a “chippie” (called also “hair bird”) sus-
pended from a branch by a horse-hair, beneath a
partly-constructed nest. I heard of a cedar-bird
caught and destroyed in the same way, and of two
young bluebirds, around whose legs a horse-hair had
become so tightly wound that the legs withered up
and dropped off. The birds became fledged, and
finally left the nest with the others. Such tragedies
are probably quite common.

Before the advent of civilization in this country, the
oriole probably built a much deeper nest than it usu-
ally does at present. When now it builds in remote
trees and along the borders of the woods, its nest, X
have noticed, is long and gourd-shaped ; but in or-
chards and near dwellings if is only a deep cup or
pouch. It shortens it up in proportion as the danger
lessens. Probably a succession of disastrous years,
like the one under review, would cause it to lengthen
it again beyond the reach of owl’s talons or jay-bird’s
beak.

The first song-sparrow’s nest I observed in the
spring of 1881 was in the field under a fragment of a
board, the board being raised from the ground a
couple of inches by two poles. It had its full com-
plement of eggs, and probably sent forth a brood of
young birds, though as to this I cannot speak posi-
tively, as I neglected to observe it further. It was
well sheltered and concealed, and was not easily come
at by any of its natural enemies, save snakes and
Weasels. But concealment often avails little. In

26

BIRDS.

May, a song-sparrow, that had evidently met with
disaster earlier in the season, built its nest in a thick
mass of woodbine against the side of my house, about
fifteen feet from the ground. Perhaps it took the
hint from its cousin, the English sparrow. The nest
was admirably placed, protected from the storms by
the overhanging eaves and from all eyes by the thick
screen of leaves. Only by patiently watching the
suspicious bird, as she lingered near with food in her
beak, did I discover its whereabouts. That brood is
safe, 1 thought, beyond doubt. But it was not ; the
nest was pillaged one night, either by an owl, or else
by a rat that had climbed into the vine, seeking an
entrance to the house. The mother-bird, after reflect-
ing upon her ill-luck about a week, seemed to resolve
to try a different system of tactics and to throw all
appearances of concealment aside. She built a nest
a few yards from the house beside the drive, upon a
smooth piece of greensward. There was not a weed
or a shrub or anything whatever to conceal it or mark
its site. The structure was completed and incubation
had begun before I discovered what was going on.
“Well, well,” I said, looking down upon the bird
almost at my feet, “ this is going to the other extreme
indeed ; now, the cats will have you.” The desper-
ate little bird sat there day after day, looking like a
brown leaf pressed down in the short green grass.
As the weather grew hot, her position became very
trying. It was no longer a question of keeping the
eggs warm, but of keeping them from roasting. The
sun had no mercy on her, and she fairly panted in the
middle of the day. In such an emergency the male
robin has been known to perch above the sitting
female and shade her with his outstretched wings.

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS.

27

But in this case there was no perch for the male bird,
had he been disposed to make a sunshade of himself.
I thought to lend a hand in this direction myself,
and so stuck a leafy twig beside the nest. This was
probably an unwise interference ; it guided disaster
to the spot ; the nest was broken up, and the mother-
bird was probably caught, as I never saw her after-
ward.

For several previous summers a pair of kingbirds
had reared, unmolested, a brood of young in an ap-
ple-tree, only a few yards from the house ; but dur-
ing this season disaster overtook them also. The
nest was completed, the eggs laid, and incubation had
just begun, when, one morning about sunrise, I heard
loud cries of distress and alarm proceed from the old
apple-tree. Looking out of the window I saw a crow,
which I knew to be a fish-crow, perched upon the
edge of the nest, hastily bolting the eggs. The parent
birds, usually so ready for the attack, seemed over-
come with grief and alarm. They fluttered about in
the most helpless and bewildered manner, and it was
not till the robber fled on my approach that they
recovered themselves and charged upon him. The
crow scurried away with upturned, threatening head,
the furious kingbirds fairly upon his back. The pair
lingered around their desecrated nest for several days,
almost silent, and saddened by their loss, and then
lisappeared. They probably made another trial else-
where.

The fish-crow only fishes when it has destroyed
all the eggs and young birds it can find. It is the
most despicable thief and robber among our feathered
creatures. From May to August it is gorged with the
fledgelings of the nest. It is fortunate that its range

28

BIRDS.

is so limited. In size it is smaller than the common
crow, and is a much less noble and dignified bird.
Its caw is weak and feminine — a sort of split and
abortive caw, that stamps it the sneak-thief it is.
This crow is common farther south, but is not found
in this State, so far as I have observed, except in the
valley of the Hudson.

One season a pair of them built a nest in a Norway
spruce that stood amid a dense growth of other or-
namental trees near a large unoccupied house. They
sat down amid plenty. The wolf established himself
in the fold. The many birds — robins, thrushes,
finches, vireos, pewees — that seek the vicinity of
dwellings (especially of these large country residences
with their many trees and park-like grounds), for the
greater safety of their eggs and young, were the easy
and convenient victims of these robbers. They plun-
dered right and left, and were not disturbed till their
young were nearly fledged, when some boys, who
had long before marked them as their prize, rifled
the nest.

The song-birds nearly all build low; their cradle
is not upon the tree-top. It is only birds of prey
that fear danger from below more than from above,
and that seek the higher branches for their nests. A
line five feet from the ground would run above more
than half the nests, and one ten feet would bound
more than three fourths of them. It is only the
oriole and the wood pewee that, as a rule, go higher
than this. The crows and jays and other enemies of
the birds have learned to explore this belt pretty
thoroughly. But the leaves and the protective color-
ing of most nests baffle them as effectually, no doubt,
as they do the professional oologist. The nest of the

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS.

29

red-eyed vireo is one of the most artfully placed in
the wood. It is just beyond the point where the eye
naturally pauses in its search ; namely, on the extreme
end of the lowest branch of the tree, usually four or
five feet from the ground. One looks up and down
and through the tree, — shoots his eye-beams into it
as he might discharge his gun at some game hidden
there, but the drooping tip of that low horizontal
branch — who would think of pointing his piece just
there ? If a crow or other marauder were to alight
upon the branch or upon those above it, the nest
would be screened from him by the large leaf that
usually forms a canopy immediately above it. The
nest-hunter, standing at the foot of the tree and look-
ing straight before him, might discover it easily, were
it not for its soft, neutral gray tint which blends so
thoroughly with the trunks and branches of trees.
Indeed, I think there is no nest in the woods — no
arboreal nest — so well concealed. The last one I
saw was pendent from the end of a low branch of a
maple, that nearly grazed the clapboards of an un-
used hay-barn in a remote backwoods clearing. 1
peeped through a crack and saw the old birds feed
the nearly fledged young within a few inches of my
face. And yet the cow-bird finds this nest and drops
her parasitical egg in it. Her tactics in this as in
other cases are probably to watch the movements of
the parent bird. She may often be seen searching
anxiously through the trees or bushes for a suitable
nest, yet she may still oftener be seen perched upon
some good point of observation watching the birds as
they come and go about her. There is no doubt that,
in many cases, the cow-bird makes room for her own
illegitimate egg in the nest by removing one of the

30

BIRDS .

bird’s own. When the cow-bird finds two or more
eggs in a nest in which she wishes to deposit her own,
she will remove one of them. I found a sparrow’s
nest with two sparrow’s eggs and one cow-bird’s egg,
and another egg lying a foot or so below it on the
ground. I replaced the ejected egg, and the next day
found it again removed, and another cow-bird’s egg
in its place ; I put it back the second time, when it
was again ejected, or destroyed, for I failed to find
it anywhere. Very alert and sensitive birds like the
warblers often bury the strange egg beneath a second
nest built on top of the old. A lady, living in the
suburbs of an eastern city, one morning heard cries
of distress from a pair of house-wrens that had a nest
in a honeysuckle on her front porch. On looking out
of the window, she beheld this little comedy — com-
edy from her point of view, but no doubt grim-tragedy
from the point of view of the wrens ; a cow-bird with
a wren’s egg in its beak running rapidly along the
walk, with the outraged wrens forming a procession
behind it, screaming, scolding, and gesticulating as
only these voluble little birds can. The cow-bird
had probably been surprised in the act of violating
the nest, and the wrens were giving her a piece of
their minds.

Every cow-bird is reared at the expense of two or
more song-birds. For every one of these dusky little
pedestrians there amid the grazing cattle there are
two or more sparrows, or vireos, or warblers, the less(
It is a big price to pay — two larks for a bunting — •
two sovereigns for a shilling ; but Nature does not
hesitate occasionally to contradict herself in just this
way. The young of the cow-bird is disproportion-
ately large and aggressive, one might say hoggish.

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS.

31

When disturbed it will clasp the nest and scream, and
snap its beak threateningly. One hatched out in a
song-sparrow’s nest which was under my observation,
and would soon have overridden and overborne the
young sparrow, which came out of the shell a few
hours later, had I not interfered from time to time
and lent the young sparrow a helping hand. Every
day I would visit the nest and take the sparrow out
from under the pot-bellied interloper and place it on
top, so that presently it was able to hold its own
against its enemy. Both birds became fledged and
left the nest about the same time. Whether the race
was an even one after that, I know not.

I noted but two warblers’ nests during that season,
one of the black-throated blue-back and one of the
redstart, — the latter built in an apple-tree but a few
yards from a little rustic summer-house where I idle
away many summer days. The lively little birds,
darting and flashing about, attracted my attention for
a week before I discovered their nest. They prob-
ably built it by working early in the morning, be-
fore I appeared upon the scene, as I never saw then!
with material in their beaks. Guessing from their
movements that the nest was in a large maple that
stood near by, I climbed the tree and explored it
thoroughly, looking especially in the forks of the
branches, as the authorities say these birds build in a
fork. But no nest could I find. Indeed, how can
one by searching find a bird’s nest ? I overshot the
mark ; the nest was much nearer me, almost under
my very nose, and I discovered it, not by searching,
but by a casual glance of the eye, while thinking of
other matters. The bird was just settling upon it as
I looked up from my book and caught her in the act»

82

BIRDS.

The nest was built near the end of a long, knotty,
horizontal branch of an apple-tree, but effectually hid-
den by the grouping of the leaves ; it had three eggs,
one of which proved to be barren. The two young
birds grew apace, and were out of the nest early in
the second week ; but something caught one of them
the first night. The other probably grew to maturity,
as it disappeared from the vicinity with its parents
after some days.

The blue-back’s nest was scarcely a foot from the
ground, in a little bush situated in a low, dense wood
of hemlock and beech and maple, amid the Catskills,
— a deep, massive, elaborate structure, in which the
sitting bird sank till her beak and tail alone were vis-
ible above the brim. It was a misty, chilly day when
I chanced to find the nest, and the mother-bird knew
instinctively that it was not prudent to leave her four
half incubated eggs uncovered and exposed for a mo-
ment. When I sat down near the nest she grew very
uneasy, and after trying in vain to decoy me away by
suddenly dropping from the branches and dragging
herself over the ground as if mortally wounded, she
approached and timidly and half doubtingly covered
her eggs within two yards of where I sat. I disturbed
her several times to note her ways. There came to
be something almost appealing in her looks and man-
ner, and she would keep her place on her precious
eggs till my outstretched hand was within a few feet
of her. Finally, I covered the cavity of the nest with
a dry leaf. This she did not remove with her beak,
but thrust her head deftly beneath it and shook it off
upon the ground. Many of her sympathizing neigh-
bors, attracted by her alarm note, came and had a
peep at the intruder and then flew away, but the male

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS. 33

bird did not appear upon the scene. The final his-
tory of this nest I am unable to give, as I did not
again visit it till late in the season, when, of course, it
was empty.

Years pass without my finding a brown-thrasher’s
nest ; it is not a nest you are likely to stumble upon
in your walk ; it is hidden as a miser hides his gold,
and watched as jealously. The male pours out his
rich and triumphant song from the tallest tree he
can find, and fairly challenges you to come and look
for his treasures in his vicinity. But you will not find
them if you go. The nest is somewhere on the outer
circle of his song ; he is never so imprudent as to
take up his stand very near it. The artists who draw
those cosy little pictures of a brooding mother-bird
with the male perched but a yard away in full song,
do not copy from nature. The thrasher’s nest I found
was thirty or forty rods from the point where the
male was wont to indulge in his brilliant recitative.
It was in an open field under a low ground-juniper.
My dog disturbed the sitting bird as I was passing
near. The nest could be seen only by lifting up and
parting away the branches. All the arts of conceal-
ment had been carefully studied. It was the last
place you would think of looking, and, if you did look,
nothing was visible but the dense green circle of the
low-spreading juniper. When you approached, the
bird would keep her place till you had begun to stir
the branches, when she would start out, and, just
skimming the ground, make a bright brown line to
the near fence and bushes. I confidently expected
that this nest would escape molestation, but it did not.
Its discovery by myself and dog probably opened the
door for ill luck, as one day, not long afterward, when

34

BIRDS.

I peeped in upon it, it was empty. The proud song
of the male had ceased from his accustomed tree, and
the pair were seen no more in that vicinity.

The phcebe-bird is a wise architect, and perhaps
enjoys as great an immunity from danger, both in
its person and its nest, as any other bird. Its mod-
est, ashen-gray suit is the color of the rocks where it
builds, and the moss of which it makes such free use
gives to its nest the look of a natural growth or ac»
cretion. But when it comes into the barn or under
the shed to build, as it so frequently does, the moss is
rather out of place. Doubtless in time the bird will
take the hint, and when she builds in such places will
leave the moss out. I noted but two nests, the sum-
mer I am speaking of : one, in a barn, failed of issue,
on account of the rats, I suspect, though the little
owl may have been the depredator ; the other, in the
woods, sent forth three young. This latter nest was
most charmingly and ingeniously placed. I discov-
ered it while in quest of pond-lilies, in a long, deep,
level stretch of water in the woods. A large tree had
blown over at the edge of the water, and its dense mass
of up-turned roots, with the black, peaty soil filling
the interstices, was like the fragment of a wall several
feet high, rising from the edge of the languid current.
In a niche in this earthy wall, and visible and acces-
sible only from the water, a phoebe had built her nest
and reared her brood. I paddled my boat up and
came alongside prepared to take the family aboard.
The young, nearly ready to fly, were quite undisturbed
by my presence, having probably been assured that no
danger need be apprehended from that side. It was
not a likely place for minks, or they would not have
been so secure.

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS.

35

I noted but one nest of the wood pewee, and that,
too, like so many other nests, failed of issue. It was
saddled upon a small dry limb of a plane-tree that
stood by the roadside, about forty feet from the ground.
Every day for nearly a week, as I passed by I saw the
sitting bird upon the nest. Then one morning she
was not in her place, and on examination the nest
proved to be empty — robbed, I had no doubt, by the
red squirrels, as they were very abundant in its vicin-
ity, and appeared to make a clean sweep of every nest.
The wood pewee builds an exquisite nest, shaped and
finished as if cast in a mould. It is modeled without
and within with equal neatness and art, like the nest
of the humming-bird and the little gray gnat-catcher.
The material is much more refractory than that used
by either of these birds, being, in the present case,
dry, fine cedar twigs ; but these were bound into a
shape as rounded and compact as could be moulded
out of the most plastic material. Indeed, the nest of
this bird looks precisely like a large, lichen-covered,
cup-shaped excrescence of the limb upon which it is
placed. And the bird, while bitting, seems entirely at
her ease. Most birds seem to make very hard work
of incubation. It is a kind of martyrdom which ap-
pears to tax all their powers of endurance. They
have such a fixed, rigid, predetermined look, pressed
down into the nest and as motionless as if made of
cast-iron. But the wood pewee is an exception. She
is largely visible above the rim of the nest. Her atti-
tude is easy and graceful ; she moves her head this
way and that, and seems to take note of whatever goes
on about her ; and if her neighbor were to drop in for
a little social chat, slie could doubtless do her part.
In fact, she makes light and easy work of what, to

36

BIRDS ,

most other birds, is such a serious and engrossing
matter. If it does not look like play with her, it at
least looks like leisure and quiet contemplation.

There is no nest-builder that suffers more from
crows and squirrels and other enemies than the wood-
thrush. It builds as openly and unsuspiciously as if
it thought the whole world as honest as itself. Its
favorite place is the fork of a sapling, eight or ten feet
from the ground, where it falls an easy prey to every
nest-robber that comes prowling through the woods
and groves. It is not a bird that skulks and hides,
like the cat-bird, the brown-thrasher, the chat, or the
cheewink, and its nest is not concealed with the same
art as theirs. Our thrushes are all frank, open-man-
nered birds ; but the veery and the hermit build upon
the ground, where they at least escape the crows, owls,
and jays, and stand a better chance to be overlooked
by the red squirrel and weasel also ; while the robin
seeks the protection of dwellings and out-buildings.
For years I have not known the nest of a wood-thrush
to succeed. During the season referred to I observed
but two, both apparently a second attempt, as the
season was well advanced, and both failures. In one
case, the nest was placed in a branch that an apple-
tree, standing near a dwelling, held out over the high-
way. The structure was barely ten feet above the mid-
dle of the road, and would just escape a passing load
of hay. It was made conspicuous by the use of a
large fragment of newspaper in its foundation — an
unsafe material to build upon in most cases. What*
ever else the press may guard, this particular news-
paper did not guard this nest from harm. It saw the
egg and probably the chick, but not the fledgeling. A
murderous deed was committed above the public high-

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS.

37

way, but whether in the open day or under cover of
darkness I have no means of knowing. The frisky red
squirrel was doubtless the culprit. The other nest
was in a maple sapling, within a few yards of the
little rustic summer-house already referred to. The
first attempt of the season, I suspect, had failed in
a more secluded place under the hill ; so the pair had
come up nearer the house for protection. The male
sang in the trees near by for several days before I
chanced to see the nest. The very morning, I think,
it was finished, I saw a red squirrel exploring a tree
but a few yards away; he probably knew what the
singing meant as well as I did. I did not see the in-
side of the nest, for it was almost instantly deserted,
the female having probably laid a single egg, which
the squirrel had devoured.

If I were a bird, in building my nest I should fol-
low the example of the bobolink, placing it in the
midst of a broad meadow, where there was no spear of
grass, or flower, or growth unlike another to mark its
site. I judge that the bobolink escapes the dangers to
which I have adverted as few or no other birds do.
Unless the mowers come along at an earlier date than
she has anticipated, that is, before July 1st, or a skunk
goes nosing through the grass, which is unusual, she is
as safe as bird well can be in the great open of nature.
She selects the most monotonous and uniform place
she can find amid the daisies or the timothy and clover,
and places her simple structure upon the ground in
the midst of it. There is no concealment, except as
the great conceals the little, as the desert conceals the
pebble, as the myriad conceals the unit. You may
find the nest once, if your course chances to lead
you across it and your eye is quick enough to note

38

BIRDS .

the silent brown bird as she darts quickly away ;
but step three paces in the wrong direction, and
your search will probably be fruitless. My friend and
I found a nest by accident one day, and then lost it
again one minute afterward. I moved away a few
yards to be sure of the mother-bird, charging my
friend not to stir from his tracks. When I returned,
he had moved two paces, he said (he had really moved
four), and we spent a half hour stooping over the
daisies and the buttercups, looking for the lost clew.
We grew desperate, and fairly felt the ground all over
with our hands, but without avail. I marked the
spot with a bush, and came the next day, and with
the bush as a centre, moved about it in slowly
increasing circles, covering, I thought, nearly every
inch of ground with my feet, and laying hold of it with
all the visual power that I could command, till my
patience was exhausted, and I gave up, baffled. I be-
gan to doubt the ability of the parent birds themselves
to find it, and so secreted myself and watched. After
much delay, the male bird appeared with food in his
beak, and satisfying himself that the coast was clear,
dropped into the grass which I had trodden down in
my search. Fastening my eye upon a particular mea-
dow-lily, I walked straight to the spot, bent down, and
gazed long and intently into the grass. Finally my
eye separated the nest and its young from its sur-
roundings. My foot had barely missed them in my
search, but by how much they had escaped my eye I
could not tell. Probably not by distance at all, but
simply by unrecognition. They were virtually in-
visible. The dark gray and yellowish brown dry
grass and stubble of the meadow-bottom were exactly
copied in the color of the half-fledged young. More

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS.

39

than that, they hugged the nest so closely and formed
such a compact mass, that though there were five of
them, they preserved the unit of expression, — no
single head or form was defined ; they were one, and
that one was without shape or color, and not separa-
ble, except by closest scrutiny, from the one of the
meadow-bottom. That nest prospered, as bobolinks5
nests doubtless generally do ; for, notwithstanding
the enormous slaughter of the birds during their fall
migrations by Southern sportsmen, the bobolink ap-
pears to hold its own, and its music does not dimin-
ish in our Northern meadows.

Birds with whom the struggle for life is the sharpest
seem to be more prolific than those whose nest and
young are exposed to fewer dangers. The robin, the
sparrow, the pewee, etc., will rear, or make the at-
tempt to rear, two and sometimes three broods in a
season ; but the bobolink, the oriole, the kingbird, the
goldfinch, the cedar-bird, the birds of prey, and the
woodpeckers, that build in safe retreats, in the trunks
of trees, have usually but a single brood. If the bob-
olink reared two broods, our meadows would swarm
with them.

I noted three nests of the cedar-bird in August in
a single orchard, all productive, but all with one or
more unfruitful eggs in them. The cedar-bird is the
most silent of our birds, having but a single fine note,
so far as I have observed, but its manners are very
expressive at times. No bird known to me is ca-
pable of expressing so much silent alarm while on
the nest as this bird. As you ascend the tree and
draw near it, it depresses its plumage and crest,
stretches up its neck, and becomes the very picture
of fear. Other birds, under like circumstances, hardly

40

BIRDS.

change their expression at all till they launch into the
air, when by their voice they express anger rather
than alarm.

I have referred to the red squirrel as a destroyer
of the eggs and young of birds. I think the mischief
it does in this respect can hardly be overestimated.
Nearly all birds look upon it as their enemy, and at-
tack and annoy it when it appears near their breed-
ing haunts. Thus, I have seen the pewee, the cuckoo,
the robin, and the wood-thrush pursuing it with angry
voice and gestures. A friend of mine saw a pair of
robins attack one in the top of a tall tree so vigor-
ously that they caused it to lose its hold, when it fell
to the ground, and was so stunned by the blow as to
allow him to pick it up. If you wish the birds to
breed and thrive in your orchard and groves, kill
every red squirrel that infests the place ; kill every
weasel also. The weasel is a subtle and arch enemy
of the birds. It climbs trees and explores them with
great ease and nimbleness. I have seen it do so on
several occasions. One day my attention was ar-
rested by the angry notes of a pair of brown-thrash-
ers that were flitting from bush to bush along an old
stone row in a remote field. Presently I saw what it
was that excited them — three large red weasels, or
ermines coming along the stone wail, and leisurely and
half playfully exploring every tree that stood near it*
They had probably robbed the thrashers. They would
go up the trees with great ease, and glide serpent-like
out upon the main branches. When they descended
the tree they were unable to come straight down, like
a squirrel, but went around it spirally. How boldly
they thrust their heads out of the wall, and eyed me
and sniffed me, as I drew near, — their round, thin

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS. * 41

ears, their prominent, glistening, bead-like eyes, and
the curving, snake-like motions of the head and neck
being very noticeable. They looked like blood-suckers
and egg-suckers. They suggested something extremely
remorseless and cruel. One could understand the
alarm of the rats when they discover one of these
fearless, subtle, and circumventing creatures thread-
ing their holes. To flee must be like trying to escape
death itself. I was one day standing in the woods
upon a flat stone, in what at certain seasons was the
bed of a stream, when one of these weasels came un-
dulating along and ran under the stone upon which I
was standing. As I remained motionless, he thrust
out his wedge-shaped head, and turned it back above
the stone as if half in mind to seize my foot ; then he
drew back, and presently went his way. These wea-
sels often hunt in packs like the British stoat. When
I was a boy, my father one day armed me with an old
musket and sent me to shoot chipmunks around the
corn. While watching the squirrels, a troop of wea-
sels tried to cross a bar-way where I sat, and were so
bent on doing it that I fired at them, boy-like, simply
to thwart their purpose. One of the weasels was dis-
abled by my shot, but the troop was not discouraged,
and, after making several feints to cross, one of them
seized the wounded one and bore it over, and the
pack disappeared in the wall on the other side.

Let me conclude this chapter with two or three
more notes about this alert enemy of the birds and
the lesser animals, the weasel.

A farmer one day heard a queer growling sound in
the grass ; on approaching the spot he saw two weasels
contending over a mouse ; each had hold of the mouse
pulling in opposite directions, and were so absorbed in

42

BIRDS.

the struggle that the farmer cautiously put his hands
down and grabbed them both by the back of the neck.
He put them in a cage, and offered them bread and
other food. This they refused to eat, but in a few
days one of them had eaten the other up, picking his
bones clean and leaving nothing but the skeleton.

The same farmer was one day in his cellar when
two rats came out of a hole near him in great haste,
and ran up the cellar wall and along its top till they
came to a floor timber that stopped their progress,
when they turned at bay, and looked excitedly back
along the course they had come. In a moment a wea-
sel, evidently in hot pursuit of them, came out of the
hole, and seeing the farmer, checked his course and
darted back. The rats had doubtless turned to give
him fight, and would probably have been a match for
him.

The weasel seems to track its game by scent. A
hunter of my acquaintance was one day sitting in the
woods, when he saw a red squirrel run with great
speed up a tree near him, and out upon a long branch,
from which he leaped to some rocks, and disappeared
beneath them. In a moment a weasel came in full
course upon his trail, ran up the tree, then out along
the branch, from the end of which he leaped to the
rocks as the squirrel did, and plunged beneath them.

Doubtless the squirrel fell a prey to him. The
squirrel’s best game would have been to have kept to
the higher tree-tops, where he could easily have dis-
tanced the weasel. But beneath the rocks he stood a
very poor chance. I have often wondered what keeps
such an animal as the weasel in check, for weasels are
quite rare. They never need go hungry, for rats and
squirrels, and mice and birds arp everywhere. They

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS.

43

probably do not fall a prey to any other animal, and
very rarely to man. But the circumstances or agen-
cies that check the increase of any species of animal
or bird are, as Darwin says, very obscure and but
little known.

BEES.

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

There is no creature with which man has sur-
rounded himself that seems so much like a product o£
civilization, so much like the result of development
on special lines and in special fields, as the honey-bee.
Indeed, a colony of bees, with their neatness and love
of order, their division of labor, their public spirited-
ness, their thrift, their complex economies and their
inordinate love of gain, seems as far removed from a
condition of rude nature as does a walled city or a
cathedral town. Our native bee, on the other hand,
“ the burly, dozing humble-bee,” affects one more like
the rude, untutored savage. He has learned nothing
from experience. He lives from hand to mouth. He
luxuriates in time of plenty, and he starves in times
of scarcity. He lives in a rude nest or in a hole in
the ground, and in small communities ; he builds a
few deep cells or sacks in which he stores a little honey
and bee-bread for his young, but as a worker in wax
he is of the most primitive and awkward. The In-
dian regarded the honey-bee as an ill-omen. She was
the white man’s fly. In fact she was the epitome of
the white man himself. She has the white man’s
craftiness, his industry, his architectural skill, his
neatness and love of system, his foresight ; and abovf*

46

BEES.

all, his eager, miserly habits. The honey-bee’s great
ambition is to be rich, to lay up great stores, to
possess the sweet of every flower that blooms. She is
more than provident. Enough will not satisfy her ;
she must have all she can get by hook or by crook.
She comes from the oldest country, Asia, and thrives
best in the most fertile and long-settled lands.

Yet the fact remains that the honey-bee is essen-
tially a wild creature, and never has been and can-
not be thoroughly domesticated. Its proper home is
the woods, and thither every new swarm counts on
going ; and thither many do go in spite of the care
and watchfulness of the bee-keeper. If the woods
in any given locality are deficient in trees with suit-
able cavities, the bees resort to all sorts of make-
shifts ; they go into chimneys, into barns and out-
houses, under stones, into rocks, and so' forth. Sev-
eral chimneys in my locality with disused flues are
taken possession of by colonies of bees nearly every
season. One day, while bee-hunting, I developed a
line that went toward a farm-house where I had rea-
son to believe no bees were kept. I followed it up
and questioned the farmer about his bees. He said
he kept no bees, but that a swarm had taken pos-
session of his chimney, and another had gone under
the clapboards in the gable end of his house. He
had taken a large lot of honey out of both places
the year before. Another farmer told me that one
day his family had seen a number of bees examining
a knot-hole in the side of his house ; the next day as
they were sitting down to dinner their attention was
attracted by a loud humming noise, when they dis-
covered a swarm of bees settling upon the side of the
house and pouring into the knot-hole. In subsequent
years other swarms came to the same place.

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

47

Apparently, every swarm of bees before it leaves
the parent hive sends out exploring parties to look
up the future home. The woods and groves ar(
searched through and through, and no doubt the pri<
vacy of many a squirrel and many a wood mouse is
intruded upon. What cozy nooks and retreats they
do spy out, so much more attractive than the painted
hive in the garden, so much cooler in summer and
so much warmer in winter !

The bee is in the main an honest citizen ; she pre-
fers legitimate to illegitimate business ; she is never
an outlaw until her proper sources of supply fail ;
she will not touch honey as long as honey-yielding
flowers can be found ; she always prefers to go to
the fountain-head, and dislikes to take her sweets at
second hand. But in the fall, after the flowers have
failed, she can be tempted. The bee-hunter takes
advantage of this fact; he betrays her with a little
honey. He wants to steal her stores, and he first
encourages her to steal his, then follows the thief home
with her booty. This is the whole trick of the bee-
hunter. The bees never suspect his game, else by tak-
ing a circuitous route they could easily baffle him.
But the honey-bee has absolutely no wit or cunning out-
side of her special gifts as a gatherer and storer of
honey. She is a simple-minded creature, and can be
imposed upon by any novice. Yet it is not every nov-
ice that can find a bee-tree. The sportsman may track
his game to its retreat by the aid of his dog, but in
hunting the honey-bee one must be his own dog, and
track his game through an element in which it leaves
no trail. It is a task for a sharp, quick eye, and may
test the resources of the best wood-craft. One autumn
when I devoted much time to this pursuit, as the best

48

BEES.

means of getting at nature and the open-air exhilara^
tion, my eye became so trained that bees were nearly
as easy to it as birds. I saw and heard bees wherever
I went. One day, standing on a street corner in a
great city, I saw above the trucks and the traffic a line
of bees carrying off sweets from some grocery or com
fectionery shop.

One looks upon the woods with a new interest when
he suspects they hold a colony of bees. What a
pleasing secret it is ; a tree with a heart of comb-
honey, a decayed oak or maple with a bit of Sicily or
Mount Hymettus stowed away in its trunk or branches ;
secret chambers where lies hidden the wealth of ten
thousand little freebooters, great nuggets and wedges
of precious ore gathered with risk and labor from
every field and wood about.

But if you would know the delights of bee-hunt-
ing, and how many sweets such a trip yields beside
honey, come with me some bright, warm, late Sep-
tember or early October day. It is the golden season
of the year, and any errand or pursuit that takes us
abroad upon the hills or by the painted woods and
along the amber colored streams at such a time is
enough. So, with haversacks filled with grapes and
peaches and apples and a bottle of milk, — for we
shall not be home to dinner, — and armed with a
compass, a hatchet, a pail, and a box with a piece of
comb-honey neatly fitted into it — any box the size of
your hand with a lid will do nearly as well as the elab-
orate and ingenious contrivance of the regular bee-
hunter — we sally forth. Our course at first lies along
the highway, under great chestnut-trees whose nuts
are just dropping, then through an orchard and
across a little creek, thence gently rising through a

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

49

long series of cultivated fields toward some high,
uplying land, behind which rises a rugged wooded
ridge or mountain, the most sightly point in all this sec-
tion. Behind this ridge for several miles the country
is wild, wooded, and rocky, and is no doubt the
home of many wild swarms of bees. What a glee-
ful uproar the robins, cedar-birds, high-holes, and cow
black-birds make amid the black cherry-trees as we
pass along. The raccoons, too, have been here after
black cherries, and we see their marks at various
points. Several crows are walking about a newly
sowed wheat field we pass through, and we pause to
note their graceful movements and glossy coats. I
have seen no bird walk the ground with just the
same air the crow does. It is not exactly pride j
there is no strut or swagger in it, though perhaps
just a little condescension ; it is the contented, com-
plaisant, and self-possessed gait of a lord over his
domains. All these acres are mine, he says, and all
these crops; men plow and sow for me, and I stay
here or go there, and find life sweet and good
wherever I am. The hawk looks awkward and out
of place on the ground ; the game birds hurry and
skulk, but the crow is at home and treads the
earth as if there were none to molest or make him
afraid.

The crows we have always with us, but it is not
every day or every season that one sees an eagle.
Hence I must preserve the memory of one I saw
the last day I went bee-hunting. As I was laboring
up the side of a mountain at the head of a valley,
the noble bird sprang from the top of a dry tree
above me and came sailing directly over my head. I
saw him bend his eye down upon me, and I could

50

BEES.

hear the low hum of his plumage, as if the weh of
every quill in his great wings vibrated in his strong,
level flight. I watched him as long as my eye
could hold him. When he was fairly clear of the
mountain he began that sweeping spiral movement in
which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went with*
out once breaking his majestic poise till he appeared
to sight some far-off alien geography, when he
bent his course thitherward and gradually vanished
in the blue depths. The eagle is a bird of large
ideas, he embraces long distances ; the continent is
his home. I never look upon one without emotion ;
I follow him with my eye as long as I can. I
think of Canada, of the Great Lakes, of the Rocky
Mountains, of the wild and sounding sea-coast.
The waters are his, and the woods and the inacces-
sible cliffs. He pierces behind the veil of the storm,
and his joy is height and depth and vast spaces.

We go out of our way to touch at a spring run in
the edge of the woods, and are lucky to find a single
scarlet lobelia lingering there. It seems almost to
light up the gloom with its intense bit of color. Be-
side a ditch in a field beyond we find the great blue
lobelia (. Lobelia syphilitica'), and near it amid the
weeds and wild grasses and purple asters the most
beautiful of our fall flowers, the fringed gentian.
What a rare and delicate, almost aristocratic look the
gentian has amid its coarse, unkempt surroundings.
It does not lure the bee, but it lures and holds every
passing human eye. If we strike through the corner
of yonder woods, where the ground is moistened by
hidden springs and where there is a little opening
amid the trees, we shall find the closed gentian, a
rare flower in this locality. I had walked this wajf

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE .

51

many times before I chanced upon its retreat ; and
then I was following a line of bees. 1 lost the bees
but 1 got the gentians. How curiously this flower
looks, with its deep blue petals folded together so
tightly — a bud and yet a blossom. It is the nun
among our wild flowers, a form closely veiled and
cloaked. The buccaneer bumble-bee sometimes tries
to rifle it of its sweets. I have seen the blossom with
the bee entombed in it. He had forced his way into
the virgin corolla as if determined to know its secret,
but he had never returned with the knowledge he had
gained.

After a refreshing walk of a couple of miles we
reach a point where we will make our first trial — a
high stone wall that runs parallel with the wooded
ridge referred to, and separated from it by a broad
field. There are bees at work there on that golden-
rod, and it requires but little manoeuvring to sweep
one into our box. Almost any other creature rudely
and suddenly arrested in its career and clapped into
a cage in this way would show great confusion and
alarm. The bee is alarmed for a moment, but the bee
has a passion stronger than its love of life or fear of
death, namely, desire for honey, not simply to eat,
but to carry home as booty. “ Such rage of honey in
their bosom beats,” says Virgil. It is quick to catch
the scent of honey in the box, and as quick to fall
to filling itself. We now set the box down upon the
wall and gently remove the cover. The bee is head
and shoulders in one of the half-filled cells, and is
oblivious to everything else about it. Come rack,
come ruin, it will die at work. We step back a few
paces, and sit down upon the ground so as to bring
the box ag®iwMJi^^ In

I lmwmry of the university jj

% fir A i QCr, TA ' i

OF ALBERTA

52

BEES.

two or three minutes the bee is seen rising slowly
and heavily from the box. It seems loath to leave so
much honey behind and it marks the place well. It
mounts aloft in a rapidly increasing spiral, surveying
the near and minute objects first, then the larger and
more distant, till having circled about the spot five
or six times and taken all its bearings it darts away
for home. It is a good eye that holds fast to the bee
till it is fairly off. Sometimes one’s head will swim
following it, and often one’s eyes are put out by the
sun. This bee gradually drifts down the hill, then
strikes away toward a farm-house half a mile away,
where I know bees are kept. Then we try another
and another, and the third bee, much to our satisfac-
tion, goes straight toward the woods. We could see
the brown speck against the darker background for
many yards. The regular bee-hunter professes to be
able to tell a wild bee from a tame one by the color,
the former, he says, being lighter. But there is no
difference ; they are both alike in color and in man-
ner. Young bees are lighter than old, and that is all
there is of it. If a bee lived many years in the
woods it would doubtless come to have some distin-
guishing marks, but the life of a bee is only a few
months at .the farthest, and no change is wrought in
this brief time.

Our bees are all soon back, and more with them,
for we have touched the box here and there with the
cork of a bottle of anise oil, and this fragrant and
pungent oil will attract bees half a mile or more.
When no flowers can be found, this is the quickest
way to obtain a bee.

It is a singular fact that when the bee first finds
the hunter’s box its first feeling is one of anger ; it

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

53

is as mad as a hornet ; its tone changes, it sounds its
shrill war trumpet and darts to and fro, and gives
vent to its rage and indignation in no uncertain man-
ner. It seems to scent foul play at once. It says,
“ Here is robbery ; here is the spoil of some hive,
may be my own,” and its blood is up. But its ruling
passion soon comes to the surface, its avarice gets
the better of its indignation, and it seems to say,
“ W ell, I had better take possession of this and carry
it home.” So after many feints and approaches and
dartings off with a loud angry hum as if it would
none of it, the bee settles down and fills itself.

It does not entirely cool off and get soberly to
work till it has made two or three trips home with
its booty. When other bees come, even if all from
the same swarm, they quarrel and dispute over the
box, and clip and dart at each other like bantam
cocks. Apparently the ill feeling which the sight of
the honey awakens is not one of jealousy or rivalry,
but wrath.

A bee will usually make three or four trips from
the hunter’s box before it brings back a companion,
I suspect the bee does not tell its fellows what it has
found, but that they smell out the secret ; it doubt-
less bears some evidence with it upon its feet or pro®
boscis that it has been upon honey-comb and not upoia
flowers, and its companions take the hint and follow,
arriving always many seconds behind. Then the
quantity and quality of the booty would also betray
it. No doubt, also, there are plenty of gossips about
a hive that note and tell everything. “ Oh, did you
see that ? Peggy Mel came in a few moments ago
in great haste, and one of the up-stairs packers says
she was loaded till she groaned with apple-blossom

54

BEES.

honey which she deposited, and then rushed off again
like mad. Apple-blossom honey in October ! Fee,
fi, fo, fum ! I smell something ! Let ’s after.’’

In about half an hour we have three well-defined
lines of bees established — two to farm-houses and
one to the woods, and our box is being rapidly de~
pleted of its honey. About every fourth bee goes to
the woods, and now that they have learned the way
thoroughly they do not make the long preliminary
whirl above the box, but start directly from it. The
woods are rough and dense and the hill steep, and we
do not like to follow the line of bees until we have
tried at least to settle the problem as to the distance
they go into the woods — whether the tree is on this
side of the ridge or in the depth of the forest on
the other side. So we shut up the box when it is
full of bees and carry it about three hundred yards
along the wall from which we are operating. When
liberated, the bees, as they always will in such cases,
go off in the same directions they have been going ;
they do not seem to know that they have been moved.
But other bees have followed our scent, and it is not
many minutes before a second line to the woods is
established. This is called cross-lining the bees. The
new line makes a sharp angle with the other lines
and we know at once that the tree is only a few
rods into the woods. The two lines we have estab-
lished form two sides of a triangle of which the wall
is the base ; at the apex of the triangle, or where the
two lines meet in the woods, we are sure to find the
tree. We quickly follow up these lines, and where
they cross each other on the side of the hill we scan
every tree closely. I pause at the foot of an oak
and examine a hole near the root ; now the bees are

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

55

in this tree and their entrance is on the upper side
near the ground, not two feet from the hole I peer
into, and yet so quiet and secret is their going and
coming that I fail to discover them and pass on up
the hill. Tailing in this direction, I return to the
oak again, and then perceive the bees going out in a
small crack in the tree. The bees do not know they
are found out and that the game is in our hands, and
are as oblivious of our presence as if we were ants
or crickets. The indications are that the swarm is a
small one, and the store of honey trifling. In “ tak-
ing up ” a bee-tree it is usual first to kill or stupefy
the bees with the fumes of burning sulphur or with
tobacco smoke. But this course is impracticable on
the present occasion, so we boldly and ruthlessly as-
sault the tree with an ax we have procured. At the
first blow the bees set up a loud buzzing, fept we
have no mercy, and the side of the cavity is soon cut
away and the interior with its white-yellow mass of
comb-honey is exposed, and not a bee strikes a blow
in defense of its all. This may seem singular, but
it has nearly always been my experience. When a
swarm of bees are thus rudely assaulted with an ax,
they evidently think the end of the world has come,
and, like true misers as they are, each one seizes as
much of the treasure as it can hold ; in other words,
they all fall to and gorge themselves with honey, and
calmly await the issue. When in this condition they
make no defense and will not sting unless taken hold
of. In fact they are as harmless as flies. Bees are
always to be managed with boldness and decision.

Any half-way measures, any timid poking about, any
feeble attempts to reach their honey, are sure to be
quickly resented. The popular notion that bees have

56

BEES.

a special antipathy toward certain persons and a lik-
ing for certain others has only this fact at the bottom
of it ; they will sting a person who is afraid of them
and goes skulking and dodging about, and they will
not sting a person who faces them boldly and has no
dread of them. They are like dogs. The way to
disarm a vicious dog is to show him you do not fear
him ; it is his turn to be afraid then. I never had
any dread of bees and am seldom stung by them. I
have climbed up into a large chestnut that contained
a swarm in one of its cavities and chopped them out
with an ax, being obliged at times to pause and brush
\;he bewildered bees from my hands and face, and not
been stung once. I have chopped a swarm out of
an apple-tree in June and taken out the cards of
honey and arranged them in a hive, and then dipped
out the bees with a dipper, and taken the whole
home with me in pretty good condition, with scarcely
any opposition on the part of the bees. In reach-
ing your hand into the cavity to detach and remove
the comb you are pretty sure to get stung, for when
you touch the “ business end ” of a bee, it will sting
even though its head be off. But the bee carries the
antidote to its own poison. The best remedy for bee
sting is honey, and when your hands are besmeared
with honey, as they are sure to be on such occasions,
the wound is scarcely more painful than the prick of
a pin. Assault your bee-tree, then, boldly with your
ax, and you will find that when the honey is exposed
every bee has surrendered and the whole swarm is
cowering in helpless bewilderment and terror. Our
tree yields only a few pounds of honey, not enough
to have lasted the swarm till January, but no matter:
we have the less burden to carry.

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

57

In the afternoon we go nearly half a mile farther
along the ridge to a corn-field that lies immediately
in front of the highest point of the mountain. The
view is superb ; the ripe autumn landscape rolls away
to the east, cut through by the great placid river ; in
the extreme north the wall of the Catskills stands out
clear and strong, while in the south the mountains
of the Highlands bound the view. The day is warm
and the bees are very busy there in that neglected
corner of the field, rich in asters, flea-bane, and
golden-rod. The corn has been cut, and upon a stout,
but a few rods from the woods, which here drop
quickly down from the precipitous heights, we set up
our bee-box, touched again with the pungent oil. In
a few moments a bee has found it ; she comes up to
leeward, following the scent. On leaving the box she
goes straight toward the woods. More bees quickly
come, and it is not long before the line is well estab-
lished. Now we have recourse to the same tactics
we employed before, and move along the ridge to
another field to get our cross line. But the bees still
go in almost the same direction they did from the
corn stout. The tree is then either on the top of the
mountain, or on the other or west side of it. We
hesitate to make the plunge into the woods and seek
to scale those precipices, for the eye can plainly see
what is before us. As the afternoon sun gets lower,
the bees are seen with wonderful distinctness. They
fly toward and under the sun and are in a strong
light, while the near woods which form the back-
ground are in deep shadow. They look like large
luminous motes. Their swiftly vibrating, transparent
wings surround their bodies with a shining nimbus
that makes them visible for a long distance. They

58

BEES.

seem magnified many times. We see them bridge
the little gulf between us and the woods, then rise
up over the tree-tops with their burdens, swerving
neither to the right hand nor to the left. It is al-
most pathetic to see them labor so, climbing the
mountain and unwittingly guiding us to their treas-
ures. When the sun gets down so that his direction
corresponds exactly with the course of the bees, we
make the plunge. It proves even harder climbing
than we had anticipated; the mountain is faced by
a broken and irregular wall of rock, up which we pull
ourselves slowly and cautiously by main strength.
In half an hour, the perspiration streaming from
every pore, we reach the summit. The trees here
are all small, a second growth, and we are soon con-
vinced the bees are not here. Then down we go on
the other side, clambering down the rocky stair-ways
till we reach quite a broad plateau that forms some-
thing like the shoulder of the mountain. On the
brink of this there are many large hemlocks, and we
scan them closely and rap upon them with our ax.
But not a bee is seen or heard ; we do not seem as
near the tree as we were in the fields below ; yet if
some divinity would only whisper the fact to us we
are within a few rods of the coveted prize, which is
not in one of the large hemlocks or oaks that absorb
our attention, but in an old stub or stump not six feet
high, and which we have seen and passed several
times without giving it a thought. We go farther
down the mountain and beat about to the right and
left and get entangled in brush and arrested by pre-
cipices, and finally as the day is nearly spent, give
up the search and leave the woods quite baffled, but
resolved to return on the morrow. The next day we

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

59

come back and commence operations in an opening
in the woods well down on the side of the mountain,
where we gave up the search. Our box is soon
swarming with the eager bees, and they go back to-
ward the summit we have passed. We follow back
and establish a new line where the ground will per«
mit ; then another and still another, and yet the rid^
die is not solved. One time we are south of them,
then north, then the bees get up through the trees
and we cannot tell where they go. But after much
searching, and after the mystery seems rather to
deepen than to clear up, we chance to pause beside
the old stump. A bee comes out of a small open-
ing, like that made by ants in decayed wood, rubs its
eyes and examines its antennae, as bees always do
before leaving their hive, then takes flight. At the
same instant several bees come by us loaded with our
honey and settle home with that peculiar low com-
placent buzz of the well-filled insect. Here then is
our idyl, our bit of Virgil and Theocritus, in a de-
cayed stump of a hemlock tree. We could tear it
open with our hands, and a bear would find it an easy
prize, and a rich one too, for we take from it fifty
pounds of excellent honey. The bees have been
here many years, and have of course sent out swarm
after swarm into the wilds. They have protected
themselves against the weather and strengthened
their shaky habitation by a copious use of wax.

When a bee-tree is thus “taken up” in the middle
of the day, of course a good many bees are away from
home and have not heard the news. When they re-
turn and find the ground flowing with honey, and
piles of bleeding combs lying about, they apparently
do not recognize the place, and their first instinct is

60

BEES.

to fall to and fill themselves ; this done, their next
thought is to carry it home, so they rise up slowly
through the branches of the trees till they have at-
tained an altitude that enables them to survey the
scene, when they seem to say, “ Why, this is home,”
■and down they come again ; beholding the wreck and
ruins once more they still think there is some mis-
take, and get up a second or a third time and then
drop back pitifully as before. It is the most pathetic
sight of all, the surviving and bewildered bees strug-
gling to save a few drops of their wasted treasures.

Presently, if there is another swarm in the woods,
robber-bees appear. You may know them by their
saucy, chiding, devil-may-care hum. It is an ill wind
that blows nobody good, and they make the most of
the misfortune of their neighbors ; and thereby pave
the way for their own ruin. The hunter marks their
course and the next day looks them up. On this oc-
casion the day was hot and the honey very fragrant,
and a line of bees was soon established S. S. W.
Though there was much refuse honey in the old stub,
and though little golden rills trickled down the hill
from it, and the near branches and saplings were be-
smeared with it where we wiped our murderous hands,
yet not a drop was wasted. It was a feast to which
not only honey-bees came, but bumble-bees, wasps,
hornets, flies, ants. The bumble-bees, which at this
season are hungry vagrants with no fixed place of
abode, would gorge themselves, then creep beneath
the bits of empty comb or fragments of bark and
pass the night, and renew the feast next day. The
bumble-bee is an insect of which the bee-hunter sees
much. There are all sorts and sizes of them. They
are dull and clumsy compared with the honey-bee.

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE .

61

Attracted in the fields by the bee-hunter’s box, they
will come up the wind on the scent and blunder into
it in the most stupid, lubberly fashion.

The honey-bee that licked up our leavings on the
old stub belonged to a swarm, as it proved, about half
a mile farther down the ridge, and a few days after-
ward fate overtook them, and their stores in turn be-
came the prey of another swarm in the vicinity, which
also tempted Providence and were overwhelmed. The
first mentioned swarm I had lined from several points,
and was following up the clew over rocks and through
gulleys, when I came to where a large hemlock had
been felled a few years before and a swarm taken
from a cavity near the top of it ; fragments of the old
comb were yet to be seen. A few yards away stood
another short, squatty hemlock, and I said my bees
ought to be there. As I paused near it I noticed
where the tree had been wounded with an ax a couple
of feet from the ground many years before. The
wound had partially grown over, but there was an
opening there that I did not see at the first glance. I
was about to pass on when a bee passed me making
that peculiar shrill, discordant hum that a bee makes
when besmeared with honey. I saw it alight in the
partially closed wound and crawl home ; then came
others and others, little bands and squads of them
heavily freighted with honey from the box. The tree
was about twenty inches through and hollow at the
butt, or from the ax mark down. This space the
bees had completely filled with honey. With an ax
we cut away the outer ring of live wood and exposed
the treasure. Despite the utmost care, we wounded
the comb so that little rills of the golden liquid issued
from the root of the tree and trickled down the hilk

62

BEES.

The other bee-tree in the vicinity, to which I hav®
referred, we found one warm November day in less
than half an hour after entering the woods. It also
was a hemlock, that stood in a niche in a wall of
hoary, moss-covered rocks thirty feet high. The tree
hardly reached to the top of the precipice. The bees
entered a small hole at the root, which was seven or
eight feet from the ground. The position was a strik-
ing one. Never did apiary have a finer outlook or
more rugged surroundings. A black, wood-embraced
lake lay at our feet ; the long panorama of the Cats-
kills filled the far distance, and the more broken out-
lines of the Shawangunk range filled the rear. On
every hand were precipices and a wild confusion of
rocks and trees.

The cavity occupied by the bees was about three
feet and a half long and eight or ten inches in diam-
eter. With an ax we cut away one side of the tree
and laid bare its curiously wrought heart of honey. It
was a most pleasing sight. WThat winding and devi-
ous ways the bees had through their palace ! Wrhat
great masses and blocks of snow-white comb there
were ! Where it was sealed up, presenting that
slightly dented, uneven surface, it looked like some
precious ore. When we carried a large pail full of it
out of the woods, it seemed still more like ore.

Your native bee-hunter predicates the distance of
the tree by the time the bee occupies in making its
first trip. But this is no certain guide. You are
always safe in calculating that the tree is inside of a
mile, and you need not as a rule look for your bee^s
return under ten minutes. One day I picked up a
bee in an opening in the woods and gave it honey,
and it made three trips to my box with an interval

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

63

of about twelve minutes between them ; it returned
alone each time ; the tree, which I afterward found,
was about half a mile distant.

In lining bees through the woods, the tactics of th©
hunter are to pause every twenty or thirty rods, lop
away the branches or cut down the trees, and set the
bees to work again. If they still go forward, he goes
forward also and repeats his observations till the
tree is found or till the bees turn and come back
upon the trail. Then he knows he has passed the
tree, and he retraces his steps to a convenient dis-
tance and tries again, and thus quickly reduces the
space to be looked over till the swarm is traced
home. On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where
the surface alternated between deep gulfs and chasms
filled with thick, heavy growths of timber and sharp,
precipitous, rocky ridges like a tempest tossed sea, I
carried my bees directly under their tree, and set
them to work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not
thirty feet distant. One would have expected them
under such circumstances to have gone straight home,
as there were but few branches intervening, but they
did not ; they labored up through the trees and at=
tained an altitude above the woods as if they had
miles to travel, and thus baffled me for hours. Bees
will always do this. They are acquainted with th©
woods only from the top side, and from the air above ;
they recognize home only by land-marks here, and in
every instance they rise aloft to take their bearings.
Think how familiar to them the topography of the
forest summits must be — an umbrageous sea op
plain where every mark and point is known.

Another curious fact is that generally you will get
track of a bee-tree sooner when you are half a mile

m

BEES

from it than when you are only a few yards. Bees,
like us human insects, have little faith in the near at
hand ; they expect to make their fortune in a distant
field, they are lured by the remote and the difficult,
and hence overlook the flower and the sweet at their
very door. On several occasions I have unwittingly
set my box within a few paces of a bee-tree and
waited long for bees without getting them, when, on
removing to a distant field or opening in the woods
1 have got a clew at once.

I have a theory that when bees leave the hive,
Unless there is some special attraction in some other
direction, they generally go against the wind. They
would thus have the wind with them when they
returned home heavily laden, and with these little
navigators the difference is an important one. With
a full cargo, a stiff head-wind is a great hindrance,
but fresh and empty-handed they can face it with
more ease. Virgil says bees bear gravel stones as
ballast, but their only ballast is their honey bag.
Hence, when I go bee-hunting, I prefer to get to
windward of the woods in which the swarm is sup-
posed to have taken refuge.

Bees, like the milkman, like to be near a spring.
They do water their honey, especially in a dry time.
The liquid is then of course thicker and sweeter, and
will bear diluting. Hence, old bee-hunters look for
bee-trees along creeks and near spring runs in the
woods. I once found a tree a long distance from
any water, and the honey had a peculiar bitter flavor
imparted to it, I was convinced, by rain water sucked
from the decayed and spongy hemlock tree, in which
the swarm was found. In cutting into the tree, the
north side of it was found to be saturated with water

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

65

like a spring, which ran out in big drops, and had a
bitter flavor. The bees had thus found a spring or
a cistern in their own house.

Bees are exposed to many hardships and many
dangers. Winds and storms prove as disastrous to
them as to other navigators. Black spiders lie in
wait for them as do brigands for travelers. One day
as I was looking for a bee amid some golden-rod, I
spied one partly concealed under a leaf. Its baskets
were full of pollen, and it did not move. On lifting
up the leaf I discovered that a hairy spider was am-
bushed there and had the bee by the throat. The
vampire was evidently afraid of the bee’s sting, and
was holding it by the throat till quite sure of its death.
Yirgil speaks of the painted lizard, perhaps a species
of salamander, as an enemy of the honey-bee. We
have no lizard that destroys the bee ; but our tree-toad,
ambushed among the apple and cherry blossoms,
snaps them up wholesale. Quick as lightning that
subtle but clammy tongue darts forth, and the unsus-
pecting bee is gone. Yirgil also accuses the titmouse
and the woodpecker of preying upon the bees, and
our kingbird has been charged with the like crime,
but the latter devours only the drones. The workers
are either too small and quick for it, or else it dreads
their sting.

(i Yirgil, by the way, had little more than a child’s
^knowledge of the honey-bee. There is little fact
and much fable in his fourth Georgia. If he had
ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is
hard to see how he could have believed that the bee
in its flight abroad carried a gravel stone for ballast -r

‘ 1 And as when empty barks on billows float,
With sandy ballast sailors trim the boat ;

66

BEES.

So bees bear gravel stones, whose poising weight
Steers through the whistling winds their steady flight ; ”

or that when two colonies made war upon each other
they issued forth from their hives led by their kings
and fought in the air, strewing the ground with the
dead and dying : —

“ Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the plain,

Nor shaken oaks such show’rs of acorns rain.”

It is quite certain he had never been bee-huntingc
If he had, we should have had a fifth Georgic. Yet
he seems to have known that bees sometimes escaped
to the woods : —

“ Nor bees are lodged in hives alone, but found
In chambers of their own beneath the ground :

Their vaulted roofs are hung in pumices,

And in the rotten trunks of hollow trees. ’ ’

Wild honey is as near like tame as wild bees are
like their brothers in the hive. The only difference is
that wild honey is flavored with your adventure, which
makes it a little more delectable than the domestic
article.

THE PASTORAL BEES.

The honey-bee goes forth from the hive in spring
like the dove from Noah’s ark, and it is not till after
many days that she brings back the olive leaf, which
in this case is a pellet of golden pollen upon each hip,
usually obtained from the alder or the swamp willow.
In a country where maple sugar is made, the bees get
their first taste of sweet from the sap as it flows from
the spiles, or as it dries and is condensed upon the

THE PASTORAL BEES.

67

sides of the buckets. They will sometimes, in their
eagerness, come about the boiling place and be over-
whelmed by the steam and the smoke. But bees
appear to be more eager for bread in the spring than
for honey ; their supply of this article, perhaps, does
not keep as well as their stores of the latter ; hence
fresh bread, in the shape of new pollen, is diligently
sought for. My bees get their first supplies from the
catkins of the willows. How quickly they find them
out. If but one catkin opens anywhere within range,
a bee is on hand that very hour to rifle it, and it is a
most pleasing experience to stand near the hive some
mild April day and see them come pouring in with
their little baskets packed with this first fruitage of
the spring. They will have new bread now ; they
have been to mill in good earnest ; see their dusty
coats, and the golden grist they bring home with
them.

When a bee brings pollen into the hive, he ad-
vances to the cell in which it is to be deposited and
kicks it off as one might his overalls or rubber boots,
making one foot help the other ; then he walks off
without ever looking behind him ; another bee, one
of the indoor hands, comes along and rams it down
with his head and packs it into the cell as the dairy-*
maid packs butter into a firkin.

The first spring wild-flowers, whose shy faces among
the dry leaves and rocks are so welcome, yield no
honey. The anemone, the hepatica, the bloodroot,
the arbutus, the numerous violets, the spring beauty,
the corydalis, etc., woo all lovers of nature, but do
not woo the honey-loving bee. It requires more sun
and warmth to develop the saccharine element, and
the beauty of these pale striplings of the woods and

68

BEES.

groves is their sole and sufficient excuse for being
The arbutus, lying low and keeping green all winter,
attains to perfume, but not to honey.

The first honey is perhaps obtained from the flow-
ers of the red maple and the golden willow. The
latter sends forth a wild, delicious perfume. The
sugar maple blooms a little later, and from its silken
tassels a rich nectar js gathered. My bees will not
label these different varieties for me as I really wish
they would. Honey from the maple, a tree so clean
and wholesome, and full of such virtues every way,
would be something to put one’s tongue to. Or that
from the blossoms of the apple, the peach, the cherry,
the quince, the currant, — one would like a card of
each of these varieties to note their peculiar qualities.
The apple-blossom is very important to the bees. A
single swarm has been known to gain twenty pounds
in weight during its continuance. Bees love the
ripened fruit, too, and in August and September will
suck themselves tipsy upon varieties such as the sops-
of-wine.

The interval between the blooming of the fruit-trees
and that of the clover and the raspberry is bridged
over in many localities by the honey locust. What
a delightful summer murmur these trees send forth
at this season. I know nothing about the quality
of the honey, but it ought to keep well. But when
the red raspberry blooms, the fountains of plenty
are unsealed indeed ; what a commotion about the
hives then, especially in localities where it is ex-
tensively cultivated, as in places along the Hudson.
The delicate, white clover, which begins to bloom
about the same time, is neglected ; even honey it-
self is passed by for this modest, colorless, all but

THE PASTORAL BEES.

69

odorless flower. A field of these berries m June
sends forth a continuous murmur like that of an
enormous hive. The honey is not so white as that
obtained from clover, but it is easier gathered ; it is
in shallow cups while that of the clover is in deep
tubes. The bees are up and at it before sunrisej
and it takes a brisk shower to drive them in. But
the clover blooms later and blooms everywhere, and
is the staple source of supply of the finest quality of
honey. The red clover yields up its stores only to
the longer proboscis of the bumble-bee, else the bee
pasturage of our agricultural districts would be un-
equaled. I do not know from what the famous honey
of Chamouni in the Alps is made, but it can hardly
surpass our best products. The snow-white honey
of Anatolia in Asiatic Turkey, which is regularly
sent to Constantinople for the use of the grand seig-
nior and the ladies of his seraglio, is obtained from
the cotton plant, which makes me think that the
white clover does not flourish there. The white clover
is indigenous with us ; its seeds seem latent in the
ground, and the application of certain stimulants to
the soil, such as wood ashes, causes them to germinate
and spring up.

The rose, with all its beauty and perfume, yields
no honey to the bee, unless the wild species be sought
by the bumble-bee.

Among the humbler plants, let me not forget the
dandelion that so early dots the sunny slopes, and
upon which the bee languidly grazes, wallowing to
his knees in the golden but not over-succulent pas-
turage. From the blooming rye and wheat the bee
gathers pollen, also from the obscure blossoms of
Indian corn. Among weeds, catnip is the great favor*

BEES.

TO

ite. It lasts nearly the whole season and yields
richly. It could no doubt be profitably cultivated
in some localities, and catnip honey would be a
novelty in the market. It would probably partake
of the aromatic properties of the plant from which it
was derived.

Among your stores of honey gathered before mid-
summer, you may chance upon a card, or mayhap
only a square inch or two of comb, in which the liquid
is as transparent as water, of a delicious quality, with
a slight flavor of mint. This is the product of the
linden or basswood, of all the trees in our forest the
one most beloved by the bees. Melissa, the goddess
of honey, has placed her seal upon this tree. The
wild swarms in the woods frequently reap a choice
harvest from it. I have seen a mountain side thickly
studded with it, its straight, tall, smooth, light-gray
shaft carrying its deep-green crown far aloft, like the
tulip-tree or the maple.

In some of the Northwestern States there are large
forests of it, and the amount of honey reported stored
by strong swarms in this section during the time the
tree is in bloom is quite incredible. As a shade and
ornamental tree the linden is fully equal to the maple,
and if it were as ‘extensively planted and cared for, our
supplies of virgin honey would be greatly increased.
The famous honey of Lithuania in Russia is the pro-
duct of the linden.

It is a homely old stanza current among bee folk
that —

“ A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay ;
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon ;
But a swarm in July
Is not worth a fly.”

THE PASTORAL BEES.

71

A swarm in May is indeed a treasure ; it is, like an
April baby, sure to thrive, and will very likely itself
send out a swarm a month or two later ; but a swarm
in J uly is not to be despised ; it will store no clover
or linden honey for the “ grand seignior and the ladies
of his seraglio,” but plenty of the rank and wholesome
poor man’s nectar, the sun-tanned product of the ple=
beian buckwheat. Buckwheat honey is the black
sheep in this white flock, but there is spirit and
character in it. It lays hold of the taste in no
equivocal manner, especially when at a winter break-
fast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat cake.
Bread with honey to cover it .from the same stalk
is double good fortune. It is not black, either, but
nut-brown, and belongs to the same class of goods
as Herrick’s

“Nut-brown mirth and russet wit.”

How the bees love it, and they bring the delicious
odor of the blooming plant to the hive with them,
so that in the moist warm twilight the apiary is
redolent with the perfume of buckwheat.

Yet evidently it is not the perfume of any flower
that attracts the bees ; they pay no attention to the
sweet-scented lilac, or to heliotrope, but work upon
sumach, silkweed, and the hateful snapdragon. In
September they are hard pressed, and do well if they
pick up enough sweet to pay the running expenses
of their establishment. The purple asters and the
golden-rod are about all that remain to them.

Bees will go three or four miles in quest of honey,
but it is a great advantage to move the hive near
the good pasturage, as has been the custom from the
earliest times in the Old World. Some enterprising
person, taking a hint perhaps from the ancient Egyp-

72

BEES.

tians, who had floating apiaries on the Nile, has tried
the experiment of floating several hundred colonies
north on the Mississippi, starting from New Orleans
and following the opening season up, thus realizing
a sort of perpetual May or June, the chief attraction
being the blossoms of the river willow, which yield
boney of rare excellence. Some of the bees were
no doubt left behind, but the amount of virgin
honey secured must have been very great. In Sep-
tember they should have begun the return tripP
following the retreating summer South.

It is the making of the wax that costs with the
bee. As with the poet, the form, the receptacle,
gives him more trouble than the sweet that fills it,
though, to be sure, there is always more or less
empty comb in both cases. The honey he can have
for the gathering, but the wax he must make him-
self — must evolve from his own inner consciousness.
When wax is to be made the wax-makers fill them-
selves with honey and retire into their chamber for
private meditation ; it is like some solemn religious
rite ; they take hold of hands, or hook themselves
together in long lines that hang in festoons from
the top of the hive, and wait for the miracle to
transpire. After about twenty-four hours their
patience is rewarded, the honey is turned into wax,
minute scales of which are secreted from between
the rings of the abdomen of each bee ; this is taken
off and from it the comb is built up. It is cab
culated that about twenty-five pounds of honey are
used in elaborating one pound of comb, to say noth-
ing of the time that is lost. Hence the importance,
in an economical point of view, of a recent device
by which the honey is extracted and the comb re>

THE PASTORAL BEES.

73

turned intact to the bees. But honey without the
comb is the perfume without the rose, — it is sweet
merely, and soon degenerates into candy. Half the
delectableness is in breaking down these frail and
exquisite walls yourself, and tasting the nectar before
it has lost its freshness by the contact with the
air. Then the comb is a sort of shield or foil
that prevents the tongue from being overwhelmed
by the shock of the sweet.

The drones have the least enviable time of it.
Their foothold in the hive is very precarious. They
look like the giants, the lords of the swarm, but
they are really the tools. Their loud, threatening
hum has no sting to back it up, and their size and
noise make them only the more conspicuous marks
for the birds.

Toward the close of the season, say in July or
August, the fiat goes forth that the drones must die ;
there is no further use for them. Then the poor
creatures, how they are huddled and hustled about,
trying to hide in corners and by-ways. There is no
loud, defiant humming now, but abject fear seizes
them. They cower like hunted criminals. I have
seen a dozen or more of them wedge themselves into
a small space between the glass and the comb, where
the bees could not get hold of them, or where they
Seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter.
They will also crawl outside and hide under the edges
of the hive. But sooner or later they are all killed
or kicked out. The drone makes no resistance, ex-
cept to pull back and try to get away ; but (putting
yourself in his place) with one bee a-hold of your col-
lar or the hair of your head, and another a-hold of each
arm or leg, and still another feeling for your waist*
bands with his sting, the odds are greatly against you.

74

BEES.

It is a singular fact, also, that the queen is made,
not born. If the entire population of Spain or Great
Britain were the offspring of one mother, it might he
found necessary to hit upon some device by which a
royal baby could be manufactured out of an ordinary
one, or else give up the fashion of royalty. All the
bees in the hive have a common parentage, and the
queen and the worker are the same in the egg and in
the chick ; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in
the food ; the cell being much larger, and the food a
peculiar stimulating kind of jelly. In certain contin-
gencies, such as the loss of the queen with no eggs
in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an
ordinary bee, enlarge the cell by taking in the two
adjoining ones, and nurse it and stuff it and coddle it,
till at the end of sixteen days it comes out a queen.
But ordinarily, in the natural course of events, the
young queen is kept a prisoner in her cell till the
old queen has left with the swarm. Later on, the un-
hatched queen is guarded against the reigning queen,
who only wants an opportunity to murder every royal
scion in the hive. At this time both the queens, the
one a prisoner and the other at large, pipe defiance
at each other, a shrill, fine, trumpet-like note that any
ear will at once recognize. This challenge, not being
allowed to be accepted by either party, is followed, in a
day or two, by the abdication of the reigning queen ; she
leads out the swarm, and her successor is liberated by
her keepers, who, in her time, abdicates in favor of the
next younger. When the bees have decided that no
more swarms can issue, the reigning queen is allowed
to use her stiletto upon her unhatched sisters. Cases
have been known where two queens issued at the
same time, when a mortal combat ensued, encouraged

THE PASTORAL BEES.

-lb

by the workers, who formed a ring about them, but
showed no preference, and recognized the victor as
the lawful sovereign. For these and many other curb
ous facts we are indebted to the blind Huber.

It is worthy of note that the position of the queen
cells is always vertical, while that of the drones and
workers is horizontal; majesty stands on its head,
which fact may be a part of the secret.

The notion has always very generally prevailed
that the queen of the bees is an absolute ruler, and
issues her royal orders to willing subjects. Hence
Napoleon the First sprinkled the symbolic bees over
the imperial mantle that bore the arms of his dynasty ;
and in the country of the Pharaohs the bee was used
as the emblem of a people sweetly submissive to the
orders of its king. But the fact is, a swarm of bees
is an absolute democracy, and kings and despots can
find no warrant in their example. The power and
authority are entirely vested in the great mass, the
workers. They furnish all the brains and foresight of
the colony, and administer its affairs. Their word
is law, and both king and queen must obey. They
regulate the swarming, and give the signal for the
swarm to issue from the hive ; they select and make
ready the tree in the woods and conduct the queen
to it.

The peculiar office and sacredness of the queen
consists in the fact that she is the mother of the
swarm, and the bees love and cherish her as a mother
and not as a sovereign. She is the sole female bee
in the hive, and the swarm clings to her because she
is their life. Deprived of their queen, and of all
brood from which to rear one, the swarm loses all
heart and soon dies, though there be an abundance
of honey in the hive.

76

BEES.

The common bees will never use their sting upon
the queen ; if she is to be disposed of they starve her
to death ; and the queen herself will sting nothing but
royalty — nothing but a rival queen.

The queen, I say, is the mother bee ; it is undoubt*
edly complimenting her to call her a queen and in-
vest her with regal authority, yet she is a superb
creature, and looks every inch a queen. It is an
event to distinguish her amid the mass of bees when
the swarm alights ; it awakens a thrill. Before you
have seen a queen you wonder if this or that bee,
which seems a little larger than its fellows, is not she,
but when you once really set eyes upon her you do
not doubt for a moment. You know that is the queen.
That long, elegant, shining, feminine-looking creature
can be none less than royalty. How beautifully her
body tapers, how distinguished she looks, how delib-
erate her movements ! The bees do not fall down be-
fore her, but caress her and touch her person. The
drones or males, are large bees too, but coarse, blunt,
broad-shouldered, masculine-looking. There is but
one fact or incident in the life of the queen that looks
imperial and authoritative : Huber relates that when
the old queen is restrained in her movements by the
workers, and prevented from destroying the young
queens in their cells, she assumes a peculiar attitude
and utters a note that strikes every bee motionless,
and makes every head bow; while this sound lasts
not a bee stirs, but all look abashed and humbled, yet
whether the emotion is one of fear, or reverence, or
of sympathy with the distress of the queen mother,
is hard to determine. The moment it ceases and she
advances again toward the royal cells, the bees bite
and pull and insult her as before.

THE PASTORAL BEES.

77

I always feel that I have missed some good fortune
if I am away from home when my bees swarm.
What a delightful summer sound it is ; how they come
pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand
bees each striving to get out first ; it is as when the
dam gives way and lets the waters loose ; it is a flood
of bees which breaks upward into the air, and becomes
a maze of whirling black lines to the eye and a soft
chorus of myriad musical sounds to the ear. This
way and that way they drift, now contracting, now
expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick about some
branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some
other point, till finally they begin to alight in earnest,
when in a few moments the whole swarm is collected
upon the branch, forming a bunch perhaps as large
as a two-gallon measure. Here they will hang from
one to three or four hours, or until a suitable tree
in the woods is looked up, when, if they have not
been offered a hive in the mean time, they are up
and off. In hiving them, if any accident happens
to the queen the enterprise miscarries at once. One
day I shook a swarm from a small pear-tree into a
tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath
the tree, and put the hive over it. The bees presently
all crawled up into it, and all seemed to go well for
ten or fifteen minutes, when I observed that some*
thing was wrong ; the bees began to buzz excitedly
and to rush about in a bewildered manner, then they
took to the wing and all returned to the parent stock.
On lifting up the pan, I found beneath it the queen
with three or four other bees. She had been one of
the first to fall, had missed the pan in her descent, and
I had set it upon her. I conveyed her tenderly back
to the hive, but either the accident terminated fatally

78

BEES.

with her or else the young queen had been liberated
in the interim, and one of them had fallen in combat,
for it was ten days before the swarm issued a second
time.

No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees
house-hunting in the woods. Yet there can be no
doubt that they look up new quarters either before
or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are
wild bees and incapable of domestication ; that is, the
instinct to go back to nature and take up again their
wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated. Years
upon years of life in the apiary seems to have no
appreciable effect towards their final, permanent do-
mestication. That every new swarm contemplates
migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the fact
that they will only come out when the weather is
favorable to such an enterprise, and that a passing
cloud, or a sudden wind, after the bees are in the air,
will usually drive them back into the parent hive.
Or an attack upon them with sand or gravel, or loose
earth or water, will quickly cause them to change
their plans. I would not even say but that, when the
bees are going off, the apparently absurd practice,
now entirely discredited by regular bee-keepers but
still resorted to by unscientific folk, of beating upon
tin pans, blowing horns, and creating an uproar gen-
erally, might not be without good results. Certainly
not by drowning the “ orders ” of the queen, but by
impressing the bees as with some unusual commotion
in nature. Bees are easily alarmed and disconcerted,
and I have known runaway swarms to be brought
down by a farmer ploughing in the field who show,
ered them with handfuls of loose soil.

I love to see a swarm go off — if it is not mine,

THE PASTORAL BEES.

79

and if mine must go I want to be on hand to see the
fun. It is a return to first principles again by a very
direct route. The past season I witnessed two such
escapes. One swarm had come out the day before,
and, without alighting, had returned to the parent
hive — some hitch in the plan, perhaps, or may be
jthe queen had found her wings too weak. The next
day they came out again, and were hived. But
something offended them, or else the tree in the
woods — perhaps some royal old maple or birch,
holding its head high above all others, with snug,
spacious, irregular chambers and galleries — had too
many attractions ; for they were presently discovered
filling the air over the garden, and whirling excitedly
around. Gradually they began to drift over the
street ; a moment more, and they had become sepa-
rated from the other bees, and, drawing together in a
more compact mass or cloud, away they went, a hum-
ming, flying vortex of bees, the queen in the centre,
and the swarm revolving around her as a pivot, — •
over meadows, across creeks and swamps, straight
for the heart of the mountain, about a mile distant,
— slow at first, so that the youth who gave chase
kept up with them, but increasing their speed till
only a fox hound could have kept them in sight. I
saw their pursuer laboring up the side of the moun-
tain ; saw his white shirt-sleeves gleam as he entered
the woods ; but he returned a few hours afterward
without any clew as to the particular tree in which
they had taken refuge out of the ten thousand that
covered the side of the mountain.

The other swarm came out about one o’clock of a
hot July day, and at once showed symptoms that
alarmed the keeper, who, however, threw neither

80

BEES.

dirt nor water. The house was situated on a steep
side-hill. Behind it the ground rose, for a hundred
rods or so, at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees,
and the prospect of having to chase them up this hill,
if chase them we should, promised a good trial of
wind at least ; for it soon became evident that their
course lay in this direction. Determined to have a
hand, or rather a foot, in the chase, I threw off my
coat and hurried on, before the swarm was yet fairly
organized and under way. The route soon led me
into a field of standing rye, every spear of which
held its head above my own. Plunging recklessly
forward, my course marked to those watching from
below by the agitated and wriggling grain, I emerged
from the miniature forest just in time to see the run-
aways disappearing over the top of the hill, some
fifty rods in advance of me. Lining them as well as
I could, I soon reached the hill-top, my breath ut-
terly gone and the perspiration streaming from every
pore of my skin. On the other side the country
opened deep and wide. A large valley swept around
to the north, heavily wooded at its head and on its
sides. It became evident at once that the bees had
made good their escape, and that whether they had
stopped on one side of the valley or the other, or
had indeed cleared the opposite mountain and gone
into some unknown forest beyond, was entirely prob-
lematical. I turned back, therefore, thinking of the
honey-laden tree that some of these forests would
hold before the falling of the leaf.

I heard of a youth in the neighborhood, more
lucky than myself on a like occasion. It seems that
he had got well in advance of the swarm, whose
route lay over a hill, as in my case, and as he neared

THE PASTORAL BEES.

81

the summit, hat in hand, the bees had just come up
and were all about him. Presently he noticed them
hovering about his straw hat, and alighting on his
arm ; and in almost as brief a time as it takes to re-
late it, the whole swarm had followed the queen into
his hat. Being near a stone wall, he coolly deposited
his prize upon it, quickly disengaged himself from
the accommodating bees, and returned for a hive.
The explanation of this singular circumstance no
doubt is, that the queen, unused to such long and
heavy flights, was obliged to alight from very ex-
haustion. It is not very unusual for swarms to be
thus found in remote fields, collected upon a bush or
branch of a tree.

When a swarm migrates to the woods in this man-
ner, the individual bees, as I have intimated, do not
move in right lines or straight forward, like a flock
of birds, but round and round, like chaff in a whirl-
wind. Unitedly they form a humming, revolving,
nebulous mass, ten or fifteen feet across, which keeps
just high enough to clear all obstacles, except in
crossing deep valleys, when, of course, it may be
Very high. The swarm seems to be guided by a line
of couriers, which may be seen (at least at the out-
set) constantly going and coming. As they take a
direct course, there is always some chance of follow-
ing them to the tree, unless they go a long distance,
and some obstruction, like a wood, or a swamp, or a
high hill, intervenes — enough chance, at any rate,
to stimulate the lookers-on to give vigorous chase
as long as their wind holds out. If the bees are
successfully followed to their retreat, two plans are
feasible : either to fell the tree at once, and seek to
hive them, perhaps bring them home in the section of

82

BEES.

the tree that contains the cavity ; or to leave the tree
till fall, then invite your neighbors, and go and cut
it, and see the ground flow with honey. The former
course is more business-like ; but the latter is the
one usually recommended by one’s friends and neigh-
foors.

Perhaps nearly one third of all the runaway swarms
leave when no one is about, and hence are unseen and
unheard, save, perchance, by some distant laborers in
the field, or by some youth ploughing on the side of
the mountain, who hears an unusual humming noise,
and sees the swarm dimly whirling by overhead, and,
•may be, gives chase ; or he may simply catch the
sound, when he pauses, looks quickly around, but sees
nothing. When he comes in at night he tells how
he heard or saw a swarm of bees go over ; and, per-
haps from beneath one of the hives in the garden a
black mass of bees has disappeared during the day.

They are not partial as to the kind of tree, — pine,
hemlock, elm, birch, maple, hickory, — any tree with
a good cavity high up or low down. A swarm of
mine ran away from the new patent hive I gave them,
and took up their quarters in the hollow trunk of an
old apple-tree across an adjoining field. The entrance
was a mouse-hole near the ground.

Another swarm in the neighborhood deserted their
keeper and went into the cornice of an out-house that
stood amid evergreens in the rear of a large mansion.
But there is no accounting for the taste of bees, as
Samson found when he discovered the swarm in the
carcass, or more probably the skeleton, of the lion he
had slain.

In any given locality, especially in the more wooded
and mountainous districts, the number of swarms that

THE PASTORAL BEES.

83

thus assert their independence forms quite a large
per cent. In the Northern States these swarms very
often perish before spring ; but in such a country as
Florida they seem to multiply, till bee-trees are very
common. In the West, also, wild honey is often
gathered in large quantities. I noticed not long
since, that some wood - choppers on the west slope
of the Coast Range felled a tree that had several pail-
fuls in it.

One night on the Potomac a party of us unwit-
tingly made our camp near the foot of a bee-tree,
which next day the winds of heaven blew down, for
our special delectation, at least so we read the sign.
Another time while sitting by a waterfall in the leaf-
less April woods I discovered a swarm in the top of
a large hickory. I had the season before remarked
the tree as a likely place for bees, but the screen of
leaves concealed them from me. This time my former
presentiment occurred to me, and, looking sharply,
sure enough there were the bees, going out and in a
large, irregular opening. In June a violent tempest
of wind and rain demolished the tree, and the honey
was all lost in the creek into which it fell. I hap-
pened along that way two or three days after the
tornado, when I saw a remnant of the swarm, those,
doubtless, that escaped the flood and those that were
away when the disaster came, hanging in a small
black mass to a branch high up near where their
home used to be. They looked forlorn enough. If
the queen was saved the remnant probably sought
another tree ; otherwise the bees have soon died.

I have seen bees desert their hive in the spring
when it was infested with worms, or when the honey
was exhausted ; at such times the swarm seems to

84

BEES.

wander aimlessly, alighting here and there, and per.
haps in the end uniting with some other colony. In
case of such union, it would be curious to know if
negotiations were first opened between the parties, and
if the houseless bees are admitted at once to all the
rights and franchises of their benefactors. It would
be very like the bees to have some preliminary plan
and understanding about the matter on both sides.

Bees will accommodate themselves to almost any
quarters, yet no hive seems to please them so well
as a section of a hollow tree — “ gums ” as they
are called in the South and West where the sweet
gum grows. In some European countries the hive
is always made from the trunk of a tree, a suitable
cavity being formed by boring. The old-fashioned
straw hive is picturesque, and a great favorite with
the bees also.

The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and
hazardous campaign of an army ; the ranks are be-
ing continually depleted, and continually recruited.
What adventures they have by flood and field, and
what hair-breadth escapes ! A strong swarm during
the honey season loses, on an average, about four
or five thousand per month, or one hundred and
fifty per day. They are overwhelmed by wind and
rain, caught by spiders, benumbed by cold, crushed
by cattle, drowned in rivers and ponds, and in
many nameless ways cut off or disabled. In the
spring the principal mortality is from the cold. As
the sun declines they get chilled before they can
reach home. Many fall down outside the hive,
unable to get in with their burden. One may see
them come utterly spent and drop hopelessly into
the grass in front of their very doors. Before they

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85

can rest the cold has stiffened them. I go out in
April and May and pick them up by the handfuls,
their baskets loaded with pollen, and warm them in
the sun or in the house, or by the simple warmth
of my hand, until they can crawl into the hive.
Heat is their life, and an apparently lifeless bee
may be revived by warming him. I have also
picked them up while rowing on the river and
seen them safely to shore. It is amusing to see
them come hurrying home when there is a thunder-
storm approaching. They come piling in till the
rain is upon them. Those that are overtaken by
the storm doubtless weather it as best they can in
the sheltering trees or grass. It is not probable
that a bee ever gets lost by wandering into strange
and unknown parts. With their myriad eyes they
see everything; and then, their sense of locality is
very acute, is, indeed, one of their ruling traits.
When a bee marks the place of his hive, or of a
bit of good pasturage in the fields or swamps, or of
the bee-hunter’s box of honey on the hills or in the
woods, he returns to it as unerringly as fate.

Honey was a much more important article of
food with the ancients than it is with us. As they
appear to have been unacquainted with sugar, honey,
no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and
pungent for the modern taste ; it soon cloys upon
the palate. It demands the appetite of youth, and
the strong, robust digestion of people who live
much in the open air. It is a more wholesome
food than sugar, and modern confectionery is poison
beside it. Beside grape sugar, honey contains manna,
mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odorifer-
ous substances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind

86

BEES.

of wild natural bread added. The manna of itself is
both food and medicine, and the pungent vegetable
extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the ex-
cretions and dissolves the glutinous and starchy im-
pedimenta of the system.

Hence it is not without reason that with the ancients
a land flowing with milk and honey should mean a
land abounding in all good things ; and the queen
in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to
eat “ bread and honey ” while the “ king was in the
parlor counting out his money,” was doing a very sen-
sible thing. Epaminondas is said to have rarely eaten
anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augus-
tus one day inquired of a centenarian how he had kept
his vigor of mind and body so long ; to which the
veteran replied that it was by “ oil without and honey
within.” Cicero, in his “ Old Age,” classes honey
with meat and milk and cheese as among the staple
articles with which a well-kept farm-house will be
supplied.

Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean
countries, appear to have been famous lands for honey.
Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and Mount Ida pro-
duced what may be called the classic honey of an-
tiquity, an article doubtless in nowise superior to our
best products. Leigh Hunt’s “Jar of Honey” is
mainly distilled from Sicilian history and literature,
Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has al-
ways been rich in bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a
hundred years ago) says the woods on this island
abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had
many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theoc-
ritus are native to the island in this respect, and
abound in bees — “ flat-nosed bees ” as he calls them

THE PASTORAL BEES.

87

m the Seventh Idyl — and comparisons in which
comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of
this world’s goods. His goatherds can think of no
greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with honey-
combs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and
fed on the combs of bees ; and among the delectables
with which Arsinoe cherishes Adonis are “honey-
cakes,” and other tid-bits made of “sweet honey.” In
the country of Theocritus this custom is said still to
prevail: when a couple are married the attendants
place honey in their mouths, by which they would sym-
bolize the hope that their love may be as sweet to
their souls as honey to the palate.

It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess
whose breasts distilled honey ; and that once when
Pindar lay asleep the bees dropped honey upon his lips.
In the Old Testament the food of the promised Im-
manuel was to be butter and honey (there is much
doubt about the butter in the original), that he might
know good from evil ; and Jonathan’s eyes were en-
lightened, by partaking of some wood or wild honey :

“ See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlight-
ened, because I tasted a little of this honey.” So far
as this part of his diet was concerned, therefore, John
the Baptist, during his sojourn in the wilderness, his
divinity school-days in the mountains and plains of
Judea, fared extremely well. About the other part,
the locusts, or, not to put too fine a point on it, the
grasshoppers, as much cannot be said, though they
were among the creeping and leaping things the chil-
dren of Israel were permitted to eat. They were prob-*
ably not eaten raw, but roasted in that most primitive
of ovens, a hole in the ground made hot by building
a fire in it. The locusts and honey may have been

88

BEES.

served together, as the Bedas of Ceylon are said to
season their meat with honey. At any rate, as the lo-
cust is often a great plague in Palestine, the prophet in
eating them found his account in the general weal, and
in the profit of the pastoral bees ; the fewer locusts,
the more flowers. Owing to its numerous wild-flowers
and flowering shrubs, Palestine has always been a fa-
mous country for bees. They deposit their honey in
hollow trees as our bees do when they escape from the
hive, and in holes in the rocks as ours do not. In a
tropical or semi-tropical climate bees are quite apt
to take refuge in the rocks, but where ice and snow
prevail, as with us, they are much safer high up in the
trunk of a forest tree.

The best honey is the product of the milder parts of
the temperate zone. There are too many rank and
poisonous plants in the tropics. Honey from certain
districts of Turkey produces headache and vomiting,
and that from Brazil is used chiefly as medicine. The
honey of Mount Hymettus owes its fine quality to wild
thyme. The best honey in Persia and in Florida is
collected from the orange blossom. The celebrated
honey of Narbonne in the south of France is obtained
from a species of rosemary. In Scotland good honey
is made from the blossoming heather.

California honey is white and delicate and highly
perfumed, and now takes the lead in the market.
But honey is honey the world over ; and the bee u
the bee still. “Men may degenerate,” says an old
traveler, “ may forget the arts by which they acquired
renown ; manufactories may fail, and commodities be
debased, but the sweets of the wild-flowers of the
wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of
the bee, will continue without change or derogation.”

n

SHARP EYES

AND OTHER PAPERS

SHARP EYES AND OTHER PAPERS,

SHARP EYES.

Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the
other, I have often amused myself by wondering what
the effect would be if one could go on opening eye
after eye to the number say of a dozen or more.
What would he see? Perhaps not the invisible —
not the odors of flowers nor the fever germs in the air
— not the infinitely small of the microscope nor the
infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require,
not more eyes so much as an eye constructed with
more and different lenses ; but would he not see with
augmented power within the natural limits of vision ?
At any rate some persons seem to have opened more
eyes than others, they see with such force and distinct-
ness ; their vision penetrates the tangle and obscurity
where that of others fails like a spent or impotent
bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open ? how
many did Henry Thoreau ? how many did Audubon ?
how many does the hunter, matching his sight against
the keen and alert sense of a deer or a moose, or a fox
or a wolf ? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open
another eye whenever we see beyond the first general
features or outlines of things — whenever we grasp the
special details and characteristic markings that this
mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision.

4

SHARP EYES.

Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds,
or the plants, or the geological features of a country,
it is as if new and keener eyes were added.

Of course one must not only see sharply, but read
aright what he sees. The facts in the life of Nature
that are transpiring about us are like written words
that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or
the writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key.!
A female oriole was one day observed very much pre*.
occupied under a shed where the refuse from the horse
stable was thrown. She hopped about among the barn
fowls, scolding them sharply when they came too near
her. The stable, dark and cavernous, was just be-
yond. The bird, not finding what she wanted outside,
boldly ventured into the stable, and was presently cap-
tured by the farmer. What did she want ? was the
query. What, but a horsehair for her nest which was
in an apple-tree near by ; and she was so bent on hav-
ing one that I have no doubt she would have tweaked
one out of the horse’s tail had he been in the stable.
Later in the season I examined her nest and found it
sewed through and through with several long horse-
hairs, so that the bird persisted in her search till the
hair was found.

Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little
characteristic scenes, are always being enacted in the
lives of the birds, if our eyes are sharp enough to see
them. Some clever observer saw this little comedy
played among some English sparrows and wrote an
account of it in his newspaper ; it is too good not to
be true : A male bird brought to his box a large, fine
goose feather, which is a great find for a sparrow and
much coveted. After he had deposited his prize and
chattered his gratulations over it he went away ill

SHARP EYES.

5

quest of his mate. His next-door neighbor, a female
bird, seeing her chance, quickly slipped in and seized
the feather, — and here the wit of the bird came out
for instead of carrying it into her own box she flew with
it to a near tree and hid it in a fork of the branches,
then went home, and when her neighbor returned with
his mate was innocently employed about her own af
fairs. The proud male, finding his feather gone, came
out of his box in a high state of excitement, and, with
wrath in his manner and accusation on his tongue,
rushed into the cot of the female. Not finding his
goods and chattels there as he had expected, he
stormed around a while, abusing everybody in general
and his neighbor in particular, and then went away as
if to repair the loss. As soon as he was out of sight,
the shrewd thief went and brought the feather home
and lined her own domicile with it.

I was much amused one summer day in seeing a
bluebird feeding her young one in the shaded street of
a large town. She had captured a cicada or harvest-
fly, and after bruising it a while on the ground flew
with it to a tree and placed it in the beak of the young
bird. It was a large morsel, and the mother seemed
to have doubts of her chick’s ability to dispose of it,
for she stood near and watched its efforts with great
solicitude. The young bird struggled valiantly with
the cicada, but made no headway in swallowing it,
when the mother took it from him and flew to the
sidewalk, and proceeded to break and bruise it more
thoroughly. Then she again placed it in his beak, and
seemed to say, “ There, try it now,” and sympathized
so thoroughly with his efforts that she repeated many
of his motions and contortions. But the great fly was
unyielding, and, indeed, seemed ridiculously dispropor*

6

SHARP EYES.

tioned to the beak that held it. The young bird flufr
tered and fluttered and screamed, “ I ’m stuck, I ’m
stuck,” till the anxious parent again seized the morsel
and carried it to an iron railing, where she came down
upon it for the space of a minute with all the force
and momentum her beak could command. Then she
offered it to her young a third time, but with the
3ame result as before, except that this time the bird
dropped it ; but she was at the ground as soon as the
;icada was, and taking it in her beak flew some dis-
tance to a high board fence where she sat motionless
for some moments. While pondering the problem
how that fly should be broken, the male bluebird ap-
proached her, and said very plainly, and I thought
rather curtly, “ Give me that bug,” but she quickly
resented his interference and flew farther away, where
she sat apparently quite discouraged when I last saw
her.

The bluebird is a home bird, and I am never tired
of recurring to him. HL coming or reappearance in
the spring marks a new chapter in the progress of the
season ; things are never quite the same after one has
heard fihat note. The past spring the males came
about a week in advance of the females. A fine male
lingered about my grounds and orchard all the time,
apparently waiting the arrival of his mate. He called
and warbled every day, as if he felt sure she was
within ear-shot, and could be hurried up. Now he
warbled half -angrily or upbraidingly, then coaxingly,
then cheerily and confidently, the next moment in a
plaintive, far-away manner. He would half open his
wings, and twinkle them caressingly, as if beckoning
his mate to his heart. One morning she had come,
bn^ was shy and reserved. The fond male flew to a

SHARP EYES.

7

knot-hole in an old apple-tree, and coaxed her to his
side. I heard a fine confidential warble, — the old,
old story. But the female flew to a near tree, and
uttered her plaintive, homesick note. The male went
and got some dry grass or bark in his beak, and flew
again to the hole in the old tree, and promised mire*
mitting devotion, but the other said “nay,” and flew
away in the distance. When he saw her going, or
rather heard her distant note, he dropped his stuff,
and cried out in a tone that said plainly enough,
“ Wait a minute. One word, please,” and flew swiftly
in pursuit. He won her before long, however, and
early in April the pair were established in one of the
four or five boxes I had put up for them, but not
until they had changed their minds several times. As
soon as the first brood had flown, and while they were
yet under their parents’ care, they began another nest
in one of the other boxes, the female, as usual, doing
all the work, and the male all the complimenting.

A source of occasional great distress to the mother-
bird was a white cat that sometimes followed me
about. The cat had never been known to catch a
bird, but she had a way of watching them that was
very embarrassing to the bird. Whenever she ap-
peared, the mother bluebird would set up that pitiful
melodious plaint. One morning the cat was standing
by me, when the bird came with her beak loaded with
building material, and alighted above me to survey
the place before going into the box. When she saw
the cat, she was greatly disturbed, and in her agitation
could not keep her hold upon all her material. Straw
after straw came eddying down, till not half her origi-
nal burden remained. After the cat had gone away,
the bird’s alarm subsided, till, presently seeing th®

SHARP EYES.

coast clear, she flew quickly to the box and pitched in
her remaining straws with the greatest precipitation,
and, without going in to arrange them, as was her
wont, flew away in evident relief.

In the cavity of an apple-tree but a few yards off,,
and much nearer the house than they usually build,
a pair of high-holes, or golden-shafted woodpeckers,
took up their abode. A knot-hole which led to the
decayed interior was enlarged, the live wood being cut
away as clean as a squirrel would have done it. The
inside preparations I could not witness, but day after
day, as I passed near, I heard the bird hammering
away, evidently beating down obstructions and shap-
ing and enlarging the cavity. The chips were not
brought out, but were used rather to floor the interior.
The woodpeckers are not nest-builders, but rather
nest-carvers.

The time seemed very short before the voices of the
young were heard in the heart of the old tree, — at
first feebly, but waxing stronger day by day until
they could be heard many rods distant. When I put
my hand upon the trunk of the tree, they would set
up an eager, expectant chattering ; but if I climbed
up it toward the opening, they soon detected the un-
usual sound and would hush quickly, only now and
then uttering a warning note. Long before they were
fully fledged they clambered up to the orifice to re=
ceive their food. As but one could stand in the open=
ing at a time, there was a good deal of elbowing and
struggling for this position. It was a very desirable
one aside from the advantages it had when food was
served ; it looked out upon the great shining world,
into which the young birds seemed never tired of gaz-
ing. The fresh air must have been a consideration

SHARP EYES.

9

also, for the interior of a high-hole’s dwelling is not
sweet. When the parent birds came with food the
young one in the opening did not get it all, but after
he had received a portion, either on his own motion or
on a hint from the old one, he would give place to the
one behind him. Still, one bird evidently outstripped
his fellows, and in the race of life was two or three
days in advance of them. His voice was loudest and
his head oftenest at the window. But I noticed that
when he had kept the position too long, the others
evidently made it uncomfortable in his rear, and, after
“ fidgeting ” about a while, he would be compelled to
“ back down.” But retaliation was then easy, and I
fear his mates spent few easy moments at that look-
out. They would close their eyes and slide back into
the cavity as if the world had suddenly lost all its
charms for them.

This bird was, of course, the first to leave the nest.
For two days before that event he kept his position in
the opening most of the time and sent forth his strong
voice incessantly. The old ones abstained from feed-
ing him almost entirely, no doubt to encourage his
exit. As I stood looking at him one afternoon and
noting his progress, he suddenly reached a resolution,
— - seconded, I have no doubt, from the rear, — and
launched forth upon his untried wings. They served
him well and carried him about fifty yards up-hill the
first heat. The second day after, the next in size and
spirit left in the same manner; then another, till
only one remained. The parent birds ceased their
visits to him, and for one day he called and called till
our ears were tired of the sound. His was the faint-
est heart of all. Then he had none to encourage him
from behind. He left the nest and clung to the outeJ

10

SHARP EYES.

bowl of the tree, and yelped and piped for an hour
longer ; then he committed himself to his wings and
went his way like the rest.

A young farmer in the western part of New York,
who has a sharp, discriminating eye, sends me some
interesting notes about a tame high-hole he once had,

' “Did you ever notice,” says he, “that the high,
hole never eats anything that he cannot pick up with
his tongue ? At least this was the case with a young
one I took from the nest and tamed. He could thrust
out his tongue two or three inches, and it was amusing
to see his efforts to eat currants from the hand. He
would run out his tongue and try to stick it to the
currant; failing in that, he would bend his tongue
around it like a hook and try to raise it by a sudden
jerk. But he never succeeded, the round fruit would
roll and slip away every time. He never seemed to
think of taking it in his beak. His tongue wos in
constant use to find out the nature of everything he
saw ; a nail-hole in a board or any similar hole was
carefully explored. If he was held near the face he
would soon be attracted by the eye and thrust his
tongue into it. In this way he gained the respect of
a number of half-grown cats that were around the
house. I wished to make them familiar to each other,
so there would be less danger of their killing him. So
I would take them both on my knee, when the bird
would soon notice the kitten’s eyes, and leveling his
bill as carefully as a marksman levels his rifle, he
would remain so a minute when he would dart his
tongue into the cat’s eye. This was held by the cats
to be very mysterious: being struck in the eye by
something invisible to them. They soon acquired
such a terror of him that they would avoid him and

SHARP EYES.

11

run away whenever they saw his bill turned in their
direction. He never would swallow a grasshopper
even when it was placed in his throat; he would shake
himself until he had thrown it out of his mouth. His
‘ best hold ’ was ants. He never was surprised at any-
thing, and never was afraid of anything. He would
drive the turkey gobbler and the rooster. He would
advance upon them holding one wing up as high as
possible, as if to strike with it, and shuffle along the
ground toward them, scolding all the while in a harsh
voice. I feared at first that they might kill him, but
I soon found that he was able to take care of himself.
I would turn over stones and dig into ant-hills for
him, and he would lick up the ants so fast that a
stream of them seemed going into his mouth unceas*
ingly. I kept him till late in the fall, when he disap-
peared, probably going south, and I never saw him
again.”

My correspondent also sends me some interesting
observations about the cuckoo. He says a large goose-
berry bush standing in the border of an old hedge-
row, in the midst of open fields, and not far from his
house, was occupied by a pair of cuckoos for two sea-
sons in succession, and, after an interval of a year, for
two seasons more. This gave him a good chance to
observe them. He says the mother-bird lays a single
egg, and sits upon it a number of days before laying
the second, so that he has seen one young bird nearly
grown, a second just hatched, and a whole egg all in
the nest at once. “ So far as I have seen, this is the
settled practice, — the young leaving the nest one at
a time to the number of six or eight. The young
have quite the look of the young of the dove in many
respects. When nearly grown they are covered with

12

SHARP EYES.

long blue pin-feathers as long as darning-needles,
without a bit of plumage on them. They part on the
back and hang down on each side by their own weight-
With its curious feathers and misshapen body the
young bird is anything but handsome. They never
open their mouths when approached, as many young
birds do, but sit perfectly still, hardly moving when
touched.” He also notes the unnatural indifference
of the mother-bird when her nest and young are ap-
proached. She makes no sound, but sits quietly on a
near branch in apparent perfect unconcern.

These observations, together with the fact that the
egg of the cuckoo is occasionally found in the nests of
other birds, raise the inquiry whether our bird is
slowly relapsing into the habit of the European spe-
cies, which always foists its egg upon other birds ; or
whether, on the other hand, it is not mending its
manners in this respect. It has but little to unlearn
or to forget in the one case, but great progress to make
in the other. How far is its rudimentary nest — a
mere platform of coarse twigs and dry stalks of weeds
— - from the deep, compact, finely woven and finely
modeled nest of the goldfinch or king-bird, and what
a gulf between its indifference toward its young and
their solicitude ! Its irregular manner of laying also
seems better suited to a parasite like our cow-bird, of
the European cuckoo, than to a regular nest-builder.

This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees
plenty of interesting things as he goes about his work.
He one day saw a white swallow, which is of rare
occurrence. He saw a bird, a sparrow he thinks, fly
against the side of a horse and fill his beak with hair
from the loosened coat of the animal. He saw a
shrike pursue a chickadee, when the latter escaped by

SHARP EYES.

13

taking refuge in a small hole in a tree. One day in
early spring he saw two hen-hawks that were circling
and screaming high in air, approach each other, ex-
tend a claw, and, clasping them together, fall toward
the earth flapping and struggling as if they were tied
together ; on nearing the ground they separated and
soared aloft again. He supposed that it was not a
passage of war but of love, and that the hawks were
toying fondly with each other.

He further relates a curious circumstance of finding
a humming-bird in the upper part of a barn with its
bill stuck fast in a crack of one of the large timbers,
dead, of course, with wings extended, and as dry as a
chip. The bird seems to have died as it had lived, on
the wing, and its last act was indeed a ghastly parody
of its living career. Fancy this nimble, flashing sprite,
whose life was passed probing the honeyed depths of
flowers, at last thrusting its bill into a crack in a dry
timber in a hay-loft, and, with spread wings, ending
its existence.

When the air is damp and heavy, swallows fre-
quently hawk for insects about cattle and moving
herds in the field. My farmer describes how they
attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the
meadow with a mowing-machine. It had been foggy
for two days, and the swallows were very hungry,
and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of
his machine was heard, the swallows appeared and
attended him like a brood of hungry chickens. He
says there was a continued rush of purple wings
over the “ cut-bar,” and just where it was causing the
grass to tremble and fall. Without his assistance the
swallows would doubtless have gone hungry yet an-
other day.

14

SHARP EYES.

Of the hen-hawk, he has observed that both male
and female take part in incubation. “I was rather
surprised,” he says, “ on one occasion, to see how
quickly they change places on the nest. The nesx, was
in a tall beech, and the leaves were not yet fully out.
I could see the head and neck of the hawk over the
edge of the nest, when I saw the other hawk coming
down through the air at full speed. I expected he
would alight near by, but instead of that he struck
directly upon the nest, his mate getting out of the
way barely in time to avoid being hit ; it seemed al-
most as if he had knocked her off the nest. I hardly
see how they can make such a rush on the nest with-
out danger to the eggs.”

The king-bird will worry the hawk as a whiffet dog
will worry a bear. It is by his persistence and au-
dacity, not by any injury he is capable of dealing his
great antagonist. The king-bird seldom more than
dogs the hawk, keeping above and between his wings,
and making a great ado ; but my correspondent says
he once “ saw a king-bird riding on a hawk’s back.
The hawk flew as fast as possible, and the king-
bird sat upon his shoulders in triumph until they
had passed out of sight,” — tweaking his feathers, no
doubt, and threatening to scalp him the next moment.

That near relative of the king-bird, the great
crested fly-catcher, has one well known peculiarity :
lie appears never to consider his nest finished until it
contains a cast-off snake-skin. My alert correspon-
dent one day saw him eagerly catch up an onion skin
and make off with it, either deceived by it or else
thinking it a good substitute for the coveted material.

One day in May, walking in the woods, I came
upon the nest of a whippoorwill, or rather its eggs.

SHARP EYES.

15

for it builds no nest, — two elliptical whitish spotted
eggs lying upon the dry leaves. My foot was within
a yard of the mother-bird before she flew. I won-
dered what a sharp eye would detect curious or char-
acteristic in the ways of the bird, so I came to the
place many times and had a look. It was always a
task to separate the bird from her surroundings,
though I stood within a few feet of her, and knew
exactly where to look. One had to bear on with his
eye, as it were, and refuse to be baffled. The sticks
and leaves, and bits of black or dark-brown bark, were
all exactly copied in the bird’s plumage. And then
she did sit so close, and simulate so well a shapeless
decaying piece of wood or bark! Twice I brought
a companion, and guiding his eye to the spot, noted
how difficult it was for him to make out there, in full
view upon the dry leaves, any semblance to a bird.
When the bird returned after being disturbed, she
would alight within a few inches of her eggs, and
then, after a moment’s pause, hobble awkwardly upon
them.

After the young had appeared, all the wit of the
bird came into play. I was on hand the next day,
I think. The mother-bird sprang up when I was
within a pace of her, and in doing so fanned the
leaves with her wings till they sprang up too; as
the leaves started the young started, and, being of
the same color, to tell which was the leaf and which
the bird was a trying task to any eye. I came the
next day, when the same tactics were repeated. Once
a leaf fell upon one of the young birds and nearly
hid it. The young are covered with a reddish down,
like a young partridge, and soon follow their mother
about. When disturbed, they gave but one leap,

16

SHARP EYES.

then settled down, perfectly motionless and stupid,
with eyes closed. The parent bird, on these occasions,
made frantic efforts to decoy me away from her
young. She would fly a few paces and fall upon her
breast, and a spasm, like that of death, would run
through her tremulous outstretched wings and pros-
trate body. She kept a sharp eye out the meanwhile
to see if the ruse took, and if it did not, she was
quickly cured, and moving about to some other point.,
tried to draw my attention as before. When followed
she always alighted upon the ground, dropping down
in a sudden peculiar way. The second or third day
both old and young had disappeared.

The whippoorwill walks as awkwardly as a swal-
low, which is as awkward as a man in a bag, and yet
she manages to lead her young about the woods. The
latter, I think, move by leaps and sudden spurts, their
protective coloring shielding them most effectively.
Wilson once came upon the mother-bird and her
brood in the woods, and, though they were at his very
feet, was so baffled by the concealment of the young
that he was about to give up the search, much disap-
pointed, when he perceived something “ like a slight
moldiness among the withered leaves, and, on stoop-
ing down, discovered it to be a young whippoorwill,
seemingly asleep.” Wilson’s description of the young
is very accurate, as its downy covering does look pre-
cisely like a “ slight moldiness.” Returning a few
moments afterward to the spot to get a pencil he had
forgotten, he could find neither old nor young.

It takes an eye to see a partridge in the woods,
motionless upon the leaves ; this sense needs to be
as sharp as that of smell in hounds and pointers ; and
yet I know an unkempt youth that seldom fails to

SHARP EYES .

17

see the bird and shoot it before it takes wing. I
think he sees it as soon as it sees him, and before
it suspects itself seen. What a training to the eye
is hunting ! To pick out the game from its surround-
ings, the grouse from the leaves, the gray squirrel from
the mossy oak limb it hugs so closely, the red fox
from the ruddy or brown or gray field, the rabbit from
the stubble, or the white hare from the snow, requires
the best powers of this sense. A woodchuck, motion-
less in the fields or upon a rock, looks very much like
a large stone or bowlder, yet a keen eye knows the
difference at a glance, a quarter of a mile away.

A man has a sharper eye than a dog, or a fox, or
than any of the wild creatures, but not so sharp an ear
or nose. But in the birds he finds his match. How
quickly the old turkey discovers the hawk, a mere
speck against the sky, and how quickly the hawk dis-
covers you if you happen to be secreted in the bushes,
or behind the fence near which he alights ! One ad-
vantage the bird surely has, and that is, owing to the
form, structure, and position of the eye, it has a much
larger field of vision — indeed, can probably see in
nearly every direction at the same instant, behind as
well as before. Man’s field of vision embraces less
than half a circle horizontally, and still less vertically ;
his brow and brain prevent him from seeing within
many degrees of the zenith without a movement of the
head ; the bird, on the other hand, takes in nearly the
whole sphere at a glance.

I find I see, almost without effort, nearly every bird
within sight in the field or wood I pass through (a flit
of the wing, a flirt of the tail are enough, though the
flickering leaves do all conspire to hide them), and
that with like ease the birds see me, though, un-

18

SHARP EYES.

questionably, the chances are immensely in their favor.
The eye sees what it has the means of seeing, truly.
You must have the bird in your heart before you can
find it in the bush. The eye must have purpose and
aim. No one ever yet found the walking fern who
did not have the walking fern in his mind. A per-
son whose eye is full of Indian relics picks them up in
every field he walks through.

One season I was interested in the tree-frogs ; espe®
cially the tiny piper that one hears about the woods
and brushy fields — the hyla of the swamps become
a denizen of the trees ; I had never seen him in this
new role. But this season, having hylas in mind, or
rather being ripe for them, I several times came across
them. One Sunday, walking amid some bushes, I cap-
tured two. They leaped before me as doubtless they
had done many times before ; but though I was not
looking for or thinking of them, yet they were quickly
recognized, because the eye had been commissioned to
find them. On another occasion, not long afterward,
I was hurriedly loading my gun in the October woods
in hopes of overtaking a gray squirrel that was
fast escaping through the tree-tops, when one of these
lilliput frogs, the color of the fast-yellowing leaves,
leaped near me. I saw him only out of the corner of
my eye and yet bagged him, because I had already
made him my own.

Nevertheless, the habit of observation is the habit
of clear and decisive gazing. Not by a first casual
glance, but by a steady deliberate aim of the eye are
the rare and characteristic things discovered. You
must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the
spot, to see more than do the rank and file of man-
kind. The sharp-shooter picks out his man and knows

SHARP EYES

19

him with fatal certainty from a stump, or a rock, or a
cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to locate, not
only form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye,
but also a faculty which they call individuality — that
which separates, discriminates, and sees in every object
its essential character. This is just as necessary to
the naturalist as to the artist or the poet. The sharp
eye notes specific points and differences, — it seizes
upon and preserves the individuality of the thing.

Persons frequently describe to me some bird they
have seen or heard and ask me to name it, but in most
cases the bird might be any one of a dozen, or else
it is totally unlike any bird found on this continent.
They have either seen falsely or else vaguely. Not
so the farm youth who wrote me one winter day that
he had seen a single pair of strange birds, which he
describes as follows: “They were about the size of
the ‘ chippie,’ the tops of their heads were red, and
the breast of the male was of the same color, while
that of the female was much lighter ; their rumps
were also faintly tinged with red. If I have described
them so that you would know them, please write me
their names.” There can be little doubt but the
young observer had seen a pair of red-polls, — a bird
related to the goldfinch, and that occasionally comes
down to us in the winter from the far north. Another
time, the same youth wrote that he had seen a strange
bird, the color of a sparrow, that alighted on fences
and buildings as well as upon the ground, and that
walked. This last fact showed the youth’s discrimi-
nating eye and settled the case. I knew it to be a
species of the lark, and from the size, color, season,
etc., the tit-lark. But how many persons would have
observed that the bird walked instead of hopped ?

20

SHARP EYES.

Some friends of mine who lived in the country tried
to describe to me a bird that built a nest in a tree
within a few feet of the house. As it was a brown
bird, I should have taken it for a wood-thrush, had
not the nest been described as so thin and loose that
from beneath the eggs could be distinctly seen. The
most pronounced feature in the description was the
barred appearance of the under side of the bird’s tail.
I was quite at sea, until one day, when we were driv-
ing out, a cuckoo flew across the road in front of us„
when my friends exclaimed, “ There is our bird ! ” I
had never known a cuckoo to build near a house, and
I had never noted the appearance the tail presents
when viewed from beneath ; but if the bird had been
described in its most obvious features, as slender, with
a long tail, cinnamon brown above and white beneath,
with a curved bill, any one who knew the bird would
have recognized the portrait.

We think we have looked at a thing sharply until
we are asked for its specific features. I thought 1
knew exactly the form of the leaf of the tulip-tree,
until one day a lady asked me to draw the outline of
one. A good observer is quick to take a hint and to
follow it up. Most of the facts of nature, especially
in the life of the birds and animals, are well screened.
We do not see the play because we do not look in»
tently enough. The other day I was sitting with a
friend upon a high rock in the woods, near a small
stream, when we saw a water-snake swimming across
a pool toward the opposite bank. Any eye would
have noted it, perhaps nothing more. A little closer
and sharper gaze revealed the fact that the snake bore
something in its mouth, which, as we went down to
investigate, proved to be a small cat-fish, three o 1

SHARP EYES.

21

four inches long. The snake had captured it in the
pool, and, like any other fisherman, wanted to get its
prey to dry land, although itself lived mostly in the
water. Here, we said, is being enacted a little tragedy,
that would have escaped any but sharp eyes. The
snake, which was itself small, had the fish by the
throat, the hold of vantage among all creatures, and
clung to it with great tenacity. The snake knew that
its best tactics was to get upon dry land as soon as
possible. It could not swallow its victim alive, and it
could not strangle it in the water. For a while it
tried to kill its game by holding it up out of the
water, but the fish grew heavy, and every few mo-
ments its struggles brought down the snake’s head.
This would not do. Compressing the fish’s throat
would not shut off its breath under such circum<
stances, so the wily serpent tried to get ashore with it,
and after several attempts succeeded in effecting a
landing on a flat rock. But the fish died hard. Cat-
fish do not give up the ghost in a hurry. Its throat
was becoming congested, but the snake’s distended
jaws must have ached. It was like a petrified gape.
Then the spectators became very curious and close in
their scrutiny, and the snake determined to withdraw
from the public gaze and finish the business in hand
to its own notions. But, when gently but firmly re-
monstrated with by my friend with his walking-stick,
it dropped the fish and retreated in high dudgeon be-
neath a stone in the bed of the creek. The fish, with
a swollen and angry throat, went its way also.

Birds, I say, have wonderfully keen eyes. Throw
a fresh bone or a piece of meat upon the snow in
winter, and see how soon the crows will discover it
and be on hand. If it be near the house or barn, the

22

SHARP EYES.

crow that first discovers it will alight near it, to make
sure he is not deceived; then he will go away, and
soon return with a companion. The two alight a few
yards from the hone, and after some delay, during
which the vicinity is sharply scrutinized, one of the
crows advances boldly to within a few feet of the
coveted prize. Here he pauses, and if no trick is dis-
covered, and the meat be indeed meat, he seizes it and
makes off.

One midwinter I cleared away the snow under an
apple-tree near the house and scattered some corn
there. I had not seen a blue-jay for weeks, yet that
very day one found my corn, and after that several
came daily and partook of it, holding the kernels
under their feet upon the limbs of the trees and peck-
ing them vigorously.

Of course the woodpecker and his kind have sharp
eyes ; still I was surprised to see how quickly Downy
found out some bones that were placed in a convenient
place under the shed to be pounded up for the hens.
In going out to the barn I often disturbed him making
a meal off the bite of meat that still adhered to them.

“ Look intently enough at anything,” said a poet to
me one day, “ and you will see something that would
otherwise escape you.” I thought of the remark as I
sat on a stump in an opening of the woods one spring
day. I saw a small hawk approaching ; he flew to a
tall tulip-tree and alighted on a large limb near the
top. He eyed me and I eyed him. Then the bird
disclosed a trait that was new to me : he hopped along
the limb to a small cavity near the trunk, when he
thrust in his head and pulled out some small object
and fell to eating it. After he had partaken of it for
some minutes he put the remainder back in his larder

SHARP EYES.

23

and flew away. I had seen something like feathers
eddying slowly down as the hawk ate, and on ap-
proaching the spot found the feathers of a sparrow
here and there clinging to the bushes beneath the
tree. The hawk then — commonly called the chicken
hawk — is as provident as a mouse or a squirrel, and
lays by a store against a time of need, but I should
not have discovered the fact had I not held my eye
on him.

An observer of the birds is attracted by any unusual
sound or commotion among them. In May or June,
when other birds are most vocal, the jay is a silent
bird; he goes sneaking about the orchards and the
groves as silent as a pickpocket ; he is robbing bird’s-
nests and he is very anxious that nothing should be
said about it ; but in the fall none so quick and loud to
cry “ Thief, thief ! ” as he. One December morning a
troop of jays discovered a little screech-owl secreted
in the hollow trunk of an old apple-tree near my
house. How they found the owl out is a mystery, since
it never ventures forth in the light of day ; but they
did, and proclaimed the fact with great emphasis. I
suspect the bluebirds first told them, for these birds are
constantly peeping into holes and crannies, both spring
and fall. Some unsuspecting bird had probably en-
tered the cavity prospecting for a place for next year’s
nest, or else looking out a likely place to pass a
cold night, and then had rushed out with important
news. A boy who should unwittingly venture into a
bear’s den when Bruin was at home could not be more
astonished and alarmed than a bluebird would be on
finding itself in the cavity of a decayed tree with an
owl. At any rate the bluebirds joined the jays in
calling the attention of all whom it might concern to

24

SHARP EYES.

the fact that a culprit of some sort was hiding from
the light of day in the old apple-tree. I heard the
notes of warning and alarm and approached to within
eye-shot. The bluebirds were cautious and hovered
about uttering their peculiar twittering calls ; but the
jays were bolder and took turns looking in at the
cavity, and deriding the poor, shrinking owl. A jay
would alight in the entrance of the hole and flirt
and peer and attitudinize, and then fly away crying
“ Thief, thief, thief ! ” at the top of his voice.

I climbed up and peered into the opening, and
could just descry the owl clinging to the inside of the
tree. I reached in and took him out, giving little
heed to the threatening snapping of his beak. He
was as red as a fox and as yellow-eyed as a cat. He
made no effort to escape, but planted his claws in my
forefinger and clung there with a grip that soon grew
uncomfortable. I placed him in the loft of an out-
house in hopes of getting better acquainted with him.
By day he was a very willing prisoner, scarcely mov-
ing at all, even when approached and touched with
the hand, but looking out upon the world with half-
closed, sleepy eyes. But at night what a change ; how
alert how wild, how active! He was like another
bird ; he darted about with wide, fearful eyes, and re-
garded me like a cornered cat. I opened the window,
and swiftly, but as silent as a shadow, he glided out
into the congenial darkness, and perhaps, ere this, has
revenged himself upon the sleeping jay or bluebird
that first betrayed his hiding-place.

THE APPLE.

Lo! sweetened with the summer light,

The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,

Drops in a silent autumn night. — Tennyson.

Not a little of the sunshine of our northern win*
ters is surely wrapped up in the apple. How could
we winter over without it ! How is life sweetened by
its mild acids! A cellar well filled with apples is
more valuable than a chamber filled with flax and
wool. So much sound ruddy life to draw upon, to
strike one’s roots down into, as it were.

Especially to those whose soil of life is inclined
be a little clayey and heavy, is the apple a winter
necessity. It is the natural antidote of most of the
ills the flesh is heir to. Full of vegetable acids and
aromatics, qualities which act as refrigerants and an-
tiseptics, what an enemy it is to jaundice, indigestion,
torpidity of liver, etc. It is a gentle spur and tonic
to the whole biliary system. Then I have read that
it has been found by analysis to contain more phos-
phorus than any other vegetable. This makes it the
proper food of the scholar and the sedentary man ; it
feeds his brain and it stimulates his liver. Nor is
this all. Besides its hygienic properties, the apple
is full of sugar and mucilage, which make it highly
nutritious. It is said, “ The operators of Cornwall,
England, consider ripe apples nearly as nourishing as
bread, and far more so than potatoes. In the year
1801 — which was a year of much scarcity — apples,

26

THE APPLE.

instead of being converted into cider, were sold to the
poor, and the laborers asserted that they could ‘ stand
their work ’ on baked apples without meat ; whereas
a potato diet required either meat or some other sub-
stantial nutriment. The French and Germans use
apples extensively, so do the inhabitants of all Euro-
pean nations. The laborers depend upon them as an
article of food, and frequently make a dinner of sliced
apples and bread.”

Yet the English apple is a tame and insipid affair,
compared with the intense, sun-colored and sun-
steeped fruit our orchards yield. The English have
no sweet apple, I am told, the saccharine element
apparently being less abundant in vegetable nature
in that sour and chilly climate than in our own. It is
well known that the European maple yields no sugar,
while both our birch and hickory have sweet in their
veins. Perhaps this fact accounts for our excessive
love of sweets, which may be said to be a national
trait.

The Russian apple has a lovely complexion, smooth
and transparent, but the Cossack is not yet all elimk
nated from it. The only one I have seen — the
Duchess of Oldenburg — is as beautiful as a Tartar
princess, with a distracting odor, but it is the least
bit puckery to the taste.

The best thing I know about Chili is not its guano
beds, but this fact which I learn from Darwin’s “ V oy
age,” namely, that the apple thrives well there. Dar-
win saw a town there so completely buried in a wood
of apple-trees, that its streets were merely paths in an
orchard. The tree indeed thrives so well, that large
branches cut off in the spring and planted two ol
three feet deep in the ground send out roots and

THE APPLE.

27

develop into fine full-bearing trees by the third year.
The people know the value of the apple too. They
make cider and wine of it and then from the refuse a
white and finely flavored spirit ; then by another pro-
cess a sweet treacle is obtained called honey. The
children and the pigs eat little or no other food. He
does not add that the people are healthy and temper-
ate, but I have no doubt they are. We knew the
apple had many virtues, but these Chilians have really
opened a deep beneath a deep. We had found out
the cider ^nd the spirits, but who guessed the wine
and the honey, unless it were the bees ? There is a
variety in our orchards called the winesap, a doubly
liquid name that suggests what might be done with
this fruit.

The apple is the commonest and yet the most varied
and beautiful of fruits. A dish of them is as becom-
ing to the centre-table in winter as was the vase of
flowers in the summer, — a bouquet of spitzenbergs
and greenings and northern spies. A rose when it
blooms, the apple is a rose when it ripens. It pleases
every sense to which it can be addressed, the touch,
the smell, the sight, the taste ; and when it falls in the
still October days it pleases the ear. It is a call to a
banquet, it is a signal that the feast is ready. The
bough would fain hold it, but it can now assert its in-
dependence ; it can now live a life of its own.

Daily the stem relaxes its hold, till finally it lets go
completely, and down comes the painted sphere with a
mellow thump to the earth, towards which it has been
nodding so long. It bounds away to seek its bed, to
hide under a leaf, or in a tuft of grass. It will now
take time to meditate and ripen ! What delicious
thoughts it has there nestled with its fellows under

28

THE APPLE.

the fence, turning acid into sugar, and sugar into
wine !

How pleasing to the touch ! I love to stroke its
polished rondure with my hand, to carry it in my
pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or through
the early spring woods. You are company, you red-
cheeked spitz, or you salmon-fleshed greening ! I toy
with you ; press your face to mine, toss you in the air?
roll you on the ground, see you shine out where you
lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You are
so alive ! You glow like a ruddy flower. You look
so animated I almost expect to see you move. I
postpone the eating of you, you are so beautiful!
How compact ; how exquisitely tinted ! Stained by
the sun and varnished against the rains. An inde-
pendent vegetable existence, alive and vascular as my
own flesh ; capable of being wounded, bleeding, wast-
ing away, and almost of repairing damages !

How it resists the cold ! holding out almost as long
as the red cheeks of the boys do. A frost that de-
stroys the potatoes and other roots only makes the
apple more crisp and vigorous ; it peeps out from
the chance November snows unscathed. When I see
the fruit-vender on the street corner stamping his feet
and beating his hands to keep them warm, and his
naked apples lying exposed to the blasts, I wonder if
they do not ache too to clap their hands and enliven
their circulation. But they can stand it nearly as long
as the vender can.

Noble common fruit, best friend of man and most
loved by him, following him like his dog or his cow,
wherever he goes. His homestead is not planted till
you are planted, your roots intertwine with his ; thriv-
ing best where he thrives best, loving the limestone

THE APPLE.

29

and the frost, the plow and the pruning-knife, you
are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and
a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste
fruit ! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither
satiety nor indolence, neither enervating heats nor the
Frigid Zones. Uncloying fruit, fruit whose best sauce
is the open air, whose finest flavors only he whose
taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking knows ;
winter fruit, when the fire of life burns brightest;
fruit always a little hyperborean, leaning towards the
cold ; bracing, sub-acid, active fruit. I think you
must come from the north, you are so frank and hon-
est, so sturdy and appetizing. You are stocky and
homely like the northern races. Your quality is
Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous south is not
akin to you. Not spices or olives or the sumptuous
liquid fruits, but the grass, the snow, the grains, the
coolness is akin to you. I think if I could subsist on
you or the like of you, X should never have an intem-
perate or ignoble thought, never be feverish or de-
spondent. So far as I could absorb or transmute
your quality I should be cheerful, continent, equitable,
sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmth
and contentment around.

Is there any other fruit that has so much facial ex-
pression as the apple ? What boy does not more than
half believe they can see with that single eye of
theirs ? Do they not look and nod to him from the
bough ? The swaar has one look, the rambo another,
the spy another. The youth recognizes the seek-no-
further buried beneath a dozen other varieties, the
moment he catches a glance of its eye, or the bonny-
cheeked Newtown pippin, or the gentle but sharp-nosed
gilliflower. He goes to the great bin in the cellar

80

THE APPLE .

and sinks his shafts here and there in the garnered
wealth of the orchards, mining for his favorites, some-
times coming plump upon them, sometimes catching a
glimpse of them to the right or left, or uncovering
them as keystones in an arch made up of many varie-
ties.

In the dark he can usually tell them by the sense
of touch. There is not only the size and shape, but
there is the texture and polish. Some apples are coarse-
grained and some are fine ; some are thin-skinned and
some are thick. One variety is quick and vigorous
beneath the touch ; another gentle and yielding. The
pinnock has a thick skin with a spongy lining, a bruise
in it becomes like a piece of cork. The tallow apple
has an unctuous feel, as its name suggests. It sheds
water like a duck. What apple is that with a fat
curved stem that blends so prettily with its own flesh.
— the wine - apple ? Some varieties impress me as
masculine, — weather-stained, freckled, lasting and
rugged ; others are indeed lady apples, fair, delicate,
shining, mild-flavored, white-meated, like the egg-drop
and the lady-finger. The practiced hand knows each
kind by the touch.

Do you remember the apple hole in the garden or
back of the house, Ben Bolt ? In the fall after the
bins in the cellar had been well stocked, we excavated
5a circular pit in the warm, mellow earth, and covering
the bottom with clean rye straw, emptied in basketful
ifter basketful of hardy choice varieties, till there was
a tent -shaped mound several feet high of shining
/ariegated fruit. Then wrapping it about with a thick
layer of long rye straw, and tucking it up snug and
warm, the mound was covered with a thin coating of
earth, a flat stone on the top holding down the stram

THE APPLE.

31

As winter set in, another coating of earth was put
upon it, with perhaps an overcoat of coarse dry stable
manure, and the precious pile was left in silence and
darkness till spring. No marmot hibernating under
ground in his nest of leaves and dry grass, more cosy
and warm. No frost, no wet, but fragrant privacy
and quiet. Then how the earth tempers and flavors
the apples ! It draws out all the acrid unripe quali-
ties, and infuses into them a subtle refreshing taste
of the soil. Some varieties perish; but the ranker,
hardier kinds, like the northern spy, the greening, or
the black apple, or the russet, or the pinnock, how
they ripen and grow in grace, how the green becomes
gold, and the bitter becomes sweet !

As the supply in the bins and barrels gets low and
spring approaches, the buried treasures in the garden
are remembered. With spade and axe we go out and
penetrate through the snow and frozen earth till the
inner dressing of straw is laid bare. It is not quite
as clear and bright as when we placed it there last
fall, but the fruit beneath, which the hand soon ex-
poses, is just as bright and far more luscious. Then,
as day after day you resort to the hole, and, removing
the straw and earth from the opening, thrust your
arm into the fragrant pit, you have a better chance
than ever before to become acquainted with yonf
favorites by the sense of touch. How you feel for
them, reaching to the right and left ! Now you have
got a Tolman sweet ; you imagine you can feel that
single meridian line that divides it into two hemi-
spheres. Now a greening fills your hand, you feel its
fine quality beneath its rough coat. Now you have
hooked a swaar, you recognize its full face ; now a
Vandevere or a King rolls down from the apex above,

32

THE APPLE.

and you bag it at once. When you were a school,
boy you stowed these away in your pockets and ate
them along the road and at recess, and again at noon-
time; and they, m a measure, corrected the effects
of the cake and pie with which your indulgent mother
filled your lunch-basket.

The boy is indeed the true apple-eater, and is not
to be questioned how he came by the fruit with which
his pockets are filled. It belongs to him . . . His
own juicy flesh craves the juicy flesh of the apple □
Sap draws sap. His fruit-eating has little reference
to the state of his appetite. Whether he be full of
meat or empty of meat he wants the apple just the
same. Before meal or after meal it never comes
amiss. The farm-boy munches apples all day long.
He has nests of them in the hay - mow, mellowing,
to which he makes frequent visits. Sometimes old
Brindle, having access through the open door, smells
them out and makes short work of them.

In some countries the custom remains of placing a
rosy apple in the hand of the dead that they may find
it when they enter paradise. In northern mythology
the giants eat apples to keep off old age.

The apple is indeed the fruit of youth. As we
grow old we crave apples less. It is an ominous sign0
When you are ashamed to be seen eating them on the
street ; when you can carry them in your pocket and
your hand not constantly find its way to them ; when
your neighbor has apples and you have none, and yon
make no nocturnal visits to his orchard; when your
lunch-basket is without them, and you can pass a
winter’s night by the fireside with no thought of the
fruit at your elbow, then be assured you are no longer
& boy, either in heart or years.

THE APPLE .

33

The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an
apple in their season as others with a pipe or cigar.
When he has nothing else to do, or is bored, he eats
an apple. While he is waiting for the train he eats
an apple, sometimes several of them. When he takes
a walk he arms himself with apples. His traveling
bag is full of apples. He offers an apple to his com-
panion, and takes one himself. They are his chief
solace when on the road. He sows their seed all along
the route. He tosses the core from the car-window
and from the top of the stage-coach. He would, in
time, make the land one vast orchard. He dispenses
with a knife. He prefers that his teeth shall have the
first taste. Then he knows the best flavor is imme-
diately beneath the skin, and that in a pared apple
this is lost. If you will stew the apple, he says, in-
stead of baking it, by all means leave the skin on. It
improves the color and vastly heightens the flavor of
the dish.

The apple is a masculine fruit ; hence women are
poor apple-eaters. It belongs to the open air, and
requires an open-air taste and relish.

I instantly sympathized with that clergyman I read
of, who on pulling out his pocket-handkerchief in the
midst of his discourse, pulled out two bouncing apples
with it that went rolling across the pulpit floor and
down the pulpit stairs. These apples were, no doubt,
to be eaten after the sermon on his way home, or to
his next appointment. They would take the taste of
it out of his mouth. Then, would a minister be apt
to grow tiresome with two big apples in his coat-tail
pockets? Would he not naturally hasten along to
“ lastly,” and the big apples ? If they were the dom-
inie apples, and it was April or May, he certainly
would.

84

THE APPLE.

How the early settlers prized the apple! When
their trees broke down or were split asunder by the
storms, the neighbors turned out, the divided tree was
put together again and fastened with iron bolts. In
some of the oldest orchards one may still occasionally
see a large dilapidated tree with the rusty iron bolt
yet visible. Poor, sour fruit, too, but sweet in those
early pioneer days. My grandfather, who was one of
these heroes of the stump, used every fall to make a
journey of forty miles for a few apples, which he
brought home in a bag on horseback. He frequently
started from home by two or three o’clock in the
morning, and at one time both he and his horse were
much frightened by the screaming of panthers in a
narrow pass in the mountains through which the road
led.

Emerson, I believe, has spoken of the apple as the
social fruit of New England. Indeed, what a pro-
moter or abettor of social intercourse among our rural
population the apple has been, the company growing
more merry and unrestrained as soon as the basket cf
apples was passed round ! When the cider followed,
the introduction and good understanding were com-
plete. Then those rural gatherings that enlivened
the autumn in the country, known as “ apple cuts,”
now, alas ! nearly obsolete, where so many things wer©
cut and dried besides apples ! The larger and more
loaded the orchard, the more frequently the invita®
tions went round and the higher the social and con®
vivial spirit ran. Ours is eminently a country of the
orchard. Horace Greeley said he had seen no land in
which the orchard formed such a prominent feature
in the rural and agricultural districts. Nearly every
farmhouse in the Eastern and Northern States has its

THE APPLE.

35

voting or its background of apple-trees, which gener-
ally date back to the first settlement of the farm.
Indeed, the orchard, more than almost any other
thing, tends to soften and humanize the country, and
to give the place of which it is an adjunct, a settled,
domestic look. The apple-tree takes the rawness and /
wildness off any scene. On the top of a mountain, or
in remote pastures, it sheds the sentiment of home.
It never loses its domestic air, or lapses into a wiki
state. And in planting a homestead, or in choosing
a building site for the new house, what a help it is to
have a few old, maternal apple-trees near by ; regular
old grandmothers, who have seen trouble, who have
been sad and glad through so many winters and sum-
mers, who have blossomed till the air about them is
sweeter than elsewhere, and borne fruit till the grass
beneath them has become thick and soft from human
contact, and who have nourished robins and finches in
their branches till they have a tender, brooding look.
The ground, the turf, the atmosphere of an old
orchard, seem several stages nearer to man than that
of the adjoining field, as if the trees had given back
to the soil more than they had taken from it ; as if
they had tempered the elements and attracted all the
genial and beneficent influences in the landscape
around.

An apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops
beside the apple. There is the crop of sweet and ten-
der reminiscences dating from childhood and spanning
the seasons from May to October, and making the
orchard a sort of outlying part of the household. You
have played there as a child, mused there as a youth
or lover, strolled there as a thoughtful, sad-eyed man.
Your father, perhaps, planted the trees, or reared them

36

THE APPLE.

from the seed, and you yourself have pruned and
grafted them, and worked among them, till every
separate tree has a peculiar history and meaning in
your mind. Then there is the never-failing crop of
birds — - robins, goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds,
hair-birds, orioles, starlings — all nesting and breed-
ing in its branches, and fitly described by Wilson
Flagg as “Birds of the Garden and Orchard.”
Whether the pippin and sweetbough bear or not, the
“punctual birds” can always be depended on. In-
deed, there are few better places to study ornithology
than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants,
many of the birds of the deeper forest find occasion to
visit it during the season. The cuckoo comes for the
tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen apples, the ruffed
grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds’ eggs, the
woodpecker and chickadees for their food, and the
high-hole for ants. The red-bird comes too, if only
to see what a friendly covert its branches form ; and
the wood-thrush now and then comes out of the grove
near by, and nests alongside of its cousin, the robin.
The smaller hawks know that this is a most likely
spot for their prey; and in spring the shy northern
warblers may be studied as they pause to feed on the
fine insects amid its branches. The mice love to
dwell here also, and hither comes from the near woods
the squirrel and the rabbit. The latter will put his
head through the boy’s slipper-noose any time for a
taste of the sweet apple, and the red squirrel and chip-
munk esteem its seeds a great rarity.

All the domestic animals love the apple, but non©
so much so as the cow. The taste of it wakes her up
as few other things do, and bars and fences must be
well looked after. No need to assort them or pick

THE APPLE.

37

out the ripe ones for her. An apple is an apple, and
there is no best about it. I heard of a quick-witted
old cow that learned to shake them down from the
tree. While rubbing herself she had observed that
an apple sometimes fell. This stimulated her to rub
a little harder, when more apples fell. She then took
the hint and rubbed her shoulder with such vigor that
the farmer had to check her and keep an eye on hei
to save his fruit.

But the cow is the friend of the apple. How many
trees she has planted about the farm, in the edge of
the woods, and in remote fields and pastures. The
wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her
planting. She browses them down to be sure, but they
are hers, and why should she not ?

What an individuality the apple-tree has, each va-
riety being nearly as marked by its form as by its
fruit. What a vigorous grower, for instance, is the
Ribston pippin, an English apple. Wide branching
like the oak, and its large ridgy fruit, in late fall or
early winter, is one of my favorites. Or the thick and
more pendent top of the belleflower, with its equally
rich, sprightly uncloying fruit.

Sweet apples are perhaps the most nutritious, and
when baked are a feast in themselves. With a tree
of the Jersey sweet or of Tolman’s sweeting in bear-
ing, no man’s table need be devoid of luxuries and
one of the most wholesome of all deserts. Or the
red astrachan, an August apple, what a gap may be
filled in the culinary department of a household at
this season, by a single tree of this fruit ! And what
a feast is its shining crimson coat to the eye before its
snow-white flesh has reached the tongue. But the
apple of apples for the household is the spitzenberg*.

38

THE APPLE.

In this casket Pomona has put her highest flavors. It
can stand the ordeal of cooking and still remain a
spitz. I recently saw a barrel of these apples from
the orchard of a fruit-grower in the northern part of
New York, who has devoted especial attention to this
variety. They were perfect gems. Not large, that
had not been the aim, but small, fair, uniform, and
red to the core. How intense, how spicy and aromatic !

But all the excellences of the apple are not con-
fined to the cultivated fruit. Occasionally a seedling
springs up about the farm that produces fruit of rare
beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted tc
the apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River,
I have noticed that most of the wild unbidden trees
bear good, edible fruit. In cold and ungenial districts,
the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in
more favorable soils they are often er mild and sweet.
I know wild apples that ripen in August, and that do
not need, if it could be had, Thoreau’s sauce of sharp
November air to be eaten with. At the foot of a hill
near me and striking its roots deep in the shale, is a
giant specimen of native tree that bears an apple that
has about the clearest, waxiest, most transparent com-
plexion I ever saw. It is good size, and the color of
a tea-rose. Its quality is best appreciated in the
kitchen. I know another seedling of excellent quality
and so remarkable for its firmness and density, that
it is known on the farm where it grows as the “ heavy
apple.”

I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of
the apple and its tree are under obligation. His
chapter on Wild Apples is a most delicious piece of
writing. It has a “ tang and smack ” like the fruit it
celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in

THE APPLE.

the same manner. It has the hue and perfume of the
crab, and the richness and raciness of the pippin. But
Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts and
was obliged to confess that his favorites could not b©
eaten in-doors. Late in November he found a blue-
pearmain tree growing within the edge of a swamp,
almost as good as wild. “ You would not suppose”
he says, “ that there was any fruit left there on the
first survey, but you must look according to system.
Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten
now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek
here and there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless,
with experienced eyes I explore amid the bare alders,
and the huckleberry bushes, and the withered sedge,
and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of
leaves, and pry under the fallen and decayed ferns
which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the
ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen
into hollows long since, and covered up by the leaves
of the tree itself — - a proper kind of packing. From
these lurking places, everywhere within the circum-
ference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit all wet and
glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out
by crickets, and perhaps a leaf or two cemented to it
(as Curzon an old manuscript from a monastery’s
mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it, anci
at least as ripe and well kept, if no better than those
in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If these
resources fail to yield anything, I have learned to look
between the leaves of the suckers which spring thickly
from some horizontal limb, for now and then one
lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump,
where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which
may have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set, for I

40

THE APPLE.

do not refuse the blue-pearmain, I fill my pockets on
each side ; and as I retrace my steps, in the frosty eve,
being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one
first from this side, and then from that, to keep my
balance.”

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

The traveler and camper-out in Maine, unless lie
penetrates its more northern portions, has less reason
to remember it as a pine-tree State than a birch-tree
State. The white-pine forests have melted away like
snow in the spring and gone down stream, leaving
only patches here and there in the more remote and
inaccessible parts. The portion of the State I saw —
the valley of the Kennebec and the woods about
Moxie Lake — had been shorn of its pine timber more
than forty years before, and is now covered with a
thick growth of spruce and cedar and various decid-
uous trees. But the birch abounds. Indeed, when
the pine goes out the birch comes in ; the race of men
succeeds the race of giants. This tree has great stay-
at-home virtues. Let the sombre, aspiring, mysterious
pine go ; the birch has humble every day uses. In
Maine, the paper or canoe birch is turned to more
account than any other tree. I read in Gibbon that
the natives of ancient Assyria used to celebrate in
verse or prose the three hundred and sixty uses to
which the various parts and products of the palm-tree
were applied. The Maine birch is turned to so many
accounts that it may well be called the palm of this
region. Uncle Nathan, our guide, said it was made
especially for the camper-out ; yes, and for the wood-
man and frontiersman generally. It is a magazine, a
furnishing store set up in the wilderness, whose goods

42 A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

are free to every comer. The whole equipment of the
camp lies folded in it, and comes forth at the beck of
the woodman’s axe ; tent, waterproof roof, boat, camp
utensils, buckets, cups, plates, spoons, napkins, table-
cloths, paper for letters or your journal, torches, can-
dles, kindling-wood, and fuel. The canoe-birch yields
you its vestments with the utmost liberality. Ask for
its coat, and it gives you its waistcoat also. Its bark
seems wrapped about it layer upon layer, and comes
off with great ease. We saw many rude structures
and cabins shingled and sided with it, and haystacks
capped with it. Near a maple-sugar camp there was
a large pile of birch-bark sap-buckets, — each bucket
made of a piece of bark about a yard square, folded
up as the tinman folds up a sheet of tin to make a
square vessel, the corners bent around against the
sides and held by a wooden pin. When, one day, we
were overtaken by a shower in traveling through the
woods, our guide quickly stripped large sheets of the
bark from a near tree, and we had each a perfect
umbrella as by magic. When the rain was over, and
we moved on, I wrapped mine about me like a large
leather apron, and it shielded my clothes from the wet
bushes. When we came to a spring, Uncle Nathan
1 would have a birch-bark cup ready before any of us
could get a tin one out of his knapsack, and I think
water never tasted so sweet as from one of these bark
cups. It is exactly the thing. It just fits the mouthf
and it seems to give new virtues to the water. It
makes me thirsty now when I think of it. In our
camp at Moxie we made a large birch-bark box to
keep the butter in ; and the butter in this box, covered
with some leafy boughs, I think improved in flavor
day by day. Maine butter needs something to mollify

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

48

and sweeten it a little, and I think birch bark will do
it. In camp Uncle Nathan often drank his tea and
roffee from a bark cup ; the china closet in the birch-
tree was always handy, and our vulgar tin ware was gen-
erally a good deal mixed, and the kitchen-maid not at
all particular about dish- washing. We all tried the
oatmeal with the maple syrup in one of these dishes,
and the stewed mountain cranberries, using a birch-
bark spoon, and never found service better. Uncle
Nathan declared he could boil potatoes in* a bark ket-
tle, and I did not doubt him. Instead of sending our
soiled napkins and table-spreads to the wash, we rolled
them up into candles and torches, and drew daily upon
our stores in the forest for new ones.

But the great triumph of the birch is of course the
bark canoe. When Uncle Nathan took us out under
his little wood-shed, and showed us, or rather modestly
permitted us to see, his nearly finished canoe, it was
like a first glimpse of some new and unknown genius
of the woods or streams. It sat there on the chips
and shavings and fragments of bark like some shy,
delicate creature just emerged from its hiding-place,
or like some wild flower just opened. It was the first
boat of the kind I had ever seen, and it filled my eye
completely. What woodcraft it indicated, and what
a wild free life, sylvan life, it promised ! It had such
a fresh, aboriginal look as I had never before seen in
any kind of handiwork. Its clear yellow-red color
would have become the cheek of an Indian maiden0
Then its supple curves and swells, its sinewy stays
and thwarts, its bow-like contour, its tomahawk stem
and stern rising quickly and sharply from its frame,
were all vividly suggestive of the race from which it
came. An old Indian had taught Uncle Nathan tha

44

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

art, and the soul of the ideal red man looked out of
the boat before us. Uncle Nathan had spent two
days ranging the mountains looking for a suitable
tree, and had worked nearly a week on the craft. It
was twelve feet long, and would seat and carry five
men nicely. Three trees contribute to the making of
a canoe besides the birch, namely, the white cedar for
ribs and lining, the spruce for roots and fibres to sew
its joints and bind its frame, and the pine for pitch
or rosin to stop its seams and cracks. It is hand-made
and home-made, or rather wood-made, in a sense that
no other craft is, except a dug-out, and it suggests a
taste and a refinement that few products of civilization
realize. The design of a savage, it yet looks like the
thought of a poet, and its grace and fitness haunt the
imagination. I suppose its production was the inev-
itable result of the Indian’s wants and surroundings,
but that does not detract from its beauty. It is, in-
deed, one of the fairest flowers the thorny plant of
necessity ever bore. Our canoe, as I have intimated,
was not yet finished when we first saw it, nor yet
when we took it up, with its architect, upon our met-
aphorical backs and bore it to the woods. It lacked
part of its cedar lining and the rosin upon its joints,
and these were added after we reached our destination.

Though we were not indebted to the birch-tree for
Our guide, Uncle Nathan, as he was known in all the
country, yet he matched well these woodsy products
and conveniences. The birch-tree had given him a
large part of his tuition, and kneeling in his canoe
and making it shoot noiselessly over the water with
that subtle yet indescribably expressive and athletic
play of the muscles of the back and shoulders, the
boat and the man seemed born of the same spirit.

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

45

He had been a hunter and trapper for over forty
years ; he had grown gray in the woods, had ripened
and matured there, and everything about him was as if
the spirit of the woods had had the ordering of it ; his
whole make-up was in a minor and subdued key, like
the moss and the lichens, or like the protective color-
ing of the game, — everything but his quick sense
and penetrative glance. He was as gentle and modest
as a girl ; his sensibilities were like plants that grow
in the shade. The woods and the solitudes had
touched him with their own softening and refining
influence ; had indeed shed upon his soil of life a
rich deep leaf mould that was delightful, and that
nursed, half concealed, the tenderest and wildest
growths. There was grit enough back of and beneath
it all, but he presented none of the rough and repeh
ling traits of character of the conventional backwoods-
man. In the spring he was a driver of logs on the
Kennebec, usually having charge of a large gang of
men ; in the winter he was a solitary trapper and
hunter in the forests.

Our first glimpse of Maine waters was Pleasant
Pond, which we found by following a white, rapid,
musical stream from the Kennebec three miles back
into the mountains. Maine waters are for the most
part dark-complexioned, Indian-colored streams, but
Pleasant Pond is a pale-face among them both in
name and nature. It is the only strictly silver lake I
ever saw. Its waters seem almost artificially white
and brilliant, though of remarkable transparency. I
think I detected minute shining motes held in suspen-
sion in it. As for the trout they are veritable bars
of silver until you have cut their flesh, when they are
the reddest of gold. They have no crimson or otheff

46

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH .

spots, and the straight lateral line is but a faint pencil
mark. They appeared to be a species of lake trout
peculiar to these waters, uniformly from ten to twelve
inches in length. And these beautiful fish, at the time
of our visit (last of August) at least, were to b©
taken only in deep water upon a hook baited with salt
pork. And then you needed a letter of introduction
to them. They were not to be tempted or cajoled by
strangers. We did not succeed in raising a fish, al-
though instructed how it was to be done, until one o£
the natives, a young and obliging farmer living hard
by, came and lent his countenance to the enterprise.
I sat in one end of the boat and he in the other ; my
pork was the same as his, and I manoeuvred it as
directed, and yet those fish knew his hook from mine
in sixty feet of water, and preferred it four times in
five. Evidently they did not bite because they were
hungry, but solely for old acquaintance’ sake.

Pleasant Pond is an irregular sheet of water, two
miles or more in its greatest diameter, with high, rug-
ged mountains rising up from its western shore, and
low rolling hills sweeping back from its eastern and
northern, covered by a few sterile farms. I was never
tired, when the wind was still, of floating along its
margin and gazing down into its marvelously trans-
lucent depths. The bowlders and fragments of rocks
were seen, at a depth of twenty-five or thirty feet,
strewing its floor, and apparently as free from any
covering of sediment as when they were dropped there
by the old glaciers aeons ago. Our camp was amid a
dense grove of second growth of white pine on the
eastern shore, where, for one, I found a most admi-
rable cradle in a little depression, outside of the tent,
carpeted with pine needles, in which to pass the night,

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH \

47

The camper-out is always in luck if lie can find, shel-
tered by the trees, a soft hole in the ground, even if
he has a stone for a pillow. The earth must open its
arms a little for us even in life, if we are to sleep
well upon its bosom. I have often heard my grand-
father, who was a soldier of the Revolution, tell with
great gusto how he once bivouacked in a little hollow
made by the overturning of a tree, and slept so
soundly that he did not wake up till his cradle was
half full of water from a passing shower.

What bird or other creature might represent the
divinity of Pleasant Pond I do not know, but its
demon, as of most northern inland waters, is the loon ;
and a very good demon he is too, suggesting some-
thing not so much malevolent, as arch, sardonic, ubi-
quitous, circumventing, with just a tinge of something
inhuman and uncanny. His fiery red eyes gleaming
forth from that jet-black head are full of meaning.
Then his strange horse laughter by day and his weird,
doleful cry at night, like that of a lost and wandering
spirit, recall no other bird or beast. He suggests
something almost supernatural in his alertness and
amazing quickness, cheating the shot and the bullet of
the sportsman out of their aim. I know of but one
other bird so quick, and that is the humming-bird,
which I have never been able to kill with a gun. The
loon laughs the shot-gun to scorn, and the obliging
young farmer above referred to told me he had shot
at them hundreds of times with his rifle, without
effect, — they always dodged his bullet. We had in
our party a breach-loading rifle, which weapon is per-
haps an appreciable moment of time quicker than the
ordinary muzzle loader, and this the poor loon could
Hot or did not dodge. He had not timed himself to

48

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

that species of fire-arm, and when, with his fellow, he
swam about within rifle range of our camp, letting off
volleys of his wild ironical ha-ha , he little suspected
the dangerous gun that was matched against him.
As the rifle cracked both loons made the gesture of
diving, but only one of them disappeared beneath the
water ; and when he came to the surface in a few
moments, a hundred or more yards away, and saw his
'companion did not follow, but was floating on the
water where he had last seen him, he took the alarm
and sped away in the distance. The bird I had killed
was a magnificent specimen, and I looked him over
with great interest. His glossy checkered coat, his
banded neck, his snow-white breast, his powerful lance-
shaped beak, his red eyes, his black, thin, slender,
marvelously delicate feet and legs, issuing from his
muscular thighs, and looking as if they had never
touched the ground, his strong wings well forward,
while his legs were quite at the apex, and the neat,
elegant model of the entire bird, speed and quickness
and strength stamped upon every feature, — all de-
lighted and lingered in the eye. The loon appears
like anything but a silly bird, unless you see him in
some collection, or in the shop of the taxidermist,
where he usually looks very tame and goose-like.
Nature never meant the loon to stand up, or to us©
his feet and legs for other purposes than swimming.
Indeed, he cannot stand except upon his tail in a per-
pendicular attitude, but in the collections he is poised
upon his feet like a barn-yard fowl, all the wildness,
and grace and alertness goes out of him. My speci-
men sits upon a table as upon the surface of the
water, his feet trailing behind him, his body low and
trim, his head elevated and slightly turned as if in the

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH. 49

act of bringing that fiery eye to bear upon you, and
vigilance and power stamped upon every lineament.

The loon is to the fishes what the hawk is to the
birds ; he swoops down to unknown depths upon
them, and not even the wary trout can elude him,
(Jncle Nathan said he had seen the loon disappear,
and in a moment come up with a large trout, which
he would cut in two with his strong beak, and swal-
low piecemeal. Neither the loon nor the otter can
bolt a fish under the water ; he must come to the sur-
face to dispose of it. (I once saw a man eat a cake
under water in London.) Our guide told me he had
seen the parent loon swimming with a single young
one upon its back. When closely pressed it dove, or
“ div ” as he would have it, and left the young bird
sitting upon the water. Then it too disappeared, and
when the old one returned and called, it came out from
the shore. On the wing overhead, the loon looks not
unlike a very large duck, but when it alights it
ploughs into the water like a bombshell. It probably
cannot take flight from the land, as the one Gilbert
White saw and describes in his letters was picked up
in a field, unable to launch itself into the air.

From Pleasant Pond we went seven miles through
the woods to Moxie Lake, following an overgrown
lumberman’s “tote” road, our canoe and supplies,
etc., hauled on a sled by the young farmer with his
three-year-old steers. I doubt if birch-bark ever made
a rougher voyage than that. As I watched it above
the bushes, the sled and the luggage being hidden, it
appeared as if tossed in the wildest and most tempest-
uous sea. When the bushes closed above it I felt as
if it had gone down, or been broken into a hundred
pieces. Billows of rocks and logs, and chasms of

50

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

creeks and spring runs, kept it rearing and pitching
in the most frightful manner. The steers went at a
spanking pace ; indeed, it was a regular bovine gale ?
but their driver clung to their side amid the brush
and bowlders with desperate tenacity, and seemed to
manage them by signs and nudges, for he hardly ut®
tered his orders aloud. But we got through without
any serious mishap, passing Mosquito Creek and Mos®
quito Pond, and flanking Mosquito Mountain, but see-
ing no mosquitoes, and brought up at dusk at a lum-
berman’s old hay-barn, standing in the midst of a
lonely clearing on the shores of Moxie Lake.

Here we passed the night, and were lucky in hav-
ing a good roof over our heads, for it rained heavily.
After we were rolled in our blankets and variously
disposed upon the haymow, Uncle Nathan lulled us to
sleep by a long and characteristic yarn.

I had asked him, half jocosely, if he believed in
“ spooks ” ; but he took my question seriously, and
without answering it directly, proceeded to tell us
what he himself had known and witnessed. It was,
by the way, extremely difficult either to surprise or to
steal upon any of Uncle Nathan’s private opinions
and beliefs about matters and things. He was as shy
of all debatable subjects as a fox is of a trap. He
usually talked in a circle, just as he hunted moose and
caribou, so as not to approach his point too rudely
and suddenly. He would keep on the lee side of his
interlocutor in spite of all one could do. He was
thoroughly good and reliable, but the wild creatures
of the woods, in pursuit of which he had spent so
much of his life, had taught him a curious gentleness
and indirection, and to keep himself in the back-
ground ; he was careful that you should not scent his

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH .

51

opinions upon any subject at all polemic, but he would
tell you what he had seen and known. What he had
seen and known about spooks was briefly this : — In
company with a neighbor he was passing the night
with an old recluse who lived somewhere in these
woods. Their host was an Englishman, who had the
reputation of having murdered his wife some years be-
fore in another part of the country, and, deserted by
his grown-up children, was eking out his days in pov-
erty amid these solitudes. The three men were sleep-
ing upon the floor, with Uncle Nathan next to a rude
partition that divided the cabin into two rooms. At
his head there was a door that opened into this other
apartment. Late at night, Uncle Nathan said, he
awoke and turned over, and his mind was occupied
with various things, when he heard somebody behind
the partition. He reached over and felt that both of
his companions were in their places beside him, and
he was somewhat surprised. The person, or whatever
it was, in the other room moved about heavily, and
pulled the table from its place beside the wall to the
middle of the floor. 44 I was not dreaming,” said
Uncle Nathan ; 44 I felt of my eyes twice to make
sure, and they were wide open.” Presently the door
opened ; he was sensible of the draught upon his head,
and a woman’s form stepped heavily past him; he
felt the 44 swirl ” of her skirts as she went by. Then
there was a loud noise in the room as if some one had
fallen their whole length upon the floor. 44 It jarred
the house,” said he, 44 and woke everybody up. I asked

old Mr. if he heard that noise. 4 Yes,’ said he,

4 it was thunder.’ But it was not thunder, I know
that ; ” and then added, 44 1 was no more afraid than I
am this minute. I never was the least mite afraid

52

A TASTE OF MAINE B1RCIE

in my life. And my eyes were wide open,” he re-
peated ; “ I felt of them twice ; but whether that was
the speret of that man’s murdered wife or not I can-
not tell. They said she was an uncommon heavy
woman.” Uncle Nathan was a man of unusually
quick and acute senses, and he did not doubt theii?
evidence on this occasion any more than he did when
they prompted him to level his rifle at a bear or a
moose.

Moxie Lake lies much lower than Pleasant Pond,
and its waters compared with those of the latter are
as copper compared with silver. It is very irregular
in shape ; now narrowing to the dimensions of a slow
moving grassy creek, then expanding into a broad
deep basin with rocky shores, and commanding the
noblest mountain scenery. It is rarely that the pond-
lily and the speckled trout are found together, — the
fish the soul of the purest spring water, the flower the
transfigured spirit of the dark mud and slime of slug-
gish summer streams and ponds ; yet in Moxie they
were both found in perfection. Our camp was amid
the birches, poplars, and white cedars near the head of
the lake, where the best fishing at this season was to
be had. Moxie has a small oval head, rather shallow,
but bumpy with rocks ; a long, deep neck, full o£
springs, where the trout lie ; and a very broad chest,
with two islands tufted with pine-trees for breasts.
We swam in the head, we fished in the neck, or in a
small section of it, a space about the size of the
Adam’s apple, and we paddled across and around the
broad expanse below. Our birch bark was not fin-
ished and christened till we reached Moxie. The ce-
dar lining was completed at Pleasant Pond, where we
had the use of a bateau , but the rosin was not applied

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

53

to the seams till we reached this lake. When I knelt
down in it for the first time and put its slender ma-
ple paddle into the water, it sprang away with such
quickness and speed that it disturbed me in my seat.
I had spurred a more restive and spirited steed than I
was used to. In fact, I had never been in a craft that
sustained so close a relation to my will, and was so
responsive to my slightest wish. When I caught my
first large trout from it, it sympathized a little toe
closely, and my enthusiasm started a leak, which, how-
ever, with a live coal and a piece of rosin, was quickly
mended. You cannot perform much of a war-dance
in a birch-bark canoe : better wait till you get on dry
land. Yet as a boat it is not so shy and “ ticklish **
as I had imagined. One needs to be on the alert, as
becomes a sportsman and an angler, and in his deal-
ings with it must charge himself with three things, —
precision, moderation, and circumspection.

Trout weighing four and five pounds have been
taken at Moxie, but none of that size came to our hand.
I realized the fondest hopes I had dared to indulge in
when I hooked the first two-pounder of my life, and
ray extreme solicitude lest he get away I trust was par-
donable. My friend, in relating the episode in camp,
said I implored him to row me down in the middle of
the lake that I might have room to manoeuvre my fish.
But the slander has barely a grain of truth in it. The
water near us showed several old stakes broken off
just below the surface, and my fish was determined to
wrap my leader about one of these stakes ; it was only
for the clear space a few yards farther out that I
prayed. It was not long after that my friend found
himself in an anxious frame of mind. He hooked a
Jarge trout, which came home on him so suddenly that

54

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

he had not time to reel up his line, and in his extrem-
ity he stretched his tall form into the air and lifted
up his pole to an incredible height. He checked the
trout before it got under the boat, but dared not come
down an inch, and then began his amusing further
elongation in reaching for his reel with one hand3
while he carried it ten feet into the air with the other.
A step-ladder would perhaps have been more welcome
to him just then than at any other moment during his
life. But the trout was saved, though my friend’s but-
tons and suspenders suffered.

We learned a new trick in fly-fishing here, worth
disclosing. It was not one day in four that the trout
would take the fly on the surface. When the south
wind was blowing and the clouds threatened rain, they
would at times, notably about three o’clock, rise hand-
somely. But on all other occasions it was rarely that
we could entice them up through the twelve or fifteen
feet of water. Earlier in the season they are not so
lazy and indifferent, but the August languor and
drowsiness were now upon them. So we learned by
a lucky accident to fish deep for them, even weighting
our leaders with a shot, and allowing the flies to sink
nearly to the bottom. After a moment’s pause we
would draw them slowly up, and when half or two
thirds of the way to the top the trout would strike,
when the sport became lively enough. Most of our
fish were taken in this way. There is nothing like
the flash and the strike at the surface, and perhaps
only the need of food will ever tempt the genuine
angler into any more prosaic style of fishing ; but if
you must go below the surface, a shotted leader is the
best thing to use.

Our camp-fire at night served more purposes than

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

55

one ; from its embers and flickering shadows, Uncle
Nathan read us many a tale of his life in the woods.
They were the same old hunter’s stories, except that
they evidently had the merit of being strictly true,
and hence were not very thrilling or marvelous. Uncle
Nathan’s tendency was rather to tone down and be»
little his experiences than to exaggerate them. If he
ever bragged at all (and I suspect he did just a little,
when telling us how he outshot one of the famous
riflemen of the American team, whom he was guiding
through these woods), he did it in such a sly, round-
about way that it was hard to catch him at it. His
passage with the rifleman referred to shows the dif-
ference between the practical off-hand skill of the
hunter in the woods and the science of the long-range
target hitter. Mr. Bull's Eye had heard that his guide
was a capital shot and had seen some proof of it, and
hence could not rest till he had had a trial of skill with
him. Uncle Nathan, being the challenged party, had
the right to name the distance and the conditions.
A piece of white paper the size of a silver dollar was
put upon a tree twelve rods off, the contestants to fire
three shots each off-hand. Uncle Nathan’s first bullet
barely missed the mark, but the other two were planted
well into it. Then the great rifleman took his turn, and
missed every time.

“ By hemp ! ” said Uncle Nathan, “ I was .sorry I

shot so well, Mr. took it so to heart ; and I had

used his own rifle, too. He did not get over it for a
week.”

But far more ignominious was the failure of Mr.
Bull’s Eye when he saw his first bear. They were
paddling slowly and silently down Dead River, when
the guide heard a slight noise in the bushes just be*

56

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

hind a little bend. He whispered to the rifleman, who
sat kneeling in the bow of the boat, to take his rifle.
But instead of doing so he picked up his two-barreled
shot-gun. As they turned the point, there stood a
bear not twenty yards away, drinking from the stream.
Uncle Nathan held the canoe, while the man who had
come so far in quest of this very game was trying to
lay down his shot-gun and pick up his rifle. “ His
hand moved like the hand of a clock,'” said Uncle
Nathan, “ and I could hardly keep my seat. I knew
the bear would see us in a moment more, and run.”
Instead of laying his gun by his side, where it be-
longed, he reached it across in front of him and laid
it upon his rifle, and in trying to get the latter from
under it a noise was made ; the bear heard it and
raised his head. Still there was time, for as the bear
sprang into the woods he stopped and looked back, — ■
“ as I knew he would,” said the guide ; yet the marks-
man was not ready. “ By hemp ! I could have shot
three bears,” exclaimed Uncle Nathan, “ while he was
getting that rifle to his face ! ”

Poor Mr. Bull’s Eye was deeply humiliated. “ Just
the chance I had been looking for,” he said, “ and my
wits suddenly left me.”

As a hunter Uncle Nathan always took the game
on its own terms, that of still-hunting. He even shot
foxes in this way, going into the fields in the fall just
at break of day, and watching for them about their
mousing haunts. One morning, by these tactics, he
shot a black fox ; a fine specimen, he said, and a wild
one, for he stopped and looked and listened every few
yards.

He had killed over two hundred moose, a large
number of them at night on the lakes. His method

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

57

was to go out in his canoe and conceal himself by
some point or island, and wait till he heard the game.
In the fall the moose comes into the water to eat the
large fibrous roots of the pond -lilies. He splashes
along till he finds a suitable spot, when he begins feed-
ing, sometimes thrusting his head and neck several
feet under water. The hunter listens, and when the
moose lifts his head and the rills of water run from
it, and he hears him “ swash ” the lily roots about to
get off the mud, it is his time to start. Silently as a
shadow he creeps up on the moose, who by the way,
it seems, never expects the approach of danger from
the water side. If the hunter accidentally makes a
noise the moose looks toward the shore for it. Ther-»
is always a slight gleam on the water, Uncle Nathan
says, even in the darkest night, and the dusky form
of the moose can be distinctly seen upon it. When
the hunter sees this darker shadow he lifts his gun to
the sky and gets the range of its barrels, then lowers
it till it covers the mark, and fires.

The largest moose Uncle Nathan ever killed is
mounted in the State House at Augusta. He shot
him while hunting in winter on snow-shoes. The
moose was reposing upon the ground, with his head
stretched out in front of him, as one may sometimes
see a cow resting. The position was such that only
a quartering shot through the animal’s hip could reach
its heart. Studying the problem carefully, and taking
his own time, the hunter fired. The moose sprang
into the air, turned, and came with tremendous strides
straight toward him. “ I knew he had not seen or
scented me,” said Uncle Nathan, “ but, by hemp, I
wished myself somewhere else just then ; for I was
lying right down in his path.” But the noble animal

58

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

stopped a few yards short, and fell dead with a bullet*
hole through his heart.

When the moose yard in the winter, that is, restrict
their wanderings to a well-defined section of the forest
or mountain, trampling down the snow and beating
paths in all directions, they browse off only the most
dainty morsels first ; when they go over the ground a
second time they crop a little cleaner ; the third time
they sort still closer, till by and by nothing is left.
Spruce, hemlock, poplar, the barks of various trees,
everything within reach, is cropped close. When the
hunter comes upon one of these yards the problem for
him to settle is, Where are the moose ? for it is abso-
lutely necessary that he keep on the lee side of them.
So he considers the lay of the land, the direction of
the wind, the time of day, the depth of the snow, ex-
amines the spoor, the cropped twigs, and studies every
hint and clew like a detective. Uncle Nathan said he
could not explain to another how he did it, but he
could usually tell in a few minutes in what direction
to look for the game. His experience had ripened
into a kind of intuition or winged reasoning that was
above rules.

He said that most large game, deer, caribou, moose,
bear, when started by the hunter and not much
scared, were sure to stop and look back before disap=
pearing from sight : he usually waited for this last
and best chance to fire. He told us of a huge bear
he had seen one morning while still-hunting foxes in
the fields ; the bear saw him, and got into the woods
before he could get a good shot. In her course some
distance up the mountain was a bald, open spot, and
he felt sure when she crossed this spot she would
pause and look behind her; and sure enough, like

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

59

Lot’s wife, her curiosity got the better of her; she
stopped to have a final look, and her travels ended
there and then.

Uncle Nathan had trapped and shot a great many
bears, and some of his experiences revealed an un-
usual degree of sagacity in this animal. One April,
when the weather began to get warm and thawy, an
old bear left her den in the rocks and built a large,
warm nest of grass, leaves, and the bark of the white
cedar, under a tall balsam fir that stood in a low,
sunny, open place amid the mountains. Hither she
conducted her two cubs, and the family began life in
what might be called their spring residence. The
tree above them was for shelter, and for refuge for
the cubs in case danger approached, as it soon did in
the form of Uncle Nathan. He happened that way
soon after the bear had moved. Seeing her track in
the snow, he concluded to follow it. When the bear
had passed, the snow had been soft and sposhy, and
she had “ slumped,” he said, several inches. It was
now hard and slippery. As he neared the tree the
track turned and doubled, and tacked this way and
that, and led through the worst brush and brambles
to be found. This was a shrewd thought of the old
bear ; she could thus hear her enemy coming a long
time before he drew very near. When Uncle Nathan
finally reached the nest, he found it empty, but still
warm. Then he began to circle about and look for
the bear’s footprints or nail-prints upon the frozen
snow. Not finding them the first time, he took a
larger circle, then a still larger ; finally he made a
long detour , and spent nearly an hour searching for
some clew to the direction the bear had taken, but all
to no purpose. Then he returned to the tree and

60

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

scrutinized it. The foliage was very dense, but pres*
ently he made out one of the cubs near the top, stand-
ing up amid the branches, and peering down at him.
This he killed. Further search only revealed a mass
of foliage apparently more dense than usual, but a
bullet sent into it was followed by loud whimpering
and crying, and the other baby bear came tumbling
down. In leaving the place, greatly puzzled as to
what had become of the mother bear, Uncle Nathan
followed another of her frozen tracks, and after about
a quarter of a mile saw beside it, upon the snow, the
fresh trail he had been in search of. In making her
escape the bear had stepped exactly in her old tracks
that were hard and icy, and had thus left no mark till
she took to the snow again.

During his trapping expeditions into the woods in
midwinter, I was curious to know how Uncle Nathan
passed the nights, as we were twice pinched with the
cold at that season in our tent and blankets. It was
no trouble to keep warm, he said, in the coldest
weather. As night approached, he would select a
place for his camp on the side of a hill. With one of
his snow-shoes he would shovel out the snow till the
ground was reached, carrying the snow out in front,
as we scrape the earth out of the side of a hill to level
up a place for the house and yard. On this level
place, which, however, was made to incline slightly
toward the hill, his bed of boughs was made. On the
ground he had uncovered he built his fire. His bed
was thus on a level with the fire, and the heat could
not thaw the snow under him and let him down, or
the burning logs roll upon him. With a steep ascent
behind it the fire burned better, and the wind was not
so apt to drive the smoke and blaze in upon him.

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH .

61

Then, with the long, curving branches of the spruce
stuck thickly around three sides of the bed, and curv-
ing over and uniting their tops above it, a shelter was
formed that would keep out the cold and the snow,
and that would catch and retain the warmth of the fire.
Boiled in his blanket in such a nest, Uncle Nathan
had passed hundreds of the most frigid winter nights.

One day we made an excursion of three miles
through the woods to Bald Mountain, following a dim
trail. We saw, as we filed silently along, plenty of
signs of caribou, deer, and bear, but were not blessed
with a sight of either of the animals themselves. I
noticed that Uncle Nathan, in looking through the
woods, did not hold his head as we did, but thrust it
slightly forward, and peered under the branches like
a deer or other wild creature.

The summit of Bald Mountain was the most im-
pressive mountain-top I had ever seen, mainly, per-
haps, because it was one enormous crown of nearly
naked granite. The rock had that gray, elemental,
eternal look which granite alone has. One seemed to
be face to face with the gods of the fore-world. Like
an atom, like a breath of to-day, we were suddenly
confronted by abysmal geologic time, — the eternities
past and the eternities to come. The enormous cleav-
age of the rocks, the appalling cracks and fissures, th@
rent bowlders, the smitten granite floors, gave one a,
new sense of the power of heat and frost. In one
place we noticed several deep parallel grooves, made
by the old glaciers. In the depressions on the sum-
mit there was a hard, black, peaty-like soil that looked
indescribably ancient and unfamiliar. Out of this
i&ould, that might have come from the moon or the
interplanetary spaces, were growing mountain cram

62

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

berries and blueberries or huckleberries. We were
soon so absorbed in gathering the latter that we were
quite oblivious of the grandeurs about us. It is these
blueberries that attract the bears. In eating them,
Uncle Nathan said, they take the bushes in their
mouths, and by an upward movement strip them clean
of both leaves and berries. We were constantly on
the lookout for the bears, but failed to see any. Yet
a few days afterward, when two of our party returned
here and encamped upon the mountain, they saw five
during their stay, but failed to get a good shot. The
rifle was in the wrong place each time. The man
with the shot-gun saw an old bear and two cubs lift
themselves from behind a rock and twist their noses
around for his scent, and then shrink away. They
were too far off for his buckshot. I must not forget
the superb view that lay before us, a wilderness of
woods and waters stretching away to the horizon on
every hand. Nearly a dozen lakes and ponds could
be seen, and in a clearer atmosphere the foot of Moose-
head Lake would have been visible. The highest and
most striking mountain to be seen was Mount Bige-
low, rising above Dead River, far to the west, and its
two sharp peaks notching the horizon like enormous
saw-teeth. We walked around and viewed curiously
a huge bowlder on the top of the mountain that had
been split in two vertically, and one of the halves
moved a few feet out of its bed. It looked recent
and familiar, but suggested gods instead of men. The
force that moved the rock had plainly come from the
north. I thought of a similar bowlder I had seen not
long before on the highest point of the Shawangunk
Mountains, in New York, one side of which is propped
up with a large stone, as wall-builders prop up a rock

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

6S

to wrap a chain around it. The rock seems poised
lightly, and has but a few points of bearing. In this
instance, too, the power had come from the north.

The prettiest botanical specimen my trip yielded
was a little plant that bears the ugly name of horned
bladderwort ( Utricularia cornuta ), and which I
found growing in marshy places along the shores of
Moxie Lake. It has a slender, naked stem nearly a
foot high, crowned by two or more large deep yellow
flowers, — flowers the shape of little bonnets or hoods.
One almost expected to see tiny faces looking out of
them. This illusion is heightened by the horn or spur
of the flower, which projects from the hood like a long
tapering chin, — some masker’s device. Then the
cape behind, — what a smart upward curve it has,
as if spurned by the fairy shoulders it was meant to
cover ! But perhaps the most notable thing about the
flower was its fragrance, — the richest and strongest
perfume I have ever found in a wild flower. This
our botanist, Gray, does not mention, as if one should
describe the lark and forget its song. The fragrance
suggested that of white clover, but was more rank and
spicy.

The woods about Moxie Lake were literally carpet-
ed with Linncea. I had never seen it in such profu-
sion. In early summer, the period of its bloom, what
a charming spectacle the mossy floors of these remote
woods must present! The flowers are purple rose=
color, nodding and fragrant. Another very abundant
plant in these woods was the Clintonia borealis.
Uncle Nathan said it was called “ bear’s corn,” though
he did not know why. The only ^noticeable flower by
the Maine roadsides at this season that is not common
in other parts of the country is the harebell. Its

64

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.

bright blue, bell-shaped corolla shone . out from amid
the dry grass and weeds all along the route. It was
one of the most delicate roadside flowers I had ever
seen.

The only new bird I saw in Maine was the pileated
woodpecker, or black “ log cock, ” called by Uncle
Nathan “ wood cock.” I had never before seen or
heard this bird, and its loud cackle in the woods about
Moxie was a new sound to me. It is the wildest and
largest of our northern woodpeckers, and the rarest..
Its voice and the sound of its hammer are heard only
in the depths of the northern woods. It is about as
large as a crow, and nearly as black.

We stayed a week at Moxie, or until we became
surfeited with its trout, and had killed the last Mer-
ganser duck that lingered about our end of the lake.
The trout that had accumulated on our hands we had
kept alive in a large champagne basket submerged in
the lake, and the morning we broke camp the basket
was towed to the shore and opened ; and after we had
feasted our eyes upon the superb spectacle, every
trout, twelve or fifteen in number, some of them two-
pounders, was allowed to swim back into the lake.
They went leisurely, in couples and in trios, and were
soon kicking up their heels in their old haunts. I ex-
pect that the divinity who presides over Moxie will
see to it that every one of those trout, doubled in
weight, comes to our basket in the future.

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

The country is more of a wilderness, more of s
wild solitude, in the winter than in the summer. The
wild comes out. The urban, the cultivated, is hidden
or negatived. You shall hardly know a good field
from a poor, a meadow from a pasture, a park from a
forest. Lines and boundaries are disregarded ; gates
and bar-ways are unclosed ; man lets go his hold upon
the earth; title-deeds are deep buried beneath the
snow; the best-kept grounds relapse to a state of
nature; under the pressure of the cold all the wild
creatures become outlaws, and roam abroad beyond
their usual haunts. The partridge comes to the or-
chard for buds ; the rabbit comes to the garden and
lawn ; the crows and jays come to the ash-heap and
corn-crib, the snow-buntings to the stack and to the
barn-yard ; tne sparrows pilfer from the domestic
fowls ; the pine grosbeak comes down from the north
and shears your maples of their buds ; the fox prowls
about your premises at night, and the red squirrels
find your grain in the barn or steal the butternuts
from ycur attic. In fact, winter, like some great ca»
lamity, changes the status of most creatures and sets
them adrift. Winter, like poverty, makes us ac-
quainted with strange bedfellows.

For my part, my nearest approach to a strange bed-
fellow is the little gray rabbit that has taken up her
abode under my study floor, As she spends the day

66

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

here and is out larking at night, she is not much of a
bedfellow after all. It is probable that I disturb her
slumbers more than she does mine. I think she is
some support to me under there — a silent wild-eyed
witness and backer ; a type of the gentle and harm-
less in savage nature. She has no sagacity to give me
or lend me, but that soft, nimble foot of hers, and
that touch as of cotton wherever she goes, are worthy
of emulation. I think I can feel her good-will through
the floor, and I hope she can mine. When I have a
happy thought I imagine her ears twitch, especially
when I think of the sweet apple I will place by her
doorway at night. I wonder if that fox chanced
to catch a glimpse of her the other night when he
stealthily leaped over the fence near by and walked
along between the study and the house ? How clearly
one could read that it was not a little dog that had
passed there. There was something furtive in the
track ; it shied off away from the house and around it,
as if eying it suspiciously ; and then it had the caution
and deliberation of the fox — bold, bold, but not too
bold ; wariness was in every footprint. If it had been
a little dog that had chanced to wander that way,
when he crossed my path he would ha\e followed it
up to the barn and have gone smelling around for
a bone ; but this sharp, cautious track held straight
across all others, keeping five or six rods from th^
house, up the hill, across the highway towards a
neighboring farmstead, with its nose in the air and its
eye and ear alert, so to speak.

A winter neighbor of mine in whom I am inter,
ested, and who perhaps lends me his support after his
kind, is a little red owl, whose retreat is in the heart
of an old apple-tree just over the fence. Where he

WINTER NEIGHBORS .

67

keeps himself in spring and summer I do not know,
but late every fall, and at intervals all winter, his
hiding-place is discovered by the jays and nut-hatches,
and proclaimed from the tree-tops for the space of
half an hour or so, with all the powers of voice they
can command. Four times during one winter they
called me out to behold this little ogre feigning sleep
in his den, sometimes in one apple-tree, sometimes in
another. Whenever I heard their cries, I knew my
neighbor was being berated. The birds would take
turns at looking in upon him and uttering their alarm-
notes. Every jay within hearing would come to the
spot and at once approach the hole in the trunk or
limb, and with a kind of breathless eagerness and ex-
citement take a peep at the owl, and then join the
outcry. When I approached they would hastily take
a final look and then withdraw and regard my move-
ments intently. After accustoming my eye to the
faint light of the cavity for a few moments, I could
usually make out the owl at the bottom feigning sleep.
Feigning, I say, because this is what he really did, as
I first discovered one day when I cut into his retreat
with the axe. The loud blows and the falling chips
did not disturb him at all. When I reached in a
stick and pulled him over on his side, leaving one of
his wings spread out, he made no attempt to recover
himself, but lay among the chips and fragments of
decayed wood, like a part of themselves. Indeed, it
took a sharp eye to distinguish him. Nor till I had
pulled him forth by one wing, rather rudely, did he
.abandon his trick of simulated sleep or death. Then,
like a detected pickpocket, he was suddenly trans-
formed into another creature. His eyes flew wide
open, his talons clutched my finger, his ears were de-

68

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

pressed, and every motion and look said, “ Hands off,
at your peril.” Finding this game did not work, he
soon began to “ play ’possum ” again. I put a cover
over my study wood-box and kept him captive for a
week. Look in upon him any time, night or day, and
he was apparently wrapped in the profoundest slum-
ber ; but the live mice which I put into his box from
time to time found his sleep was easily broken ; there
would be a sudden rustle in the box, a faint squeak,
and then silence. After a week of captivity I gave
him his freedom in the full sunshine : no trouble for
him to see which way and where to go.

Just at dusk in the winter nights, I often hear his
soft bur-r-r-r , very pleasing and bell-like. What a
furtive, woody sound it is in the winter stillness, so
unlike the harsh scream of the hawk. But all the
ways of the owl are ways of softness and duskiness.
His wings are shod with silence, his plumage is edged
with down.

Another owl neighbor of mine, with whom I pass
the time of day more frequently than with the last,
lives farther away. I pass his castle every night on
my way to the post-office, and in winter, if the hour
is late enough, am pretty sure to see him standing in
his doorway, surveying the passers-by and the land-
scape through narrow slits in his eyes. For four suc-
cessive winters now have I observed him. As the
twilight begins to deepen he rises out of his cavity
in the apple-tree, scarcely faster than the moon rises
from behind the hill, and sits in the opening, com-
pletely framed by its outlines of gray bark and dead
wood, and by his protective coloring virtually invisible
to every eye that does not know he is there. Prob'
ably my own is the only eye that has ever penetrated

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

69

his secret, and mine never would have done so had I
not chanced on one occasion to see him leave his re-
treat and make a raid upon a shrike that was impal-
ing a shrew-mouse upon a thorn in a neighboring tree,
and which I was watching. Failing to get the mouse,
the owl returned swiftly to his cavity, and ever since,
while going that way, I have been on the lookout for
him. Dozens of teams and foot-passengers pass him
late in the day, but he regards them not, nor they
him. When I come alone and pause to salute him,
he opens his eyes a little wider, and, appearing to
recognize me, quickly shrinks and fades into the back-
ground of his door in a very weird and curious
manner. When he is not at his outlook, or when he
is, it requires the best powers of the eye to decide the
point, as the empty cavity itself is almost an exact
image of him. If the whole thing had been carefully
studied it could not have answered its purpose better.
The owl stands quite perpendicular, presenting a front
of light mottled gray ; the eyes are closed to a mere
slit, the ear-feathers depressed, the beak buried in the
plumage, and the whole attitude is one of silent,
motionless waiting and observation. If a mouse
should be seen crossing the highway, or scudding over
any exposed part of the snowy surface in the twilight,
the owl would doubtless swoop down upon it. I
think the owl has learned to distinguish me from the
rest of the passers-by ; at least, when I stop before
him, and he sees himself observed, he backs down into
his den, as I have said, in a very amusing manner.
Whether bluebirds, nut -hatches, and chickadees —
birds that pass the night in cavities of trees — ever
run into the clutches of the dozing owl, I should be
glad to know. My impression is, however, that they

TO

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

seek out smaller cavities. An old willow by the road-
side blew down one summer, and a decayed branch
broke open, revealing a brood of half-fledged owls,
and many feathers and quills of bluebirds, orioles, and
■other songsters, showing plainly enough why all birds
fear and berate the owl.

The English house sparrows, that are so rapidly
increasing among us, and that must add greatly to the
food supply of the owls and other birds of prey, seek
to baffle their enemies by roosting in the densest ever-
greens they can find, in the arbor-vitse, and in hem-
lock hedges. Soft-winged as the owl is, he cannot
steal in upon such a retreat without giving them
warning.

These sparrows are becoming about the most no-
ticeable of my winter neighbors, and a troop of them
every morning watch me put out the hens’ feed, and
soon claim their share. I rather encouraged them in
their neighborliness, till one day T discovered the snow
under a favorite plum-tree where they most frequently
perched covered with the scales of the fruit-buds. On
investigating I found that the tree had been nearly
stripped of its buds — a very unneighborly act on the
part of the sparrows, considering, too, all the cracked
corn I had scattered for them. So I at once served
notice on them that our good understanding was at
an end. And a hint is as good as a kick with this
bird. The stone I hurled among them, and the one
with which I followed them up, may have been taken
as a kick ; but they were only a hint of the shot-gun
that stood ready in the corner. The sparrows left in
high dudgeon, and were not back again in some days,
and were then very shy. No doubt the time is near
at band when we shall have to wage serious war upon

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

71

these sparrows, as they long have had to do on the
continent of Europe. And yet it will be hard to kill
the little wretches, the only Old World bird we have.
When I take down my gun to shoot them I shall prob-
ably remember that the Psalmist said, “ I watch, and
am as a sparrow alone upon the house-top,” and may-
be the recollection will cause me to stay my hando
The sparrows have the Old World hardiness and pro-
lificness ; they are wise and tenacious of life, and we
shall find it by and by no small matter to keep them
in check. Our native birds are much different, less
prolific, less shrewd, less aggressive and persistent,
less quick-witted and able to read the note of danger
or hostility, — in short, less sophisticated. Most of
our birds are yet essentially wild, that is, little changed
by civilization. In winter, especially, they sweep by
me and around me in flocks, — the Canada sparrow,
the snow-bunting, the shore-lark, the pine grosbeak,
the red-poll, the cedar-bird, — feeding upon frozen,
apples in the orchard, upon cedar-berries, upon ma-
ple-buds, and the berries of the mountain ash, and
the celtis, and upon the seeds of the weeds that rise
above the snow in the field, or upon the hay-seed
dropped where the cattle have been foddered in the
barn-yard or about the distant stack ; but yet taking
no heed of man, in no way changing their habits so
as to take advantage of his presence in nature. The
pine grosbeak will come in numbers upon your porch
to get the black drupes of the honeysuckle or the
woodbine, or within reach of your windows to get the
berries of the mountain-ash, but they know you not ;
they look at you as innocently and unconcernedly as
at a bear or moose in their native north, and youl
house is no more to them than a ledge of rocks.

72

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

The only ones of my winter neighbors that actually
rap at my door are the nut-hatches and woodpeckers,
and these do not know that it is my door. My retreat
is covered with the bark of young chestnut-trees, and
the birds, I suspect, mistake it for a huge stump that
ought to hold fat grubs (there is not even a book-
worm inside of it), and their loud rapping often
makes me think I have a caller indeed. I place frag-
ments of hickory-nuts in the interstices of the bark,
and thus attract the nut-hatches ; a bone upon my
window-sill attracts both nut-liatches and the downy
woodpecker. They peep in curiously through the
window upon me, pecking away at my bone, too often
a very poor one. A bone nailed to a tree a few feet
in front of the window attracts crows as well as lesser
birds. Even the slate-colored snow-bird, a seed-eater,
comes and nibbles it occasionally.

The bird that seems to consider he has the best
right to the bone both upon the tree and upon the sill
is the downy woodpecker, my favorite neighbor among
the winter birds, to whom I will mainly devote the
remainder of this chapter. His retr,eat is but a few
paces from my own, in the decayed limb of an apple*
tree which he excavated several autumns ago. I say
“ he ” because the red plume on the top of his head
proclaims the sex. It seems not to be generally known
to our writers upon ornithology that certain of our
woodpeckers — probably all the winter residents — *
each fall excavate a limb or the trunk of a tree in which
to pass the winter, and that the cavity is abandoned
in the spring, probably for a new one in which nidifi-
cation takes place. So far as I have observed, these
cavities are drilled out only by the males. Where the
females take up their quarters I am not so well in*

WINTER NEIGHBORS. 73

formed, though I suspect that they use the abandoned
holes of the males of the previous year.

The particular woodpecker to which I refer drilled
his first hole in my apple-tree one fall four or five
years ago. This he occupied till the following spring,
when he abandoned it. The next fall he began a hole
in ail adjoining limb, later than before, and when it
was about half completed a female took possession of
his old quarters. I am sorry to say that this seemed
to enrage the male very much, and he persecuted the
poor bird whenever she appeared upon the scene. He
would fly at her spitefully and drive her off. One
chilly November morning, as I passed under the tree,
I heard the hammer of the little architect in his cav-
ity, and at the same time saw the persecuted female
sitting at the entrance of the other hole as if she would
fain come out. She was actually shivering, probably
from both fear and cold. I understood the situation
at a glance ; the bird was afraid to come forth and
brave the anger of the male. Not till I had rapped
smartly upon the limb with my stick did she come
out and attempt to escape ; but she had not gone ten
feet from the tree before the male was in hot pur-
suit, and in a few moments had driven her back to
the same tree, where she tried to avoid him among
the branches. A few days after, he rid himself of
his unwelcome neighbor in the following ingenious
manner : he fairly scuttled the other cavity ; he drilled
a hole into the bottom of it that let in the light and
the cold, and I saw the female there no more. I did
not see him in the act of rendering this tenement
uninhabitable ; but one morning, behold it was punc-
tured at the bottom, and the circumstances all seemed
to point to him as the author of it. There is probably

74

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

no gallantry among the birds except at the mating
season. I have frequently seen the male woodpecker
drive the female away from the bone upon the tree.
When she hopped around to the other end and timidly
nibbled it, he would presently dart spitefully at her.
She would then take up her position in his rear and
wait till he had finished his meal. The position of
the female among the birds is very much the same as
that of woman among savage tribes. Most of the
drudgery of life falls upon her, and the leavings of
the males are often her lot.

My bird is a genuine little savage, doubtless, but I
value him as a neighbor. It is a satisfaction during
the cold or stormy winter nights to know he is warm
and cosy there in his retreat. When the day is bad
and unfit to be abroad in, he is there too. When I
wish to know if he is at home, I go and rap upon his
tree, and, if he is not too lazy or indifferent, after
some delay he shows his head in his round doorway
about ten feet above, and looks down inquiringly upon
me — sometimes latterly I think half resentfully, as
much as to say, “ I would thank you not to disturb me
so often.” After sundown, he will not put his head
out any more when I call, but as I step away I can
get a glimpse of him inside looking cold and reserved.
He is a late riser, especially if it is a cold or disagree-
able morning, in this respect being like the barn fowls $
it is sometimes near nine o’clock before I see him
leave his tree. On the other hand, he comes home
early, being in if the day is unpleasant by four p. m.
He lives all alone ; in this respect I do not commend
his example. Where his mate is I should like to
know.

I have discovered several other woodpeckers in ad*

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

75

joining orchards, each of which has a like home and
leads a like solitary life. One of them has excavated
a dry limb within easy reach of my hand, doing the
work also in September. But the choice of tree was
not a good one ; the limb was too much decayed, and
the workman had made the cavity too large ; a chip
had come out, making a hole in the outer wall. Then
he went a few inches down the limb and began again,,
and excavated a large, commodious chamber, but had
again come too near the surface ; scarcely more than
the bark protected him in one place, and the limb was
very much weakened. Then he made another attempt
still farther down the limb, and drilled in an inch
or two, but seemed to change his mind ; the work
stopped, and I concluded the bird had wisely aban-
doned the tree. Passing there one cold, rainy Novem-
ber day, I thrust in my two fingers and was surprised
to feel something soft and warm : as I drew away my
hand the bird came out, apparently no more surprised
than I was. It had decided, then, to make its home
in the old limb ; a decision it had occasion to regret,
for not long after, on a stormy night, the branch gave
way and fell to the ground.

“ When the hough breaks the cradle will fall,

And down will come baby, cradle and all.”

Such a cavity makes a snug, warm home, and wheia
the entrance is on the under side of the limb, as is
usual, the wind and snow cannot reach the occupanto
Late in December, while crossing a high, wooded
mountain, lured by the music of fox-hounds, I dis-
covered fresh yellow chips strewing the new-fallen
snow, and at once thought of my woodpeckers. On
looking around I saw where one had been at work
excavating a lodge in a small yellow birch. The ori«

76

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

fice was about fifteen feet from the ground, and ap.
peared as round as if struck with a compass. It was
on the east side of the tree, so as to avoid the prevail-
ing west and northwest winds. As it was nearly two
inches in diameter, it could not have been the work of
the downy, but must have been that of the hairy, or
else the yellow-bellied woodpecker. His home had
probably been wrecked by some violent wind, and h©
was thus providing himself another. In digging out
these retreats the woodpeckers prefer a dry, brittle
trunk, not too soft. They go in horizontally to the
centre and then turn downward, enlarging the tunnel
as they go, till when finished it is the shape of a long,
deep pear.

Another trait our woodpeckers have that endears
them to me, and that has never been pointedly noticed
by our ornithologists, is their habit of drumming in
the spring. They are songless birds, and yet all are
musicians ; they make the dry limbs eloquent of the
coming change. Did you think that loud, sonorous
hammering which proceeded from the orchard or from
the near woods on that still March or April morning
was only some bird getting its breakfast ? It is downy,
but he is not rapping at the door of a grub ; he is rap-
ping at the door of spring, and the dry limb thrills
beneath the ardor of his blows. Or, later in the sea®
son, in the dense forest or by some remote mountain’
lake, does that measured rhythmic beat that breaks
upon the silence, first three strokes following each
other rapidly, succeeded by two louder ones with longer
intervals between them, and that has an effect upon
the alert ear as if the solitude itself had at last found a
voice — does that suggest anything less than a delib-
erate musical performance ? In fact, our woodpeckers

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

77

are just as characteristically drummers as is the ruffed
grouse, and they have their particular limbs and stubs
to which they resort for that purpose. Their need of
expression is apparently just as great as that of the
song-birds, and it is not surprising that they should
have found out that there is music in a dry, seasoned
limb which can be evoked beneath their beaks.

A few seasons ago a downy woodpecker, probably
the individual one who is now my winter neighbor,
began to drum early in March in a partly decayed
apple-tree that stands in the edge of a narrow strip of
woodland near me. When the morning was still and
mild I would often hear him through my window be-
fore I was up, or by half-past six o’clock, and he
would keep it up pretty briskly till nine or ten o’clock,
in this respect resembling the grouse, which do most
of their drumming in the forenoon. His drum was
the stub of a dry limb about the size of one’s wrist.
The heart was decayed and gone, but the outer shell
was hard and resonant. The bird would keep his po-
sition there for an hour at a time. Between his drum-
mings he would preen his plumage and listen as if for
the response of the female, or for the drum of some
rival. How swift his head would go when he was
delivering his blows upon the limb ! His beak wore
the surface perceptibly. When he wished to change
the key, which was quite often, he would shift his
position an inch or two to a knot which gave out a
higher, shriller note. When I climbed up to examine
his drum he was much disturbed. I did not know he
was in the vicinity, but it seems he saw me from a
near tree, and came in haste to the neighboring
branches, and with spread plumage and a sharp note
demanded plainly enough what my business was with

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

T8

his drum. I was invading his privacy, desecrating
his shrine, and the bird was much put out. After
some weeks the female appeared; he had literally
drummed up a mate ; his urgent and oft-repeated ad-
vertisement was answered. Still the drumming did
not cease, but was quite as fervent as before. If f
mate could be won by drumming she could be kep\
and entertained by more drumming ; courtship should
not end with marriage. If the bird felt musical be
fore, of course he felt much more so now. Besides
that, the gentle deities needed propitiating in behalf
of the nest and young as well as in behalf of the mate.
After a time a second female came, when there was
war between the two. I did not see them come to
blows, but I saw one female pursuing the other about
the place, and giving her no rest for several days.
She was evidently trying to run her out of the neigh-
borhood. Now and then she, too, would drum briefly,
as if sending a triumphant message to her mate.

The woodpeckers do not each have a particular dry
limb to which they resort at all times to drum, like
the one I have described. The woods are full of
suitable branches, and they drum more or less here
and there as they are in quest of food ; yet I am con-
vinced each one has its favorite spot, like the grouse^
to which it resorts, especially in the morning. The
sugar-maker in the maple-woods may notice that this
sound proceeds from the same tree or trees about his
camp with great regularity. A woodpecker in my vi-
cinity has drummed for two seasons on a telegraph-
pole, and he makes the wires and glass insulators ring.
Another drums on a thin board on the end of a long
grape-arbor, and on still mornings can be heard a
Jong distance.

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

79

A friend of mine in a Southern city tells me of a
red-headed woodpecker that drums upon a lightning-
rod on his neighbor’s house. Nearly every clear, still
morning at certain seasons, he says, this musical rap-
ping may be heard. “ He alternates his tapping with
his stridulous call, and the effect on a cool, autumn®
like morning is very pleasing.”

The high-hole appears to drum more promiscuously
than does the downy. He utters his long, loud spring
call, which — which — which — which , and then be-
gins to rap with his beak upon his perch before the
last note has reached your ear. I have seen him
drum sitting upon the ridge of the barn. The log
cock, or pileated woodpecker, the largest and wildest
of our Northern species, I have never heard drum6
His blows should wake the echoes.

When the woodpecker is searching for food, or lay-
ing siege to some hidden grub, the sound of his ham-
mer is dead or muffled, and is heard but a few yards.
It is only upon dry, seasoned timber, freed of its bark,
that he beats his reveille to spring and wooes his
mate.

Wilson was evidently familiar with this vernal
drumming of the woodpeckers, but quite misinterprets
it. Speaking of the red-bellied species, he says : “ It
rattles like the rest of the tribe on the dead limbs*
and with such violence as to be heard in still weather
more than half a mile off ; and listens to hear the in-
sect it has alarmed.” He listens rather to hear the
drum of his rival or the brief and coy response of the
female ; for there are no insects in these dry limbs.

On one occasion I saw downy at his drum when a
female flew quickly through the tree and alighted a
few yards beyond him.. He paused instantly, and

80

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

kept hits place, apparently without moving a muscle.
The female, I took it, had answered his advertisement.
She flitted about from limb to limb (the female may
be known by the absence of the crimson spot on the
back of the head), apparently full of business of her
own, and now and then would drum in a shy, tenta-
tive manner. The male watched her a few mo-
ments, and, convinced perhaps that she meant busk
ness, struck up his liveliest tune, then listened for her
response. As it came back timidly but promptly, he
left his perch and sought a nearer acquaintance with
the prudent female. Whether or not a match grew
out of this little flirtation I cannot say.

Our smaller woodpeckers are sometimes accused of
injuring the apple and other fruit trees, but the depre-
dator is probably the larger and rarer yellow-bellied
species. One autumn I caught one of these fellows in
the act of sinking long rows of his little wells in the
limb of an apple-tree. There were series of rings of
them, one above another, quite around the stem, some
of them the third of an inch across. They are evi-
dently made to get at the tender, juicy bark, or cam-
bium layer, next to the hard wood of the tree. The
health and vitality of the branch are so seriously im-
paired by them that it often dies.

In the following winter the same bird (probably)
tapped a maple-tree in front of my window in fifty-six
places ; and when the day was sunny, and the sap
oozed out, he spent most of his time there. He knew
the good sap-days, and was on hand promptly for his
tipple ; cold and cloudy days he did not appear. He
knew which side of the tree to tap, too, and avoided
the sunless northern exposure. When one series of
well-holes failed to supply him, he would sink another,

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

81

drilling through the bark with great ease and quick-
ness. Then, when the day was warm, and the sap ran
freely, he would have a regular sugar-maple debauch,
sitting there by his wells hour after hour, and as fast
as they became filled sipping out the sap. This he
did in a gentle, caressing manner that was very sug-
gestive. He made a row of wells near the foot of the
tree, and other rows higher up, and he would hop
up and down the trunk as these became filled. He
would hop down the tree backward with the utmost
ease, throwing his tail outward and his head inward at
each hop. When the wells would freeze or his thirst
become slaked, he would ruffle his feathers, draw him-
self together, and sit and doze in the sun on the sid&
of the tree. He passed the night in a hole in an
apple-tree not far off. He was evidently a young bird,
not yet having the plumage of the mature male or fe-
male, and yet he knew which tree to tap and where to
tap it. I saw where he had bored several maples in
the vicinity, but no oaks or chestnuts. I nailed up a
fat bone near his sap-works : the downy woodpecker
came there several times a day to dine ; the nut-hatch
came, and even the snow-bird took a taste occasion-
ally ; but this sap-sucker never touched it ; the sweet
of the tree sufficed for him. This woodpecker does
not breed or abound in my vicinity ; only stray speci-
mens are now and then to be met with in the colder
months. As spring approached, the one I refer to
took his departure.

I must bring my account of my neighbor in the tree
down to the latest date ; so after the lapse of a year I
add the following notes. The last day of February
was bright and springlike. I heard the first sparrow

82

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

sing that morning and the first screaming of the ciiv
cling hawks, and about seven o’clock the first drum-
ming of my little friend. His first notes were uncer-
tain and at long intervals, but by and by he warmed
up and beat a lively tattoo. As the season advanced
he ceased to lodge in his old quarters. I would rap
and find nobody at home. Was he out on a lark, I
said, the spring fever working in his blood ? After a
fime his drumming grew less frequent, and finally, in
file middle of April, ceased entirely. Had some acci-
dent befallen him, or had he wandered away to fresh
fields, following some siren of his species ? Probably
the latter. Another bird that I had under observa-
tion also left his winter-quarters in the spring. This,
then, appears to be the usual custom. The wrens and
the nut-hatches and chickadees succeed to these aban-
doned cavities, and often have amusing disputes over
them. The nut-hatches frequently pass the night in
•them, and the wrens and chickadees nest in them. I
have further observed that in excavating a cavity for
a nest the downy woodpecker makes the entrance
smaller than when he is excavating his winter-quar-
ters. This is doubtless for the greater safety of the
young birds.

The next fall, the downy excavated another limb in
the old apple-tree, but had not got his retreat quit©
finished, when the large hairy woodpecker appeared
upon the scene. I heard his loud click, click, early
one frosty November morning. There was something
impatient and angry in the tone that arrested my at-
tention. I saw the bird fly to the tree where downy
had been at work, and fall with great violence upon
the entrance to his cavity. The bark and the chips
flew beneath his vigorous blows, and before I fairly

WINTER NEIGHBORS.

83

woke up to what he was doing, he had completely de-
molished the neat, round doorway of downy. He had
made a large ragged opening large enough for himself
to enter. I drove him away and my favorite came
back, but only to survey the ruins of his castle for a
moment and then go away. He lingered about for a
day or two and then disappeared. The big hairy
usurper passed a night in the cavity, but on being hus«
tied out of it the next night by me, he also left, but
not till he had demolished the entrance to a cavity in
a neighboring tree where downy and his mate had
reared their brood that summer, and where I had
hoped the female would pass the winter.

NOTES BY THE WAY.

I. THE WEATHER-WISE MUSKRAT.

I am more than half persuaded that the muskrat
is a wise little animal, and that on the subject of the
weather, especially, he possesses some secret that I
should be glad to know. In the fall of 1878 I noticed
that he built unusually high and massive nests. I
noticed them in several different localities. In a shal-
low, sluggish pond by the roadside, which I used to
pass daily in my walk, two nests were in process of
construction throughout the month of November. The
builders worked only at night, and I could see each
day that the work had visibly advanced. When there
was a slight skim of ice over the pond, this was broken
up about the nests, with trails through it in different
directions where the material had been brought. The
houses were placed a little to one side of the main
channel, and were constructed entirely of a species of
coarse wild grass that grew all about. So far as I
could see, from first to last they were solid masses
(of grass, as if the interior cavity or nest was to be
excavated afterward, as doubtless it was. As they
emerged from the pond they gradually assumed the
shape of a miniature mountain, very bold and steep
on the south side, and running down a long gentle
grade to the surface of the water on the north. One
could see that the little architect hauled all his ma-
terial up this easy slope, and thrust it out boldly

THE WEATHER-WISE MUSKRAT.

85

around the other side. Every mouthful was distinctly
defined. After they were two feet or more above the
water, I expected each day to see that the finishing
stroke had been given and the work brought to a
close. But higher yet, said the builder. December
drew near, the cold became threatening, and I was
apprehensive that winter would suddenly shut down
rapon those unfinished nests. But the wise rats knew
better than I did ; they had received private advices
from headquarters that I knew not of. Finally, about
the 6th of December, the nests assumed completion ;
the northern incline was absorbed or carried up, and
each structure became a strong massive cone, three or
four feet high, the largest nest of the kind I had ever
seen. Does it mean a severe winter ? I inquired. An
old farmer said it meant “ high water,” and he was
right once, at least, for in a few days afterward we
had the heaviest rainfall known in this section for
half a century. The creeks rose to an almost unprece-
dented height. The sluggish pond became a seething,
turbulent watercourse ; gradually the angry element
crept up the sides of these lake dwellings, till, when
the rain ceased, about four o’clock they showed above
the flood no larger than a man’s hat. During the
night the channel shifted till the main current swept
over them, and next day not a vestige of the nests was
to be seen ; they had gone down-stream, as had many
other dwellings of a less temporary character. The
rats had built wisely, and would have been perfectly
secure against any ordinary high water, but who can
foresee a flood ? The oldest traditions of their race
did not run back to the time of such a visitation.

Nearly a week afterward another dwelling was
begun, well away from the treacherous channel, but

86

NOTES BY THE WAY.

the architects did not work at it with much heart ;
the material was very scarce, the ice hindered, and be-
fore the basement-story was fairly finished, winter had
the pond under his lock and key.

In other localities I noticed that where the nests
were placed on the banks of streams, they were made
secure against the floods by being built amid a small
clump of bushes. When the fall of 1879 came, the
muskrats were very tardy about beginning their house,
laying the corner-stone — or the corner-sod — about
December . 1st, and continuing the work slowly and
indifferently. On the 15th of the month the nest was
not yet finished. This, I said, indicates a mild winter ;
and, sure enough, the season was one of the mildest
known for many years. The rats had little use for
their house.

Again, in the fall of 1880, while the weather-wise
were wagging their heads, some forecasting a mild,
some a severe winter, I watched with interest for a
sign from my muskrats. About November 1st, a month
earlier than the previous year, they began their nest,
and worked at it with a will. They appeared to have
just got tidings of what was coming. If I had taken
the hint so palpably given, my celery would not have
been frozen in the ground, and my apples caught
in unprotected places.// When the cold wave struck
us, about November 20th, my four-legged “ I-told-you-
so’s” had nearly completed their dwelling; it lacked
only the ridge-board, so to speak ; it needed a little
“topping out,” to give it a finished look. But this
it never got. Tlie winter had come to stay, and it
waxed more and more severe, till the unprecedented
cold of the last days of December must have aston-
ished even the wise muskrats in their snug retreat.

THE WEATHER-WISE MUSKRAT.

87

I approached their nest at this time, a white mound
upon the white, deeply frozen surface ©f the pond, and
wondered if there was any life in that apparent sep-
ulchre. I thrust my walking - stick sharply into it,
when there was a rustle and a splash into the water,
as the occupant made his escape. What a damp base-
ment that house has, I thought, and what a pity to
rout a peaceful neighbor out of his bed in this weather,
and into such a state of things as this ! But water does
not wet the muskrat ; his fur is charmed, and not a
drop penetrates it. Where the ground is favorable,
the muskrats do not build these mound-like nests, but
burrow into the bank a long distance, and establish
their winter-quarters there.

Shall we not say, then, in view of the above facts,
that this little creature is weather-wise ? The hitting
of the mark twice might be mere good luck ; but three
bull’s-eyes in succession is not a mere coincidence ; it
is a proof of skill. The muskrat is not found in the
Old World, which is a little singular, as other rats so
abound there, and as those slow-going English streams
especially, with their grassy banks, are so well suited
to him. The water-rat of Europe is smaller, but of
similar nature and habits. The muskrat does not
hibernate like some rodents, but is pretty active all
winter. In December I noticed in my walk where
they had made excursions of a few yards to an orchard
for frozen apples. One day, along a little stream, I
saw a mink track amid those of the muskrat ; follow-
ing it up, I presently came to blood and other marks
of strife upon the snow beside a stone wall. Looking
in between the stones, I found the carcass of the luck-
less rat, with its head and neck eaten away. The
mink had made a meal of him.

88

NOTES BY THE WAY.

II. CHEATING THE SQUIRRELS.

For tlie largest and finest chestnuts I had last fall
I was indebted to the gray squirrels. Walking through
the early October woods one day, I came upon a place
where the ground was thickly strewn with very large
unopened chestnut burs. On examination I found
that every bur had been cut square off with about an
inch of the stem adhering, and not one had been left
on the tree. It was not accident, then, but design.
Whose design? The squirrels’. The fruit was the
finest I had ever seen in the woods, and some wise
squirrel had marked it for his own. The burs were
ripe, and had just begun to divide, not “ threefold,”
but fourfold, “ to show the fruit within.” The squir-
rel that had taken all this pains had evidently rea-
soned with himself thus : “ Now, these are extremely
fine chestnuts, and I want them ; if I wait till the
burs open on the tree the crows and jays will be sure
to carry off a great many of the nuts before they fall ;
then, after the wind has rattled out what remain,
there are the mice, the chipmunks, the red squirrels,
the raccoons, the grouse, to say nothing of the boys
and the pigs, to come in for their share ; so I will
forestall events a little ; I will cut off the burs when]
they have matured, and a few days of this dry Octo-
ber weather will cause every one of them to open on
the ground ; I shall be on hand in the nick of time to
gather up my nuts.” The squirrel, of course, had to
take the chances of a prowler like myself coming
along, but he had fairly stolen a march on his neigh-
bors. As I proceeded to collect and open the burs, I
was half prepared to hear an audible protest from the

FOX AND HOUND.

89

trees about, for I constantly fancied myself watched
by shy but jealous eyes. It is an interesting inquiry
how the squirrel knew the burs would open if left to
lie on the ground a few days. Perhaps he did not
know, but thought the experiment worth trying.

The gray squirrel is peculiarly an American prod-
uct, and might serve very well as a national emblem.,
The Old World can beat us on rats and mice, but we
are far ahead on squirrels, having five or six species
to Europe’s one.

III. FOX AND HOUND.

I STOOD on a high hill or ridge one autumn day
and saw a hound run a fox through the fields far be-
neath me. What odors that fox must have shaken
out of himself, I thought, to be traced thus easily, and
how great their specific gravity not to have been
blown away like smoke by the breeze ! The fox ran
a long distance down the hill, keeping within a few
feet of a stone wall ; then turned a right angle and
led off for the mountain, across a plowed field and a
succession of pasture lands. In about fifteen minutes
the hound came in full blast with her nose in the air,
and never once did she put it to the ground while in
my sight. When she came to the stone wall she took
the other side from that taken by the fox, and kept
about the same distance from it, being thus separated
several yards from his track, with the fence between
her and it. At the point where the fox turned
sharply to the left, the hound overshot a few yards,
tnen wheeled, and feeling the air a moment with her
nose, took up the scent again and was off on his trail

90

NOTES BY THE WAY.

as unerringly as fate. It seemed as if the fox must
have sowed himself broadcast as he went along, and
that his scent was so rank and heavy that it settled
in the hollows and clung tenaciously to the bushes
and crevices in the fence. I thought I ought to have
caught a remnant of it as I passed that way some
minutes later, but I did not. But I suppose it wag
not that the light-footed fox so impressed himself
upon the ground he ran over, but that the sense of
the hound was so keen. To her sensitive nose these
tracks steamed like hot cakes, and they would not
have cooled off so as to be undistinguishable for sev-
eral hours. For the time being she had but one
sense : her whole soul was concentrated in her nose.

It is amusing when the hunter starts out of a win-
ter morning to see his hound probe the old tracks to
determine how recent they are. He sinks his nose
down deep in the snow so as to exclude the air from
above, then draws a long full breath, giving some-
times an audible snort. If there remains the least
effluvium of the fox the hound will detect it. If it be
very slight it only sets his tail wagging ; if it be
strong it unloosens his tongue.

Such things remind one of the waste, the friction
that is going on all about us, even when the wheels of
life run the most smoothly. A fox cannot trip along
the top of a stone wall so lightly but that he will leave
enough of himself to betray his course to the hound
for hours afterward. When the boys play “ hare and
hounds ” the hare scatters bits of paper to give a clew
to the pursuers, but he scatters himself much more
freely if only our sight and scent were sharp enough
to detect the fragments. Even the fish leave a trail
in the water, and it is said the otter will pursue them

FOX AND HOUND.

91

by it. The birds make a track in the air, only their
enemies hunt by sight rather than by scent. The fox
baffles the hound most upon a hard crust of frozen
snow ; the scent will not hold to the smooth, bead-like
granules.

Judged by the eye alone, the fox is the lightest and
most buoyant creature that runs. His soft wrapping
of fur conceals the muscular play and effort that is so
obvious in the hound that pursues him, and he comes
bounding along precisely as if blown by a gentle wind*
His massive tail is carried as if it floated upon the air
by its own lightness.

The hound is not remarkable for his fleetness, but
how he will hang ! — often running late into the night
and sometimes till morning, from ridge to ridge, from
peak to peak ; now on the mountain, now crossing the
valley, now playing about a large slope of uplying
pasture fields. At times the fox has a pretty well-
defined orbit, and the hunter knows where to intercept
him. Again he leads off like a comet, quite beyond
the system of hills and ridges upon which he was
started, and his return is entirely a matter of conjec-
ture ; but if the day be not more than half spent, the
chances are that the fox will be back before night*
though the sportsman’s patience seldom holds out that
long.

The hound is a most interesting dog. How solemB
and long-visaged he is — how peaceful and well-dis-
posed ! He is the Quaker among dogs. All the vi-
ciousness and currishness seem to have been weeded
out of him ; he seldom quarrels, or fights, or plays,
like other dogs. Two strange hounds, meeting for
the first time, behave as civilly toward each other as
fcwo men. I know a hound that has an ancient, wrin«

92

NOTES BY THE WAY

kled, human, far-away look that reminds one of the
bust of Homer among the Elgin marbles. He looks
like the mountains toward which his heart yearns so
much.

The hound is a great puzzle to the farm dog ; the
latter, attracted by his baying, comes barking and
snarling up through the fields bent on picking a quar-
rel; he intercepts the hound, snubs and insults and
annoys him in every way possible, but the hound
heeds him not ; if the dog attacks him he gets away
as best he can, and goes on with the trail ; the cur
bristles and barks and struts about for a while, then
goes back to the house, evidently thinking the hound
a lunatic, which he is for the time being — a mono-
maniac, the slave and victim of one idea. I saw the
master of a hound one day arrest him in full course,
to give one of the hunters time to get to a certain
runaway ; the dog cried and struggled to free himself
and would listen neither to threats nor caresses.
Knowing he must be hungry, I offered him my lunch,
but he would not touch it. I put it in his mouth, but
he threw it contemptuously from him. We coaxed
and petted and reassured him, but he was under a
spell ; he was bereft of all thought or desire but the
one passion to pursue that trail.

IV. THE WOODCHUCK

Writers upon rural England and her familiar
natural history make no mention of the marmot or
woodchuck. In Europe this animal seems to be con-
fined to the high mountainous districts, as on out

THE WOODCHUCK.

98

Pacific slope, burrowing near the snow line. It is
more social or gregarious than the American species,
living in large families like our prairie-dog. In the
Middle and Eastern States our woodchuck takes the
place, in some respects, of the English rabbit, burro w°
ing in every hillside and under every stone wall and
jutting ledge and large bowlder, from whence it makes
raids upon the grass and clover and sometimes upon
the garden vegetables. It is quite solitary in its
habits, seldom more than one inhabiting the same den,
unless it be a mother and her young. It is not now
so much a wood chuck as a field chuck. Occasionally,
however, one seems to prefer the woods, and is not
seduced by the sunny slopes and the succulent grass,
but feeds, as did his fathers before him, upon roots
and twigs, the bark of young trees, and upon various
wood plants.

One summer day, as I was swimming across a
broad, deep pool in the creek in a secluded place in
the woods, I saw one of these sylvan chucks amid the
rocks but a few feet from the edge of the water where
I proposed to touch. He saw my approach, but doubt-
less took me for some water-fowl, or for some cousin
of his of the muskrat tribe ; for he went on with his
feeding, and regarded me not till I paused within ten
feet of him and lifted myself up. Then he did not
know me, having, perhaps, never seen Adam in his
simplicity, but he twisted his nose around to catch my
scent ; and the moment he had done so he sprang like
a jumping-jack and rushed into his den with the ut-
most precipitation.

The woodchuck is the true serf among our animals ;
he belongs to the soil, and savors of it. He is of the
earth, earthy. There is generally a decided odor about

94

NOTES BY THE WAY.

his dens and lurking-places, but it is not at all dis-
agreeable in the clover-scented air, and his shrill
whistle, as he takes to his hole or defies the farm dog
from the interior of the stone wall, is a pleasant sum-
mer sound. In form and movement the woodchuck
is not captivating. His body is heavy and flabby,
Indeed, such a flaccid, fluid, pouchy carcass, I have
never before seen. It has absolutely no muscular ten t
sion or rigidity, but is as baggy and shaky as a skin
filled with water. Let the rifleman shoot one while
it lies basking on a sidelong rock, and its body slumps
off, and rolls and spills down the hill, as if it were a
mass of bowels only. The legs of the woodchuck are
short and stout, and made for digging rather than
running. The latter operation he performs by short
leaps, his belly scarcely clearing the ground. For a
short distance he can make very good time, but he
seldom trusts himself far from his hole, and when
surprised in that predicament, makes little effort to
escape, but, grating his teeth, looks the danger squarely
in the face.

I knew a farmer in New York who had a very
large bob-tailed churn-dog by the name of Cuff. The
farmer kept a large dairy and made a great deal of
butter, and it was the business of Cuff to spend nearly
the half of each summer day treading the endless
round of the churning-machine. During the remainder
of the day he had plenty of time to sleep, and rest,
and sit on his hips and survey the landscape. One
day, sitting thus, he discovered a woodchuck about
forty rods from the house, on a steep side-hill, feeding
about near his hole, which was beneath a large rock.
The old dog, forgetting his stiffness, and remembering
the fun he had had with woodchucks in his earlier

THE WOODCHUCK.

95

days, started off at his highest speed, vainly hoping to
catch this one before he could get to his hole. But
the woodchuck, seeing the dog come laboring up the
hill, sprang to the mouth of his den, and, when his
pursuer was only a few rods off, whistled tauntingly
and went in. This occurred several times, the old
dog marching up the hill, and then marching down
again, having had his labor for his pains. I suspect
that he revolved the subject in his mind while he re-
volved the great wheel of the churning-machine, and
that some turn or other brought him a happy thought,
for next time he showed himself a strategist. Instead
of giving chase to the woodchuck when first dis-
covered, he crouched down to the ground, and, resting
his head on his paws, watched him. The woodchuck
kept working away from the hole, lured by the tender
clover, but, not unmindful of his safety, lifted him-
self up on his haunches every few moments and sur-
veyed the approaches. Presently, after the woodchuck
had let himself down from one of these attitudes of
observation, and resumed his feeding, Cuff started
swiftly but stealthily up the hill, precisely in the at-
titude of a cat when she is stalking a bird. When
the woodchuck rose up again, Cuff was perfectly mo-
tionless and half hid by the grass. When he again
resumed his clover, Cuff sped up the hill as before,
this time crossing a fence, but in a low place, and so
nimbly that he was not discovered. Again the wood-
chuck was on the outlook, again Cuff was motionless
and hugging the ground. As the dog nears his victim
he is partially hidden by a swell in the earth, but still
the woodchuck from his outlook reports “ all right,”
when Cuff, having not twice as far to run as the
’chuck, throws all stealthiness aside and rushes di-

96

NOTES BY THE WAY.

rectly for the hole. At that moment the woodcnuok
discovers his danger, and, seeing that it is a race for
life, leaps as I never saw marmot leap before. But
he is two seconds too late, his retreat is cut off, and
the powerful jaws of the old dog close upon him.

The next season Cuff tried the same tactics agaii
with like success ; but when the third woodchuck had
taken up his abode at the fatal hole, the old churner’ss
wits and strength had begun to fail him, and he wa£
baffled in each attempt to capture the animal.

The woodchuck always burrows on a side-hill. This
enables him to guard against being drowned out, by
making the termination of the hole higher than the
entrance. He digs in slantingly for about two or three
feet, then makes a sharp upward turn and keeps nearly
parallel with the surface of the ground for a distance
of eight or ten feet farther, according to the grade.
Here he makes his nest and passes the winter, holing
up in October or November and coming out again in
April. This is a long sleep, and is rendered possible
only by the amount of fat with which the system has
become stored during the summer. The fire of life
still burns, but very faintly and slowly, as with the
draughts all closed and the ashes heaped up. Res-
piration is continued, but at longer intervals, and all
the vital processes are nearly at a standstill. Dig on©
out during hibernation (Audubon did so), and you
find it a mere inanimate ball, that suffers itself to be
moved and rolled about without showing signs of
awakening. But bring it in by the fire, and it pres-
ently unrolls and opens its eyes, and crawls feebly
about, and if left to itself will seek some dark hole or
corner, roll itself up again, and resume its former com
dition.

m

A BUNCH OF HERBS

AND OTHER PAPERS

A BUNCH OF HERBS, AND OTHER
PAPERS*

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

FRAGRANT WILD FLOWERS.

The charge that was long ago made against our wild
flowers by English travelers in this country, namely,
that they were odorless, doubtless had its origin in the
/act that, whereas in England the sweet-scented flowers
are among the most common and conspicuous, in this
country they are rather shy and withdrawn, and con-
sequently not such as travelers would be likely to
encounter. Moreover, the British traveler, remem-
bering the deliciously fragrant blue violets he left at
home, covering every grassy slope and meadow bank
in spring, and the wild clematis, or traveler’s joy,
overrunning hedges and old walls with its white,
sweet-scented blossoms, and finding the corresponding
species here equally abundant but entirely scentless,
very naturally inferred that our wild flowers were all
deficient in this respect. He would be confirmed in
this opinion when, on turning to some of our most
beautiful and striking native flowers, like the laurel,
the rhododendron, the columbine, the inimitable
fringed gentian, the burning cardinal-flower, or our
asters and goldenrod, dashing the roadsides with tints

10

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

of purple and gold, he found them scentless also.
*‘ Where are your fragrant flowers ? ” he might well
say ; “ I can find none.” Let him look closer and
penetrate our forests, and visit our ponds and lakes.
Let him compare our matchless, rosy-lipped, honey-
hearted trailing arbutus with his own ugly ground-
ivy ; let him compare our sumptuous, fragrant pond-
lily with his own odorless Nymphcea alba. In our
Northern woods he shall find the floors carpeted with
the delicate linnaea, its twin rose-colored, nodding
flowers filling the air with fragrance. (I am aware
that the linnaea is found in some parts of Northern
Europe.) The fact is, we perhaps have as many
sweet-scented wild flowers as Europe has, only they
are not quite so prominent in our flora, nor so well
known to our people or to our poets.

Think of Wordsworth’s “ Golden Daffodils : ” —

“ I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When, all at once, I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

“ Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a hay.

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

No such sight could greet the poet’s eye here. He
might see ten thousand marsh marigolds, or ten times
ten thousand houstonias, but they would not toss in
the breeze, and they would not be sweet-scented like
the daffodils.

It is to be remembered, too, that in the moister

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

11

atmosphere of England the same amount of fragrance
would be much more noticeable than with us. Think
how our sweet bay, or our pink azalea, or our white
alder, to which they have nothing that corresponds,
would perfume that heavy, vapor-laden air !

In the woods and groves in England, the wild hya-
cinth grows very abundantly in spring, and in places
the air is loaded with its fragance. In our woods a
species of dicentra, commonly called squirrel corn,
has nearly the same perfume, and its racemes of nod-
ding whitish flowers, tinged with red, are quite as
pleasing to the eye, but it is a shyer, less abundant
plant. When our children go to the fields in April
and May, they can bring home no wild flowers as
pleasing as the sweet English violet, and cowslip, and
yellow daffodil, and wallflower ; and when British
children go to the woods at the same season, they can
load their hands and baskets with nothing that com-
pares with our trailing arbutus, or, later in the season,
with our azaleas ; and when their boys go fishing or
boating in summer, they can wreathe themselves with
nothing that approaches our pond-lily.

There are upward of forty species of fragrant
native wild flowers and flowering shrubs and trees in
New England and New York, and, no doubt, many
more in the South and West. My list is as fol-
lows : —

White violet ( Viola bland a ).

Canada violet (Viola Canadensis).

Hepatica (occasionally fragrant).

Trailing arbutus (Epigcea repens).

Mandrake (Podophyllum peltatum).

Yellow lady’s slipper (Cypripedium parviflorum).

Purple lady’s-slipper (Cypripedium acaule).

Squirrel corn (Bicentra Canadensis).

Showy orchis (Orchis spectabilis) .

12

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

Purple fringed-orchis (Ilabenaria psy codes)*

Arethusa ( Arethusa bulbosa).

Calopogon (Calopogon pulchellus).

Lady’s-tresses ( Spiranthes cernua).

Pond-lily ( Nymphcea odorata).

Wild rose ( Rosa nitida).

Twin-flower ( Linncea borealis).

Sugar maple ( Acer saccharinum).

Linden ( Tilia Americana).

Locust-tree (Robinia pseudacacia).

White-alder (Clethra alnifolia).

Smooth azalea ( Rhododendron arborescens).

White azalea ( Rhododendron viscosum).

Pinxter-flower ( Rhododendron nudiflorum).

Yellow azalea ( Rhododendron calendulaceum)*

Sweet bay ( Magnolia glauca).

Mitchella vine ( Mitchella repens).

Sweet coltsfoot (Petasites palmata).

Pasture thistle ( Cnicus pumilus).

False wintergreen ( Pyrola rotundifolia).

Spotted wintergreen ( Chimaphila maculata).

Prince’s pine ( Chimaphila umbellata).

Evening primrose ( CEnothera biennis).

Hairy loosestrife ( Steironema ciliatum).

Dogbane ( Apocynum ).

Ground-nut ( Apios tuberosa).

Adder’ s-tongue pogonia ( Pogonia ophioglossoides).

Wild grape ( Vitis cordifolia).

Horned bladderwort (Utricularia cornuta).

The last-named, horned bladderwort, is perhaps the
most fragrant flower we have. In a warm, moist
atmosphere, its odor is almost too strong. It is a
plant with a slender, leafless stalk or scape less than
a foot high, with two or more large yellow hood or
helmet shaped flowers. It is not common, and be-
longs pretty well north, growing in sandy swamps
and along the marshy margins of lakes and ponds.
Its perfume is sweet and spicy in an eminent degree.
I have placed in the above list several flowers that
are intermittently fragrant, like the hepatica, or liver-

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

13

leaf. This flower is the earliest, as it is certainly one
of the most beautiful, to be found in our woods, and
occasionally it is fragrant. Group after group may
be inspected, ranging through all shades of purple
and blue, with some perfectly white, and no odor be
detected, when presently you will happen upon a
little brood of them that have a most delicate and
delicious fragrance. The same is true of a species of
loosestrife growing along streams and on other wet
places, with tall bushy stalks, dark green leaves, and
pale axillary yellow flowers (probably European).
A handful of these flowers will sometimes exhale a
sweet fragrance ; at other times, or from another
locality, they are scentless. Our evening primrose is
thought to be uniformly sweet-scented, but the past
season I examined many specimens, and failed to find
one that was so. Some seasons the sugar maple
yields much sweeter sap than in others ; and even
individual trees, owing to the soil, moisture, etc.,
where they stand, show a great difference in this
respect. The same is doubtless true of the sweet-
scented flowers. I had always supposed that our
Canada violet — the tall, leafy-stemmed white violet
of our Northern woods — was odorless, till a corre-
spondent called my attention to the contrary fact.
On examination I found that, while the first ones that
bloomed about May 25 had very sweet-scented foliage,
especially when crushed in the hand, the flowers were
practically without fragrance. But as the season ad-
vanced the fragrance developed, till a single flower
had a well-marked perfume, and a handful of them
was sweet indeed. A single specimen, plucked about
August 1, was quite as fragrant as the English violet,
though the perfume is not what is known as violet,

14

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

but, like that of the hepatica, comes nearer to the
odor of certain fruit-trees.

It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of
our sugar maple are sweet-scented ; the perfume seems
to become stale after a few days : but pass under this
tree just at the right moment, say at nightfall on the
first or second day of its perfect inflorescence, and the
air is loaded with its sweetness ; its perfumed breath
falls upon you as its cool shadow does a few weeks
later.

After the linnaea and the arbutus, the prettiest sweet-
scented flowering vine our woods hold is the common
mitchella vine, called squaw-berry and partridge-
berry. It blooms in June, and its twin flowers, light
cream-color, velvety, tubular, exhale a most agreeable
fragrance.

Our flora is much more rich in orchids than the
European, and many of ours are fragrant. The first
to bloom in the spring is the showy orchis, though it
is far less showy than several others. I find it in
May, not on hills, where Gray says it grows, but in
low, damp places in the woods. It has two oblong
shining leaves, with a scape four or five inches high
strung with sweet-scented, pink-purple flowers. I
usually find it and the fringed polygala in bloom at
the same time ; the lady’s-slipper is a little later. The
purple fringed-orchis, one of the most showy and
striking of all our orchids, blooms in midsummer in
swampy meadows and in marshy, grassy openings in
the woods, shooting up a tapering column or cylinder
of pink-purple fringed flowers, that one may see at
quite a distance, and the perfume of which is too rank
for a close room. This flower is, perhaps, like the
English fragrant orchis, founij in pastures.

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

15

Few fragrant flowers in the shape of weeds have
come to us from the Old World, and this leads me to
remark that plants with sweet-scented flowers are, for
the most part, more intensely local, more fastidious
and idiosyncratic, than those without perfume. Our
native thistle — the pasture thistle — has a marked
fragrance, and it is much more shy and limited in its
range than the common Old World thistle that grows
everywhere. Our little sweet white violet grows only
in wet places, and the Canada violet only in high,
cool woods, while the common blue violet is much
more general in its distribution. How fastidious and
exclusive is the cypripedium ! You will find it in one
locality in the woods, usually on high, dry ground,
and will look in vain for it elsewhere. It does not
go in herds like the commoner plants, but affects
privacy and solitude. When I come upon it in my
walks, I seem to be intruding upon some very private
and exclusive company. The large yellow cypripe-
dium has a peculiar, heavy, oily odor.

In like manner one learns where to look for arbu-
tus, for pipsissewa, for the early orchis ; they have
their particular haunts, and their surroundings are
nearly always the same. The yellow pond-lily is
found in every sluggish stream and pond, but Nym-
phcea odorata requires a nicer adjustment of condi-
tions, and consequently is more restricted in its range.
If the mullein were fragrant, or toad-flax, or the daisy,
or blue-weed, or goldenrod, they would doubtless be
far less troublesome to the agriculturist. There are,
of course, exceptions to the rule I have here indicated,
but it holds in most cases. Genius is a specialty : it
does not grow in every soil ; it skips the many and
touches the few ; and the gift of perfume to a flower

16

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

is a special grace like genius or like beauty, and
never becomes common or cheap.

“Do honey and fragrance always go together in
the flowers ? ” Not uniformly. Of the list of fra-
grant wild flowers I have given, the only ones that
the bees procure nectar from, so far as I have ob-
served, are arbutus, dicentra, sugar maple, locust, and
linden. Non-fragrant flowers that yield honey are
those of the raspberry, clematis, sumac, bugloss, ailan-
tlius, goldenrod, aster, fleabane. A large number of
odorless plants yield pollen to the bee. There is nec-
tar in the columbine, and the bumblebee sometimes
gets it by piercing the spur from the outside, as she
does with the dicentra. There ought to be honey in
the honeysuckle, but I have never seen the hive bee
make any attempt to get it.

WEEDS.

One is tempted to say that the most human plants,
after all, are the weeds. How they cling to man and
follow him around the world, and spring up wherever
he sets his foot ! How they crowd around his barns
and dwellings, and throng his garden and jostle and
override each other in their strife to be near him !
Some of them are so domestic and familiar, and so
harmless withal, that one comes to regard them with
positive affection. Motherwort, catnip, plantain, tansy,
wild mustard, — what a homely human look they
have! they are an integral part of every old home-
stead. Your smart new place will wait long before
they draw near it. Our knot-grass, that carpets every
old dooryard, and fringes every walk, and softens
every path that knows the feet of children, or that
leads to the spring, or to the garden, or to the barn,

A BUNCH OF HERBS

17

how kindly one comes to look upon it ! Examine it
with a pocket glass and see how wonderfully beautiful
and exquisite are its tiny blossoms. It loves the
human foot, and when the path or the place is long
disused other plants usurp the ground.

The gardener and the farmer are ostensibly the
greatest enemies of the weeds, but they are in reality
their best friends. Weeds, like rats and mice, increase
and spread enormously in a cultivated country. They
have better food, more sunshine, and more aids in
getting themselves disseminated. They are sent from
one end of the land to the other in seed grain of vari-
ous kinds, and they take their share, and more too,
if they can get it, of the phosphates and stable
manures. How sure, also, they are to survive any
war of extermination that is waged against them ! In
yonder field are ten thousand and one Canada thistles.
The farmer goes resolutely to work and destroys ten
thousand and thinks the work is finished, but he has
done nothing till he has destroyed the ten thousand
and one. This one will keep up the stock and again
cover his fields with thistles.

Weeds are Nature’s makeshift. She rejoices in the
grass and the grain, but when these fail to cover her
nakedness she resorts to weeds. It is in her plan or
a part of her economy to keep the ground constantly
covered with vegetation of some sort, and she has
layer upon layer of seeds in the soil for this purpose,
and the wonder is that each kind lies dormant until
it is wanted. If I uncover the earth in any of my
fields, ragweed and pigweed spring up ; if these are
destroyed, harvest grass, or quack grass, or purslane,
appears. The spade or plow that turns these under
is sure to turn up some other variety, as chickweed,

18

A BUNCH OF HERBS .

slieep-sorrel, or goose-foot. The soil is a storehouse
of seeds.

The old farmers say that wood ashes will bring in
the white clover, and they will ; the germs are in the
soil wrapped in a profound slumber, but this stimulus
tickles them until they awake. Stramonium has been
known to start up on the site of an old farm building,
when it had not been seen in that locality for thirty
years. I have been told that a farmer, somewhere
in New England, in digging a well came at a great
depth upon sand like that of the seashore ; it was
thrown out, and in due time there sprang from it a
marine plant. I have never seen earth taken from so
great a depth that it would not before the end of the
season be clothed with a crop of weeds. Weeds are
so full of expedients, and the one engrossing pur-
pose with them is to multiply. The wild onion multi-
plies at both ends, — at the top by seed, and at the
bottom by offshoots. Toad-flax travels under ground
and above ground. Never allow a seed to ripen, and
yet it will cover your field. Cut off the head of the
wild carrot, and in a week or two there are five heads
in place of this one ; cut off these, and by fall there
are ten looking defiance at you from the same root.
Plant corn in August, and it will go forward with its
preparations as if it had the whole season before it.
Not so with the weeds ; they have learned better. If
amaranth, or abutilon, or burdock gets a late start, it
makes great haste to develop its seed ; it foregoes its
tall stalk and wide flaunting growth, and turns all its
energies into keeping up the succession of the species.
Certain fields under the plow are always infested with
“ blind nettles,” others with wild buckwheat, black
bindweed, or cockle. The seed lies dormant under

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 19

the sward, the warmth and the moisture affect it not
until other conditions are fulfilled.

The way in which one plant thus keeps another
down is a great mystery. Germs lie there in the
soil and resist the stimulating effect of the sun and
the rains for years, and show no sign. Presently
something whispers to them, “ Arise, your chance has
come ; the coast is clear; ” and they are up and doing
in a twinkling.

Weeds are great travelers ; they are, indeed, the
tramps of the vegetable world. They are going east,
west, north, south ; they walk ; they fly ; they swim ;
they steal a ride ; they travel by rail, by flood, by
wind; they go under ground, and they go above,
across lots, and by the highway. But, like other
tramps, they find it safest by the highway : in the
fields they are intercepted and cut off ; but on the
public road, every boy, every passing drove of sheep or
cows, gives them a lift. Hence the incursion of a new
weed is generally first noticed along the highway or
the railroad. In Orange County I saw from the car
window a field overrun with what I took to be the
branching white mullein. Gray says it is found in
Pennsylvania and at the head of Oneida Lake.
Doubtless it had come by rail from one place or the
other. Our botanist says of the bladder campion, a
species of pink, that it has been naturalized around
Boston ; but it is now much farther west, and I know
fields along the Hudson overrun with it. Streams and
watercourses are the natural highway of the weeds.
Some years ago, and by some means or other, the
viper’s bugloss, or blue-weed, which is said to be a
troublesome weed in Virginia, effected a lodgment
near the head of the Esopus Creek, a tributary of the

20

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

Hudson. From this point it has made its way down
the stream, overrunning its banks and invading
meadows and cultivated fields, and proving a serious
obstacle to the farmer. All the gravelly, sandy mar-
gins and islands of the Esopus, sometimes acres in
extent, are in June and July blue with it, and rye and
oats and grass in the near fields find it a serious com-
petitor for possession of the soil. It has gone down the
Hudson, and is appearing in the fields along its shores.
The tides carry it up the mouths of the streams where
it takes root ; the winds, or the birds, or other agen-
cies, in time give it another lift, so that it is slowly
but surely making its way inland. The bugloss
belongs to what may be called beautiful weeds,
despite its rough and bristly stalk. Its flowers are
deep violet-blue, the stamens exserted, as the botanists
say, that is, projected beyond the mouth of the corolla,
with showy red anthers. This bit of red, mingling
with the blue of the corolla, gives a very rich, warm
purple hue to the flower, that is especially pleasing at
a little distance. The best thing I know about this
weed besides its good looks is that it yields honey or
pollen to the bee.

Another foreign plant that the Esopus Creek has
distributed along its shores and carried to the Hudson
is saponaria, known as “ Bouncing Bet.” It is a com-
mon and in places a troublesome weed in this valley.
Bouncing Bet is, perhaps, its English name, as the
pink-white complexion of its flowers with their per-
fume and the coarse, robust character of the plant
really give it a kind of English feminine comeliness
and bounce. It looks like a Yorkshire housemaid.
Still another plant in my section, which I notice has
been widely distributed by the agency of water, is the

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

21

spiked loosestrife. It first appeared many years ago
along the Wallkill; now it may be seen upon many
of its tributaries and all along its banks ; and in many
of the marshy bays and coves along the Hudson, its
great masses of purple-red bloom in middle and late
summer affording a welcome relief to the traveler’s
eye. It also belongs to the class of beautiful weeds.
It grows rank and tall, in dense communities, and
always presents to the eye a generous mass of color.
In places, the marshes and creek banks are all aglow
with it, its wand-like spikes of flowers shooting up
and uniting in volumes or pyramids of still flame.
Its petals, when examined closely, present a curious
wrinkled or crumpled appearance, like newly-washed
linen ; but when massed the effect is eminently pleas-
ing. It also came from abroad, probably first brought
to this country as a garden or ornamental plant.

As a curious illustration of how weeds are carried
from one end of the earth to the other, Sir Joseph
Hooker relates this circumstance : “ On one occa-
sion,” he says, “ landing on a small uninhabited island
nearly at the Antipodes, the first evidence I met with
of its having been previously visited by man was the
English chickweed ; and this I traced to a mound that
marked the grave of a British sailor, and that was
covered with the plant, doubtless the offspring of seed
that had adhered to the spade or mattock with which
the grave had been dug.”

Ours is a weedy country because it is a roomy
country. Weeds love a wide margin, and they find
it here. You shall see more weeds in one day’s
travel in this country than in a week’s journey in
Europe. Our culture of the soil is not so close and
thorough, our occupancy not so entire and exclusive.

22

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

The weeds take up with the farmers’ leavings, and
find good fare. One may see a large slice taken
from a field by elecampane, or by teasle or milkweed ;
whole acres given up to whiteweed, goldenrod, wild
carrots, or the ox-eye daisy ; meadows overrun with
bear-weed, and sheep pastures nearly ruined by St.
John’s- wort or the Canada thistle. Our farms are so
large and our husbandry so loose that we do not mind
these things. By and by we shall clean them out.
When Sir Joseph Hooker landed in New England a
few years ago, he was surprised to find how the Euro-
pean plants flourished there. He found the wild chic-
ory growing far more luxuriantly than he had ever
seen it elsewhere, “ forming a tangled mass of stems
and branches, studded with turquoise-blue blossoms,
and covering acres of ground.” This is one of the
many weeds that Emerson binds into a bouquet in
his “ Humble-Bee : ” —

“ Succory to match the sky,

Columbine with horn of honey,

Scented fern, and agrimony,

Clover, catchfly, adder’s-tongue,

And brier-roses, dwelt among.”

A less accurate poet than Emerson would probably
have let his reader infer that the bumblebee gathered
honey from all these plants, but Emerson is careful to
say only that she dwelt among them. Succory is one
of Virgil’s weeds also, —

“And spreading succ’ry chokes the rising field.”

Is there not something in our soil and climate ex-
ceptionally favorable to weeds, — something harsh,
ungenial, sharp-toothed, that is akin to them ? How
woody and rank and fibrous many varieties become,
lasting the whole season, and standing up stark and

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

23

stiff through the deep winter snows, — desiccated,
preserved by our dry air ! Do nettles and thistles
bite so sharply in any other country ? Let the
farmer tell you how they bite of a dry midsummer
day when he encounters them in his wheat or oat
harvest.

Yet it is a fact that all our more pernicious weeds,
like our vermin, are of Old World origin. They
hold up their heads and assert themselves here, and
take their fill of riot and license ; they are avenged
for their long years of repression by the stern hand
of European agriculture. We have hardly a weed
we can call our own. I recall but three that are at
all noxious or troublesome, namely, milkweed, rag-
weed, and goldenrod ; but who would miss the last
from our fields and highways ?

“ Along the roadside, like the flowers of gold
That tawny Incas for their gardens wrought,

Heavy with sunshine droops the goldenrod,”

sings Whittier. In Europe our goldenrod is culti-
vated in the flower gardens, as well it may be. The
native species is found mainly in woods, and is much
less showy than ours.

Our milkweed is tenacious of life ; its roots lie
deep, as if to get away from the plow, but it seldom
infests cultivated crops. Then its stalk is so full of
milk and its pod so full of silk that one cannot but
ascribe good intentions to it, if it does sometimes
overrun the meadow.

“ In dusty pods the milkweed
Its hidden silk has spun,”

sings “ H. H.” in her “ September.”

Of our ragweed not much can be set down that is
complimentary, except that its name in the botany is

24

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

Ambrosia , food of the gods. It must be the food of
the gods if anything, for, so far as I have observed,
nothing terrestrial eats it, not even billy-goats. (Yet
a correspondent writes me that in Kentucky the cattle
eat it when hard-pressed, and that a certain old farmer
there, one season when the hay crop failed, cut and
harvested tons of it for his stock in winter. It is said
that the milk and butter made from such hay is not
at all suggestive of the traditional Ambrosia !) It
is the bane of asthmatic patients, but the gardener
makes short work of it. It is about the only one of
our weeds that follows the plow and the harrow, and,
except that it is easily destroyed, I should suspect it
to be an immigrant from the Old World. Our flea-
bane is a troublesome weed at times, but good hus-
bandry has little to dread from it.

But all the other outlaws of the farm and garden
come to us from over seas ; and what a long list it is :

Common thistle,

Gill,

Canada thistle,

Nightshade,

Burdock,

Buttercup,

Yellow dock,

Dandelion,

Wild carrot,

Wild mustard,

Ox-eye daisy,

Shepherd’s purse,

Chamomile,

St. John’s-wort,

Mullein,

Chickweed,

Dead-nettle ( Lamium ),

Purslane,

Hemp nettle ( Galeopsis ),

Mallow,

Elecampane,

Darnel,

Plantain,

Poison hemlock,

Motherwort,

Hop-clover,

Stramonium,

Yarrow,

Catnip,

Wild radish,

Blue-weed,

Wild parsnip,

Stick-seed,

Chicory,

Hound’s-tongue,

Live-forever,

Henbane,

Toad-flax,

Pigweed,

Sheep-sorrel,

Quitch grass,

Mayweed,

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

25

and others less noxious. To offset this list we have
given Europe the vilest of all weeds, a parasite that
sucks up human blood, tobacco. Now if they catch
the Colorado beetle of us, it will go far toward pay-
ing them off for the rats and the mice, and for other
pests in our houses.

The more attractive and pretty of the British
weeds — as the common daisy, of which the poets
have made so much, the larkspur, which is a pretty
corn-field weed, and the scarlet field-poppy, which
flowers all summer, and is so taking amid the ripening
grain — have not immigrated to our shores. Like a
certain sweet rusticity and charm of European rural
life, they do not thrive readily under our skies. Our
fleabane has become a common roadside weed in Eng-
land, and a few other of our native less known plants
have gained a foothold in the Old World. Our beau-
tiful jewel-weed has recently appeared along certain
of the English rivers.

Pokeweed is a native American, and what a lusty,
royal plant it is ! It never invades cultivated fields,
but hovers about the borders and looks over the fences
like a painted Indian sachem. Thoreau coveted its
strong purple stalk for g cane, and the robins eat its
dark crimson-juiced berries.

It is commonly believed that the mullein is indige-
nous to this country, for have we not heard that it is
cultivated in European gardens, and christened the
American velvet plant? Yet it, too, seems to have
come over with the Pilgrims, and is most abundant
in the older parts of the country. It abounds through-
out Europe and Asia, and had its economic uses with
the ancients. The Greeks made lamp-wicks of its
dried leaves, and the Romans dipped its dried stalk

26

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

in tallow for funeral torches. It affects dry uplands
in this country, and, as it takes two years to mature,
it is not a troublesome weed in cultivated crops. The
first year it sits low upon the ground in its coarse
flannel leaves, and makes ready; if the plow comes
along now, its career is ended. The second season it
starts upward its tall stalk, which in late summer is
thickly set with small yellow flowers, and in fall is
charged with myriads of fine black seeds. “As full
as a dry mullein stalk of seeds ” is almost equivalent
to saying, “as numerous as the sands upon the sea-
shore.”

Perhaps the most notable thing about the weeds
that have come to us from the Old World, when com-
pared with our native species, is their persistence, not
to say pugnacity. They fight for the soil ; they plant
colonies here and there and will not be rooted out.
Our native weeds are for the most part shy and harm-
less, and retreat before cultivation, but the European
outlaws follow man like vermin; they hang to his
coat-skirts, his sheep transport them in their wool, his
cow and horse in tail and mane. As I have before
said, it is as with the rats and mice. The American
rat is in the woods and is rarely seen even by wood-
men, and the native mouse barely hovers upon the
outskirts of civilization ; while the Old W orld species
defy our traps and our poison, and have usurped the
land. So with the weeds. Take the thistle for in-
stance: the common and abundant one everywhere,
in fields and along highways, is the European spe-
cies; while the native thistles, swamp thistle, pasture
thistle, etc., are much more shy, and are not at all
troublesome. The Canada thistle, too, which came to
us by way of Canada, — what a pest, what a usurper,

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

27

what a defier of the plow and the harrow ! I know
of but one effectual way to treat it, — put on a pair
of buckskin gloves, and pull up every plant that
shows itself; this will effect a radical cure in two
summers. Of course the plow or the scythe, if not
allowed to rest more than a month at a time, will
finally conquer it.

Or take the common St. John’s-wort, — how has
it established itself in our fields and become a most
pernicious weed, very difficult to extirpate ; while the
native species are quite rare, and seldom or never
invade cultivated fields, being found mostly in wet
and rocky waste places. Of Old World origin, too,
is the curled-leaf dock that is so annoying about one’s
garden and home meadows, its long tapering root
clinging to the soil with such tenacity that I have
pulled upon it till I could see stars without budging
it ; it has more lives than a cat, making a shift to live
when pulled up and laid on top of the ground in the
burning summer sun. Our native docks are mostly
found in swamps, or near them, and are harmless.

Purslane — 'Commonly called “pusley,” and which
has given rise to the saying, “as mean as pusley” —
of course is not American. A good sample of our
native purslane is the claytonia, or spring beauty, a
shy, delicate plant that opens its rose-colored flowers
in the moist, sunny places in the woods or along their
borders so early in the season.

There are few more obnoxious weeds in cultivated
ground than sheep-sorrel, also an Old World plant;
while our native wood-sorrel, — belonging, it is true
to a different family of plants, — with its white, deli-
cately veined flowers, or the variety with yellow flow-
ers, is quite harmless. The same is true of the mah

28

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

low, the vetch, or tare, and other plants. We have
no native plant so indestructible as garden orpine, or
live-forever, which our grandmothers nursed and for
which they are cursed by many a farmer. The fat,
tender, succulent dooryard stripling turned out to be
a monster that would devour the earth. I have seen
acres of meadow land destroyed by it. The way to
drown an amphibious animal is to never allow it to
come to the surface to breathe, and this is the way to
kill live-forever. It lives by its stalk and leaf, more
than by its root, and, if cropped or bruised as soon
as it comes to the surface, it will in time perish. It
laughs the plow, the hoe, the cultivator to scorn, but
grazing herds will eventually scotch it. Our two
species of native orpine, Sedum ternatum and S.
telephioides , are never troublesome as weeds.

The European weeds are sophisticated, domesti-
cated, civilized ; they have been to school to man for
many hundred years, and they have learned to thrive
upon him : their struggle for existence has been sharp
and protracted ; it has made them hardy and prolific ;
they will thrive in a lean soil, or they will wax strong
in a rich one; in all cases they follow man and profit
by him. Our native weeds, on the other hand, are
furtive and retiring; they flee before the plow and
the scythe, and hide in corners and remote waste
places. Will they, too, in time, change their habits
in this respect ?

“Idle weeds are fast in growth,” says Shakespeare,
but that depends upon whether the competition is
sharp and close. If the weed finds itself distanced,
or pitted against great odds, it grows more slowly and
is of diminished stature, but let it once get the upper
hand and what strides it makes ! Red-root will grow

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

29

four or five feet high if it has a chance, or it will
content itself with a few inches and mature its seed
almost upon the ground.

Many of our worst weeds are plants that have es-
caped from cultivation, as the wild radish, which is
troublesome in parts of New England ; the wild car-
rot, which infests the fields in eastern New York; and
live-forever, which thrives and multiplies under the
plow and harrow. In my section an annoying weed
is abutilon, or velvet-leaf, also called “old maid,”
which has fallen from the grace of the garden and
followed the plow afield. It will manage to mature
its seeds if not allowed to start till midsummer.

Of beautiful weeds quite a long list might be made
without including any of the so-called wild flowers.
A favorite of mine is the little moth mullein that
blooms along the highway, and about the fields, and
maybe upon the edge of the lawn, from midsummer
till frost comes. In winter its slender stalk rises
above the snow, bearing its round seed-pods on its
pin-like stems, and is pleasing even then. Its flowers
are yellow or white, large, wheel-shaped, and are
borne vertically with filaments loaded with little tufts
of violet wool. The plant has none of the coarse,
hairy character of the common mullein. Our cone-
flower, which one of our poets has called the “brown-
eyed daisy,” has a pleasing effect when in vast num-
bers they invade a meadow (if it is not your meadow),
their dark brown centres or disks and their golden
rays showing conspicuously.

Bidens, two-teeth, or “pitchforks,” as the boys call
them, are welcomed by the eye when in late summer
they make the swamps and wet waste places yellow
with their blossoms.

30

A BUNCH OF HERBS .

Vervain is a beautiful weed, especially the blue or
purple variety. Its drooping knotted threads also
make a pretty etching upon the winter snow.

Iron-weed, which looks like an overgrown aster,
has the same intense purple-blue color, and a royal
profusion of flowers. There are giants among the
weeds, as well as dwarfs and pigmies. One of the
giants is purple eupatorium, which sometimes carries
its corymbs of flesh-colored flowers ten and twelve
feet high. A pretty and curious little weed, some-
times found growing in the edge of the garden, is the
clasping specularia, a relative of the harebell and of
the European Venus’s looking-glass. Its leaves are
shell-shaped, and clasp the stalk so as to form little
shallow cups. In the bottom of each cup three buds
appear that never expand into flowers ; but when the
top of the stalk is reached, one and sometimes two
buds open a large, delicate purple-blue corolla. All
the first-born of this plant are still-born, as it were ;
only the latest, which spring from its summit, attain
to perfect bloom. A weed which one ruthlessly de-
molishes when he finds it hiding from the plow amid
the strawberries, or under the currant-bushes and
grapevines, is the dandelion; yet who would banish
it from the meadows or the lawns, where it copies in
gold upon the green expanse the stars of the midnight
sky ? After its first blooming comes its second and
finer and more spiritual inflorescence, when its stalk,
dropping its more earthly and carnal flower, shoots
upward, and is presently crowned by a globe of the
most delicate and aerial texture. It is like the poet’s
dream, which succeeds his rank and golden youth.
This globe is a fleet of a hundred fairy balloons, each
one of which bears a seed which it is destined to drop
far from the parent source.

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

31

Most weeds have their uses; they are not wholly
malevolent. Emerson says a weed is a plant whose
virtues we have not yet discovered ; but the wild crea-
tures discover their virtues if we do not. The bum-
blebee has discovered that the hateful toad-flax, which
nothing will eat, and which in some soils will run out
the grass, has honey at its heart. Narrow-leaved
plantain is readily eaten by cattle, and the honey-bee
gathers much pollen from it. The ox-eye daisy makes
a fair quality of hay if cut before it gets ripe. The
cows will eat the leaves of the burdock and the sting-
ing nettles of the woods. But what cannot a cow’s
tongue stand ? She will crop the poison ivy with im-
punity, and I think would eat thistles if she found
them growing in the garden. Leeks and garlics are
readily eaten by cattle in the spring, and are said to
be medicinal to them. Weeds that yield neither pas-
turage for bee nor herd, yet afford seeds to the fall
and winter birds. This is true of most of the obnox-
ious weeds of the garden and of thistles. The wild
lettuce yields down for the hummingbird’s nest, and
the flowers of whiteweed are used by the kingbird
and cedar-bird.

Yet it is pleasant to remember that, in our climate,
there are no weeds so persistent and lasting and uni-
versal as grass. Grass is the natural covering of the
fields. There are but four weeds that I know of — ■
milkweed, live-forever, Canada thistle, and toad-flax
— that it will not run out in a good soil. W e crop
it and mow it year after year ; and yet, if the season
favors, it is sure to come again. Fields that have
never known the plow, and never been seeded by
man, are yet covered with grass. And in human
nature, too, weeds are by no means in the ascendant,,

32

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

troublesome as they are. The good green grass of
love and truthfulness and common sense is more
universal, and crowds the idle weeds to the wall.

But weeds have this virtue : they are not easily dis-
couraged; they never lose heart entirely; they die
game. If they cannot have the best, they will take
up with the poorest; if fortune is unkind to them to-
day, they hope for better luck to-morrow; if they
cannot lord it over a corn-hill, they will sit humbly
at its foot and accept what comes ; in all cases they
make the most of their opportunities.

STRAWBERRIES.

Was it old Dr. Parr who said or sighed in his last
illness, “Oh, if I can only live till strawberries
come!” The old scholar imagined that, if he could
weather it till then, the berries would carry him
through. No doubt he had turned from the drugs
and the nostrums, or from the hateful food, to the
memory of the pungent, penetrating, and unspeakably
fresh quality of the strawberry with the deepest long-
ing. The very thought of these crimson lobes, em-
bodying as it were the first glow and ardor of the
young summer, and with their power to unsheathe the
taste and spur the flagging appetite, made life seem
possible and desirable to him.

The strawberry is always the hope of the invalid,
and sometimes, no doubt, his salvation. It is the
first and finest relish among fruits, and well merits
Dr. Boteler’s memorable saying, that “doubtless God
could have made a better berry, but doubtless God
never did.”

On the threshold of summer, Nature proffers us
this her virgin fruit; more rich and sumptuous are to
follow, but the wild delicacy and fillip of the straw-
berry are never repeated, — that keen feathered edge
greets the tongue in nothing else.

Let me not be afraid of overpraising it, but probe
and probe for words to hint its surprising virtues.
We may well celebrate it with festivals and music.
It has that indescribable quality of all first things,

34

STRA W BERRIES.

— that shy, uncloying, provoking barbed sweetness.
It is eager and sanguine as youth. It is born of the
copious dews, the fragrant nights, the tender skies,
the plentiful rains of the early season. The singing
of birds is in it, and the health and frolic of lusty
Nature. It is the product of liquid May touched by
the June sun. It has the tartness, the briskness, the
unruliness of spring, and the aroma and intensity of
summer.

Oh the strawberry days! how vividly they come
back to one! The smell of clover in the fields, of
blooming rye on the hills, of the wild grape beside
the woods, and of the sweet honeysuckle and spiraea
about the house. The first hot, moist days. The
daisies and buttercups; the songs of the birds, their
first reckless jollity and love-making over; the full
tender foliage of the trees; the bees swarming, and
the air strung with resonant musical chords. The
time of the sweetest and most succulent grass, when
the cows come home with aching udders. Indeed,
the strawberry belongs to the juiciest time of the
year.

What a challenge it is to the taste! how it bites
back again! and is there any other sound like the
snap and crackle with which it salutes the ear on
being plucked from the stems ? It is a threat to one
sense that the other is soon to verify. It snaps to
the ear as it smacks to the tongue. All other berries
are tame beside it.

The plant is almost an evergreen ; it loves the cov
erlid of the snow, and will keep fresh through the
severest winters with a slight protection. The frost
leaves its virtues in it. The berry is a kind of vege-
table snow. How cool, how tonic, how melting, and

STRAWBERRIES. 35

how perishable ! It is almost as easy to keep frost.
Heat kills it, and sugar quickly breaks up its cells.

Is there anything like the odor of strawberries?
The next best thing to tasting them is to smell them ;
one may put his nose to the dish while the fruit is yet
too rare and choice for his fingers. Touch not and
taste not, but take a good smell and go mad ! Last
fall I potted some of the Downer, and in the winter
grew them in the house. In March the berries were
ripe, only four or five on a plant, just enough, all
told, to make one consider whether it were not worth
while to kill off the rest of the household, so that the
berries need not be divided. But if every tongue
could not have a feast, every nose banqueted daily
upon them. They filled the house with perfume.
The Downer is remarkable in this respect. Grown
in the open field, it surpasses in its odor any straw-
berry of my acquaintance. And it is scarcely less
agreeable to the taste. It is a very beautiful berry
to look upon, round, light pink, with a delicate, fine-
grained expression. Some berries shind, the Downer
glows as if there were a red bloom upon it. Its core
is firm and white, its skin thin and easily bruised,
which makes it a poor market berry, but, with its high
flavor and productiveness, an admirable one for home
use. It seems to be as easily grown as the Wilson,
while it is much more palatable. The great trouble
with the Wilson, as everybody knows, is its rank
acidity. When it first comes, it is difficult to eat it
without making faces. It is crabbed and acrimoni-
ous. Like some persons, the Wilson will not ripen
and sweeten till its old age. Its largest and finest
crop, if allowed to remain on the vines, will soften
and fail unregenerated, or with all its sins upon it.

36

STRA W BERRIES.

But wait till toward the end of the season, after the
plant gets over its hurry and takes time to ripen its
fruit. The berry will then face the sun for days,
and, if the weather is not too wet, instead of soften-
ing will turn dark and grow rich. Out of its crabbed-
ness and spitefulness come the finest, choicest flavors.
It is an astonishing berry. It lays hold of the taste
in a way that the aristocratic berries, like the Jocunda
or the Triumph, cannot approximate to. Its quality is
as penetrating as that of ants and wasps, but sweet.
It is, indeed, a wild bee turned into a berry, with the
sting mollified and the honey disguised. A quart of
these rare-ripes I venture to say contains more of the
peculiar virtue and excellence of the strawberry kind
than can be had in twice the same quantity of any
other cultivated variety. Take these berries in a
bowl of rich milk with some bread, — ah, what a
dish ! — too good to set before a king ! I suspect this
was the food of Adam in Paradise, only Adam did
not have the Wilson strawberry; he had the wild
strawberry that Eve plucked in their hill-meadow and
“hulled” with her own hands, and that, take it all
in all, even surpasses the late-ripened Wilson.

Adam is still extant in the taste and appetite of
most country boys; lives there a country boy who
does not like wild strawberries and milk, — yea, pre-
fer it to any other known dish ? I am not thinking
of a dessert of strawberries and cream; this the city
boy may have, too, after a sort ; but bread-and-milk,
with the addition of wild strawberries, is peculiarly
a country dish, and is to the taste what a wild bird’s
song is to the ear. When I was a lad, and went
afield with my hoe or with the cows, during the straw-
berry season, I was sure to return at meal-time with

STRA W BERRIES.

37

a lining of berries in the top of my straw hat. They
were my daily food, and I could taste the liquid and
gurgling notes of the bobolink in every spoonful of
them; and to this day, to make a dinner or supper
off a bowl of milk with bread and strawberries, —
plenty of strawberries, — well, is as near to being a
boy again as I ever expect to come. The golden age
draws sensibly near. Appetite becomes a kind of
delicious thirst, — a gentle and subtle craving of all
parts of the mouth and throat, — and those nerves of
taste that occupy, as it were, a back seat, and take
little cognizance of grosser foods, come forth, and are
played upon and set vibrating. Indeed, I think, if
there is ever rejoicing throughout one’s alimentary
household, — if ever that much-abused servant, the
stomach, says Amen, or those faithful handmaidens,
the liver and spleen, nudge each other delightedly, it
must be when one on a torrid summer day passes by
the solid and carnal dinner for this simple Arcadian
dish.

The wild strawberry, like the wild apple, is spicy
and high-flavored, but, unlike the apple, it is also
mild and delicious. It has the true rustic sweetness
and piquancy. What it lacks in size, when compared
with the garden berry, it makes up in intensity. It
is never dropsical or overgrown, but firm-fleshed and
hardy. Its great enemies are the plow, gypsum, and
the horse-rake. It dislikes a limestone soil, but seems
to prefer the detritus of the stratified rock. Where
the sugar maple abounds, I have always found plenty
of wild strawberries. We have two kinds, — the
wood berry and the field berry. The former is as
wild as a partridge. It is found in open places in the
woods and along the borders, growing beside stumps

38

STRA WBERRIES.

and rocks, never in abundance, but very sparsely.
It is small, cone-shaped, dark red, shiny, and pim-
ply. It looks woody, and tastes so. It has never
reached the table, nor made the acquaintance of
cream. A quart of them, at a fair price for human
labor, would be worth their weight in silver at least.
(Yet a careful observer writes me that in certain sec-
tions in the western part of New York they are very
plentiful.)

Ovid mentions the wood strawberry, which would
lead one to infer that they were more abundant in his
time and country than in ours.

This is, perhaps, the same as the alpine strawberry,
which is said to grow in the mountains of Greece, and
thence northward. This was probably the first variety
cultivated, though our native species would seem as
unpromising a subject for the garden as club-moss or
wintergreens.

Of the field strawberry there are a great many
varieties, — some growing in meadows, some in pas-
tures, and some upon mountain-tops. Some are
round, and stick close to the calyx or hull ; some are
long and pointed, with long, tapering necks. These
usually grow upon tall stems. They are, indeed, of
the slim, linear kind. Your corpulent berry keeps
close to the ground ; its stem and foot-stalk are short,
and neck it has none. Its color is deeper than that
of its tall brother, and of course it has more juice.
You are more apt to find the tall varieties upon knolls
in low, wet meadows, and again upon mountain-tops,
growing in tussocks of wild grass about the open
summits. These latter ripen in July, and give one
his last taste of strawberries for the season.

But the favorite haunt of the wild strawberry is an

STRA WBERRIES.

39

nplying meadow that has been exempt from the plow
for five or six years, and that has little timothy and
much daisy. When ‘you go a-berrying, turn your
steps toward the milk-white meadows. The slightly
bitter odor of the daisies is very agreeable to the
smell, and affords a good background for the perfume
of the fruit. The strawberry cannot cope with the
rank and deep-rooted clover, and seldom appears in
a field till the clover has had its day. But the daisy
with its slender stalk does not crowd or obstruct the
plant, while its broad white flower is like a light para-
sol that tempers' and softens the too strong sunlight.
Indeed, daisies and strawberries are generally asso-
ciated. Nature fills her dish with the berries, then
covers them with the white and yellow of milk and
cream, thus suggesting a combination we are quick
to follow. Milk alone, after it loses its animal heat,
is a clod, and begets torpidity of the brain; the ber-
ries lighten it, give wings to it, and one is fed as by
the air he breathes or the water he drinks.

Then the delight of “picking” the wild berries!
It is one of the fragrant memories of boyhood. In-
deed, for boy or man to go a-berrying in a certain
pastoral country I know of, where a passer-by along
the highway is often regaled by a breeze loaded with
a perfume of the o’er-ripe fruit, is to get nearer to
June than by almost any course I know of. Your
errand is so private and confidential! You stoop low.
You part away the grass and the daisies, and would
lay bare the inmost secrets of the meadow. Every-
thing is yet tender and succulent; the very air is
bright and new; the warm breath of the meadow
comes up in your face ; to your knees, you are in a sea
of daisies and clover ; from your knees up, you are in

40

STRA W BERRIES.

a sea of solar light and warmth. Now you are pros-
trate like a swimmer, or like a surf -bather reaching
for pebbles or shells, the white and green spray
breaks above you; then, like a devotee before a
shrine, or naming his beads, your rosary strung with
luscious berries; anon you are a grazing Nebuchad-
nezzar, or an artist taking an inverted view of the
landscape.

The birds are alarmed by your close scrutiny of
their domain. They hardly know whether to sing or
to cry, and do a little of both. The bobolink follows
you and circles above and in advance of you, and is
ready to give you a triumphal exit from the field, if
you will only depart.

“Ye boys that gather flowers and strawberries,

Lo, hid within the grass, an adder lies,”

Warton makes Virgil sing; and Montaigne, in his
“Journey to Italy,” says: “The children very often
are afraid, on account of the snakes, to go and pick
the strawberries that grow in quantities on the moun-
tains and among the bushes.” But there is no serpent
here, — at worst, only a bumblebee’s or yellow-jack-
et’s nest. You soon find out the spring in the corner
of the field under the beechen tree. While you wipe
your brow and thank the Lord for spring water, you
glance at the initials in the bark, some of them so old
that they seem runic and legendary. You find out,
also, how gregarious the strawberry is, — that the
different varieties exist in little colonies about the
field. When you strike the outskirts of one of these
plantations, how quickly you work toward the centre
of it, and then from the centre out, then circumnavi-
gate it, and follow up all its branchings and wind-
ings!

STB A W BERRIES.

41

Then the delight in the abstract and in the concrete
of strolling and lounging about the June meadows;
of lying in pickle for half a day or more in this pas-
toral sea, laved by the great tide, shone upon by the
virile sun, drenched to the very marrow of your being
with the warm and wooing influences of the young
summer !

I was a famous berry-picker when a boy. It was
near enough to hunting and fishing to enlist me.
Mother would always send me in preference to any
of the rest of the boys. I got the biggest berries
and the most of them. There was something of the
excitement of the chase in the occupation, and some-
thing of the charm and preciousness of game about
the trophies. The pursuit had its surprises, its ex-
pectancies, its sudden disclosures, — in fact, its un-
certainties. I went forth adventurously. I could
wander free as the wind. Then there were moments
of inspiration, for it always seemed a felicitous stroke
to light upon a particularly fine spot, as it does when
one takes an old and wary trout. You discovered
the game where it was hidden. Your genius prompted
you. Another had passed that way and had missed
the prize. Indeed, the successful berry -picker, like
Walton’s angler, is born, not made. It is only an-
other kind of angling. In the same field one boy gets
big berries and plenty of them ; another wanders up
and down, and finds only a few little ones. He can-
not see them; he does not know how to divine them
where they lurk under the leaves and vines. The
berry-grower knows that in the cultivated patch his
pickers are very unequal, the baskets of one boy or
girl having so inferior a look that it does not seem
possible they could have been filled from the same

42

STRA W BERRIES.

vines with certain others. But neither blunt fingers
nor blunt eyes are hard to find; and as there are
those who can see nothing clearly, so there are those
who can touch nothing deftly or gently.

The cultivation of the strawberry is thought to be
comparatively modern. The ancients appear to have
been a carnivorous race : they gorged themselves with
meat ; while the modern man makes larger and larger
use of fruits and vegetables, until this generation is
doubtless better fed than any that has preceded it.
The strawberry and the apple, and such vegetables as
celery, ought to lengthen human life, — at least to
correct its biliousness and make it more sweet and
sanguine.

The first impetus to strawberry culture seems to
have been given by the introduction of our field berry
(. Fragaria Virginiana ) into England in the seven-
teenth century, though not much progress was made
till the eighteenth. This variety is much more fra-
grant and aromatic than the native berry of Europe,
though less so in that climate than when grown here.
Many new seedlings sprang from it, and it was the
prevailing berry in English and French gardens, says
Fuller, until the South American species, F. grandi-
flora,1 was introduced and supplanted it. This berry
is naturally much larger and sweeter, and better
adapted to the English climate, than our F. Virgin •
iana. Hence the English strawberries of to-day sur-

1 What was formerly called Fragaria grandiflora is now known as
Fragaria Chiloensis. This species is native along- the Pacific coast of
both North and South America. From it have been derived, most
probably, all the more important forms of cultivated strawberries,
including the Hovey Seedling and the Boston Pine, with their numerous
descendants in this country, and the wonderful Keen’s Seedling with
its many derivatives in England.

STRAWBERRIES.

43

pass ours in these respects, but are wanting in that
aromatic pungency that characterizes most of our
berries.

The strawberry, in the main, repeats the form of
the human heart, and perhaps, of all the small fruits
known to man, none other is so deeply and fondly
cherished, or hailed with such universal delight, as
this lowly but youth-renewing berry.

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

ON THE POTOMAC.

March 1. — The first day of spring and the first
spring day ! I felt the change the moment I put my
head out of doors in the morning. A fitful, gusty
south wind was blowing, though the sky was clear.
But the sunlight was not the same. There was an
interfusion of a new element. Not ten days before
there had been a day just as bright, — even brighter
and warmer, — a clear, crystalline day of February,
with nothing vernal in it ; but this day was opaline ;
there was a film, a sentiment in it, a nearer approach
to life. Then there was that fresh, indescribable
odor, a breath from the Gulf, or from Florida and
the Carolinas, — a subtle, persuasive influence that
thrilled the sense. Every root and rootlet under
ground must have felt it; the buds of the soft maple
and silver poplar felt it, and swelled perceptibly dur-
ing the day. The robins knew it, and were here that
morning; so were the crow blackbirds. The shad
must have known it, down deep in their marine re-
treats, and leaped and sported about the mouths of
the rivers, ready to dart up them if the genial influ-
ence continued. The bees in the hive also, or in the
old tree in the woods, no doubt awoke to new life;
and the hibernating animals, the bears and wood-
chucks, rolled up in their subterranean dens, — I
imagine the warmth reached even them, and quick-
ened their sluggish circulation.

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

45

Then in the afternoon there was the smell of smoke,

— the first spring fires in the open air. The Virginia
farmer is raking together the rubbish in his garden,
or in the field he is preparing for the plow, and burn-
ing it up. In imagination I am there to help him.
I see the children playing about, delighted with the
sport and the resumption of work ; the smoke goes up
through the shining haze ; the farmhouse door stands
open, and lets in the afternoon sun ; the cow lows for
her calf, or hides it in the woods; and in the morn-
ing the geese, sporting in the spring sun, answer the
call of the wild flock steering northward above them.

As I stroll through the market I see the signs here.
That old colored woman has brought spring in her
basket in those great green flakes of moss, with ar-
butus showing the pink; and her old man is just in
good time with his fruit-trees and gooseberry bushes.
Various bulbs and roots are also being brought out
and offered, and the onions are sprouting on the
stands. I see bunches of robins and cedar-birds also,

— so much melody and beauty cut off from the supply
going north. The fish market is beginning to be
bright with perch and bass, and with shad from the
Southern rivers, and wild ducks are taking the place
of prairie hens and quails.

In the Carolinas, no doubt, the fruit-trees are in
bloom, and the rice land is being prepared for the
seed. In the mountains of Virginia and in Ohio they
are making maple sugar ; in Kentucky and Tennessee
they are sowing oats ; in Illinois they are, perchance,
husking the corn which has remained on the stalk in
the field all winter. Wild geese and ducks are stream-
ing across the sky from the lower Mississippi toward
the great lakes, pausing a while on the prairies, or

46

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

alighting in the great cornfields, making the air re«
sound with the noise of their wings upon the stalks
and dry shucks as they resume their journey. About
this time, or a little later, in the still spring morning,
the prairie hens or prairie cocks set up that low,
musical cooing or crowing that defies the ear to trace
or locate. The air is filled with that soft, mysterious
undertone; and, save that a bird is seen here and
there flitting low over the ground, the sportsman
walks for hours without coming any nearer the source
of the elusive sound.

All over a certain belt of the country the rivers
and streams are roily, and chafe their banks. There
is a movement of the soils. The capacity of the water
to take up and hold in solution the salt and earths
seemed never so great before. The frost has relin-
quished its hold, and turned everything over to the
water. Mud is the mother now ; and out of it creep
the frogs, the turtles, the crawfish.

In the North how goes the season? The winter is
perchance just breaking up. The old frost king is
just striking, or preparing to strike, his tents. The
Ice is going out of the rivers, and the first steamboat
on the Hudson is picking its way through the blue
lanes and channels. The white gulls are making ex-
cursions up from the bay, to see what the prospects
are. In the lumber countries, along the upper Ken-
nebec and Penobscot, and along the northern Hud-
son, starters are at work with their pikes and hooks
starting out the pine logs on the first spring freshet.
All winter, through the deep snows, they have been
hauling them to the bank of the stream, or placing
them where the tide would reach them. Now, in
countless numbers, beaten and bruised, the trunks of

A MARCH CHRONICLE .

47

the noble trees come, borne by the angry flood. The
snow that furnishes the smooth bed over which they
were drawn, now melted, furnishes the power that
carries them down to the mills. On the Delaware
the raftsmen are at work running out their rafts.
Moating islands of logs and lumber go down the swol-
len stream, bending over the dams, shooting through
the rapids, and bringing up at last in Philadelphia or
beyond.

In the inland farming districts what are the signs ?
Few and faint, but very suggestive. The sun has
power to melt the snow ; and in the meadows all the
knolls are bare, and the sheep are gnawing them in-
dustriously. The drifts on the side -hills also begin
to have a worn and dirty look, and, where they cross
the highway, to become soft, letting the teams in up
to their bellies. The oxen labor and grunt, or pa-
tiently wait for the shovel to release them ; but the
spirited horse leaps and flounders, and is determined
not to give up. In the woods the snow is melted
around the trees, and the burrs and pieces of bark
have absorbed the heat till they have sunk half way
through to the ground. The snow is melting on the
underside ; the frost is going out of the ground : now
comes the trial of your foundations.

About the farm buildings there awakens the old
familiar chorus, the bleating of calves and lambs, and
the answering bass of their distressed mothers ; while
the hens are cackling in the hay-loft, and the geese
are noisy in the spring run. But the most delightful
of all farm work, or of all rural occupations, is at
hand, namely, sugar-making. In New York and
northern New England the beginning of this season
varies from the first to the middle of March, some-

48

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

times even holding off till April. The moment the
contest between the sun and frost fairly begins, sugar
weather begins; and the more even the contest, the
more the sweet. I do not know what the philosophy
of it is, but it seems a kind of see-saw, as if the sun
drew the sap up and the frost drew it down; and an
excess of either stops the flow. Before the sun has
got power to unlock the frost, there is no sap ; and
after the frost has lost its power to lock up again the
work of the sun, there is no sap. But when it freezes
soundly at night, with a bright, warm sun next day,
wind in the west, and no signs of a storm, the veins
of the maples fairly thrill. Pierce the bark any-
where, and out gushes the clear, sweet liquid. But
let the wind change to the south and blow moist and
warm, destroying that crispness of the air, and the
flow slackens at once, unless there be a deep snow in
the woods to counteract or neutralize the warmth, in
which case the run may continue till the rain sets in.
The rough-coated old trees, — one would not think
they could scent a change so quickly through that
wrapper of dead, dry bark an inch or more thick. I
have to wait till I put my head out of doors, and feel
the air on my bare cheek, and sniff it with my nose ;
but their nerves of taste and smell are no doubt under
ground, imbedded in the moisture, and if there is
anything that responds quickly to atmospheric changes
it is water. Do not the fish, think you, down deep
in the streams, feel every wind that blows, whether it
be hot or cold ? Do not the frogs and newts and tur-
tles under the mud feel the warmth, though the water
still seems like ice? As the springs begin to rise in
advance of the rain, so the intelligence of every
change seems to travel ahead under ground and fore-
warn things.

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

49

A “sap-run” seldom lasts more than two or three
days. By that time there is a change in the weather,
perhaps a rainstorm, which takes the frost nearly all
out of the ground. Then, before there can be another
run, the trees must be wound up again, the storm
must have a white tail, and “come off” cold. Pres-
ently the sun rises clear again, and cuts the snow or
softens the hard-frozen ground with his beams, and
the trees take a fresh start. The boys go through the
wood, emptying out the buckets or the pans, and re-
claiming those that have blown away, and the delight-
ful work is resumed. But the first run, like first
love, is always the best, always the fullest, always
the sweetest ; while there is a purity and delicacy of
flavor about the sugar that far surpasses any subse-
quent yield.

Trees differ much in the quantity as well as in the
quality of sap produced in a given season. Indeed,
in a bush or orchard of fifty or one hundred trees, as
wide a difference may be observed in this respect ias
among that number of cows in regard to the milk they
yield. I have in my mind now a “sugar -bush” nes-
tled in the lap of a spur of the Catskills, every tree
of which is known to me, and assumes a distinct indi-
viduality in my thought. I know the look and qual-
ity of the whole two hundred; and when on my annual
visit to the old homestead I find one has perished, or
fallen before the axe, I feel a personal loss. They
are all veterans, and have yielded up their life’s blood
for the profit of two or three generations. They
stand in little groups or couples. One stands at the
head of a spring run, and lifts a large dry branch
high above the woods, where hawks and crows love to
alight. Half a dozen are climbing a little hill ; while

50

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

others stand far out in the field, as if they had come
out to get the sun. A file of five or six worthies sen-
try the woods on the northwest, and confront a steep
side-hill where sheep and cattle graze. An equal
number crowd up to the line on the east; and their
gray, stately trunks are seen across meadows or fields
of grain. Then there is a pair of Siamese twins, with
heavy, bushy tops ; while in the forks of a wood-road
stand the two brothers, with their arms around each
other’s neck, and their bodies in gentle contact for a
distance of thirty feet.

One immense maple, known as the “ old-cream -pan-
tree,” stands, or did stand, quite alone among a thick
growth of birches and beeches. But it kept its end up,
and did the work of two or three ordinary trees, as its
name denotes. Next to it the best milcher in the lot
was a shaggy-barked tree in the edge of the field, that
must have been badly crushed or broken when it was
little, for it had an ugly crook near the ground, and
seemed to struggle all the way up to get in an upright
attitude, but never quite succeeded ; yet it could out-
run all its neighbors nevertheless. The poorest tree
in the lot was a short-bodied, heavy -topped tree that
stood in the edge of a spring run. It seldom pro-
duced half a gallon of sap during the whole season ;
but this half gallon was very sweet, — three or four
times as sweet as the ordinary article. In the pro-
duction of sap, top seems far less important than
body. It is not length of limb that wins in this race,
but length of trunk. A heavy, bushy-topped tree in
the open field, for instance, will not, according to my
observation, compare with a tall, long-trunked tree
in the woods, that has but a small top. Young,
thrifty, thin-skinned trees start up with great spirit,

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

51

indeed, fairly on a run; but they do not hold out,
and their blood is very diluted. Cattle are very fond
Df sap; so are sheep, and will drink enough to kill
them. The honey-bees get here their first sweet, and
the earliest bug takes up his permanent abode on the
“spile.” The squirrels also come timidly down the
trees, and sip the sweet flow ; and occasionally an ugly
lizard, just out of its winter quarters and in quest of
novelties, creeps up into the pan or bucket. Soft
maple makes a very fine white sugar, superior in qual-
ity, but far less in quantity.

I think any person who has tried it will agree with
me about the charm of sugar-making, though he have
no tooth for the sweet itself. It is enough that it is
the first spring work, and takes one to the woods.
The robins are just arriving, and their merry calls
ring through the glades. The squirrels are now ven-
turing out, and the woodpeckers and nuthatches run
briskly up the trees. The crow begins to caw, with
his accustomed heartiness and assurance; and one
sees the white rump and golden shafts of the high-
hole as he flits about the open woods. Next week, or
the week after, it may be time to begin plowing, and
other sober work about the farm ; but this week we
will picnic among the maples, and our camp-fire shall
be an incense to spring. Ah, I am there now ! I see
the woods flooded with sunlight; I smell the dry
leaves, and the mould under them just quickened by
the warmth ; the long-trunked maples in their gray,
rough liveries stand thickly about ; I see the brimming
pans and buckets, always on the sunny side of the
trees, and hear the musical dropping of the sap ; the
“boiling-place,” with its delightful camp features, is
just beyond the first line, with its great arch looking

52

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

to the southwest. The sound of its axe rings through
the woods. Its huge kettles or broad pans boil and
foam ; and I ask no other delight than to watch and
tend them all day, to dip the sap from the great casks
into them, and to replenish the fire with the newly-
cut birch and beech wood. A slight breeze is blow-
ing from the west ; I catch the glint here and there
in the afternoon sun of the little rills and creeks
coursing down the sides of the hills ; the awakening
sounds about the farm and the woods reach my ear;
and every rustle or movement of the air or on the
earth seems like a pulse of returning life in nature.
I sympathize with that verdant Hibernian who liked
sugar -making so well that he thought he should fol-
low it the whole year. I should at least be tempted
to follow the season up the mountains, camping this
week on one terrace, next week on one farther up,
keeping just on the hem of Winter’s garment, and
just in advance of the swelling buds, until my smoke
went up through the last growth of maple that sur-
rounds the summit.

Maple sugar is peculiarly an American product, the
discovery of it dating back into the early history of
New England. The first settlers usually caught the
sap in rude troughs, and boiled it down in kettles
slung to a pole by a chain, the fire being built around
them. The first step in the way of improvement was
to use tin pans instead of troughs, and a large stone
arch in which the kettles or caldrons were set with
the fire beneath them. But of late years, as the ques-
tion of fuel has become a more important one, greater
improvements have been made. The arch has given
place to an immense stove designed for that special
purpose ; and the kettles to broad, shallow, sheet-iron

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

53

pans, the object being to economize all the heat, and
to obtain the greatest possible extent of evaporating
surface.

March 15. — From the first to the middle of March
the season made steady progress. There were no
checks, no drawbacks. Warm, copious rains from
the south and southwest, followed by days of unbroken
sunshine. In the moist places — and what places are
not moist at this season ? — the sod buzzed like a
hive. The absorption and filtration among the net-
work of roots was an audible process.

The clod fairly sang. How the trees responded
also! The silver poplars were masses of soft gray
bloom, and the willows down toward the river seemed
to have slipped off their old bark and on their new in
a single night. The soft maples, too, when massed
in the distance, their tops deeply dyed in a bright
maroon color, — how fair they looked !

The 15th of the month was “one of those charmed
days when the genius of God doth flow.” The wind
died away by mid-forenoon, and the day settled down
so softly and lovingly upon the earth, touching every-
thing, filling everything. The sky visibly came down.
You could see it among the trees and between the
hills. The sun poured himself into the earth as into
a cup, and the atmosphere fairly swam with warmth
and light. In the afternoon I walked out over the
country roads north of the city. Innumerable col-
umns of smoke were going up all around the horizon
from burning brush and weeds, fields being purified
by fire. The farmers were hauling out manure ; and
I am free to confess, the odor of it, with its associa-
tions of the farm and the stable, of cattle and horses,
was good in my nostrils. In the woods the liverleaf

54

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

and arbutus had just opened doubtingly; and in the
little pools great masses of frogs’ spawn, with a milky
tinge, were deposited. The youth who accompanied
me brought some of it home in his handkerchief, to
see it hatch in a goblet.

The month came in like a lamb, and went out like
a lamb, setting at naught the old adage. The white
fleecy clouds lay here and there, as if at rest, on the
blue sky. The fields were a perfect emerald; and
the lawns, with the new gold of the first dandelions
sprinkled about, were lush with grass. In the parks
and groves there was a faint mist of foliage, except
among the willows, where there was not only a mist,
but a perfect fountain -fall of green. In the distance
the river looked blue ; the spring freshets at last over,
the ground settled, the jocund season steps forth into
April with a bright and confident look.

A SPRAY OF PINE.

How different the expression of the pine, in fact of
all the coniferae, from that of the deciduous trees!
Not different merely by reason of color and foliage,
but by reason of form. The deciduous trees have
greater diversity of shapes; they tend to branch end-
lessly; they divide and subdivide until the original
trunk is lost in a maze of limbs. Not so the pine
and its congeners. Here the main thing is the cen-
tral shaft; there is one dominant shoot which leads
all the rest, and which points the tree upward; the
original type is never departed from: the branches
shoot out at nearly right angles to the trunk, and
occur in regular whorls ; the main stem is never di-
vided unless some accident nips the leading shoot,
when two secondary branches will often rise up and
lead the tree forward. The pine has no power to
develop new buds, new shoots, like the deciduous
trees ; no power of spontaneous variation to meet new
exigencies, new requirements. It is, as it were, cast
in a mould. Its buds, its branches occur in regular
series and after a regular pattern. Interrupt this
series, try to vary this pattern, and the tree is power-
less to adapt itself to any other. Victor Hugo, in his
old age, compared himself to a tree that had been
many times cut down, but which always sprouted
again. But the pines do not sprout again. The
spontaneous development of a new bud or a new shoot
rarely or never occurs. The hemlock seems to be

56

A SPRAY OF PINE.

under the same law. I have cut away all the branches,
and rubbed away all the buds, of a yoitng sapling of
this species, and found the tree, a year and a half
later, full of life, but with no leaf or bud upon it.
It could not break the spell. One bud would have
released it and set its currents going again, but it was
powerless to develop it. Remove the bud, or the new
growth from the end of the central shaft of the branch
of a pine, and in a year or two the branch will die
back to the next joint; remove the whorl of branches
here and it will die back to the next whorl, and so on.

When you cut the top of a pine or a spruce, remov-
ing the central and leading shaft, the tree does not
develop and send forth a new one to take the place
of the old, but a branch from the next in rank, that
is, from the next whorl of limbs, is promoted to take
the lead. It is curious to witness this limb rise up
and get into position. One season I cut off the tops
of some young hemlocks that were about ten feet
high, that I had balled in the winter and had moved
into position for a hedge. The next series of branches
consisted of three that shot out nearly horizontally.
As time passed, one of these branches, apparently the
most vigorous, began to lift itself up very slowly toward
the place occupied by the lost leader. The third year
it stood at an angle of about forty -five degrees ; the
fourth year it had gained about half the remaining
distance, when the clipping shears again cut it down.
In five years it would probably have assumed an up-
right position. A white pine of about the same height
lost its central shaft by a grub that developed from
the egg of an insect, and I cut it away. It rose from
a whorl of four branches, and it now devolved upon
one of these to take the lead. Two of them, on oppo-

A SPRAY OF PINE.

57

site sides, were more vigorous than the other two, and
the struggle now is as to which of these two shall gain
the mastery. Both are rising up and turning toward
the vacant chieftainship, and, unless something inter-
feres, the tree will probably become forked and led
upward by two equal branches. I shall probably
humble the pride of one of the rivals by nipping its
central shoot. One of my neighbors has cut off a
yellow pine about six inches in diameter, so as to
leave only one circle of limbs seven or eight feet from
the ground. It is now the third year of the tree’s
decapitation, and one of this circle of horizontal limbs
has risen up several feet, like a sleeper rising from
his couch, and seems to be looking around inquiringly,
as much as to say : “ Come, brothers, wake up ! Some
one must take the lead here; shall it be I?”

In one of my Norway spruces I have witnessed the
humbling or reducing to the ranks of a would-be lead-
ing central shoot. For a couple of years the vigorous
young tree was led upward by two rival branches :
they appeared almost evenly matched ; but on the
third year one of them clearly took the lead, and at
the end of the season was a foot or more in advance
of the other. The next year the distance between
them became still greater, and the defeated leader
appeared to give up the contest, so that a season or
two afterward it began to lose its upright attitude
and to fall more and more toward a horizontal posi-
tion ; it was willing to go back into the ranks of the
lateral branches. Its humiliation was so great that
it even for a time dropped below them; but toward
midsummer it lifted up its head a little, and was soon
fairly in the position of a side branch, simulating
defeat and willing subordination as completely as if
it had been a conscious, sentient being.

58

A SPRAY OF PINE.

The evergreens can keep a secret the year round,
some one has said. How well they keep the secret of
the shedding of their leaves ! so well that in the case
of the spruces we hardly know when it does occur.
In fact, the spruces do not properly shed their leaves
at all, but simply outgrow them, after carrying them
an indefinite time. Some of the species carry their
leaves five or six years. The hemlock drops its
ieaves very irregularly; the winds and the storms
whip them off; in winter the snow beneath them is
often covered with them.

But the pine sheds its leaves periodically, though
always as it were stealthily and under cover of the
newer foliage. The white pine usually sheds its leaves
in midsummer, though I have known all the pines to
delay till October. It is on with the new love before
it is off with the old. From May till near autumn
it carries two crops of leaves, last year’s and the pres-
ent year’s. Emerson’s inquiry,

“ How the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads,”

is framed in strict accordance with the facts. It is
to her old leaves that she adds the new. Only the
new growth, the outermost leaves, are carried over till
the next season, thus keeping the tree always clothed
and green. As its moulting season approaches, these
old leaves, all the rear ranks on the limbs, begin to
turn yellow, and a careless observer might think the
tree was struck with death, but it is not. The decay
stops just where the growth of the previous spring
began, and presently the tree stands green and
vigorous, with a newly-laid carpet of fallen leaves
beneath it.

I wonder why it is that the pine has an ancient

A SPRAY OF PINE.

59

look, a suggestion in some way of antiquity? Is it
because we know it to be the oldest tree ? or is it not
rather that its repose, its silence, its unchangeable-
ness, suggest the past, and cause it to stand out in
sharp contrast upon the background of the flitting,
fugitive present? It has such a look of permanence!
When growing from the rocks, it seems expressive of
the same geologic antiquity as they. It has the sim-
plicity of primitive things; the deciduous trees seem
more complex, more heterogeneous ; they have greater
versatility, more resources. The pine has but one
idea, and that is to mount heavenward by regular
steps, — tree of fate, tree of dark shadows and of
mystery.

The pine is the tree of silence. Who was the God-
dess of Silence? Look for her altars amid the pines,
— silence above, silence below. Pass from deciduous
woods into pine woods of a windy day, and you think
the day has suddenly become calm.. Then how silent
to the foot ! One walks over a carpet of pine needles
almost as noiselessly as over the carpets of our dwell-
ings. Do these halls lead to the chambers of the
great, that all noise should be banished from them?
Let the designers come here and get the true pattern
for a carpet, — a soft yellowish brown with only a
red leaf, or a bit of gray moss, or a dusky lichen
scattered here and there ; a background that does not
weary or bewilder the eye, or insult the ground-loving
foot.

How friendly the pine-tree is to man, — so docile
and available as timber, and so warm and protective
as shelter! Its balsam is salve to his wounds, its
fragrance is long life to his nostrils; an abiding,
perennial tree, tempering the climate, cool as mur-

60

A SPRAY OF PINE.

muring waters in summer and like a wrapping of fur
in winter.

The deciduous trees are inconstant friends that fail
us when adverse winds do blow ; but the pine and all
its tribe look winter cheerily in the face, tossing the
snow, masquerading in his arctic livery, in fact hold-
ing high carnival from fall to spring. The Norseman
of the woods, lofty and aspiring, tree without bluster
or noise, that sifts the howling storm into a fine spray
of sound ; symmetrical tree, tapering, columnar,
shaped as in a lathe, the preordained mast of ships,
the mother of colossal timbers ; centralized, towering,
patriarchal, coming down from the foreworld, count-
ing centuries in thy rings and outlasting empires in
thy decay.

A little tall talk seems not amiss on such a subject.
The American or white pine has been known to grow
to a height of two hundred and sixty feet, slender and
tapering as a rush, and equally available for friction
matches or for the mast of a ship of the line. It is
potent upon the sea and upon the land, and lends it-
self to become a standard for giants or a toy for babes,
with equal readiness. No other tree so widely useful
in the mechanic arts, or so beneficent in the economy
of nature. House of refuge for the winter birds, and
inn and hostelry for the spring and fall emigrants.
All the northern creatures are more or less dependent
upon the pine. Nature has made a singular excep-
tion in the conformation of the beaks of certain birds,
that they might the better feed upon the seeds of its
cones, as in the crossbills. Then the pine grosbeak
and pine linnet are both nurslings of this tree. Cer-
tain of the warblers, also, the naturalist seldom finds
except amid its branches.

A SPRAY OF PINE. 61

The dominant races come from the region of the
pine.

“ Who liveth by the Tagged pine
Foundeth a heroic line ; ”

says Emerson.

“ Who liveth in the palace hall
Waneth fast and spendeth all.”

The pines of Norway and Sweden sent out the vikings,
and out of the pine woods of northern Europe came
the virile barbarian overrunning the effete southern
countries.

“ And grant to dwellers with the pine
Dominion o’er the palm and vine.”

There is something sweet and piny about the northern
literatures as contrasted with those of the voluble and
passionate south, — something in them that heals the
mind’s hurts like a finer balsam. In reading Bjorn-
son, or Andersen, or Russian Turgeneff, though one
may not be in contact with the master spirits of the
world, he is yet inhaling an atmosphere that is res-
inous and curative; he is under an influence that is
arboreal, temperate, balsamic.

“The white pine,” says Wilson Flagg in his
“Woods and Waysides of New England,” “has no
legendary history. Being an American tree, it is
celebrated neither in poetry nor romance.” Not per-
haps in Old World poetry and romance, but certainly
in that of the New World. The New England poets
have not overlooked the pine, however much they may
have gone abroad for their themes and tropes. Whit-
tier’s “My Playmate ” is written to the low monotone
of the pine.

“ The pines were dark on Ramoth hill,

Their song was soft and low;

The blossoms in the sweet May wind
Were falling like the snow.”

62 A SPRA Y OF PINE.

Lowell’s “To a Pine-Tree ” is well known, —

“ Far up on Katahdin thou towerest

Purple-blue with the distance and vast ;

Like a cloud o’er the lowlands thou lowerest,

That hangs poised on a lull in the blast
To its fall leaning awful.”

In his “A Mood” his attention is absorbed by this
tree, and in the poet’s quest of the muse he says, —

“ I haunt the pine-dark solitudes,

With soft brown silence carpeted.”

But the real white pine among our poets is Emerson.
Against that rustling deciduous background of the
New England poets he shows dark and aspiring.
Emerson seems to have a closer fellowship with the
pine than with any other tree, and it recurs again and
again in his poems. In his “Garden” the pine is
the principal vegetable, — “the snow-loving pines,”
as he so aptly says, and “the hemlocks tall, untama-
ble.” It is perhaps from the white pine that he gets
the idea that “Nature loves the number five;” its
leaves are in fives and its whorl of branches is com-
posed of five. His warbler is the “pine warbler,”
and he sees “the pigeons in the pines,” where they
are seldom to be seen. He even puts a “pine state-
house” in his “Boston Hymn.”

But, more than that, his “ Woodnotes,” one of his
longest poems, is mainly the notes of the pine. Theo-
dore Parker said that a tree that talked like Emer-
son’s pine ought to be cut down; but if the pine were
to find a tongue, I should sooner expect to hear the
Emersonian dialect from it than almost any other.
It would be pretty high up, certainly, and go over
the heads of most of the other trees. It were sure to
be pointed, though the point few could see. And it

A SPRA Y OF PINE.

63

would not be garrulous and loud-mouthed, though it
might talk on and on. Whether it would preach or
not is a question, but I have no doubt it would be a
fragrant healing gospel if it did. I think its sen-
tences would be short ones with long pauses between
them, and that they would sprout out of the subject
independently and not connect or interlock very much.
There would be breaks and chasms or maybe some
darkness between the lines, but I should expect from
it a lofty, cheerful, and all-the-year-round philosophy.
The temptation to be oracular would no doubt be
great, and could be more readily overlooked in this
tree than in any other. Then, the pine being the
oldest tree, great wisdom and penetration might be
expected of it.

Though Emerson’s pine boasts

“ My garden is the cloven rock,

And my manure the snow ;

And drifting sand-heaps feed my stock,

In summer’s scorching glow,” —

yet the great white pine loves a strong deep soil.
How it throve along our river bottoms and pointed
out the best land to the early settlers ! Eemnants of
its stumps are still occasionally seen in land that has
been given to the plow these seventy or eighty years.
In Pennsylvania the stumps are wrenched from the
ground by machinery and used largely for fencing.
Laid upon their side with their wide branching roots
in the air, they form a barrier before which even the
hound-pursued deer may well pause.

This aboriginal tree is fast disappearing from the
country. Its second growth seems to be a degenerate
race, what the carpenters contemptuously call pump-
kin pine, on account of its softness. All the large

64

A SPRAY OF PINE.

tracts and provinces of the original tree have been
invaded and ravished by the lumbermen, so that only
isolated bands, and straggling specimens, like the
remnants of a defeated and disorganized army, are
now found scattered up and down the country. The
spring floods on our northern rivers have for decades
of years been moving seething walls of pine logs,
sweeping down out of the wilderness. I remember
pausing beside a mammoth pine in the Adirondack
woods, standing a little to one side of the destroyer’s
track, that must have carried its green crown near
one hundred and fifty feet above the earth. How
such a tree impresses one ! How it swells at the base
and grows rigid as if with muscular effort in its deter-
mined gripe of the earth ! How it lays hold of the
rocks, or rends them asunder to secure its hold!
Nearly all trunk, it seems to have shed its limbs like
youthful follies as it went skyward, or as the builders
pull down their scaffoldings and carry them higher as
the temple mounts ; nothing superfluous, no waste of
time or energy, the one purpose to cleave the empy-
rean steadily held to.

At the Centennial fair I saw a section of a pine
from Canada that was eight feet in diameter, and that
had been growing, I have forgotten how many centu-
ries. But this was only a sapling beside the redwoods
of California, one of which would carry several such
trees in his belt.

In the absence of the pine, the hemlock is a grace-
ful and noble tree. In primitive woods it shoots up
in the same manner, drawing the ladder up after it,
and attains an altitude of nearly or quite a hundred
feet. It is the poor man’s pine, and destined to hum-
bler uses than its lordlier brother. It follows the

A SPRAY OF PINE.

65

pine like a servitor, keeping on higher and more
rocky ground, and going up the minor branch valleys
when the pine follows only the main or mother
stream. As an ornamental tree it is very pleasing,
and deserves to be cultivated more than it is. It is
a great favorite with the sylvan folk, too. The ruffed
grouse prefer it to the pine; it is better shelter in
winter, and its buds are edible. The red squirrel
has found out the seeds in its cones, and they are an
important part of his winter stores. Some of the
rarer warblers, too, like the Blackburnian and the
blue yellow-back, I never find except among the hem-
locks. The older ornithologists, Audubon and Wil-
son, named a “hemlock warbler” also, but this bird
turns out to be none other than the young of the
Blackburnian described as a new species and named
for its favorite tree.

All trees in primitive woods are less social, less
disposed to intermingle, than trees in groves or fields ;
they are more heady ; they meet only on high grounds ;
they shake hands over the heads of their neighbors;
the struggle for life is sharper and more merciless, — •
in these and other respects suggesting men in cities.
One tree falls against a more stanch one, and bruises
only itself; a weaker one it carries to the ground
with it.

Both the pine and the hemlock make friends with
the birch, the maple, and the oak, and one of the
most pleasing and striking features of our autumnal
scenery is a mountain side sown broadcast with these
intermingled trees, forming a combination of colors
like the richest tapestry, the dark green giving body
and permanence, the orange and yellow giving light
?jid brilliancy.

A SPRING RELISH.

It is a little remarkable how regularly severe and
mild winters alternate in our climate for a series of
years, — a feminine and a masculine one, as it were,
almost invariably following each other. Every other
season now for ten years the ice-gatherers on the
river have been disappointed of a full harvest, and
every other season the ice has formed from fifteen to
twenty inches thick. From 1873 to 1884 there was
no marked exception to this rule. But in the last-
named year, when, according to the succession, a mild
winter was due, the breed seemed to have got crossed,
and a sort of mongrel winter was the result ; neither
mild nor severe, but very stormy, capricious, and dis-
agreeable, with ice a foot thick on the river. The
winter which followed, that of 1884-85, though slow
and hesitating at first, fully proved itself as belonging
to the masculine order. The present winter of 1885-
86 shows a marked return to the type of two years
ago, less hail and snow, but by no means the mild
season that was due. By and by, probably, the me-
teorological influences will get back into the old ruts
again, and we shall have once more the regular alter-
nation of mild and severe winters. During very open
winters, like that of 1879-80, nature in my latitude,
eighty miles north of New York, hardly shuts up
house at all. That season I heard a little piping frog
on the 7th of December, and on the 18th of January,
in a spring run, I saw the common bullfrog out of

A SPRING RELISH.

67

his hibernaculum, evidently thinking it was spring.
A copperhead snake was killed here about the same
date; caterpillars did not seem to retire, as they
usually do, but came forth every warm day. The
note of the bluebird was heard nearly every week all
winter, and occasionally that of the robin. Such
open winters make one fear that his appetite for spring
will be blunted when spring really does come ; but he
usually finds that the April days have the old relish.
April is that part of the season that never cloys upon
the palate. It does not surfeit one with good things,
but provokes and stimulates the curiosity. One is
on the alert, there are hints and suggestions on every
hand. Something has just passed, or stirred, or
called, or breathed, in the open air or in the ground
about, that we would fain know more of. May is
sweet, but April is pungent. There is frost enough
in it to make it sharp, and heat enough in it to make
it quick.

In my walks in April, I am on the lookout for
watercresses. It is a plant that has the pungent
April flavor. In many parts of the country the
watercress seems to have become completely natural-
ized, and is essentially a wild plant. I found it one
day in a springy place, on the top of a high, wooded
mountain, far from human habitation. We gathered
it and ate it with our sandwiches. Where the walker
cannot find this salad, a good substitute may be had
in our native spring cress, which is also in perfection
in April. Crossing a wooded hill in the regions of
the Catskills on the 15th of the month, I found a
purple variety of the plant, on the margin of a
spring that issued from beneath a ledge of rocks, just
ready to bloom. I gathered the little white tubers,

68

A SPRING RELISH.

that are clustered like miniature potatoes at the rootj
and ate them, and they were a surprise and a chal-
lenge to the tongue; on the table they would well fill
the place of mustard, and horseradish, and other ap-
petizers. When I was a schoolboy, we used tc
gather, in a piece of woods on our way to school, the
roots of a closely allied species to eat with our lunch.
But we generally ate it up before lunch-time. Our
name for this plant was “Crinkle -root.” The botan-
ists call it the toothwort ( Dentaria ), also pepper-root.

From what fact or event shall one really date the
beginning of spring? The little piping frogs usually
furnish a good starting-point. One spring I heard
the first note on the 6th of April; the next on the
27 th of February; but in reality the latter season was
only about two weeks earlier than the former. When
the bees carry in their first pollen, one would think
spring had come ; yet this fact does not always corre-
spond with the real stage of the season. Before there
is any bloom anywhere, bees will bring pollen to the
hive. Where do they get it?

I have seen them gathering it on the fresh sawdust
in the woodyard, especially on that of hickory or
maple. They wallow amid the dust, working it over
and over, and searching it like diamond-hunters, and
after a time their baskets are filled with the precious
flour, which is probably only a certain part of the
wood, doubtless the soft, nutritious inner bark.

In fact, all signs and phases of life in the early
season are very capricious, and are earlier or later
just as some local or exceptional circumstance favors
or hinders. It is only such birds as arrive after about
the 20th of April that are at all “punctual” accord-
ing to the almanac. I have never known the arrival

A SPRING RELISH.

69

of the barn swallow to vary much from that date in
this latitude, no matter how early or late the season
might be. Another punctual bird is the yellow red-
poll warbler, the first of his class that appears. Year
after year, between the 20th and the 25th, I am sure
to see this little bird about my place for a day or two
only, now on the ground, now on the fences, now on
the small trees and shrubs, and closely examining the
buds or just-opening leaves of the apple-trees. He
is a small olive-colored bird, with a dark-red or ma-
roon-colored patch on the top of his head. His ordi-
nary note is a smart “chirp.” His movements are
very characteristic, especially that vertical, oscillating
movement of the hind part of his body, like that of
the wagtails. There are many birds that do not come
here till May, be the season never so early. The
spring of 1878 was very forward, and on the 27th of
April I made this entry in my note-book : “ In nature
it is the middle of May, and, judging from vegetation
alone, one would expect to find many of the later
birds, as the oriole, the wood thrush, the kingbird,
the catbird, the tanager, the indigo-bird, the vireos,
and many of the warblers, but they have not arrived.
The May birds, it seems, will not come in April, no
matter how the season favors.”

Some birds passing north in the spring are provok-
ingly silent. Every April I see the hermit thrush
hopping about the woods, and in case of a sudden
snowstorm seeking shelter about the outbuildings;
but I never hear even a fragment of his wild, silvery
strain. The white-crowned sparrow also passes in
silence. I see the bird for a few days about the same
date each year, but he will not reveal to me his song.
On the other hand, his congener, the white-throated

TO

A SPRING RELISH.

sparrow, is decidedly musical in passing, both spring
and fall. His sweet, wavering whistle is at times
quite as full and perfect as when heard in June or
July in the Canadian woods. The latter bird is much
more numerous than the white-crowned, and its stay
with us more protracted, which may in a measure
account for the greater frequency of its song. The
fox sparrow, who passes earlier (sometimes in March),
is also chary of the music with which he is so richly
endowed. It is not every season that I hear him,
though my ear is on the alert for his strong, finely-
modulated whistle.

Nearly all the warblers sing in passing. I hear
them in the orchards, in the groves, in the woods, as
they pause to feed in their northward journey, their
brief, lisping, shuffling, insect-like notes requiring to
be searched for by the ear, as their forms by the eye.
But the ear is not tasked to identify the songs of the
kinglets, as they tarry briefly with us in spring. In
fact, there is generally a week in April or early
May, —

“ On such a time as goes before the leaf,

When all the woods stand in a mist of green
And nothing perfect,”

during which the piping, voluble, rapid, intricate,
and delicious warble of the ruby-crowned kinglet is
the most noticeable strain to be heard, especially
among the evergreens.

I notice that during the mating season of the birds
the rivalries and jealousies are not all confined to the
males. Indeed, the most spiteful and furious battles,
as among the domestic fowls, are frequently between
females. I have seen two hen robins scratch and
pull feathers in a manner that contrasted strongly

A SPRING RELISH.

71

with the courtly and dignified sparring usual between
the males. One March a pair of bluebirds decided
to set up housekeeping in the trunk of an old apple-
tree near my house. Not long after, an unwedded
female appeared, and probably tried to supplant the
lawful wife. I did not see what arts she used, but I
saw her being very roughly handled by the jealous
bride. The battle continued nearly all day about the
orchard and grounds, and was a battle at very close
quarters. The two birds would clinch in the air or
on a tree, and fall to the ground with beaks and claws
locked. The male followed them about, and warbled
and called, but whether deprecatingly or encour-
agingly, I could not tell. Occasionally, he would take
a hand, but whether to separate them or whether to
fan the flames, that I could not tell. So far as I
could see, he was highly amused, and culpably indif-
ferent to the issue of the battle.

The English spring begins much earlier than ours
in New England and New York, yet an exceptionally
early April with us must be nearly, if not quite,
abreast with April as it usually appears in England.
The black -thorn sometimes blooms in Britain in Feb-
ruary, but the swallow does not appear till about the
20th of April, nor the anemone bloom ordinarily till
that date. The nightingale comes about the same
time, and the cuckoo follows close. Our cuckoo does
not come till near June ; but the water-thrush, which
Audubon thought nearly equal to the nightingale as
a songster (though it certainly is not), I have known
to come by the 21st. I have seen the sweet English
violet, escaped from the garden, and growing wild by
the roadside, in bloom on the 25th of March, which
is about its date of flowering at home. During the

72

A SPRING RELISH.

same season, the first of our native flowers to appear
was the hepatica, which I found on April 4. The
arbutus and the dicentra appeared on the 10th, and
the coltsfoot — which, however, is an importation — =
about the same time. The bloodroot, claytonia, saxi-
frage, and anemone were in bloom on the 17th, and I
found the first blue violet and the great spurred violet
on the 19th (saw the little violet-colored butterfly
dancing about the woods the same day). I plucked
my first dandelion on a meadow slope on the 23d, and
in the woods, protected by a high ledge, my first tril-
lium. During the month at least twenty native shrubs
and wild flowers bloomed in my vicinity, which is an
unusual showing for April.

There are many things left for May, but nothing
fairer, if as fair, as the first flower, the hepatica. I
find I have never admired this little firstling half
enough. When at the maturity of its charms, it is
certainly the gem of the woods. What an individ-
uality it has ! No two clusters alike ; all shades and
sizes; some are snow-white, some pale pink, with just
a tinge of violet, some deep purple, others the purest
blue, others blue touched with lilac. A solitary blue-
purple one, fully expanded and rising over the brown
leaves or the green moss, its cluster of minute anthers
showing like a group of pale stars on its little firma-
ment, is enough to arrest and hold the dullest eye.
Then, as I have elsewhere stated, there are individual
hepaticas, or individual families among them, that
are sweet-scented. The gift seems as capricious as
the gift of genius in families. You cannot tell which
the fragrant ones are till you try them. Sometimes
it is the large white ones, sometimes the large purple
ones, sometimes the small pink ones. The odor is

A SPRING RELISH.

73

faint, and recalls that of the sweet violets. A corre-
spondent, who seems to have carefully observed these
fragrant hepaticas, writes me that this gift of odor is
constant in the same plant; that the plant which
bears sweet-scented flowers this year will bear them
next.

There is a brief period in our spring when I like
more than at any other time to drive along the coun-
try roads, or even to be shot along by steam and have
the landscape presented to me like a map. It is at
that period, usually late in April, when we behold the
first quickening of the earth. The waters have sub-
sided, the roads have become dry, the sunshine has
grown strong and its warmth has penetrated the sod ;
there is a stir of preparation about the farm and all
through the country. One does not care to see things
very closely ; his interest in nature is not special but
general. The earth is coming to life again. All the
genial and more fertile places in the landscape are
brought out; the earth is quickened in spots and
streaks; you can see at a glance where man and na-
ture have dealt the most kindly with it. The warm,
moist places, the places that have had the wash of
some building or of the road, or have been subjected
to some special mellowing influence, how quickly the
turf awakens there and shows the tender green ! See
what the landscape would be, how much earlier
spring would come to it, if every square yard of it
was alike moist and fertile. As the later snows lay
in patches here and there, so now the earliest verdure
is irregularly spread over the landscape, and is espe-
cially marked on certain slopes, as if it had blown
over from the other side and lodged there.

A little earlier the homesteads looked cold and

74

A SPRING RELISH.

naked ; the old farmhouse was bleak and unattractive \
now Nature seems especially to smile upon it; her
genial influences crowd up around it ; the turf awakens
all about as if in the spirit of friendliness. See the
old barn on the meadow slope; the green seems to
have oozed out from it, and to have flowed slowly
down the hill ; at a little distance it is lost in the sere
stubble. One can see where every spring lies buried
about the fields; its influence is felt at the surface,
and the turf is early quickened there. Where the
cattle have loved to lie and ruminate in the warm
summer twilight, there the April sunshine loves to
linger too, till the sod thrills to new life.

The home, the domestic feeling in nature, is brought
out and enhanced at this time; what man has done
tells, especially what he has done well. Our interest
centres in the farmhouses, and in the influence that
seems to radiate from there. The older the home,
the more genial nature looks about it. The new ar-
chitectural place of the rich citizen, with the barns
and outbuildings concealed or disguised as much as
possible, ■ — spring is in no hurry about it ; the sweat
of long years of - honest labor has not yet fattened the
soil it stands upon.

The full charm of this April landscape is not
brought out till the afternoon. It seems to need the
slanting rays of the evening sun to give it the right
mellowness and tenderness, or the right perspective.
It is, perhaps, a little too bald in the strong, white
light of the earlier part of the day; but when the
faint, four-o’clock shadows begin to come out, and we
look through the green vistas, and along the farm
lanes toward the west, or out across long stretches of
fields above which spring seems fairly hovering, just

A SPRING RELISH.

75

ready to alight, and note the teams slowly plowing,
the brightened mould-board gleaming in the sun now
and then, — it is at such times we feel its fresh, deli-
cate attraction the most. There is no foliage on the
trees yet; only here and there the red bloom of the
soft maple, illuminated by the declining sun, shows
vividly against the tender green of a slope beyond, or
a willow, like a thin veil, stands out against a leafless
wood. Here and there a little meadow watercourse
is golden with marsh marigolds, or some fence border,
or rocky streak of neglected pasture land, is thickly
starred with the white flowers of the bloodroot. The
eye can devour a succession of landscapes at such a
time ; there is nothing that sates or entirely fills it ;
but every spring token stimulates it and makes it
more on the alert.

April, too, is the time to go budding. A swelling
bud is food for the fancy, and often food for the eye.
Some buds begin to glow as they begin to swell. The
bud scales change color and become a delicate rose
pink. I note this especially in the European maple.
The bud scales flush as if the effort to “keep in”
brought the blood into their faces. The scales of the
willow do not flush, but shine like ebony, and each
one presses like a hand upon the catkin that will
escape from beneath it.

When spring pushes pretty hard, many buds begin
to sweat as well as to glow ; they exude a brown, fra-
grant, gummy substance that affords the honey-bee
her first cement and hive varnish. The hickory, the
horse-chestnut, the plane-tree, the poplars, are all
coated with this April myrrh. That of certain pop-
lars, like the Balm of Gilead, is the most noticeable
and fragrant. No spring incense more agreeable.

76

A SPRING RELISH.

Its perfume is often upon the April breeze. I pick
up the bud scales of the poplars along the road, long
brown scales like the beaks of birds, and they leave
a rich gummy odor in my hand that lasts for hours.
I frequently detect the same odor about my hives
when the bees are making all snug against the rains,
or against the millers. When used by the bees, we
call it propolis. Virgil refers to it as a “glue more
adhesive than bird-lime and the pitch of Phrygian
Ida.” Pliny says it is extracted from the tears of the
elm, the willow, and the reed. The bees often have
serious work to detach it from their leg-baskets, and
make it stick only where they want it to.

The bud scales begin to drop in April, and by
May Day the scales have fallen from the eyes of
every branch in the forest. In most cases the bud
has an inner wrapping that does not fall so soon. In
the hickory this inner wrapping is like a great livid
membrane, an inch or more in length, thick, fleshy,
and shining. It clasps the tender leaves about as
if both protecting and nursing them. As the leaves
develop, these membranous wrappings curl back, and
finally wither and fall. In the plane-tree, or syca-
more, this inner wrapping of the bud is a little pe-
lisse of soft yellow or tawny fur. When it is cast
off, it is the size of one’s thumb-nail, and suggests
the delicate skin of some golden -haired mole. The
young sycamore balls lay aside their fur wrappings
early in May. The flower tassels of the European
maple, too, come packed in a slightly furry covering.
The long and fleshy inner scales that infold the flow-
ers and leaves are of a clear olive green, thinly cov-
ered with silken hairs like the young of some animals.
Our sugar maple is less striking and beautiful in the

A SPRING RELISH. 77

bud, but the flowers are more graceful and fringe-
like.

Some trees have no bud scales. The sumac pre-
sents in early spring a mere fuzzy knot, from which,
by and by, there emerges a soft, furry, tawny-colored
kitten’s paw. I know of nothing in vegetable nature
that seems so really to be born as the ferns. They
emerge from the ground rolled up, with a rudimen-
tary and “touch-me-not” look, and appear to need a
maternal tongue to lick them into shape. The sun
plays the wet-nurse to them, and very soon they are
out of that uncanny covering in which they come,
swathed, and take their places with other green
things.

The bud scales strew the ground in spring as the
leaves do in the fall, though they are so small that
we hardly notice them. All growth, all development,
is a casting off, a leaving of something behind. First
the bud scales drop, then the flower drops, then the
fruit drops, then the leaf drops. The first two are
preparatory and stand for spring; the last two are
the crown and stand for autumn. Nearly the same
thing happens with the seed in the ground. First the
shell, or outer husk, is dropped or cast off ; then the
cotyledons, those nurse leaves of the young plant;
then the fruit falls, and at last the stalk and the leaf.
A bud is a kind of seed planted in the branch instead
of in the soil. It bursts and grows like a germ. In
the absence of . seeds and fruit, many birds and ani-
mals feed upon buds. The pine grosbeaks from the
north are the most destructive budders that come
among us. The snow beneath the maples they fre-
quent is often covered with bud scales. The ruffed
grouse sometimes buds in an orchard near the woods,

78

A SPRING RELISH.

and thus takes the farmer’s apple crop a year in
advance. Grafting is but a planting of buds. The
seed is a complete, independent bud ; it has the nutri-
ment of the young plant within itself, as the egg holds
several good lunches for the young chick. When the
spider, or the wasp, or the carpenter bee, or the sand
hornet lays an egg in a cell, and deposits food near
it for the young when hatched, it does just what na-
ture does in every kernel of corn or wheat, or bean,
or nut. Around or within the chit or germ, she stores
food for the young plant. Upon this it feeds till the
root takes hold of the soil and draws sustenance from
thence. The bud is rooted in the branch, and draws
its sustenance from the milk of the pulpy cambium
layer beneath the bark.

Another pleasant feature of spring, which I have
not mentioned, is the full streams. Riding across
the country one bright day in March, I saw and felt,
as if for the first time, what an addition to the satis-
faction one has in the open air at this season are the
clear, full watercourses. They come to the front, as
it were, and lure and hold the eye. There are no
weeds, or grasses, or foliage to hide them ; they are
full to the brim, and fuller; they catch and reflect
the sunbeams, and are about the only objects of life
and motion in nature. The trees stand so still, the
fields are so hushed and naked, the mountains so
exposed and rigid, that the eye falls upon the blue,
sparkling, undulating watercourses with a peculiar
satisfaction. By and by the grass and trees will be
waving, and the streams will be shrunken and hidden,
and our delight will not be in them. The still ponds
and lakelets will then please us more.

The little brown brooks, — how swift and full they

A SPRING RELISH.

78

ran ! One fancied something gleeful and hilarious in
them. And the large creeks, — how steadily they
rolled on, trailing their ample skirts along the edges
of the fields and marshes, and leaving ragged patches
of water here and there ! Many a gentle slope spread,
as it were, a turfy apron in which reposed a little
pool or lakelet. Many a stream sent little detach-
ments across lots, the sparkling water seeming to trip
lightly over the unbroken turf. Here and there an
oak or an elm stood knee-deep in a clear pool, as if
rising from its bath. It gives one a fresh, genial
feeling to see such a bountiful supply of pure, run-
ning water. One’s desires and affinities go out toward
the full streams. How many a parched place they
reach and lap in one’s memory! How many a vision
of naked pebbles and sun-baked banks they cover and
blot out! They give eyes to the fields; they give
dimples and laughter; they give light and motion.
Running water / What a delightful suggestion the
words always convey! One’s thoughts and sympa-
thies are set flowing by them ; they unlock a foimtain
of pleasant fancies and associations in one’s memory;
the imagination is touched and refreshed.

March water is usually clean, sweet water; every
brook is a trout-brook, a mountain brook; the cold
and the snow have supplied the condition of a high
latitude; no stagnation, no corruption, comes down-
stream now as on a summer freshet. Winter comes
down, liquid and repentant. Indeed, it is more than
water that runs then : it is frost subdued ; it is spring
triumphant. No obsolete watercourses now. The
larger creeks seek out their abandoned beds, return
to the haunts of their youth, and linger fondly there.
The muskrat is adrift, but not homeless; his range is

80

A SPRING RELISH.

vastly extended, and he evidently rejoices in full
streams. Through the tunnel of the meadow-mouse
the water rushes as through a pipe ; and that nest of
his, that was so warm and cozy beneath the snowbank
in the meadow-bottom, is sodden or afloat. But
meadow-mice are not afraid of water. On various oc-
casions I have seen them swimming about the spring
pools like muskrats, and, when alarmed, diving be-
neath the water. Add the golden willows to the full
streams, with the red-shouldered starlings perched
amid their branches, sending forth their strong, liquid,
gurgling notes, and the picture is complete. The
willow branches appear to have taken on a deeper
yellow in spring; perhaps it is the effect of the
stronger sunshine, perhaps it is the effect of the swift,
vital water laving their roots. The epaulettes of the
starlings, too, are brighter than when they left us in
the fall, and they appear to get brighter daily until
the nesting begins. The males arrive many days be-
fore the females, and, perched along the marshes and
watercourses, send forth their liquid, musical notes,
passing the call from one to the other, as if to guide
and hurry their mates forward.

The noise of a brook, you may observe, is by no
means in proportion to its volume. The full March
streams make far less noise relatively to their size
than the shallower streams of summer, because the
rocks and pebbles that cause the sound in summer
are deeply buried beneath the current. “ Still waters
run deep” is not so true as “deep waters run still.”
I rode for half a day along the upper Delaware, and
my thoughts almost unconsciously faced toward the
full, clear river. Both the Delaware and the Susque-
hanna have a starved, impoverished look in summer,

A SPRING RELISH.

81

. — unsightly stretches of naked drift and bare, bleach-
ing rocks. But behold them in March, after the
frost has turned over to them the moisture it has held
back and stored up as the primitive forests used to
hold the summer rains. Then they have an easy,
ample, triumphant look, that is a feast to the eye.
A plump, well-fed stream is as satisfying to behold
as a well-fed animal or a thrifty tree. One source of
charm in the English landscape is the full, placid
stream the season through ; no desiccated watercourses
will you see there, nor any feeble, decrepit brooks,
hardly able to get over the ground.

This condition of our streams and rivers in spring
is evidently but a faint reminiscence of their condition
during what we may call the geological springtime,
the March or April of the earth’s history, when, the
annual rainfall appears to have been vastly greater
than at present, and when the watercourses were con-
sequently vastly larger and fuller. In pleistocene
days the earth’s climate was evidently much damper
than at present. It was the rainiest of March wea-
ther. On no other theory can we account for the
enormous erosion of the earth’s surface, and the plow-
ing of the great valleys. Professor Newberry finds
abundant evidence that the Hudson was, in former
times, a much larger river than now. Professor
Zittel reaches the same conclusion concerning the
Nile, and Humboldt was impressed with the same
fact while examining the Orinoco and the tributaries
of the Amazon. All these rivers appear to be but
mere fractions of their former selves. The same is
true of all the great lakes. If not Noah’s flood, then
evidently some other very wet spell, of which this is
a tradition, lies far behind us. Something like the

82

A SPRING RELISH.

drouth of summer is beginning upon the earth; the
great floods have dried up; the rivers are slowly-
shrinking ; the water is penetrating farther and farther
into the cooling crust of the earth; and what was
ample to drench and cover its surface, even to make
a Noah’s flood, will be but a drop in the bucket t<>
the vast interior of the cooled sphere.

ENGLISH WOODS : A CONTRAST.

One cannot well overpraise the rural and pastoral
beauty of England — the beauty of her fields, parks,
downs, holms. In England you shall see at its full
that of which you catch only glimpses in this country,
the broad, beaming, hospitable beauty of a perfectly
cultivated landscape. Indeed, to see England is to
take one’s fill of the orderly, the permanent, the well-
kept in the works of man, and of the continent, the
beneficent, the uniform, in the works of nature. It
is to see the most perfect bit of garden lawn extended
till it covers an empire ; it is to see the history of two
thousand years written in grass and verdure, and in
the lines of the landscape ; a continent concentrated
into a state, the deserts and waste places left out,
every rood of it swarming with life; the pith and
marrow of wide tracts compacted into narrow fields
and recruited and forwarded by the most vigilant hus-
bandry. Those fields look stall-fed, those cattle beam
contentment, those rivers have never left their banks ;
those mountains are the paradise of shepherds : those
open forest glades, half sylvan, half pastoral, clean,
stately, full of long vistas and cathedral-like aisles,
— where else can one find beauty like that? The
wild and the savage flee away. The rocks pull the
green turf over them like coverlids; the hills are
plump with vegetable mould, and when they bend this
way or that, their sides are wrinkled and dimpled like
the forms of fatted sheep. And fatted they are ; not

84

ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST.

merely by the care of man, but by the elements them-
selves ; the sky rains fertility upon them ; there is no
wear and tear as with our alternately flooded, parched,
and frozen hilltops; the soil accumulates, the mould
deepens; the matted turf binds it and yearly adds
to it.

All this is not simply because man is or has been
so potent in the landscape (this is but half the truth),
but because the very mood and humor of Nature her-
self is domestic and human. She seems to have
grown up with man and taken on his look and ways.
Her spirit is that of the full, placid stream that you
may lead through your garden or conduct by your
doorstep without other danger than a wet sill or a
soaked flower-plot, at rare intervals. It is the opu-
lent nature of the southern seas, brought by the Gulf
Stream, and reproduced and perpetuated here under
these cool northern skies, the fangs and the poison
taken out ; full, but no longer feverish ; lusty, but no
longer lewd.

Yet there is a certain beauty of nature to be had
in much fuller measure in our own country than in
England, — the beauty of the wild, the aboriginal,
— the beauty of primitive forests, — the beauty of
lichen-covered rocks and ledges. The lichen is one
of the lowest and humblest forms of vegetable growth,
but think how much it adds to the beauty of all our
wild scenery, giving to our mountain walls and drift
bowlders the softest and most pleasing tints. The
rocky escarpments of New York and New England
hills are frescoed by Time himself, painted as with
the brush of the eternal elements. But the lichen is
much less conspicuous in England, and plays no such
part in her natural scenery. The climate is too

ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST.

85

damp. The rocks in Wales and Northumberland and
in Scotland are dark and cold and unattractive. The
trees in the woods do not wear the mottled suit of
soft gray ours do. The bark of the British beech is
smooth and close-fitting, and often tinged with a
green mould. The Scotch pine is clad as in a ragged
suit of leather. Nature uses mosses instead of lichens.
The old walls and housetops are covered with moss
— a higher form of vegetation than lichens. Its
decay soon accumulates a little soil or vegetable
mould, which presently supports flowering plants.

Neither are there any rocks in England worth men-
tioning; no granite bowlders, no fern-decked or moss-
covered fragments scattered through the woods, as
with us. They have all been used up for building
purposes, or for road -making, or else have quite dis-
solved in the humid climate. I saw rocks in Wales,
quite a profusion of them in the pass of Llanberis,
but they were tame indeed in comparison with such
rock scenery as that say at Lake Mohunk, in the
Shawangunk range in New York. There are passes
in the Catskills that for the grandeur of wildness and
savageness far surpass anything the Welsh mountains
have to show. Then for exquisite and thrilling beauty,
probably one of our mottled rocky walls with the di-
centra blooming from little niches and shelves in
April, and the columbine thrusting out from seams
and crevices clusters of its orange bells in May, with
ferns and mosses clinging here and there, and the
woodbine tracing a delicate green line across its face,
cannot be matched anywhere in the world.

Then, in our woods, apart from their treasures of
rocks, there is a certain beauty and purity unknown
in England, a certain delicacy and sweetness, and

86

ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST.

charm of unsophisticated nature, that are native to
our forests.

The pastoral or field life of nature in England is so
rank and full, that no woods or forests that I was
able to find could hold their own against it for a
moment. It flooded them like a tide. The grass
grows luxuriantly in the thick woods, and where the
grass fails, the coarse bracken takes its place. There
was no wood spirit, no wild wood air. Our forests
shut their doors against the fields; they shut out the
strong light and the heat. Where the land has been
long cleared, the woods put out a screen of low
branches, or else a brushy growth starts up along
their borders that guards and protects their privacy.
Lift or part away these branches, and step inside, and
you are in another world; new plants, new flowers,
new birds, new animals, new insects, new sounds, new
odors; in fact, an entirely different atmosphere and
presence. Dry leaves cover the ground, delicate
ferns and mosses drape the rocks, shy, delicate flow-
ers gleam out here and there, the slender brown wood-
frog leaps nimbly away from your feet, the little red
newt fills its infantile pipe, or hides under a leaf, the
ruffed grouse bursts up before you, the gray squirrel
leaps from tree to tree, the wood pewee utters its
plaintive cry, the little warblers lisp and dart amid
the branches, and sooner or later the mosquito de-
mands his fee. Our woods suggest new arts, new
pleasures, a new mode of life. English parks and
groves, when the sun shines, suggest a perpetual
picnic, or Maying party; but no one, I imagine,
thinks of camping out in English woods. The con-
stant rains, the darkened skies, the low temperature,
make the interior of a forest as uninviting as an

ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST.

87

underground passage. I wondered what became of the
dry leaves that are such a feature and give out such
a pleasing odor in our woods. They are probably
raked up and carried away; or, if left upon the
ground, are quickly resolved into mould by the damp
climate.

While in Scotland I explored a large tract of wood-
land, mainly of Scotch fir, that covers a hill near
Ecclefechan, but it was grassy and uninviting. In
one of the parks of the Duke of Hamilton, I found a
deep wooded gorge through which flowed the river
Avon (I saw four rivers of this name in Great Brit-
ain), a branch of the Clyde, — a dark, rock-paved
stream, the color of brown stout. It was the wildest
bit of forest scenery I saw anywhere. I almost im-
agined myself on the headwaters of the Hudson or the
Penobscot. The stillness, the solitude, the wild boil-
ing waters, were impressive; but the woods had no
charm; there were no flowers, no birds; the sylvan
folk had moved away long ago, and their house was
cold and inhospitable. I sat a half-hour in their dark
nettle-grown halls by the verge of the creek, to see if
they were stirring anywhere, but they were not. I
did, indeed, hear part of a wren’s song, and the call
of the sandpiper ; but that was all. Not one purely
wood voice or sound or odor. But looking into the
air a few yards below me, there leapt one of those
matchless stone bridges, clearing the profound gulf
and carrying the road over as securely as if upon the
geological strata. It was the bow of art and civiliza-
tion set against nature’s wildness. In the woods be-
yond, I came suddenly upon the ruins of an old castle,
with great trees growing out of it, and rabbits burrow-
ing beneath it. One learns that it takes more than

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a collection of trees to make a forest, as we know it
in this country. Unless they house that spirit of
wildness and purity like a temple, they fail to satisfy.
In walking to Selborne, I skirted Wolmer Forest,
but it had an uninviting look. The Hanger on the
hill above Selborne, which remains nearly as it was
in White’s time, — a thrifty forest of beeches, — I
explored, but found it like the others, without any
distinctive woodsy attraction — only so much soil cov-
ered with dripping beeches, too dense for a park and
too tame for a forest. The soil is a greasy, slippery
clay, and down the steepest part of the hill, amid the
trees, the boys have a slide that serves them for sum-
mer “coastings.” Hardly a leaf, hardly a twig or
branch, to be found. In White’s time, the poor peo-
ple used to pick up the sticks the crows dropped in
building their nests, and they probably do so yet.
When one comes upon the glades beyond the Hanger,
the mingling of groves and grassy common, the eye
is fully content. The beech, which is the prevailing
tree here, as it is in many other parts of England,
is a much finer tree than the American beech. The
deep limestone soil seems especially adapted to it. It
grows as large as our elm, with much the same man-
ner of branching. The trunk is not patched and
mottled with gray, like ours, but is often tinged with
a fine deep green mould. The beeches that stand
across the road in front of Wordsworth’s house, at
Rydal Mount, have boles nearly as green as the sur-
rounding hills. The bark of this tree is smooth and
close-fitting, and shows that muscular, athletic char-
acter of the tree beneath it which justifies Spenser’s
phrase, “the warlike beech.” These beeches develop
finely in the open, and make superb shade-trees along

ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST.

89

the highway. All the great historical forests of Eng-
land— Shrewsbury Forest, the Forest of Dean, New
Forest, etc. — have practically disappeared. Rem-
nants of them remain here and there, but the country
they once occupied is now essentially pastoral.

It is noteworthy that there is little or no love of
woods as such in English poetry; no fond mention of
them, and dwelling upon them. The muse of Brit-
ain’s rural poetry has none of the wide-eyedness and
furtiveness of the sylvan creatures; she is rather a
gentle, wholesome, slightly stupid divinity of the
fields. Milton sings the praises of

“ Arched walks of twilight groves.”

But his wood is a “drear wood,”

“ The nodding horror of whose shady brows
Threats the forlorn and wandering passenger.”

Again : —

“ Very desolation dwells
By grots and caverns shagg’d with horrid shade.”

Shakespeare refers to the “ruthless, vast, and horrid
wood,” — a fit place for robbery, rapine, and murder.
Indeed, English poetry is pretty well colored with the
memory of the time when the woods were the hiding-
places of robbers and outlaws, and were the scenes
of all manner of dark deeds. The only thing I recall
in Shakespeare that gives a faint whiff of our forest
life occurs in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” where
the clown says to Lafeu, “I am a woodland fellow,
sir, that always loved a great fire.” That great fire
is American; wood is too scarce in Europe. Francis.
Higginson wrote in 1680: “New England may boast
of the element of fire more than all the rest ; for all
Europe is not able to afford to make so great fires as
New England. A poor servant, that is to possess but

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ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST.

fifty acres, may afford to give more wood for fire, as
good as the world yields, than many noblemen in
England.” In many parts of New England, New
York, and Pennsylvania, the same royal fires may
still be indulged in. In the chief nature-poet of
England, Wordsworth, there is no line that has the
subtle aroma of the deep woods. After seeing his
country, one can recognize its features, its spirit, all
through his poems — its impressive solitudes, its
lonely tarns, its silent fells, its green dales, its voiceful
waterfalls; but there are no woods there to speak of;
the mountains appear to have always been treeless,
and the poet’s muse has never felt the spell of this
phase of nature — the mystery and attraction of the
indoors of aboriginal wildness. Likewise in Tennyson
there is the breath of the wold, but not of the woods.

Among our own poets, two at least of the more
eminent have listened to the siren of our primitive
woods. I refer to Bryant and Emerson. Though so
different, there is an Indian’s love of forests and for-
est-solitudes in them both. Neither Bryant’s “For-
est Hymn” nor Emerson’s “Woodnotes” could have
been written by an English poet. The “Woodnotes ”
savor of our vast Northern pine forests, amid which
one walks with distended pupil, and a boding, alert
sense.

“ In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers’ gang,

Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang ; ^

He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone ;

Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,

And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.

He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,

The slight Linnsea hang its twin-born heads,

And blessed the monument of the man of flowers,

Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers.

ENGLISH WOODS: A CONTRAST.

91

He heard, when in the grove, at intervals,

With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls, —

One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree,

Declares the close of its green century.”

Emerson’s muse is urbane, but it is tliat wise ur-
banity that is at home in the woods as well as in the
town, and can make a garden of a forest.

“ My garden is a forest ledge,

Which older forests bound ;

The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,

Then plunge to depths profound.”

On the other hand, we have no pastoral poetry in
the English sense, because we have no pastoral nature
as overpowering as the English have. When the
muse of our poetry is not imitative, it often has a
piny, woodsy flavor that is unknown in the older lit-
eratures. The gentle muse of Longfellow, so civil,
so cultivated ; yet how it delighted in all legends and
echoes and Arcadian dreams that date from the for-
est primeval. Thoreau was a wood-genius — the spirit
of some Indian poet or prophet, graduated at Harvard
College, but never losing his taste for the wild. The
shy, mystical genius of Hawthorne was never more
home than when in the woods. Read the forest-
scenes in “The Scarlet Letter.” They are among the
'most suggestive in the book

AUTUMN TIDES.

The season is always a little behind the sun in our
climate, just as the tide is always a little behind the
moon. * According to the calendar, the summer ought
to culminate about the 21st of June, but in reality it
is some weeks later; June is a maiden month all
through. It is not high noon in nature till about the
first or second week in July. When the chestnut-tree
blooms, the meridian of the year is reached. By the
first of August it is fairly one o’clock. The lustre of
the season begins to dim, the foliage of the trees and
woods to tarnish, the plumage of the birds to fade,
and their songs to cease. The hints of approaching
fall are on every hand. How suggestive this thistle-
down, for instance, which, as I sit by the open win-
dow, comes in and brushes softly across my hand!
The first snowflake tells of winter not more plainly
than this driving down heralds the approach of fall.
Come here, my fairy, and tell me whence you come
and whither you go ? What brings you to port here,
you gossamer ship sailing the great sea ? How exqui-
sitely frail and delicate ! One of the lightest things
in nature; so light that in the closed room here it
will hardly rest in my open palm. A feather is a
clod beside it. Only a spider’s web will hold it;
coarser objects have no power over it. Caught in the
upper currents of the air and rising above the clouds,
it might sail perpetually. Indeed, one fancies it
might almost traverse the interstellar ether and drive

AUTUMN TIDES.

93

against the stars. And every thistle-head by the
roadside holds hundreds of these sky rovers, — im-
prisoned Ariels unable to set themselves free. Their
liberation may be by the shock of the wind, or the
rude contact of cattle, but it is oftener the work of
the goldfinch with its complaining brood. The seed
of the thistle is the proper food of this bird, and in
obtaining it myriads of these winged creatures are
scattered to the breeze. Each one is fraught with a
seed which it exists to sow, but its wild careering and
soaring does not fairly begin till its burden is dropped,
and its spheral form is complete. The seeds of many
plants and trees are disseminated through the agency
of birds ; but the thistle furnishes its own birds, —
flocks of them, with wings more ethereal and tireless
than were ever given to mortal creature. From the
pains Nature thus takes to sow the thistle broadcast
over the land, it might be expected to be one of the
most troublesome and abundant of weeds. But such
is not the case; the more pernicious and baffling
weeds, like snapdragon or blind nettles, being more
local and restricted in their habits, and unable to fly
at all.

In the fall, the battles of the spring are fought
over again, beginning at the other or little end of the
series. There is the same advance and retreat, with
many feints and alarms, between the contending
forces, that was witnessed in April and May. The
spring comes like a tide running against a strong
wind ; it is ever beaten back, but ever gaining ground,
with now and then a mad “push upon the land” as
if to overcome its antagonist at one blow. The cold
from the north encroaches upon us in about the same
fashion. In September or early in October it usually

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AUTUMN TIDES.

makes a big stride forward and blackens all tlie more
delicate plants, and hastens the “mortal ripening” of
the foliage of the trees, but it is presently beaten back
again and the genial warmth repossesses the land.
Before long, however, the cold returns to the charge
with augmented forces and gains much ground.

The course of the seasons never does run smooth,
owing to the unequal distribution of land and water,
mountain, wood, and plain.

An equilibrium, however, is usually reached in our
climate in October, sometimes the most marked in
November, forming the delicious Indian summer; a
truce is declared, and both forces, heat and cold, meet
and mingle in friendly converse on the field. In the
earlier season, this poise of the temperature, this
slack-water in nature, comes in May and June; but
the October calm is most marked. Day after day,
and sometimes week after week, you cannot tell which
way the current is setting. Indeed, there is no cur-
rent, but the season seems to drift a little this way or
a little that, just as the breeze happens to freshen a
little in one quarter or the other. The fall of ’74
was the most remarkable in this respect I remember
ever to have seen. The equilibrium of the season
lasted from the middle of October till near December,
with scarcely a break. There were six weeks of
Indian summer, all gold by day, and, when the moon
came, all silver by night. The river was so smooth
at times as to be almost invisible, and in its place
was the indefinite continuation of the opposite shore
down toward the nether world. One seemed to be in
an enchanted land and to breathe all day the atmos-
phere of fable and romance. Not a smoke, but a kind
of shining nimbus filled all the spaces. The vessels

AUTUMN TIDES.

95

would drift by as if in mid-air with all their sails set.
The gypsy blood in one, as Lowell calls it, could
hardly stay between four walls and see such days go
by. Living in tents, in groves and on the hills,
seemed the only natural life.

Late in December we had glimpses of the same
weather, — the earth had not yet passed all the golden
isles. On the 27th of that month, I find I made this
entry in my note-book : “ A soft, hazy day, the year
asleep and dreaming of the Indian summer again.
Not a breath of air and not a ripple on the river.
The sunshine is hot as it falls across my table.”

But what a terrible winter followed ! what a savage
chief the fair Indian maiden gave birth to !

This halcyon period of our autumn will always in
some way be associated with the Indian. It is red
and yellow and dusky like him. The smoke of his
camp-fire seems again in the air. The memory of
him pervades the woods. His plumes and moccasins
and blanket of skins form just the costume the season
demands. It was doubtless his chosen period. The
gods smiled upon him then if ever. The time of the
chase, the season of the buck and the doe, and of the
ripening of all forest fruits ; the time when all men
are incipient hunters, when the first frosts have given
pungency to the air, when to be abroad on the hills
or in the woods is a delight that both old and young
feel, — if the red aborigine ever had his summer of
fullness and contentment, it must have been at this
season, and it fitly bears his name.

In how many respects fall imitates or parodies the
spring! It is indeed, in some of its features, a sort
of second youth of the year. Things emerge and
become conspicuous again. The trees attract all eyes

96

AUTUMN TIDES.

as in May. The birds come forth from their summer
privacy and parody their spring reunions and rival-
ries; some of them sing a little after a silence of
months. The robins, bluebirds, meadowlarks, spar-
rows, crows, all sport, and call, and behave in a man-
ner suggestive of spring. The cock grouse drums in
the woods as he did in April and May. The pigeons
reappear, and the wild geese and ducks. The witch-
hazel blooms. The trout spawns. The streams are
again full. The air is humid, and the moisture rises
in the ground. Nature is breaking camp, as in spring
she was going into camp. The spring yearning and
restlessness is represented in one by the increased
desire to travel.

Spring is the inspiration, fall the expiration. Both
seasons have their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy
air, their ruddy forest tints, their cold rains, their
drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have the
same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the
sun; yet, after all, how different the feelings which
they inspire! One is the morning, the other the
evening; one is youth, the other is age*

The difference is not merely in us ; there is a subtle
difference in the air, and in the influences that ema-
nate upon us from the dumb forms of nature. All
the senses report a difference. The sun seems to have
burned out. One recalls the notion of Herodotus
that he is grown feeble, and retreats to the south be-
cause he can no longer face the cold and the storms
from the north. There is a growing potency about
his beams in spring, a waning splendor about them
in fall. One is the kindling fire, the other the sub-
siding flame.

It is rarely that an artist succeeds in painting un-

AUTUMN TIDES.

97

mistakably the difference between sunrise and sunset ;
and it is equally a trial of his skill to put upon can-
vas the difference between early spring and late fall,
say between April and November. It was long ago
observed that the shadows are more opaque in the
morning than in the evening; the struggle between
the light and the darkness more marked, the gloom
more solid, the contrasts more sharp. The rays of
the morning sun chisel out and cut down the shad-
ows in a way those of the setting sun do not. Then
the sunlight is whiter and newer in the morning, —
not so yellow and diffused. A difference akin to this
is true of the two seasons I am speaking of. The
spring is the morning sunlight, clear and determined ;
the autumn, the afternoon rays, pensive, lessening,
golden.

Does not the human frame yield to and sympathize
with the seasons? Are there not more births in the
spring and more deaths in the fall? In the spring
one vegetates ; his thoughts turn to sap ; another kind
of activity seizes him ; he makes new wood which does
not harden till past midsummer. For my part, I find
all literary work irksome from April to August ; my
sympathies run in other channels; the grass grows
where meditation walked. As fall approaches, the
currents -mount to the head again. But my thoughts
do not ripen well till after there has been a frost.
The burrs will not open much before that. A man’s
thinking, I take it, is a kind of combustion, as is the
ripening of fruits and leaves, and he wants plenty of
oxygen in the air.

Then the earth seems to have become a positive
magnet in the fall; the forge and anvil of the sun
have had their effect. In the spring it is negative to

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AUTUMN TIDES.

all intellectual conditions, and drains one of liis light*
ning.

To-day, October 21st, I found the air in the bushy
fields and lanes under the woods loaded with the per-
fume of the witch-hazel, — a sweetish, sickening odor.
With the blooming of this bush, Nature says, “Posi-
tively the last.” It is a kind of birth in death, of
spring in fall, that impresses one as a little uncanny.
All trees and shrubs form their flower-buds in the
fall, and keep the secret till spring. How comes the
witch-hazel to be the one exception, and to celebrate
its floral nuptials on the funeral day of its foliage?
No doubt it will be found that the spirit of some love-
lorn squaw has passed into this bush, and that this is
why it blooms in the Indian summer rather than in
the white man’s spring.

But it makes the floral series of the woods com-
plete. Between *it and the shad -blow of earliest spring
lies the mountain of bloom ; the latter at the base on
one side, this at the base on the other, with the chest-
nut blossoms at the top in midsummer.

A peculiar feature of our fall may sometimes be
seen of a clear afternoon late in the season. Looking
athwart the fields under the sinking sun, the ground
appears covered with a shining veil of gossamer. A
fairy net, invisible at midday and which the position
of the sun now reveals, rests upon the stubble and
upon the spears of grass, covering acres in extent, — ■
the work of innumerable little spiders. The cattle
walk through it, but do not seem to break it. Per-
haps a fly would make his mark upon it. At the
same time, stretching from the tops of the trees, or
from the top of a stake in the fence, and leading off
toward the sky, may be seen the cables of the flying

AUTUMN TIDES.

99

spider, — a fairy bridge from the visible to the in-
visible. Occasionally seen against a deep mass of
shadow, and perhaps enlarged by clinging particles
of dust, they show quite plainly and sag down like a
stretched rope, or sway and undulate like a hawser
in the tide.

They recall a verse of our rugged poet, Walt Whit-
man : —

“ A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where, in a little promontory, it stood isolated :

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself ;

Ever unreeling them — ever tirelessly spreading them.

“ And you, O my soul, where you stand,

Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, —

Seeking the spheres to connect them ;

Till the bridge you will need he formed — till the ductile anchor
hold ;

Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, 0 my soul.”

To return a little, September may be described as
the month of tall weeds. Where they have been
suffered to stand, along fences, by roadsides, and in
forgotten corners, — redroot, pigweed, ragweed, ver-
vain, goldenrod, burdock, elecampane, thistles, tea-
sels, nettles, asters, etc., — how they lift themselves
up as if not afraid to be seen now ! They are all out-
laws; every man’s hand is against them; yet how
surely they hold their own ! They love the roadside,
because here they are comparatively safe ; and ragged
and dusty, like the common tramps that they are, they
form one of the characteristic features of early fall.

I have often noticed in what haste certain weeds
are at times to produce their seeds. Redroot will
grow three or four feet high when it has the whole

100

AUTUMN TIDES.

season before it; but let it get a late start, let it
come up in August, and it scarcely gets above the
ground before it heads out, and apparently goes to
work with all its might and main to mature its seed.
In the growth of most plants or weeds, April and
May represent their root, June and July their stalk,
and August and September their flower and seed.
Hence, when the stalk months are stricken out, as in
the present case, there is only time for a shallow root
and a foreshortened head. I think most weeds that
get a late start show this curtailment of stalk, and
this solicitude to reproduce themselves. But I have
not observed that any of the cereals are so worldly
wise. They have not had to think and shift for them-
selves as the weeds have. It does indeed look like a
kind of forethought in the redroot. It is killed by
the first frost, and hence knows the danger of delay.

How rich in color, before the big show of the tree
foliage has commenced, our roadsides are in places in
early autumn, — rich to the eye that goes hurriedly
by and does not look too closely, — with the profusion
of goldenrod and blue and purple asters dashed in
upon here and there with the crimson leaves of the
dwarf sumac ; and at intervals, rising out of the fence
corner or crowning a ledge of rocks, the dark green
of the cedars with the still fire of the woodbine at its
heart. I wonder if the waysides of other lands pre-
sent any analogous spectacles at this season.

Then, when the maples have burst out into color,
showing like great bonfires along the hills, there is
indeed a feast for the eye. A maple before your
windows in October, when the sun shines upon it,
will make up for a good deal of the light it has
excluded ; it fills the room with a soft golden glow.

AUTUMN TIDES.

101

Thoreau, I believe, was the first to remark upon
the individuality of trees of the same species with re-
spect to their foliage, — some maples ripening their
leaves early and some late, and some being of one tint
and some of another; and, moreover, that each tree
held to the same characteristics, year after year.
There is, indeed, as great a variety among the maples
as among the trees of an apple orchard; some are
harvest apples, some are fall apples, and some are
winter apples, each with a tint of its own. Those
late ripeners are the winter varieties, — the Rhode
Island greenings or swaars of their kind. The red
maple is the early astrachan. Then come the red-
streak, the yellow-sweet, and others. There are
windfalls among them, too, as among the apples, and
one side or hemisphere of the leaf is usually brighter
than the other.

The ash has been less noticed for its autumnal
foliage than it deserves. The richest shades of plum-
color to be seen — becoming by and by, or in certain
lights, a deep maroon — are afforded by this tree.
Then at a distance there seems to be a sort of bloom
on it, as upon the grape or plum. Amid a grove of
yellow maple, it makes a most pleasing contrast.

By mid-October, most of the Rip Van Winkles
among our brute creatures have lain down for their
winter nap. The toads and turtles have buried them-
selves in the earth. The woodchuck is in his hiber-
naculum, the skunk in his, the mole in his ; and the
black bear has his selected, and will go in when the
snow comes. He does not like the looks of his big
tracks in the snow. They publish his goings and
comings too plainly. The coon retires about the
same time. The provident wood-mice and the chip-

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AUTUMN TIDES.

munk are laying by a winter supply of nuts or grain,
tlie former usually in decayed trees, the latter in the
ground. I have observed that any unusual disturb-
ance in the woods, near where the chipmunk has his
den, will cause him to shift his quarters. One Octo-
ber, for many successive days, I saw one carrying
into his hole buckwheat which he had stolen from a
near field. The hole was only a few rods from where
we were getting out stone, and as our work progressed,
and the racket and uproar increased, the chipmunk
became alarmed. He ceased carrying in, and after
much hesitating and darting about, and some pro-
longed absences, he began to carry out ; he had deter-
mined to move; if the mountain fell, he, at least,
would be away in time. So, by mouthfuls or cheek-
fuls, the grain was transferred to a new place. He
did not make a “bee” to get it done, but carried it
all himself, occupying several days, and making a
trip about every ten minutes.

The red and gray squirrels do not lay by winter
stores; their cheeks are made without pockets, and
whatever they transport is carried in the teeth. They
are more or less active all winter, but October and
November are their festal months. Invade some but-
ternut or hickory-nut grove on a frosty October morn-
ing, and hear the red squirrel beat the “juba” on a
horizontal branch. It is a most lively jig, what the
boys call a “regular break-down,” interspersed with
squeals and snickers and derisive laughter. The most
noticeable peculiarity about the vocal part of it is the
fact that it is a kind of duet. In other words, by
some ventriloquial tricks, he appears to accompany
himself, as if his voice split up, a part forming a low
guttural sound, and a part a shrill nasal sound.

AUTUMN TIDES.

103

The distant bark of the more wary gray squirrel
inay be heard about the same time. There is a teas-
ing and ironical tone in it also, but the gray squirrel
is not the Puck the red is.

Insects also go into winter-quarters by or before
this time; the bumble-bee, hornet, and wasp. But
here only royalty escapes; the queen-mother alone
foresees the night of winter coming and the morning
of spring beyond. The rest of the tribe try gypsying
for a while, but perish in the first frosts. The pres-
ent October I surprised the queen of the yellow-jack-
ets in the woods looking out a suitable retreat. The
royal dame was house-hunting, and, on being dis-
turbed by my inquisitive poking among the leaves,
she got up and flew away with a slow, deep hum.
Her body was unusually distended, whether with fat
or eggs I am unable to say. In September I took
down the nest of the black hornet and found several
large queens in it, but the workers had all gone. The
queens were evidently weathering the first frosts and
storms here, and waiting for the Indian summer to go
forth and seek a permanent winter abode. If the
covers could be taken off the fields and woods at this
season, how many interesting facts of natural history
would be revealed ! — the crickets, ants, bees, reptiles,
animals, and, for aught I know, the spiders and flies
asleep or getting ready to sleep in their winter dormi-
tories; the fires of life banked up, and burning just
enough to keep the spark over till spring.

The fish all run down the stream in the fall except
the trout ; it runs up or stays up and spawns in No-
vember, the male becoming as brilliantly tinted as
the deepest-dyed maple leaf. I have often wondered
why the trout spawns in the fall, instead of in the

104

AUTUMN TIDES .

spring like other fish. Is it not because a full supply
of clear spring water can be counted on at that season
more than at any other ? The brooks are not so liable
to be suddenly muddied by heavy showers, and defiled
with the washings of the roads and fields, as they are
in spring and summer. The artificial breeder finds
that absolute purity of water is necessary to hatch the
spawn; also that shade and a low temperature are
indispensable.

Our Northern November day itself is like spring-
water. It is melted frost, dissolved snow. There is
a chill in it and an exhilaration also. The forenoon
is all morning and the afternoon all evening. The
shadows seem to come forth and to revenge them-
selves upon the day. The sunlight is diluted with
darkness. The colors fade from the landscape, and
only the sheen of the river lights up the gray and
brown distance.

BIRDS AND ANIMALS

BURROUGHS, JOHN

Bird Stories from Burroughs. Illustrated. 60 cents, net.

Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers. Illustrated. School Edition
60 cents, net.

Afoot and Afloat. Riverside Literature Series , No. 176. Paper
15 cents ; cloth, 25 cents, net.

Birds and Bees. R. L. S., No. 28. Paper, 15 cents, net. Nos
28 and 36 in one volume, cloth, 40 cents, net.

Bunch of Herbs, and Other Papers. R. L. S., No. 92. Paper,
15 cents, net.

Sharp Eyes, and Other Papers. R. L. S., No. 36. Paper, 15
cents; cloth, 25 cents, net.

MILLER, OLIVE THORNE

True Bird Stories from my Note-Books. Illustrated. School
Edition. 60 cents, net.

The First Book of Birds. Illustrated. School Edition. 6c
cents, net.

The Second Book of Birds: Bird Families. Illustrated

$i.qo, net.

SHARP, DALLAS LORE

The Fall of the Year. Illustrated. 60 cents, net.

PLANTS

EASTMAN, HELEN

New England Ferns and their Common Allies. Illustrated.
$1.25, net.

SARGENT, FREDERICK LE ROY

Corn Plants: Their Uses and Ways of Life. Illustrated. 75
cents.

THOREAU, HENRY D.

Katahdin and Chesuncook. From “The Maine Woods.” With
an introduction. Illustrated. Riverside Literature Series , No. 1 86.
Paper, 15 cents, net ; linen, 25 cents, net.

The Succession of Forest Trees, Wild Apples, and Sounds.

R. L. S., No. 27. Paper, 15 cents, net. Also in one volume with
Burroughs’ Birds and Bees (No. 28) and Warner’s A-Hunting of
the Deer (No. 37), cloth, 50 cents, net.

Walden. Edited by Francis H. Allen. Illustrated. R. L. S., No
195. (Triple Number.) Paper, .45 ; cloth, .50.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

819

Date Due

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1837-1921.

Birds and bees
and other studies in
®«micuLTSBature.

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PS 1224 B6 c.l

Burroughs, John, 1837-192
Birds and bees and other studi

CUKRHIST

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