i

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

PRESENTED BY

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

•nr

BY-WAYS

AND

BIRD NOTES

BY

MAURICE THOMPSON

AUTHOR OF

AT LOVE'S EXTREMES," "His SECOND CAMPAIGN," "SONGS
OP FAIR WEATHER," "A TALLAHASSEE
GIRL," ETC.

NEW YORK
JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER

1885

Copyright, 1885,

BY

JOHN B. ALDEN

TROWS

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
NEW YORK.

9

CONTENTS.

PAGE

IN THE HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING
BIRD 5

A RED-HEADED FAMILY 23

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS ; 1 40

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS : II 50

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS : III 59

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS : IV 66

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS 75

BROWSING AND NIBBLING 95

OUT-DOOR INFLUENCES IN LITERA
TURE 105

A FORTNIGHT IN A PALACE OF REEDS.. nS

CUCKOO NOTES 133

SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS 151

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS 164

M368459

BY-WAYS

AND

BIRD-NOTES.

IN THE HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING
BIRD.

THE mocking-bird has been called the
American nightingale, with a view, no doubt,
to inflicting a compliment involving the opera
tion, known to us all, of damning with faint
praise. The nightingale presumably is not
the sufferer by the comparison, since she holds
immemorial title to preeminence amongst sing
ing-birds. The story of Philomela, however,
as first told, was not an especially pleasing
one, and the poets made no great use of it.
Nowhere in Greek or Roman literature, so far
as I know, is there any genuine lyric apostro
phe to the nightingale comparable to SappTio's
fragment To the Rose; still the bird has a
prestige gathered from centuries of poetry and
upheld by the master romancers of the world.

To compare the song of any other bird with
that of the nightingale is like instituting a
comparison between some poet of to-day and
Shakespeare, so far as any sympathy with the
would-be rival is concerned. The world has
long ago made up its mind, and when the
world once does that there is an end, a cul de

6 BY-WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

sac, a stopping-place, of all argument of the
question. Indeed, it is a very romantic dis
tance that separates the bird from most of us.
Chaucer's groves and Shakespeare's woods
shake out from their leaves a fragrance that
reaches us along with a song which is half the
bird's and half the poet's. We connect the
nightingale's music with a dream of chivalry,
troubadours, and mediaeval castles. It is as
dear to him who has heard it only in the
changes rung by the Persian, French, and
English bards as it is to him whose chamber
window opens on a choice haunt of the bird
in rural England.

I might dare to go further and claim that I,
who have never heard a nightingale sing, can
say with truth that its music is, in a certain
way, as familiar to me as the sound of a run
ning stream or the sough of a spring breeze.
I often find myself reluctantly shaking off
something like a recollection of having some
where, in some dim old grove, heard the voice
that Keats imprisoned in his matchless ode.
There is a sort of aerial perspective in the
mere name of the nightingale ; it is like some
of those classical allusions which bring into a
modern essay suggestions with an Infinite dis
tance in them. So thoroughly has this been
felt that it may safely be said that the nightin
gale has been more frequently mentioned by
our American writers, good, bad, and indiffer
ent, than any one of our native birds. No
doubt it ought to provoke a smile, this gushing
about a music one has never heard ; but, like
the music of the spheres and the roar of the
ocean, the nightingale's voice is common
property, and we all take it as a sort of hered-

HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 7

itary music, descending to us by immemorial
custom. Its notes are echoing within us, and
we feel their authenticity though in fact we
know as little about the bird as chemists do
about Geber. How shall we doubt that the
bird whose song inspired Keats to write that
masterpiece of English poetry is indeed a
wonderful musician ? Shakespeare and rare
Ben Jonson and Burns and Scott and Shelley
and Byron heard this same song ; it was just
as clear and sweet as it is now when Chaucer
was telling his rhymed tales, when Robin
Hood was in the greenwood, even when the
Romans made their first invasion.

In a general way, we do not think of the
nightingale having a nest and rearing a brood
and dying. It is simply the incomparable
nightingale, philomela, rossignol, or whatever
the name may be, — a bird that has been sing
ing in rose-gardens and orange-orchards and
English woods night after night for thousands
of years without a rival. Its song is to the
imagination of all of us

" L'hymne flottant des nuits d'ete."

as Lamartine has expressed it. So it can
easily be understood how hard a struggle our
American mocking-bird is going to have before
it reaches a place in the world's esteem beside
the nightingale. Nor is it my purpose to do
anything with a special view to aid it in the
struggle ; but I have studied our bird in all
its haunts and in all seasons, with a view to a
most intimate acquaintance with its habits, its
song, and its character.

To begin with, the name mocking-bird, is a
heavy load for any bird to bear. Unmusical

8 BY- WA YS AND BIRD- NO TES.

as it is, the worst feature of such an appella
tion is the idea of flippancy and ill-breeding
that it conveys. To " mock " is to imitate
with an ill-natured purpose, to jeer at, to ridi
cule; it was for mocking that bad children
were made food for bears. Such a name
carries with it a shadow of something repel-
lant, and no poet can ever rescue it, as a
name, from its meaning and its eight harsh
consonants. It would indeed require some
centuries of romantic and charming associa
tions to make of it a name by which to con
jure, as in the case of the nightingale. The
bird, with almost any other name than mock
ing-bird, would fare much better at the hands
of artists and poets, and might hope, if birds
may hope at all, finally to gain the meed of
praise it so richly deserves.

In a beautiful little valley among the moun
tains of North Georgia I first began to study
the mocking-bird in its wild state. It was not
a very common bird there, just rare enough to
keep one keenly interested in its habits. I
had great trouble in finding a nest. Many a
delightful tramp through the thorny thickets
and wild orchards of plum-trees ended in noth
ing, before my eyes discovered the loose sticks
and matted midribs of leaves which usually
make up the songster's home. The haw-tree,
several varieties of which grow in the glades
of what is known as the Cherokee Region, is a
favorite nesting-place, and so is the honey-
locust tree, which is also much chosen by the
shrike or butcher-bird. There is so strong a
resemblance in colors and size between this
shrike and the mocking-bird that one is often
mistaken for the other by careless observers,

HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 9

hence in some neighborhoods, I have found a
strong prejudice existing against the mocking
bird on account of the fiendish habits of the
shrike.

A mountain lad once led me over a con
siderable mountain and down into a wild dell
to show me a nest in a thorn tree, where he
was sure I should find every evidence that a
mocking-bird was a soulless monster, murder
ing little pee-wee fly-catchers and warblers,
and impaling them on thorns out of sheer
wantonness. I felt sure it was a shrike, but
the boy said he knew better. Didn't he know
a mocking-bird when he saw it ? He had
heard it sing and " mock " all the birds in the
thickets around, and had also seen it doing its
brutal work. Boys are sometimes very close
and reliable in their observations, and this one
was an inveterate hunter, and so stoutly as
serted his knowledge that I was induced to
test his accuracy by going with him to the
place he called Mocking-Bird Hollow. Of
course the nest was that of a shrike, but a
number of mocking-birds were breeding in the
immediate vicinity, hence the mistake.

The mocking-bird does not appear to be a
strictly migratory bird, its range being much
narrower than that of the brown-thrush, the
cat-bird, and the wood-thrush. I have never
been able to find it a regular visitant in the
West north of Tennessee, though I have no
reason to doubt that it comes at times much
farther, even into the Ohio valley. In the
mountain valleys it is extremely wary and shy,
its habits approaching very close to those
attributed to the nightingale of England. It
chooses lonely and almost inaccessible nest-

io BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES.

ing places, and will not sing if at all disturbed.
Often, while I have been lying on the ground
in some secluded glade, I have heard, far in
the night, a sudden gush of melody begun by
one bird and echoed by another and another
all around me, filling the balmy air of spring
with a half-cheerful, half-plaintive medley.
This is more common when the moon shines,
but I have heard it when the night was black.'
At several points near the coast of the
Carolinas I have found the mocking-bird ap
parently a resident, and yet, so far South as
Savannah, Georgia, it seems to shrink from the
occasional midwinter rigors. In the hills near
the Alabama River, not far from Montgomery,
it is certainly resident, but I found it a much
shyer bird there than in the thickets along the
bayous of Louisiana. Early in the winter of
1883 I made a most careful search for the
mocking-bird in Pensacola, Florida, and its
environs, but found none. I was told that the
bird would appear about the last of February.
At Marianna, Florida, and along the line of
the road thence to the Appalachicola River, I
saw it frequently in midwinter. On the Gulf
Coast, down as far as Punta Rassa, and across
the peninsula to the Indian River country, in
the orange, lemon, and citron groves, in the
bay thickets, and even in the sandy pine
woods, I noted it quite frequently. In this
semi-tropical country it is not so shy and so
chary of its song, as it is farther north. Near
the mouth of the St. Mark's River, as I lay un
der a small tree, a mocking-bird came and lit
on the top of a neighboring bush, and sang for
me its rarest and most wonderful combination,
called by the negroes the "dropping song."

HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. u

Whoever has closely observed the bird has
noted its " mounting song," a very frequent
performance, wherein the songster begins on
the lowest branch of a tree and .appears liter
ally to mount on its music, from bough to
bough, until the highest spray of the top is
reached, where it will sit for many minutes
flinging upon the air an ecstatic stream of
almost infinitely varied vocalization. But he
who has never heard the " dropping song "
has not discovered the last possibility of the
mocking-bird's voice. I have never found
any note of this extremely interesting habit of
the bird by any ornithologist, a habit which is,
I suspect, occasional, and connected with the
most tender part of the mating season. It is,
in a measure, the reverse of the "mounting
song," beginning where the latter leaves off.
I have heard it but four times, when I was
sure of it, during all my rambles and patient
observations in the chosen haunts of the bird ;
once in North Georgia, twice in the immediate
vicinity of Tallahassee, Florida, and once
near the St. Mark's River, as above men
tioned. I have at several other times heard
the song, as I thought, but not being able to
see the bird, or clearly distinguish the peculiar
notes, I cannot register these as certainly cor
rect. My attention was first called to this in
teresting performance by an aged negro man,
who, being with me on an egg-hunting expe
dition, cried out one morning, as a burst of
strangely rhapsodic music rang from a haw
thicket near our extemporized camp, " Lis'n,
mars, lis'n, dar, he's a droppin', he's a-drop-
pin', sho's yo' bo'n ! " I could not see the

12 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

bird, and before I could get my attention
rightly fixed upon the song it had ended.

Something of the rare aroma, so to speak,
of the curiously modulated trills and quavers
lingered in my memory, however, along with
Uncle Jo's graphic description of the bird's
actions. After that I was on the lookout for
an opportunity to verify the negro's state
ments.

I have not exactly kept the date of my first
actual observation, but it was late in April, or
very early in May; for the crab-apple trees,
growing wild in the Georgian hills, were in
full bloom, and spring had come to stay. I
had been out since the first sparkle of day
light. The sun was rising, and I had been
standing quite still for some minutes, watch
ing a mocking-bird that was singing in a
snatchy, broken way, as it fluttered about in a
thick-topped crab-apple tree thirty yards dis
tant from me. Suddenly the bird, a fine speci
men, leaped like a flash to the highest spray
of the tree and began to flutter in a trembling,
peculiar way, with its wings half-spread and
its feathers puffed out. Almost immediately
there came a strange, gurgling series of notes,
liquid and sweet, that seemed to express utter
rapture. Then the bird dropped, with a back
ward motion, from the spray, and began to
fall slowly and somewhat spirally down through
the bloom-covered boughs. Its progress was
quite like that of a bird wounded to death by a
shot, clinging here and there to a twig, quiver
ing and weakly striking with its wings as it fell,
but all the time it was pouring forth the most
exquisite gushes and trills of song, not at all
like its usual medley of improvised imitations

HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD, 13

but strikingly, almost startlingly, individual
and unique. The bird appeared to be dying
of an ecstasy of musical inspiration. The
lower it fell the louder and more rapturous
became its voice, until the song ended on the
ground in a burst of incomparable vocal power.
It remained for a short time, after its song
was ended, crouching where it had fallen, with
its wings outspread, and quivering and pant
ing as if utterly exhausted ; then it leaped
boldly into the air and flew away into an ad
jacent thicket.

Since then, as I have said, three other op
portunities have been afforded me of witness
ing this curiously pleasing exhibition of bird-
acting. I can half imagine what another
ode Keats might have written had his eyes
seen and his ears heard that strange, fasci
nating, dramatically rendered song. Or it
might better have suited Shelley's powers of ex
pression. It is said that the grandest bursts of
oratory are those which contain a strong trace
of a reserve of power. This may be true ; but
is not the best song that wherein the voice
sweeps, with the last expression of ecstasy,
from wave to wave of music until with a su
preme effort it wreaks its fullest power, thus
ending in a victory over the final obstacle, as
if with its utmost reach ? Be this as it may,
whoever may be fortunate enough to hear the
mocking-bird's " dropping song," and at the
same time see the bird's action, will at once
have the idea of genius, pure and simple, sug
gested to him.

The high, beautiful country around Talla
hassee, in Middle Florida, is the paradise of
mocking-birds. I am surprised to find this

14 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

region so little visited, comparatively speaking,
by those who really desire to know all that is
beautiful and interesting in our country. Per
haps it is because the places most frequented
by the mocking-bird have not been sought by
those deeply interested in bird-habits and
history, that so little is known of the most
striking traits of its character. Quite certain
it is that no monograph exists which gives to
the general reader any approximate idea of
our great American singer. I must say just
here that the mocking-bird's song in captivity,
strong and sweet as it is, and its voice from
the cage, liquid, flexible, and pure, are not
in the least comparable to what they are in the
open-air freedom of a Southern grove. If you
would hear these at their best, and they are
truly worth going a long journey to hear, you
must seek some secluded grove in Southern
Alabama, Georgia, or Middle Florida about
the last of March or the first of April, when
spring is in its prime and the gulf breezes are
flowing over all that semi-tropical region.

It is a silly notion, without any foundation
in fact, that the mocking-bird in its wild state
is a mere mimic, without a song of its own.
The truth is that all birds get their notes, as
we get our language, by imitating what they
hear. Very few of them, however, are suffi
ciently gifted mentally and vocally to be able
to pass the limitation of immemorial heredity,
or to feel any impulse toward any attainments
of voice beyond what they catch as younglings
from their parents. Hence, as a rule, the
young bird is satisfied with the pipes and calls
caught from its immediate ancestors. No
doubt a lack of finely developed vocal organs

HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 15

has much to do with this. But the mocking
bird, the brown-thrush, and the cat-bird are
notable exceptions to the rule. Nature has
endowed them with an instinctive impulse
toward a cultivation of their vocal powers, as
well as with voices capable of wonderful
achievements.

A mocking-bird reared in captivity becomes
much more a mere mimic than the wild bird,
and yet, so strong is the hereditary tendency,
the caged bird will perfectly sound the notes
of a grossbeak or a blue-jay without ever hav
ing heard them. I have heard a mocking-bird,
reared in a cage in Indiana, utter with singu
lar accuracy the cry of the Southern wood
pecker (Picus querulus), a bird I have never
seen north of the Cumberland Mountains.

Many little incidents noted in the woods
and in the orchards haunted by the mocking
bird have led me to conclude that a genuine
sense of the importance of singing well in
spires some of its most remarkable efforts.
One morning in March, 1881, I looked out of
a window in the old City Hotel at Talla
hassee, and witnessed a pitched battle of song
between a brown-thrush and a mocking-bird.
In the grounds about the Capitol building
across the street stood some venerable oak
trees just beginning to leave out. The birds
had each chosen a perch on the highest prac
ticable point of a tree. They were not more
than fifty feet apart, and with swelling throats
were evidently vying fiercely with each other.
This gave me the best possible opportunity of
comparing their styles and methods of expres
sion. To my ear the brown-thrush in the wild
state is a sweeter singer than any caged mock-

1 6 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

ing-bird ; but when both are free, the latter is
infinitely superior at every point. There is a
wide variety of pure flute-notes expressed by
the wild mocking-bird. These notes become
vitiated in captivity and their tone degraded
to the level of mere mellow piping. In the
hedges of Cherokee rose that grew along the
old Augustine road east of Tallahassee, mock
ing-birds were so numerous that their songs,
mingling together, made a strange din which
could be heard a long way on a still morning.

I have already spoken of the injustice done
the mocking-bird by the name given it, but at
this point I may say that other American song
birds of a superior order have suffered even
more from this cause. Cat-bird and thrasher,
— what names to be embalmed in poetry and
romance ! It required all the genius of Emer
son successfully to use a titmouse as the sub
ject for a poem. If Bryant's Lines to a Water
fowl had been addressed to a duck or a snake-
bird, one would scarcely be content to accept
the poem as perfect. A name certainly has
an intrinsic value.

Mr. Cable in his powerful novel, Dr. Sevier,
speaks of the mocking-bird's morning note as
unmusical. At certain seasons of the year the
bird's voice is not especially pleasing, but this
is not in song-time. Early morning and the
twilight of evening in the spring call forth its
most charming powers. Its night song is
sweet and peculiarly effective, but except on
rare occasions in the nesting season, when the
moon is very brilliant the nocturnal notes are
pitched in a minor key and the voice is less
flexible and brilliant, as if the bird were sing
ing in its sleep.

HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 17

In Florida and in the valley of the Alabama,
I observed the mocking-bird assuming a famil
iarity with man very closely approaching volun
tary domestication. A pair had their nest in
a small vine-covered peach-tree close to the
window of a room for some weeks occupied by
me. They seemed not in the least disturbed
when I boldly watched them, though occasion
ally the male bird was inclined to scold if I
raised the window. Every morning, just at
the peep of dawn, the singing began, and was
kept up at intervals all day. The house was
a mere cabin with unchinked cracks. All out
door sounds came in freely. The Suwanee
River, made famous by the Old Folks at
Home, rippled near, and the heavy perfume of
magnolia flowers filled the air. My vigorous
exercise in the woods and fields by day, which
was sometimes continued far into the night,
made me sleep soundly, but very often I was
aroused sufficiently to be aware of a nocturne,
all the sweeter to my half-dreaming sense on
account of its plaintive and desultory render
ing.

In the neighborhood of Thomasville, Geor
gia, a mocking-bird's nest, built in a pear-
tree, was close to a kitchen door, where ser
vants were all day passing in and out within
ten or twelve feet of the sitting bird. The
brood was hatched, and the young taken by a
negro and sold tq a -New York tourist for
twenty dollars. The birds tore up their nest
as soon as it was robbed, and appeared greatly
excited for a few days ; but one morning the
singing began again, and soon after a new
nest was built a little higher up in the same
tree.

i8 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NOTES.

It has been told of the mocking-birds that,
in Louisiana and other Southern regions, when
such of them as have taken a summer jaunt to
New England or Pennsylvania return to the
magnolia and orange groves in late autumn,
they are attacked by their resident brethren.
My observation has not tended to verify this.
Nor can I bear testimony to the bravery and
fighting qualities of the mocking-bird. The
blue-bird whips it, driving it hither and yon at
will, though not more than half its size. It is,
however, a famous scold and blusterer, accom
plishing a good deal by fierce threats and
savage demonstrations. I do not believe the
story about it killing snakes. It would be a
very small and weak reptile that such a bird
could kill, being so poorly armed for warlike
exploits.

On a pedestrian tour through the loveliest
and loneliest part of Middle Florida, I was
struck with the strong contrast between the
negroes and the white people as to the extent
and accuracy of their ornithological knowledge,
a contrast almost as marked as that of color.
I could get no information from the whites.
They had never paid any attention to mocking
birds. The subject appeared to them too
slight and trivial to be worth any study. But
the negroes were sometimes enthusiastic, al
ways interested and interesting. Somehow
there has always seemed to me a fine touch of
power in the way a cabin, a few banana-stalks,
a plum-tree or two, and a straggling bower of
grape-vines get themselves together for the
use of indolent negroes and luxury-loving
mocking-birds. I have fancied it, or else there
is a marked preference shown by the songster

HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 19

for the cots of the freedmen, and there can
be no doubting that a warm feeling for the
bird is nursed by the ordinary negro.

As I have suggested, the nature of the
mocking-bird is that of a resident more than
that of a migratory bird, and I am inclined to
name its true habitat semi-tropical. Even so
far South as Macon, Ga., and in the region of
Montgomery, Ala., the chilly days of midwin
ter are sufficient to drive the birds to heavy
cover. In fact, a large majority of the spe
cies of Mimus (Mimus polyglottus being the
scientific name of the mocking-bird) are to be
found in South America and in the tropical
islands of the Atlantic.

The plantation negroes used to have a say
ing which might serve the turn of Mr. Harris
or Mr. Macon : " Takes a red-hot sun fo' ter
bri'l de mockin'-bird's tongue, but er mighty
small fros' er gwine ter freeze 'im froat up
solid." Mr. Fred. A. Ober, in his report of
explorations made in the Okeechobee region,
does not mention seeing the mocking-bird, but
it is there, nevertheless, or was in 1867. I re
member seeing a fine fellow flying about in
some small bushes, near the remains of a de
serted cabin, on the north-eastern shore of the
lake. I saw some paroquets at the same
place.

On what is known as the Dauphine Way,
running west from Dauphine Street in Mobile,
mocking-birds used to be numerous, nesting in
the groves on either side and filling the air
with their songs. Whoever has walked out
on this lovely road will remember a low, old-
fashioned brick house, no doubt a plantation
residence one day, with a row of queer little

20 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

dormer windows on the roof in front, and
graduated parapets to hide the gables, a long
lean-to veranda and a row of chimneys, a dark,
heavy-looking building near the south side of
the Way. In a small tree just east of this
house used to sing a mocking-bird whose voice
was as much above the average of his kind as
Patti's voice is above the average woman's
voice. If one could get a caged bird to sing
as that one did, he might profitably advertise
it for concerts. A friend and I sat down
across the Way from the house, and, while the
gulf breeze poured over us and the bird music
filled our ears, got a sketch of the charmingly
picturesque old place ; but somehow we could
not put in the song of the wonderful mocking
bird.

Bird-fanciers and bird-buyers may profit by
what I now whisper to them, to wit : the best-
voiced mocking-birds, without a doubt, are
those bred in Middle Florida and Southern
Alabama. I have no theory in connection
with this statement of a fact ; but if I were
going to risk the reputation of our country on
the singing of a mocking-bird against a Euro
pean nightingale, I should choose my cham
pion from the hill-country in the neighborhood
of Tallahassee, or from the environs of Mo
bile.

No doubt proper food has much to do with
the development of the bird in all its parts,
and it may be that the dry, fertile, chocolate-
tinted hills that swell up along the Gulf Coast
produce just the berries, insects, and other tid
bits needed for the mocking-bird's fullest
growth. Then, perhaps, the climate best suits
the bird's nature. Be this as it may, I have

HAUNTS OF THE MOCKING-BIRD. 21

found no birds elsewhere to compare with
those in that belt of country about thirty miles
wide, stretching from Live Oak in Florida, by
way of Tallahassee, to some miles west of Mo
bile. Nor is there anywhere a more interest
ing country to him who delights in pleasant
wildwood rambles, unusual scenery, and a
wonderful variety of birds and flowers in their
season.

Most of our descriptive ornithologists have
taken great pains to assure their readers that
the American mocking-bird is very plain, if
not positively unattractive in its plumage. But
to my eye the graceful little fellow, especially
when flying, is an object of real beauty.
There is a silver-white flash to his wings, along
with a shimmer of gray, and a dusky, shadowy
twinkle, so to speak, about his head and shoul
ders, as you see him fluttering through the top
of an orange tree or climbing, in his peculiar
zigzag way, the gnarled boughs of a fig-bush.
His throat and breast are the perfection of
symmetry, and his eyes are clear pale gold,
bright and alert. The eggs of the mocking
bird are delicate and shapely, having a body
color of pale, ashy green tinged with blue and
blotched with brown. The eggs of the shrike
closely resemble those of the mocking-bird, so
that the amateur naturalist is often deceived.
The nests of the two birds are also very much
alike in shape and materials, and the places in
which they are usually found are exactly simi
lar, a lonely thorny tree being preferred, if in
the wildwood, and a pear-tree or a plum-tree
if in an orchard.

I am quite sure that every one who has
studied, or who hereafter may study, the

22 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

mocking-bird in its proper haunts will agree
with me that its voice is something far more
marvellous than has ever been dreamed of by
those who have heard it only from the cage ;
and especially will the lover of high dramatic
art and consummate individuality of manner
and vocalization be charmed with the bird's
exquisite " dropping song," if once he has the
good fortune to witness its delivery and hear
its rhythmic gushes of rapture.

A RED-HEADED FAMILY.

" CE'TINGLY I ken, ce'tingly, seh," said my
Cracker host, taking down his long flint-lock
rifle from over the cabin door and slipping his
frowzy head through the suspension-strap of
his powder-horn and bullet-pouch. " Ce'tingly,
seh, I ken cyarry ye ter wha' them air birds
hed their nestis las' yer."

I had passed the night in the cabin, and now
as I recall the experience to mind, there comes
the grateful fragrance of pine wood to empha
size the memory. Corn " pones " and broiled
chicken, fried bacon and sweet potatoes,
strong coffee and scrambled eggs — a break
fast, indeed, to half persuade one that a
Cracker is a bon vivant — had just been eaten.
I was standing outside the cabin on the rude
door-step. Far off through the thin pine woods
to the eastward, where the sun was beginning
to flash, a herd of " scrub " cattle were formed
into a wide skirmish line of browsers, led by
an old cow, whose melancholy bell clanged in
time to her desultory movements. Near by,
to the westward, lay one of those great gloomy
swamps, so common in Southeastern Georgia,
so repellant and yet so fascinating, so full of
interest to the naturalist, and yet so little ex
plored. The perfume of yellow jasmine was
in the air, along with those indescribable
woodsy odors which almost evade the sense
of smell, and yet so pleasingly impress it. A
rivulet, slow, narrow, and deep, passed near the

24 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

front of the cabin, with a faint, dreamy mur
mur and crept darkling into the swamp be
tween dense brakes of cane, and bay-bushes.

" Ye-as, seh, I ken mek er bee-line to that
air ole pine snag. Hit taint more'n er half er
mile out yender," continued my host and vol
unteer guide, as we climbed the little worm-
fence that inclosed the house; "but! allus
called 'em air birds woodcocks ; didn't know
'at they hed any other name ; allus thut 'at a
Peckwood wer' a leetle, tinty, stripedy feller ;
never hyeard er them air big ole woodcocks
a bein' called Peckwoods."

He led and I followed into the damp, m6ss-
scented shadows of the swamp, under cypress
and live-oak and through slender fringes of
cane. We floundered across the coffee-colored
stream, the water cooling my india-rubber
wading-boots above the knees, climbed over
great walls of fallen tree-boles, crept under
low-hanging festoons of wild vines, and at
length found ourselves wading rather more
than ankle-deep in one of those shallow
cypress lakes of which the larger part of the
Okefenokee region is formed. I thought it a
very long half-mile before we reached a small
tussock whereon grew, in the midst of a dense
underbrush thicket, some enormous pine
trees.

" Ther'," said the guide, " thet air snag air
the one. Sorter on ter tother side ye'll see
the hole, 'bout twenty foot up. Kern yer, I'll
show hit ter ye."

The "snag" was 'a stump some fifty feet
tall, barkless, smooth, almost as white as chalk,
the decaying remnant of what had once, been
the grandest pine on the tussock.

A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 25

" Hello, yer' ! Hit's ben to work some more
sence I wer' yer' las' time. Hit air done dug
another hole ! "

As he spoke he pointed indicatively, with
his long, knotty forefinger. I looked and saw
two large round cavities, not unlike immense
auger-holes, running darkly into the polished
surface of the stump, one about six feet below
the other ; the lower twenty-five feet above the
ground. Surely it was no very striking pict
ure, this bare, weather-whitened column, with
its splintered top and its two orifices, and yet
I do not think it was a weakness for me to
feel a thrill of delight as I gazed at it. How
long and how diligently I had sought the home
of Campephilus printipalis, the great king of
the red-headed family, and at last I stood be
fore its door !

At my request, the kind Cracker now left
me alone to prosecute my observations.

" Be in ter dinner ? " he inquired as he
turned to go.

" No ; supper," I responded.
"Well, tek cyare ev yerself," and off he
went into the thickest part of the cypress.

I waited awhile for the solitude to regain its
equilibrium after the slashing tread of my
friend had passed out of hearing ; then I stole
softly to the stump, and tapped on it with the
handle of my knife. This I repeated several
times. Campephilus was not at home, for if he
had been I should have seen a long, strong,
ivory-white beak thrust out of the hole up
there, followed by a great red-crested head
turned sidewise so as to let fall upon me the
glint of an iris unequalled by that of any other
bird in the world. He had gone out early. I

26 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD- NO TES.

should have to wait and watch , but first I sat
isfied myself by a simple method that my
watching would probably not be in vain. A
little examination of the ground at the base of
the stump showed me a quantity of fresh wood-
fragments, not unlike very coarse saw-dust
scattered over the surface. This assured me
that one of the excavations above was a new
one, and that a nest was either building or had
been finished but a short while. So I hastily
hid myself on a log in a clump of bushes, dis
tant from the stump about fifty feet, whence I
could plainly see the holes.

One who has never been out alone in a
Southern swamp can have no fair understand
ing of its loneliness, solemnity and funereal
sadness of effect. Even in the first gush of
Spring — it was now about the sixth of April —
I felt the weight of something like eternity in
the air — not the eternity of the future but the
eternity of the past. Everything around me
appeared old, sleepy, and musty, despite the
fresh buds, tassels, and flower-spikes. What
can express dreariness so effectually as the
long moss of those damp woods ? I imagined
that the few little birds I saw flitting here and
there in the tree tops were not so noisy and
joyous as they would be when, a month later,
their northward migration should bring them
into our greening northern woods. As the
sun mounted, however, a cheerful twitter ran
with the gentle breeze through the bay thickets
and magnolia clumps, and I recognized a
number of familiar voices ; then suddenly the
gavel of Campephilus sounded sharp and
strong a quarter-mile away. A few measured
raps, followed by a rattling drum-call, a space

A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 27

of silence rimmed with receding echoes, and
then a trumpet-note, high, full, vigorous, al
most startling, cut the air with a sort of broad
sword sweep. Again the long-roll answered,
from a point nearer me, by two or three ham
mer-like raps on the resonant branch of some
dead cypress-tree. The king and queen were
coming to their palace. I waited patiently,
knowing that it was far beyond my power to
hurry their movements. It was not long be
fore one of the birds, with a rapid cackling
that made the wood rattle, came over my head,
and went straight to the stump, where it lit,
just below the lower hole, clinging gracefully
to the trunk. It was a superb specimen — the
female, and I suspected that she had come to
leave an egg. I could have killed her easily
with the little sixteen-gauge breech-loader at
my side, but I would not have done the act
for all the stuffed birds in the country. I had
come as a visitor to this palace, with the hope
of making the acquaintance I had so long de
sired, and not as an assassin. She was quite
unaware of me, and so behaved naturally, her
large gold-amber eyes glaring with that wild
sincerity of expression seen in the eyes of but
few savage things.

After a little while the male came bounding
through the air, with that vigorous galloping
flight common to all our woodpeckers, and lit
on a fragmentary projection at the top of the
stump. He showed larger than his mate, and
his aspect was more fierce, almost savage.
The green-black feathers near his shoulders,
the snow-white lines down his neck, and the
tall red crest on his head, all shone with great
brilliancy, whilst his ivory beak gleamed like a

28 B Y- WA KS" AND BIRD-NOTES.

dagger. He soon settled for me a question
which had long been in my mind. With two
or three light preliminary taps on a hard heart-
pine splinter, he proceeded to beat the regular
woodpecker drum-call— that long rolling rattle
made familiar to us all by the common red
head (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) and our
other smaller woodpeckers. This peculiar
call is not, in my opinion, the result of elasticity
or springiness in the wood upon which it is
performed, but is effected by a rapid, spas
modic motion of the bird's head, imparted by a
voluntary muscular action. I have seen the
common Red-head make a soundless call on a
fence-stake where the decaying wood was
scarcely hard enough to prevent the full en
trance of his beak. His head went through
the same rapid vibration, but no sound accom
panied the performance. ' Still, it is resonance
in the wood that the bird desires, and it keeps
trying until a good sounding-board is found.

It was very satisfying to me when the superb
King of the Woodpeckers— //<; noir a bee blanc,
as the great French naturalist named it — went
over the call, time after time, with grand effect,
letting go, between trials, one or two of his
triumphant trumpet-notes. Hitherto I had
not seen the Campephilus do this, though I
had often heard what I supposed to be the call.
As I crouched in my hiding-place and furtively
watched the proceedings, I remember compar
ing the birds and their dwelling to some half-
savage lord and lady and their isolated castle
of medieval days. A twelfth-century bandit
nobleman might have gloried in trigging him
self in such apparel as my ivory-billed wood
pecker wore. What a perfect athlete he ap-

A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 29

peared to be, as he braced himself for an ef
fort which was to generate a force sufficient to
hurl his heavy head and beak back and forth
at a speed of about twenty-eight strokes to
the second !

All of our woodpeckers, pure and simple —
that is, all of the species in which the wood
pecker character has been preserved almost
unmodified — have exceedingly muscular heads
and strikingly constricted necks ; their beaks
are nearly straight, wedge-shaped, fluted or
ribbed on the upper mandible, and their nos
trils are protected by hairy or feathery tufts.
Their legs are strangely short in appearance,
but are exactly adapted to their need, and their
tail-feathers are tipped with stiff points. These
features are all fully developed in the Campe-
philus principalis, the bill especially showing a
size, strength and symmetrical beauty truly
wonderful.

The stiff pointed tail-feathers of the wood
pecker serve the bird a turn which I have
never seen noted by any ornithologist. When
the bird must strike a hard blow with its bill,
it does not depend solely upon its neck and
head ; but, bracing the points of its tail-feath
ers against the tree, and rising to the full
length of its short, powerful legs, and drawing
back its body, head, and neck to the farthest
extent, it dashes its bill home with all the
force of its entire bodily weight and muscle. I
have seen the ivory-bill, striking thus, burst
off from almost flinty-hard dead trees frag
ments of wood half as large as my hand ; and
once in the Cherokee hills of Georgia I watched
a pileated woodpecker (Hylotomus pileatus) dig
a hole to the very heart of an exceedingly

30 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

tough, green, mountain hickory tree, in order
to reach a nest of winged ants. The point of
ingress of the insects was a small hole in a
punk knot ; but the bird, by hopping down the
tree tail-foremost and listening, located the
nest about five feet below, and there it pro
ceeded to bore through the gnarled, cross-
grained wood to the hollow.

Of all our wild American birds, I have
studied no other one which combines all of the
elements of wildness so perfectly in its char
acter as does the ivory-billed woodpecker. It
has no trace whatever in its nature of what
may be called a tamable tendency. Savage
liberty is a prerequisite of its existence, and its
home is the depths of the woods, remotest
from the activities of civilized man. It is a
rare bird, even in the most favorable regions,
and it is almost impossible to get specimens of
its eggs. Indeed, I doubt if there are a dozen
cabinets in all the world containing these eggs ;
but they are almost exactly similar in size,
color and shape to those of Hylotomus pileatus,
the only difference being that the latter are,
upon close examination, found to be a little
shorter, and, as I have imagined, a shade less
semi-transparent porcelain-white, if I may so
express it.

The visit of my birds to their home in the
stump lasted nearly two hours. The female
went into and out of the hole several times
before she finally settled herself, as I suppose,
on her nest. When she came forth at the end
of thirty or forty minutes, she appeared ex
ceedingly happy, cackling in a low, harsh,
but rather wheedling voice, and evidently
anxious to attract the attention of the male,

A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 31

who in turn treated her with lofty contempt.
To him the question of a new egg was not
worth considering. But when she at last
turned away from him, and mounting into the
air, galloped off into the solemn gloom of the
cypress wood, he followed her, trumpeting at
the top of his voice.

Day after day I returned to my hiding-place
to renew my observation, and, excepting a
visitation of mosquitoes now and then, noth
ing occurred to mar my enjoyment. As the
weather grew warmer the flowers and leaves
came on apace, and the swamp became a vast
wilderness of perfume and contrasting colors.
Bird songs from migrating warblers, vireos,
finches and other happy sojourners for a day
(or mayhap they were all nesting there, I can
not say, for I had larger fish to fry), shook the
wide silence into sudden resonance. Along
the sluggish little stream between the cane-
brakes, the hermit-thrush and the cat-bird were
met by the green heron and the belted king
fisher. The snake-bird, too, that veritable
water-dragon of the South, was there, wrig
gling and squirming in the amber-brown pools
amongst the lily-pads and lettuce.

At last, one morning, my woodpeckers dis
covered me in my hiding-place ; and that was
the end of all intimacy between us. Thence
forth my observations were few and at a long
distance. No amount of cunning could serve
me any turn. Go as early as I might, and hide
as securely as I could, those great yellow eyes
quickly espied me, and then there would be a
rapid and long flight away into the thickest
and most difficult part of the swamp.

I confess that it was with no little debate

32 BY-WAYS A ND BIRD-NO TES.

that I reached the determination that it was
my duty to rob that nest in the interest of
knowledge. It was the first opportunity I ever
had had to examine an occupied nest of the
Campephilus printipalis, and I felt that it was
scarcely probable that I should ever again be
favored with such a chance. With the aid of
my Cracker host, I erected a rude ladder and
climbed up into the hole. It was almost
exactly circular, and nearly five inches in di
ameter. With a little axe I began break
ing and hacking away the crust of hard outer
wood. The cavity descended with a slightly
spiral course, widening a little as it proceeded.
I had followed it nearly five feet when I found
a place where it was contracted again, and im
mediately below was a sudden expansion, at
the bottom of which was the nest. Five
beautiful pure white eggs of the finest old-
china appearance, delicate, almost transparent,
exceedingly fragile, and, to the eyes of a
collector, vastly valuable, lay in a shallow
bowl of fine chips. But in breaking away the
last piece of wood-crust, I jerked it a little too
hard, and those much coveted prizes rolled out
and fell to the ground. Of course they were
" hopelessly crushed," and my feelings with
them. I would willingly have fallen in their
stead, if the risk could have saved the eggs.
I descended ruefully enough, hearing as I did
so the loud cry of Campephilus battling around
in the jungle. Once or twice more I went
back to the spot in early morning, but my
birds did not appear. I made minute exami
nation of the rifled nest, and also tore out the
other excavation, so as to compare the two.
They were very much alike, especially in the

A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 33

jug-shape of their lower ends. From a care
ful study of all the holes (apparently made by
Campephilus) that I have been able to find
and reach in either standing or fallen trees, I
am led to believe that this jug-shape is pecul
iar to the ivory-bill's architecture, as I have
never found it in the excavations of other
species, save where the form was evidently the
result of accident. The depth of the hole
varies from three to seven feet, as a rule, but I
found one that was nearly nine feet deep and
another that was less than two. Our smaller
woodpeckers, including Hylotomus pileatus,
usually make their excavations in the shape of
a gradually widening pocket, of which the en
trance is the narrowest part.

It is curious to note that — beginning with the
ivory-bill and coming down the line of species
in the scale of size — we find the red mark on
the head rapidly falling away from a grand
scarlet crest some inches in height to a mere
touch of carmine, or dragon's blood, on crown,
nape, cheek, or chin. The lofty and brilliant
head-plume of the ivory-bill, his powerful beak,
his semi-circular claws and his perfectly spiked
tail, as well as his superiority of size and
strength, indicate that he is what he is, the
original type of the woodpecker, and the one
pure species left to us in America. He is the
only woodpecker which eats insects and larvae
(dug out of rotten wood) exclusively. Neither
the sweetest fruits nor the oiliest grains can
tempt him to depart one line from his heredit
ary habit. He accepts no gifts from man, and
asks no favors. But the pileated woodpecker,
just one remove lower in the scale of size,
strength, and beauty, shows a little tendency

a

34 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES.

towards a grain and fruit diet, and it also often
descends to old logs and fallen boughs for its
food — a thing never thought of by the ivory-
bill. As for the rest of the red-headed family,
they are degenerate species, though lively,
clever, and exceedingly interesting. What a
sad dwarf the little downy woodpecker is when
compared with the ivory-bill! and yet to my
mind it is clear that Picus pubescens is the de
generate off-shoot from the grand campephilus
trunk.

Our red-headed woodpecker (M. erythro-
cephalus) is a genuine American in every sense.
a plausible, querulous, aggressive, enterpris
ing, crafty fellow, who tries every mode of get
ting a livelihood, and always with success. He
is a woodpecker, a nut-eater, a cider-taster, a
judge of good fruits, a connoisseur of corn,
wheat, and melons, and an expert fly-catcher as
well. As if to correspond with his versatility
of habit, his plumage is divided into four reg
ular masses of color. His head and neck are
crimson, his back, down to secondaries, a
brilliant black, tinged with green or blue in
the gloss ; then comes a broad girdle of pure
white, followed by a mass of black at the tail
and wing-tips. He readily adapts himself to
the exigencies of civilized life. I prophecy
that, within less than a hundred years to come,
he will be making his nest on the ground, in
hedges or in the crotches of orchard trees.
Already he has begun to push his way out into
our smaller Western prairies, where there is no
dead timber for him to make his nest-holes in.
I found a compromise-nest between two fence-
rails in Illinois, which was probably a fair index
of the future habit of the red-head. It was

A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 35

formed by pecking away the inner sides of two
vertical parallel rails, just above a horizontal
one, upon which, in a cup of pulverized wood,
the eggs were laid. This was in the prairie
country between two vast fields of Indian corn.
The power of sight exhibited by the red
headed woodpecker is quite amazing. I have
seen the bird, in the early twilight of a summer
evening, start from the highest spire of a very
tall tree, and fly a hundred yards straight to an
insect near the ground. He catches flies on
the wing with as deft a turn as does the great-
crested fly-catcher. It is not my purpose to
offer any ornithological theories, in this pa
per ; but I cannot help remarking that the far
ther a species of woodpecker departs from the
feeding-habit of the ivory-bill, the more broken
up are its color-masses, and the more diffused
or degenerate becomes the typical red tuft on
the head. The golden-winged woodpecker
(Colaptes auratus), for instance, feeds much on
the ground, eating earth-worms, seeds, beetles,
etc. ; and we find him taking on the colors of
the ground-birds with a large loss of the char
acteristic woodpecker arrangement of plumage
and color-masses. He looks much more like
a meadow-lark than like an ivory-bill ! The
red appears in a delicate crescent, barely no
ticeable on the back of the head, and its bill
is slender, curved, and quite unfit for hard
pecking. On the other hand, the downy
woodpecker, and the hairy woodpecker, having
kept well in the line of the typical feeding
habit, though seeking their food in places be
neath the notice of their great progenitor,
have preserved in a marked degree an outline
of the ivory-bill's color-masses, degenerate

36 B Y- WA YS AND ^IRD-NO TES.

though they are. The dwarfish, insignificant
looking Picus pubescens pecking away at the
stem of a dead iron-weed to get the minute
larvae that may be imbedded in the pith, when
compared with Campephilus principalis drum
ming on the bole of a giant cypress-tree, is
like a Digger Indian when catalogued in a col
umn with men like Goethe and Gladstone,
Napoleon and Lincoln.

I have been informed that the ivory-bill is
occasionally found in the Ohio valley ; but I
have never been able to discover it north of
the Cumberland range of mountains. It is a
swamp bird, or rather it is the bird of the high
timber that grows in low wet soil. Its princi
pal food is a large flat-headed timber-worm
known in the South as borer or saw-worm,
which it discovers by ear and reaches by dili
gent and tremendously effective pecking. A
Cracker deer-stalker, whom I met at Black-
shear, Georgia, gave an amusing account of an
experience he had had in the swamps. He
said :

" I had turned in late, and got to sleep on
a tussock under a big pine, an' slep' tell sun
up. Wull, es ther' I laid flat er my back an'
er snorin' away, kerwhack sumpen tuck me
in the face an' eyes, jes' like spankin' er
baby, an' I wuk up with ergret chunk er wood
ercross my nose, an' er blame ole woodcock
jest er whangin' erway up in thet pine. My
nose hit bled an' bled, an' I hed er good mint
er shoot thet air bird, but I cudn't stan' the
expense er the thing. Powder'n' lead air
mighty costive. Anyhow I don't s'pose 'at
the ole woodcock knowed at hit'd drapped thet
air fraygment onto me. Ef hit'd er 'peared

A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 37

like's ef hit wer' 'joyin' the joke any, I wud er
shot hit all ter pieces ef I'd er hed ter lived
on turpentime all winter ! "

Of the American woodpecker there are more
than thirty varieties, I believe, nearly every
one of which bears some trace of the grand
scarlet crown of the great ivory-billed king of
them all. The question arises — and I shall
not attempt to answer it — whether the ivory-
bill is an example of the highest development,
from the downy woodpecker, say, or whether
all these inferior species and varieties are the
result of degeneracy? Neither Darwin nor
Wallace has given us the key that certainly
unlocks this very interesting mystery.

The sap-drinking woodpeckers (Sphyropicus),
of which there are three or four varieties in
this country, appear to form the link between
the fruit-eating and the non-fruit-eating species
of the red-headed family. From sipping the
sap of the sugar-maple to testing the flavor of
a cherry, a service-berry, or a haw-apple, is a
short and delightfully natural step. How logi
cal, too, for a bird, when once it has acquired
the fruit-eating habit, to quit delving in the
hard green wood for a nectar so much inferior
to that which may be had ready bottled in the
skins of apples, grapes, and berries ! In ac
cordance with this rule, M. erythrocephalus
and Centurus carolinus, though great tipplers,
are too lazy or too wise to bore the maples,
preferring to sit on the edge of a sugar-trough,
furtively drinking therefrom leisurely draughts
of the saccharine blood of the ready-tapped
trees. I have seen them with their bills
stained purple to the nostrils with the rich
juice of the blackberry, and they quarrel

38 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD- NO TES.

from morning till night over the ripest June-
apples and reddest cherries, their noise mak
ing a Bedlam of the fairest country orchard.

The woodpecker family is scattered widely
in our country. In the West Canadian woods
one meets, besides a number of the commoner
species, Lewis' woodpecker, a large, beautiful,
and rare bird. The California species include
the Nuttall, the Harris, the Cape St. Lucas, the
white-headed, and several other varieties, all
showing more or less kinship to the ivory-bill.
Lewis's woodpecker shows almost entirely
black, its plumage giving forth a strong green
ish or bluish lustre. The red on its head is
softened down to a fine rose-carmine. It is
a wild, wary bird, flying high, combining in
its habits the traits of both Hylotomus pikatus
and Campephilus principalis.

In concluding this paper a general descrip
tion of the male ivory-bill may prove accept
able to those who may never be able to see
even a stuffed specimen of a bird which, taken
in every way, is, perhaps, the most interesting
and beautiful in America. In size 21 inches
long, and 33 in alar extent ; bill, ivory white,
beautifully fluted above, and two and a-half
inches long; head-tuft, or crest, long and
fine, of pure scarlet faced with black. Its
body-color is glossy blue-black, but down its
slender neck on each side, running from the
crest to the back, a pure white stripe contrasts
vividly with the scarlet and ebony. A mass
of white runs across the back when the wings
are closed, as in M. erythrocephalus, leaving the
wing-tips and tail black. Its feet are ash-
blue, its eyes amber-yellow. The female is
like the male, save that she has a black crest

A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 39

instead of the scarlet. I can think of nothing
in Nature more striking than the flash of color
this bird gives to the dreary swamp-landscape,
as it careers from tree to tree, or sits upon
some high skeleton cypress-branch and plies
its resounding blows. The species will prob
ably be extinct within a few years.*

* Since writing the foregoing, I have made several ex
cursions in search of the ivory-bill. Early in January,
1885, I killed a fine male specimen in a swamp near
Bay St. Louis, Mississippi ; but was prevented, by an
accident, from preserving it or making a sketch of it.

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS.
I.

IN the season of nest-building, which is also
the season of song-singing, the by-ways of
American rural districts offer many attractions
to the student of nature, and especially to the
student who hopes to turn his discoveries to
account in any field of art. Of mere descrip
tive matter, so far as it may go in literature,
and of mere conventionalization, so far as dec
orative drawing and painting are concerned,
the most that was ever possible has, probably,
already been done ; but the higher forms of art,
which we have agreed to call creative, must
get the germs of all new combinations from
the suggestions of nature. I often have
thought that even criticism in our country
would have more virility in it if the critics had
more time and more inclination to study nature
outside of cities and greenhouses. How can
Wordsworth be studied with true critical in
sight by one who but vaguely remembers the
outlines of the woods and fields, the shady
lanes, and the fine aerial effects of hilly land
scape ? When one with open eyes and ears
goes out into the unshorn ways of nature in the
creative season — spring — the fine fervor at
work in birds, and trees, and plants, in the air,
the earth, and the water, is so manifest that
one cannot doubt that some subtle element of
originality is easily obtainable therefrom by in
fection. Of course one must be susceptible to

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 41

the most delicate shades of influence in order
to get the values of nature. Even the photo
graph is to be caught on no plate save the most
sensitive.

The other day, when I told a friend that I
had discovered that the mocking-bird never
tries to imitate the cooing of a dove, he said,
"Why, every one knew that long ago." —
" Show me the record," I demanded ; but he
could not. "Well, what good can come of
your discovery, even if you are entitled to the
credit ? " he rather triumphantly asked. I
answered that the fact was suggestive ; that it
had an artistic value. A mournful, desponding
voice is never attractive to a vigorous, healthy
nature. Cheerfulness and enthusiasm are
what win followers for birds as well as men.
The mocking-bird is a genius who catches from
nature all its available notes, and combines
them so as to express the last possibility of
bird-song, rejecting the moaning of the dove
and the thumping notes of the yellow-billed
cuckoo, just as the true poet rejects thoughts
and words unworthy of his lay.

It is true that, as the times go, the artist is
called upon to please a vitiated taste. The
poet and the novelist must meet the demands
of the schools and coteries. The precious
hints and suggestions caught from the provin
cial lanes and wood-paths are not considered
favorable by the metropolitan, as a rule ; but
out of these must grow, as the plant from the
seed, the living, lasting values of all art. City
study is book study, through which the truths
and beauties of nature are seen at a distance,
as if through a very delusive atmosphere. To
test this take your books into the woods of

42 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES,

spring, beside a brook, and see how many of
them will bear reading in the light and pres
ence of nature. How tasteless become the
polished bits of conventional art when we at
tempt to enjoy them in the open air, where the
violets grow, and the wild vine hangs its fes
toons !

There is another test of the force and vital
ity of nature's suggestions known to every ob
servant artist. For instance, a sketch of some
out-door scene, made on the spot, will appear
to have scarcely any value so long as it can be
readily compared with the original; but no
sooner is the portfolio opened in the studio
than the sketch discloses, in a marked degree,
many of the subtlest beauties or peculiarities
of the living scene. How different in the case
of a sketch made from the flat ! How diluted
the power of nature becomes !

I was once enjoying a luncheon with a gay
sylvan party, when the earth served as table
and a sward of blue-grass as table-cloth. A
lady who gloried in her collection of rare hand-
painted china was serving tea to us in cups
worth more than their weight in gold ; and yet
when one of these chanced to be set down in
the midst of a tuft of wild violets it was so
dulled by contrast with the living blooms that
it really appeared coarse and crude. To study
nature is the surest way to a knowledge of
what art ought to be. Nature is the standard.
I have little respect for the judgment of the
critic who measures one man's work by that of
another. The main question, when any art
work is to be critically considered should be,
Has it the symmetry, force, and vital beauty
of nature ?

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 43

It is easy to write about nature ; but to write
in the spirit of nature, to keep within the limit
of her rules, is not so easy. So to copy all the
salient features of a landscape is within the
power of any painter, but how few can get their
brushes to spill upon the canvas even a modi
cum of what we all may see in the sky, and
sea, and shore ! Greening hedgerows, and
blooming orchards, the songs of the cat-bird
and brown thrush, always have something new
in them. We never see or hear them twice
from the same point of observation. The
brook's voice has an infinite variety of tones.
The sunlight and the cloud shadows are con
tinually changing. And so if one can hoard
up the impressions made by the thousand pass
ing moods of spring, they will prove richly
suggestive when reviewed in the quiet of the
study. The fine mass of such impressions will
be found afresh and fragrant matrix, enclosing
the perfect crystals of original thought. If it
is true that one grows like what one contem
plates nothing but good can come of lonely
rambles with nature, and especially in the sea
son of quickening germs and tender impulses.

Those who assert that there is nothing espe
cially picturesque or strikingly interesting in
our rural scenery seem to me deficient either
in judgment or in the power of observing
closely. The fact is, it is hard for the profes
sional artist or literary man to cut loose from
an hereditary old-country taint. The far-away,
the dim, the old in literature and art are
shrouded in the blue enchantment that hovers
so tantalizingly on all heights. Standing on
one mountain-top we look to another longingly ;
reclining on one bank of a river we dream of

44 BY- IV A YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

the joy awaiting us on the other. It is, in
other words, apparently almost impossible for
Americans to fully recognize and appreciate
the richness of " local color " everywhere of
fered at home. If we knew our country as well
as the English know theirs we should have a
stronger vital energy in our literature and art.
Of course we lack that long perspective and rich
historical atmosphere belonging to old coun
tries, but as a nation we are just at that age
when our genius should find its note. Our
highways are reasonably good, our lanes and
by-ways are inviting, our people are hospitable
and communicative. There is no good reason
why some tourists, of a more interesting sort
than tax-gatherers and lightning-rod peddlers,
should not explore the pastoral districts where
the richest materials for poetry, romance, and
art may be had for the taking.

Rummaging the remote nooks of literature —
the pages of Chaucer and Spenser, and Izaak
Walton and Roger Ascham, or Francois Villon
and Marot and Ronsard, is very pleasing and
profitable ; but the living, budding, redolent,
and resonant by-ways of our own neighborhoods
offer a richer reward. There are moments
when there are a fragrance and savor, so to
speak, in the song of a plough-boy heard across
the fresh-turned fields. One pauses by the
fence or hedge-row to enjoy what no book or
picture can quite give. A breath of perfume
from the blooming top of a wild crab-apple tree,
along with the hum of the bees at work there,
is a poem much older than any bal^de or trio
let, and fresher and sweeter than any song of
troubadour or any idyl of Greek lyrist. What
matters it whether one walks, or rides a tri-

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 45

cycle, or spins noiselessly along on a bicycle,
so that one keeps one's eyes and ears open ?
If the body is to be refreshed and strengthened
by exercise, why not also take pains to recreate
the mind by filling the memory with pungent
and healthful data ? A cool draught from a
country way-side spring, where the calamus
grows, and the little platoons of sky-blue butter
flies arrange themselves on the damp spots,
might well inspire an ode as good as any Ana-
creon ever drew from the purple grape-juice.
The first dragon-fly of the season is always a
happy discovery for me.

I know where Longfellow got the sugges
tions for his Flower de Luce, the fresher stanzas,
at least ; for the dew of morning, brushed from
brook-side flags and meadow weeds, is in them.
The poem is bookish, too, showing the scholar
a little too plainly, perhaps ; but it serves -to
urge a current of out-door air over one as one
reads, and the sound of the mill-flume is in the
measure. It is always a charming junction
where ripe scholarship and an accurate and
loving knowledge of nature flow together.
From that point onward how the imagination
is enriched !

The poems of Theocritus and the song of
the cardinal-bird are blended together, and
something new comes of the mixture. I like to
follow through a racy poem or essay some elu
sive, fascinating trace of the author's recipe.
It is never quite hidden.

The impetus given to out-door rambling by
the advent of cycling must, it seems to me,
bring some fresh elements into American
thought. It will, unless we allow the love of
mere whirling to shut out everything else. I

46 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

have found a tricycle the most helpful and en
joyable thing in exploring the by-ways and
high-ways of my neighborhood. It has helped
me to see things that I might not have discov
ered had I been on foot, and it has awakened
sensations never before experienced by me.
The mere joy in self-propulsion seems to
sharpen one's vision, and strengthen one's re
ceptive faculties. I like to stop and sit in the
saddle, and peep between the rails of a fence,
letting my eyes follow the fresh green rows of
young Indian corn that reach far across the
level field of dark loam. From the same po
sition I can make such notes and sketches as
will be of use to me in the future. Charming
physical exercise and pleasing study combined
make up about the most desirable of all com
pounds. When I am tired of pedalling I can
stop in the shade of a way-side tree and draw
forth a book to read, or I can watch the effect
of cloud-shadows and wind-flaws on the rank
green wheat. Meadow-larks and blue-birds
preen themselves on the fence-stakes, field-
sparrows sing in the young oats, yonder or
chard rings with the medley of the cat-bird.
Here is a good place to test the qualities of a
book as an out-door companion. One can find
out how its pages will accord with certain
phases of nature, so to speak. Ten to one what
had seemed quite perfect, read in the atmos
phere of the library, will fall off to a mere skel
eton in the open air. I have found that,
strange as it may seem, the poems of Burns
lose something by out-door reading, whilst cer
tain passages of Tennyson, Browning, and
Emerson reach out and gather an increment of
freshness from pastoral surroundings. The

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 47

humorists, as a rule, require to be read within
the limitations of four walls. Nature is always
in earnest.

A novel that will bear the sunlight and the
winds and the bird-songs may be put down as
a thoroughly good one. Short, crisp stories,
not too tragic, having strong local color and
bright conversations, stand this test very well.
Our magazines often fall into the error of
printing, during the out-door season, light
society stories of city life ; these fade into col
orless and tasteless films when read on the
beach, or in the open country. I sometimes
read French novels out-of-doors, merely for the
antiseptic effect that the sun and air have on
the offensive passages ; but at best I often find
myself glad that American birds and flowers do
not understand French.

We Americans are too fast with whatever
we undertake. Our horses must trot "below
fifteen," our yachts must go like a hurricane ;
and when we ride bicycles or tricycles we must
run a hundred miles in the shortest possible
space of time. Now, a tourist who hopes to see
anything or hear anything worth remembering
must go slowly over his ground, with many
stops and with all sorts of detours. One never
can foreknow what odd and interesting things
may be discovered tucked away in unfre
quented nooks. I have experienced many
pleasing surprises in the way of valuable
information drawn from most unpromising
sources. Such rich dialect phrases, too, and
such rare, quaint traits of character, disclose
themselves ! How marvellously weatherwise
some of the country folk are, and what keen
observers of nature ! On the other hand, they

48 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

have such queer " notions " about signs and
omens. For instance, the well-known guttural
croaking of the yellow-billed cuckoo is, in the
West and South generally believed to presage
rain ; hence the bird is known amongst the
rural people by the name of rain-crow.

I remember with what solemn earnestness
an old man once heaped maledictions on a
cuckoo. It was in the midst of a distressing
drought, and the bird was mournfully uttering
its notes in an orchard. "There's thet air
dad-blasted rain crow a-bellerin' down ther'
ag'in" he cried, savagely wagging his head.
" Ef I hed a gun I'd blow it inter thunder V
gone. Ever'thin' a-burnin' up an' the crick a-
goin' dry an' thet air lyin' rain-crow jest
a-yowkin' an' yowkin', es ef a flood wer' a-
comin' in less an' fifteen minutes — blast its
pictur' ! "

Speaking of the yellow-billed cuckoo, it is
one of the most interesting of our American
birds, — a late comer to our Northern woods,
where about the middle of May it begins a
shy, shadowy pilgrimage from tree to tree,
peering furtively among the tufts of young
leaves, as if bent on some errand of mystery.
It is a slender, graceful figure, with a dispro
portionately long tail and a slim, slightly curved
bill, which is almost black above and yellow
below ; its back is drab ; its under parts a pure
silvery-white, and its tail dark, tipped with
snow-white. You may know it by its peculiar
zigzag flight, and by its cry, " Kaow, Kaow"
etc., repeated slowly at first, then increasing in
rapidity to a rattling or pounding croak, and
finally ending laggingly as it began. It has all

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 49

the most interesting habits of the English
cuckoo.

I am aware that naturalists have stoutly
claimed that our yellow-bill never lays its eggs
in other birds' nests , but I have the evidence
of my own eyes to the contrary. I was plying
a country lad with questions touching the birds
and nests of his neighborhood, when he in
formed me that a robin and a rain-crow had a
nest " in cahoot " * in an apple-tree just across
a lane from where we stood. Of course I was
anxious to see that nest at once. It was built
in the usual robin fashion, stacked up in a low
crotch of the tree, and contained three robin
eggs and one cuckoo egg. This was a num
ber of years ago.; but so late as the spring of
1883 I found a cuckoo's egg in the nest of a
blue-jay. In the mountain region of North
Georgia, where the yellow-bill nests among the
haw thickets, I have seen it carrying its egg in
its mouth, no doubt with the purpose of deposit
ing it in the care of some other bird. Wher
ever I have gone I have heard this cuckoo
charged with eating the eggs of other birds;
but I believe the charge has no better founda
tion than the mistake of observers, who, seeing
it with its own egg in its mouth, naturally sup
pose that it has been robbing some neighbor-
bird's nest. My opinion is, that by the time
our country shall have reached the age of the
England of to-day our cuckoos will have be
come confirmed in all the habits of the Euro
pean species. At best the bird is very indif
ferent to nest-building, and its natural bent is
towards entirely evading the reponsibility.

* " In cahoot " is a common Western and Southern
phrase for in partnership.
4

50 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES.

Its architectural powers are of the poorest.
No other of our arboreal birds, not even the
common dove, builds so crazy and insecure a
home. But I am getting into rather deep or
nithological mire. It is so easy to find room
for digression when one gets out-of-doors !
Everything is suggestive. To the vision of a
careful observer and student each object in na
ture has an interrogation-point beside it. With
pencil and note-book let us catalogue these
suggestions and interrogations, and lay them
aside for future use. When, some day, we
come to look them over we shall be surprised
how perfectly — like dried roots and plants —
they have kept their out-door fragrance and
taste.

II.

In studying the birds most usually met with
on out-door excursions I have found it very in
teresting to make notes of certain striking evi
dences of a special harmonic relation between
their movements, colors, and attitudes, and
the peculiarities of their natural surroundings.

Ornithologists have over and over again
rung the changes on the ease with which the
quail, the grouse, and the hare make them
selves next to invisible to the human eye, and
to the piercing vision of birds cff prey as well ;
but there are many curious details connected
with this subject of a natural harmony of mo
tion and color, regarding birds and their envi
ronments, which I have never seen in print.
Of course, since the quail, the hare, and the
grouse have been for so long the objects of
desire of sportsmen, pot-hunters, and epicures,

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 51

as well as of careful study by naturalists, their
peculiarities have all been catalogued, and
every intelligent person knows that a hare, by
crouching flat on a dry gray spot of earth, so
blends with its surroundings as to become
almost undistinguishable, and that a quail, sit
ting in a handful of dry brown leaves is as
effectually hidden as if buried. So a grouse
among the tangled twigs of a bare winter tree
is a very difficult object to discover. A mead
ow-lark, in a sunny clover-field, melts, so to
speak, into the general confusion of brown,
green, and gold, so that it becomes indeed a
" sightless song." The humming-bird makes
its nest of lichen, and places it in a tuft of the
same on some wrinkled bough, usually at or
near a crotch ; and the little bird, while on the
nest, is so in harmony with its surroundings
that none but the keenest eye would distin
guish her from one of the little ruffled knots
on the bark beside her. The whippoorwill
builds no nest. Its eggs are deposited-on the
ground at a place where the bird's colors and
those of her eggs perfectly harmonize with the
general tone of their surroundings. I have
known this bird to roll her eggs from spot to
spot while incubating, evidently for the pur
pose of keeping them and herself within a
proper entourage, this being her only means of
protection from hawks, owls, and other ene
mies. The common dove places its shallow,
ill-made nest in what appear to be the most
exposed places, but the bluish ash-gray color
of the bird's plumage runs so evenly into the
tone of its surroundings that one might look
in vain for any sign of a living thing in the

52 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

midst of that apparently flat wash of drab neu
tral.

That hawks and owls have powerful and
far-seeing eyes cannot be doubted ; but they
either lack a fine power of discrimination in
vision, or this adaptation of the colors and
markings of birds to their surroundings is
very effectual, else these birds of prey exhibit
a wonderful forbearance toward their natural
victims during the season of incubation. I
am inclined to the opinion that hawks are
what might be called "far-sighted," and that
their vision at very short distances is not very
clear. I once saw a goshawk pursuing a
downy woodpecker, when the latter darted
through a tuft of foliage and flattened itself
close upon the body of a thick oak bough,
where it remained as motionless as the bark
itself. The hawk alighted on the same bough
within two feet of its intended victim, and re
mained sitting there for some minutes, evi
dently looking in vain for it, with nothing but
thin air between monster and morsel. The
woodpecker was stretched longitudinally on
the bough, its tail and beak close to the bark,
its black and white speckled feathers looking
like a continuation of the wrinkles and lichen.
No doubt those were moments of awful sus
pense for the little- fellow; but its ruse suc
ceeded, and the hawk flew away to try some
other tidbit. If the woodpecker had stopped
amongst the green leaves, the hawk would
have discovered it instantly.

I have noticed that the cardinal-grosbeak and
the blue-jay are more often killed by hawks
than are the other common birds of our woods ;
and I attribute the fact to their brilliant plu-

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS 53

mage. The blue-jays are aware of their dan
ger, and resort to mob-law whenever a hawk or
owl is discovered. I have seen a hundred
blue-jays bonded together and worrying one
little screech-owl. The grosbeaks protect
themselves as best they can by keeping well
within thickets and thorny close-topped trees.

Along our rivers and brooks live a great
many aquatic and semi-aquatic birds, whose
traits and peculiar characteristics seem not to
have been very closely noted by our natural
ists.

I have mentioned the motions and attitudes
of birds as partaking of the general tone of
their surroundings. This is particularly ob
servable in the herons, sand-pipers, plovers,
bitterns, and many shore birds. The motion
less, dreamy appearance of the heron as it
stands in the edge of a still gray pool of water
is in perfect keeping with all the features and ac
cessories of a tarn. So the wavering, tilting
motion of the little sand-pipers accords harmo
niously with the rippling surface of running
water. So accentuated is this light see-saw
movement of one of the lesser sand-pipers,
that the bird is called "teeter-snipe" by the coun
try folk. The kill-deer plover, common in our
damp meadows and fallow lands, has a way of
running in the low grass and stubble that ren
ders it very hard to follow with the eye, and,
when it stops, its outlines are so shadowy and
so intimately blent with the gray-brown back
ground that one has to look sharply to dis
cover it. The little green heron of our brooks
and rivulets has a habit of sitting on old heaps
of drift-wood, where he looks for all the world
like an upright stick or piece of bark. When

54 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD -NO 7'ES.

standing in the water his colors shade off into
the greenish wash of the stream, and you rarely
see him, no matter how near him you may be,
before he springs into the air, and is away. I
once shot a fine specimen as it flew past me,
and it fell among some stones at a brook's
edge. Something attracted my eyes from the
spot where it fell, and when I turned again to
look for my bird I could not see it. I walked
round and round. I knew it had fallen quite
dead ; but what had become of it ? In fact it
lay there in plain view under my eyes ; but its
colors were so uniform with those of the
smooth, water-washed stones, amongst which
it had fallen, that I was full five minutes dis
covering it. Every sportsman has experienced
similar difficulty in looking for snipe and wood
cock after bringing them down.

The kingfisher's colors are, no doubt, of
great advantage to him in taking his prey from
the water. If he were red, instead of being
dashed over with all the blue and purple and
silver-gray, and liquid shadows of the brook
itself, he would not catch many fish. How
hard it must be for the minnows, as they dis
port in the dancing current, to see, through the
trembling medium, the sky-blue and silvery
markings of the bird sitting on a swaying
branch between them and the sky ! And how
easy it would be for the kingfisher to get all
the food he might desire if those little fish were
less of the color of the water in which they
swim. If quails were scarlet instead of mottled
brown, how soon the hawks would exterminate
them !

But there is another side to this subject of
which the poet and artist must take careful

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 55

note. Nature's tone is rarely loud, rarely over-
accentuated. The blue-jay in the orchard,
the cat-bird in the hedgerow, the kingfisher by
the brook, each is a key to a harmony. Na
ture, on the whole, suggests under-statement
and a reserve of color. Her contrasts are not
of the Rembrandt type ; her expressions do
not abound in adjectives. Gay, flaunting flow
ers and gorgeous birds are rare save in green
houses and cages. The suppressed power felt
in the solemn stillness of great woods is sug
gestive of that force which some men of few
words bear about with them.

I saw a simple picture of Nature's painting
once, which has returned to my memory again
and again, and if it could be put on a canvas
or fastened in a poem it would forever remain
a masterpiece of art. And yet it was nothing
but a green heron standing in the swift shallow
current of a brook with the diamond-bright
wavelets breaking around its slender legs and
a tuft of water-grass trembling beside it. I
was lying idly enough, at full length on the
brook's bank, so that beyond the bird, as I
gazed, opened a fairy-like landscape, over
which a gentle breeze was blowing with an
effect wholly indescribable, shaking tall flags
and tossing the dragon-flies about in the sun
shine. The whole effect was cooling and tran
quillizing, with a subtle hint in it of a land
somewhere just out of reach where one might
dream the lotos-dream forever.

Now, a good artist might have easily painted
the little scene so far as painting usually goes ;
but it would have required such genius as is
yet to be born to imprison in the sketch the
hint of what seemed to lie just beyond the

56 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES.

dreamy horizon. None but the most master
ful genius would have been able to keep up to
the sweet, quiet key of the coloring, and yet be
satisfied with the tender, wavering outlines and
the soft, transparent shadows. The liquid
tones of sound and color in the brook came so
harmoniously to my senses, along with the
motion of swaying flags and bubble-beaded
waves, that the graceful bird, seen through
half closed eyes, appeared to be a half-fanciful
embodiment of the spirit of calm delight, knee-
deep in some tide of enchantment or romance.
(Looking back over this last sentence I recog
nize its weakness, but must wilfully let it go,
for it comes very near expressing one phase of
the view.) Nature is rarely either flamboyant
or grisatre, but keeps well the golden mean.
But, to return to the motions of birds, how
perfectly in keeping with the broad expanse of
sky and the movements of the clouds is the
sailing of the great-winged hawks and vultures !
I have watched the swallow-tailed hawks of
the South sailing so high that they appeared to
be sliding against the sky. No labored move
ments there ; those wings were far above the
difficulties that beset our earth, and were
spread on heavenly tides. Even the obscene
turkey-buzzard, when it has reached a great
altitude, and is moving so smoothly and
dreamily between us and the empyrean, be
comes an object of respect ; we forget its vul
garity, as we do that of men who have mounted
on the wings of genius, bearing their depravi
ties into the rare atmosphere of exalted art.
The albatross, that prince of the sea-winds,
seems a part of the fleece-clouds and the sky.
The flamingoes, the pelicans, the gulls — all

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 57

the wild sea-fowl and shore-birds have some
thing of the ocean-swell and the surf-ripple in
their flight. I believe it is Dr. Holmes who
speaks of the

" Oriole floating like a flake of fire,"

but, true as the comparison is, the oriole, with
its sunshine and shadows, harmonizes perfectly
with the fresh greens and yellows of the young
spring leaves and tassels. How many of our
fly-catchers, finches, and warblers have a dash
of sap green and pale leaf-yellow, as if Nature
had purposely meant them for a part of her
general spring scheme of color ! Even the
bull-frog has the same marking as the tuft of
water-grass in which he sits ready for his head
long plunge into the pool. Need I remind the
experienced sportsman of the fact that a wood-
duck among the broad leaves and snowy
blooms of the water-lily is a thing almost im
possible to see although in plain view ? The
beautiful bird's white and gray and purplish
markings blend easily with the water-gleams,
and leaf-shimmer, and pure white flower-clus
ters.

The herons and kingfishers have for ages
set an example that anglers have not had the
wit to follow. White and pale blue are the
water high-lights as seen from under the surf ace
of the water. A white coat, with misty, dark-
gray wading-boots, would be nearly the snowy-
heron's fishing outfit for still, murky water.
Why ? Because the legs must be in the water
and the coat above water. So the great blue-
heron has dark gray-brown legs, and all its
under parts are overlaid with fine narrow
feathers of silvery white. But the kingfisher,

58 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

whose prey is taken from clear, moving water —
are peculiarly marked underneath. On his
breast, next to his white necklace, is a band of
pale blue, touched here and there with light-
brown, and below this to his tail he is white.
Now, a fish looking up through the water has
the kingfisher between him and the sky.
Those sky-blue and silver-white feathers cor
respond exactly with the water-light and sky
light as they are broken up and blended to
gether by the tiny chopping waves. When the
kingfisher makes a harpoon of itself, and, beak
downward, darts from its perch above the
water to fall upon a fish, it presents two par
allel curved lines, one of which is mainly
bright blue, the other mostly pure white ; these
seen through moving water blend into a soft
mist-gray, perfectly in tone with the prevailing
tint of most brook-water.

In connection with observations on the mo
tions of birds it is well to recall the fact that
nearly all the night-birds fly on wings that
make no sound. An owl slips through the air
with the utter silence of a shadow. This ac
cords with the stillness of the night. It also
serves the bird a good turn, for the least noise
would startle his prey at a time when all nature
is hushed and breathless. I have observed,
as has every nature-student, I suppose, that
nearly, if not quite all, the night insects are
comparatively noiseless in their flight. The
giant moth does not hum like a bumble-bee or
a humming-bird. The mosquito is the noisiest
with his wings of all the night-flyers. But I
must not get over the line from birds to in
sects, while on this subject of harmony, for a
study of butterflies alone would fill more space

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 59

than I have for this paper. In tropical and
semi-tropical countries a curious resemblance
in color and shape exists between the butter
flies and the flowers they haunt, a resemblance
quite noticeable as far north as the fortieth
degree of latitude.

III.

How would " Tricycles and Triolets " do for
an alliterative heading to a light chapter on
out-door poetry ? Ever since I began to taste
Virgil in my school-days I have had a special
liking for verse smacking of the woods and
fields, the birds, the sunshine, and the brooks.
A certain passage in the y£neid comes into my
mind now, a strong sketch of a grove of trees,
with the light playing through the swaying
foliage with that strangely brilliant effect so
often observed on bright days in spring and
summer : —

— "Turn silvis scena coruscis
Desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra."

I do not think that William Morris has quite
done justice to this beautiful Virgilian bit of
landscape in his rhymed translation. Here is
his rendering : —

— " Lo ! the flickering wood above
And wavering shadow cast adown by darksome hang
ing grove."

" Flickering wood " is not of subtle signifi
cance enough to suggest what is somehow con
veyed by the original phrase. I have seen the
sunlight and a breeze playing at once through
the bright-green top of a tall tree when the
sudden thrills, so to speak, of golden fire, leap-

60 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES.

ing among the swaying foliage, were like
flashes of rare thought shot swiftly through
the brain of some grand genius.

Although I have hinted at the triolet, I shall
not speak of that, or indeed of any other
purely conventional form of verse, saving the
mere observation that nothing of the kind,
from the sonnet to the rondel, is suited to the
freshness and freedom of out-door life. The
over-racy honey of the bumble-bee, little suited
as it is to the table of the epicure, has such
flavor as ought to mark the songs of the sylvan
poet. I am in hopes that in our country a
school of young singers will soon appear,
widely different from that now forming in Eng
land, and also unlike the jeune ecole of France.
Why should we as a people foster, or even
countenance, forms of poetical affectation
worn out and flung aside by the Old World
some hundreds of years ago ?

Our venerable Walt Whitman may have
pushed at times too far in the other direction,
but he has caught the spirit of freedom and
has dashed his unkempt songs with a dew as
American as that of Helicon was Greek. It is
a broad, out-door sense in which one enjoys
some of his breezy verses : —

" I think I have blown with you, O winds ;
O waters, I have fingered every shore with you."

It is indeed a pleasing thing to idly blow
with the wind, or to blow with the wind for a
purpose ; and what is more recreating than to
finger sweet shores with the water ? A canoe,
if but a pirogue, and a shore to finger, if only
the bank of a rivulet, can give delight of no
uncertain sort to a healthv soul.

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 61

A Western poet, Ben Parker, has embodied
in a simple stanza a good idea of that freshness
which lingers in the memory after one has been
driven by the pressure of worldly cares out of
the redolent ways of nature : —

" O morning when the days are long,

And youth and innocence are wed,
And every grove is full of song,

And every pathway void of dread ;
Who rightly sings its rightful praise,

Or rightly dreams it o'er again,
When cold and narrow are the days,

And shrunken all the hopes of men —
He shall re-waken with his song
The morning when the days were long."

The old English poet, Sir Richard Fanshawe,
took a gloomier view : —

" Let us use it while we may
Snatch those joys that haste away !
Earth her winter coat may cast
And renew her beauty past :
But, our winter come in vain,
We solicit spring again ;
And when our furrows snow shall cover
Love may return, but never lover."

There was a philosopher for you ; but here
comes one of our young American poets with
a fancy that finds pretty and apt comparisons
wherever it skips. Sings Edgar Fawcett : —

" If trees are Nature's thoughts or dreams,

And witness how her great heart yearns,
Then she has only shown, it seems,
Her lightest fantasies in ferns."

It is quite surprising, when one comes to
look, how chary our later poets are of using
the dew for dampening their materials ; they
seem to prefer lamp-oil. It may be, after all,

62 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

that lamp-oil is the better medium, but just
now I am writing from the saddle of a tricycle
with the spell of all out-doors upon me.

How precious is the pleasure now-a-days of
coming upon a really good stanza of verse, one
that breaks ©pen, so to speak, like a fragrant
bud, and distils into one's mind the quintes
sence of genuine originality ! I do not speak
of such originality as Poe's or Baudelaire's or
Rossetti's, but such as Swinburne has shown
in a choice few of his simpler lyrics, where he
has forgotten himself ; for Swinburne is a
master when French and Greek influences do
not master him. His music is haunting, and
there are, scattered through his poems, pic
tures sketched from nature with a hand as free
and firm as Shakespeare's : —

" Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers,
Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea."

It is not hard to find good out-door poetry if
we go back to the beginning of English verse.
Chaucer, with the language fresh in his hands,
so to speak, coined his phrases with a pen
dipped in dew. See how he begins his pro
logue : —

" When that Aprille with his schowres swoote

The drought of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertue engendred is the flour."

From Chaucer's day down to this no poet,
save Chaucer himself, has written four lines so
full of the subtle flavor of Spring as these. I
must add another stanza : —

" And the river that I sat upon,
It made such a noise as it ron,

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 63

Accordant with the birdes armony,

Methought it was the best melody
That might ben yheard of any mon."

Indeed, Chaucer is one of the few poets who
are good companions in the open air. It is
like a luncheon of fruit and nuts and choice
old wine — reading the " Canterbury Tales "
under a plane-tree by the brookside.

" And he himself as swete as is the roote
Of lokorys, or eny cetewale."

— " Sweete as bragat is or meth,
Or hoord of apples layd in hay or heth."

" The hoote somer had maad his hew al brown,
And certainly he was a good felawe."

Chaucer saw nature with frank, wide-open
eyes, albeit he never forgot to be a scholar,
as the times went.

" And in a launde, upon a hill of floures,
Was set this noble goddesse Nature,
Of branches were her halles and her boures,
Ywrought, after her craft and her mesure."

" To do Nature honour and pleasaunce " was
so good, in the eyes of the old poet, that he
did not nicely weigh the manner of the doing,
viewed from the stand-point of our latter-day
versifiers, but he let in the crispness of morn
ing and the pungency of spring buds in lieu
of these refinements of versification, now so
highly prized. His knightly spirit and his
courtly instincts could not repress his abound
ing love for the singing-birds, the breezy fields,
and the wayside brooks. He was artist
enough to know the value of words and the
suggestive force of the more elusive elements
of nature : —

"Verse, a breeze 'mid blossoms straying,"

64 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

as Coleridge expresses it, was Chaucer's verse
in a large degree. His was a. paradis parfume,
of a kind quite different from the hot-house
paradise of our modern poetry, whose odors are
of Vhuile de coco, du muse et du goudron so liked
by Baudelaire and his admirers.

Emerson's poems are good to have in one's
tricycle-pouch. I wish I could say as much for
those of Matthew Arnold. 'Nothing can be
finer than the tonic raw sweetness of some of
Emerson's verses when read in the solitude of
the woods ; and no doubt this unstrained
American honey is too rich (as is the pulp of
our papaws) for the over-delicate English pal
ate. I am afraid that Mr. Arnold would find
fault even with the flavor of sassafras tea or
rhubarb pies ! It is one of Emerson's quali
ties, sharply observable, that, whatever maybe
his technical short-coming, his thoughts are so
phrased in his poems as to give them a smack
of the clean, the home-brewed, the genuine.
A cup of sweet-apple cider, with its honest bou
quet and non-intoxicating effect, is not a whit
more grateful than some of his wood-notes.
He had the nerve to preserve the aroma of a
thought, even at the expense of a false rhyme
or a halting verse. He left some seeds and
floating bits of apple-rind in his cider. As we
slowly imbibe his precious meanings we are
ready to quote him : —

" I, drinking this,
Shall hear far Chaos talk with me;"

and we fall into a state of mind that melts

" Solid nature to a dream."
Let some flying tourist stop for a moment

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 65

on a breezy hill-top, as I did lately, and read
this :—

" I hung my verses in the wind ;

Time and tide their faults may find :
All were winnowed through and through ;
Five lines lasted sound and true."

Or this :—

— " The bell of beetle and of bee
Knell their melodious memory ; "

and he will feel a new consciousness of how
Nature

" Rounds with rhyme her every rune."

Scattered all through Emerson's poems are
thoughts that cut into nature and tap her
sweetest and most hidden veins.

It is remarkable that no Southern poet has
arisen to give us the wood-notes of the land of
the magnolia and the orange. Some of Syd
ney Lanier's verses, it is true, are dashed with
the fervid colors of the semi-tropic, but he did
not live to do his best, and his ill-health no
doubt interfered with his out-door studies.
His Marsh Hymns are lofty, fragmentary na
ture-songs, and I have no doubt that when his
poems appear in book-form, as they soon will,
it will be seen that his death was a sad thing
for those who like genuine poetry. Still the
fact remains that we have no poet who gives
us the warm, odorous, fruitful South in rhythm
and rhyme slumbrous as her sunshine and
electrifying as her breezes. Indeed, no poet,
of whatever country, has ever found the way
to an expression of tropical out-door life. Of
course I do not speak of mere descriptive
verse, which is the lowest order of poetry. A

66 BY-WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

Southern Emerson would not be content with
mere adjectives of color and form ; he would
go about like a bumble-bee, extracting from
nature such sweets as might be found racy of
the soil. He would be a mole among the
juicy roots of plants, a butterfly among the
flowers. He would cut into the sap-veins of
the trees ; he would peel the fragrant barks.
His poems would not be composed of these
things, nor principally of them, but their flavor
would come out of them, and out of the sun
shine and the lazy summer winds.

Who knows but that the invention of the
wheel, this charming instrument of self-propul
sion, is to work a new element into our litera
ture — not merely the wheel element, but the
provincial element • — an element which seems
to have almost disappeared from the poetry
and fiction made in the great literary centres
of New York, London and Paris. I have felt,
while enjoying short leisurely tours on the tri
cycle, that all the bright young cyclists of our
country are certainly in the best way of gath
ering that knowledge which fully complements
the lore of the books. Surely it is given to
him who knows Nature and loves her, to
speak :

" As if by secret sight he knew
Where, in far fields, the orchis grew."

IV.

Here are my notes of a short tricycle run
made on the second of May, 1884. The trip
was far more pleasing to me, no doubt, than
I can make it appear to others, but the notes
may serve to show how much can be seen,

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 67

heard, and felt in a little while under the
ordinary circumstances of a run ; or rather
what a mass of observations one can record
by the industrious use of one's eyes, ears, and
note-book, and pencil, even when nothing
really unusual occurs.

I set out quite early in the morning over
a good road. A slight rain had fallen the
day before, and there were a few puddles here
and there, but no real mud. The spring had
been a little slow coming, though the wheat-
fields were waving ankle-high with a rich
sward, and the woods were washed over with
the tender green* of tassels and leaves. A
bracing freshness pervaded the air, which was
from the south — a mere breath with a hint of
summer warmth in it. No sooner had I
cleared the town and got rid of the half-dozen
ragged urchins that ran howling after me, as
if I might have been mistaken for the advance
agent of a circus, than I put on a spurt of
power, bowling along in a level lane, with a
hedge of bois d'etre on one hand and a high
board fence on the other. A man walking in
the middle of the road ahead of me evidently
did not hear me coming, for when I whisked
past him he shied like a young colt and
glared at me as if he meant to attack me, but
I left him so suddenly that I could not analyze
his expression further. Somehow this little
incident called up De Quincey's Vision of
Sudden Death — a story which has always
seemed to me a most perfect piece of art-work.
If you have not read it, I advise you to take
it with you on your first outing. It will
fill an hour of rest with an enjoyment wholly

68 BY-WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

new. You will understand how it was recalled
by the trifling incident above recorded.

My way lay due east for nearly a mile, with
the meadow-larks whistling in the fields on my
right, and the woodpeckers chattering on the
fence-posts to the left. The woodpeckers
(those fellows half white and half black and
hooded in scarlet) had just arrived from the
South, and appeared overjoyed with their sur
roundings. They looked very clean in their
shining jet coats and snow under-garments.
A toll-gate stood at the end of the lane. I
whirled noiselessly through it before the wo
man who kept it could decide whether my
vehicle was down on her list, and ran over a
little hill just as the sun cleared the tree-tops
in the east. A small boy was riding a big-
wheeled plough, to which three fine sleek
horses were working abreast. The musty
odor of the fresh-turned soil was very pleasant.
Blue-birds were dropping into the new furrow
behind the plough to get the larvae of various
insects exposed there. Two sparrow-hawks
were wheeling in small circles, some fifty feet
high, watching for field-mice, or possibly intent
on taking one of the blue-birds unaware.
There was a worm-fence on one side of the
road and the corners were literally carpeted
with wild blue-violets. What a pity it is that
these beautiful flowers have no perfume ! The
lack seems to take a great deal from their
value when one discovers it. It is almost like
finding that a very musical song has no mean
ing in its sonorous phrases. I now had some
stiff work going up a hill on a curve, and then
came a smooth bit of coasting, followed by a
short stretch through level heavy sand ; then

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 69

across a brook on an iron bridge and into a
grove of buckeye trees heavy with young leaves
and clustered blooms, about which the wild
bees were booming merrily enough.

Here I stopped, and sitting in the saddle,
sketched in the rough outlines of a boy who
was trying to snare sucker-fish, in a clear eddy
of the brook, with a looped wire. The first
Baltimore oriole of the season was singing
overhead in its peculiar, monotonous way.
This bird's song always seems spiral to me, as
if it had got a twist in coming forth. On the
anchor-posts of an old water-gate, I saw some
of the finest lichens I have ever met with ;
great round rosettes, puffed and ruffled, show
ing many delicate shades of sap-green, celadon
and gray. Not far from here I found a hill
too steep for comfortable riding, and after
pushing my machine up it, I was glad to see
before me a long stretch of level road through
beautiful farms. An apple orchard, too
closely set, was beginning to bloom, and a long
row of cherry-trees was white as a windrow of
snow. What is more expressive of comforta
ble, worthy wealth and liberal security from the
failures of life than a broad, well-kept Western
farm ? Here were fields of wheat, so wide that
they looked almost like prairies, side by side
with meadow-lands on which the clover and
timothy were thick and green over hundreds
of acres ; and then the rich black plough-land,
too, where soon the corn-planting would begin.
Orchards, garden-plats, grazing lands, cattle,
swine, sheep, and horses, broad-winged barns,
windmills for pumping water, and a spacious
residence embowered in maple trees ; surely it
is well to be an Indiana farmer.

7o B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

I bowled along at a good rate with my head
high, taking in deep draughts of the whole
some air ; a long row of beehives in a garden,
with the busy workers stirring on their little
porches, sweetened the scene with a thought
of big white honey-combs and snowy muffins.
A fair,, yellow-haired child was standing on
a stile as I ran past the house, and she looked
at me with great surprised blue eyes, holding
meantime her little sun-bonnet in her hands.
A big brown dog left her side and ran bark
ing after me in a good-natured way for some
distance, then turned and leisurely trotted
back. A little farther on I stopped to watch
a pair of cat-birds in a bit of hedge. They
seemed to be looking for a good place in which
to build their nest, for the female had a slender
wisp of dry grass in her mouth. Up and
down and in and out they went, all the time
uttering their peculiar mewing cry. Finally
the male mounted to the highest branch of the
hedge and poured forth a sweet, trickling
medley, not unlike the night-song of the South
ern mocking-bird, though of far slenderer vol
ume and inferior timbre. Why is it that the
country folk have a contempt for the cat-bird ?
I have found this beautiful little songster under
a ban from Michigan to Florida, with no one
to say a good word for it, and yet, the mock
ing-bird and brown-thrush excepted, it has
no rival in America as a singer.

Driving on again my road soon began to
descend, growing steeper and steeper, until at
length I put my feet on the rest, and, with
hand on the brake, coasted at dizzying speed
round a long curve down into a dense wood
of maple, walnut, and plane trees that bor-

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 71

dered a little river. At the foot of the hill I
met a man driving a team of six horses hitched
to a wagon whereon was a saw-log sixteen
feet long and nearly four feet in diameter.
The log was tulip, usually called poplar in the
West, the Liriodendron lulipifera of the bota
nists, and appeared not to have a blemish of
any sort in it. What a grand tree it must have
been when standing, and for how many Junes
it had bloomed in the woods, its huge flowers
flaming among its rich green leaves.

For some distance my road now skirted
the foot of a bluff along the bank of the river.
At one point I stopped for awhile to watch
a fisherman casting for bass. He was in a
little skiff near the middle of the river and
was casting down stream with a minnow for
bait. He appeared to understand his busi
ness, but I got tired, and drove on before he
caught anything ; still I carried away with me
a pleasing impression, — in my memory a pict
ure of the silver current breaking around the
skiff and the tall graceful angler patiently ply
ing his rod and reel. What fascinating uncer
tainty there is in angling ! What a big fish
one is always just on the point of catching !
As I write I have in my ears the murmur of
every brook from Canada to the chestnut-cov
ered hills of North Georgia.

Turning aside from the main road I pushed
my tricycle up a steep, stony hill and mount
ing, soon found myself following the mean-
derings of a narrow cart-way, overshadowed by
wide-branching beech trees just beginning
to show their leaves. A half-mile of slow
riding brought me to a thicket of wild plum
bushes loaded with their fragrant white

72 BY- W 'AYS AND BIRD-NOTES.

blooms, amongst which bees and other insects
were glancing and humming, and a number of
small yellow green fly-catchers were actively
engaged in a restless pursuit of their proper
food. I gathered a big bunch of these odorous
plum-sprays and bound it fast to the handle of
my brake lever so that I could have with me
in my further journeying the fruity breath of
the wild orchard.

Running down a long rut-furrowed slope, and
then over a damp flat in a cool, shady hollow, I
came to a nasty little stream sweeping through
a narrow bog. Here I called a halt for con
sultation. That mud looked deep and treacher
ous. I saw where a wagon had been pried
out of it with fence rails. There was nothing
to do but get across, however, so I fell to
work, carrying pieces of logs, rails, fallen
boughs, etc., until I had made a quite respect
able corduroy bridge, over which I pushed my
machine with perfect safety ; then I had to
lift it over a large log that had fallen across
the road. In fact I did not mount again for a
quarter of a mile, at the end of which I found
myself at the source of the road, where it ap
peared that I was caught fast between a huge
old red barn and a weather-beaten but com
fortable looking farm-house.

A brawny, grizzled man with a hammer and
monkey-wrench was tinkering with a disabled
plough. I approached him cap in hand, and
mopping the perspiration from my face. He
immediately showed a deep but quasi-con
temptuous interest in the mechanism of the
tricycle. I plied him with questions as to his
crop-prospects, and was soon on easy terms
with him. I got a drink out of a sweet old

TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 73

gourd at his well, and obtained permission to
ride across his wide pasture land to a road a
half-mile distant. I mounted in his barnyard,
and, while he held open a big gate for me,
dashed out at my best speed into the level
grass-field, where the dandelions shone like
stars. A herd of steers, as I approached them,
eyed me wildly for awhile, then ran away at a
thundering pace, with their tails whirling and
their heads high in air. I had to push across
thirty acres of fresh ploughed land (a very unin
teresting and tiresome operation) before I
reached the road. Now came a long spin over
a surface just damp enough to be elastic, and
although the road-bed had been gravelled it was
quite free from ugly stones. The air had
freshened and was blowing in sweet gusts
from the south.

The sunshine was growing in power ; one
could almost hear the buds exploding. A
clover-field beside the road was a lovely
sight, though not yet in bloom. Its dark green
tufts looked as if they had gushed out of the
earth in a moment of ecstatic impulse. In
deed, some occult force made itself manifest
in every bud and blade, and stalk and leaflet,
from which one could not fail to catch a fine
mental tonic. I passed a level reach of maple
wood in which grew scattered patches of man
drake that looked like the grass-green tents of
lilliputian armies. In places the ground was
rosy white with the blooms of the claytonia,
or yellow with the stars of the adder-tongue.

What sweet and sure alchemic recipes
Mother Earth gives us, if we could but read
them ! How unfailing are her schemes for
the perpetuation of life, freshness, strength,

74 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

beauty? These flowers are but the bubbles
thrown up from her inexhaustible veins of vital
force. Is not this woodsy fragrance which
loads the air of spring mere surplus steam
from Nature's alembics ? and in breathing it do
we not take into our blood a trace of her elixir ?
One's imagination renews itself by absorbing
and assimilating the precious exhalations from
the countless valves of woods and fields. How
evenly and perfectly our book-lore blends and
shades into what we gather from nature !

" Spirit of lake, and sea, and river —
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healthy herbs to just men's fields."

All herbs and plants are healthy and whole
some, too, in their way. I saw a flicker eat
the berries of the dreadful night-shade — not
on this tour, for the plant comes later — and I
have known a quail to swallow the seeds of
the Jamestown weed with no bad result. But
to my tricycling.

I soon came to where a broad road, leading
homeward, crossed mine at nearly right-angles,
and I set my face towards town with a three-
mile run before me, over a fine rolling way be
tween incomparably fertile farms. A fox-
squirrel ran ahead of me on a fence until I
came so near him that he sailed off into a
field of wheat, and went bounding through the
waving green blades to a lone walnut tree, up
which he darted and disappeared in a hole.

The spires of our little city came in sight,
gleaming above the maple trees that border
the streets. I bumped across the railway
track, whirled over a long hill, and descended
into the suburbs with my blood tingling, and
my memory full of fresh sights and sounds.
At nine o'clock sharp I was at my desk.

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS.

" Silva altajovis, lucusue Diana"

How shall we account for the old mytholo
gies, -or shall we attempt to account for them
at all ? That beauty is imperishable, and that
whatever fills the measure of logic may be
taken as demonstrated, has somehow come to be
accepted by wise men as true. But shall we
receive or reject the gods of the ancients on
the score of beauty on the one hand or of logic
on the other ? Who ever did believe in the
gods ? Were they men of feeble minds or
debilitated physiques— a lot of degenerate
clods without any fixedness of character?
Was Agamemnon a fool, Homer a dunce,
Pythagoras a ninny, or Caesar a weakling ?

These may at first view seem questions both
trite and uninteresting ; but I purpose sketch
ing presently, as best I may, the outlines of a
quiet little adventure which led me to ponder
deeply over the proposition, Was there ever
any foundation in fact for this belief in the
gods ? I will not say that I believe there ever
was, nor can I own to a total disregard for
certain rather obscure and mysterious evi
dences in nature of the existence of beings
whose tenure of material bodies is as certain
and indestructible as the bodies are shadowy,
and whose power is somehow held, for some
reason hard to discover, in abeyance. If
gods ever were they now are. They may not
be now palpable or visible or audible, but

76 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

they are not dead or banished. For our pres
ent purpose let us admit that time was when
nature, the great generator of mysteries, dis
closed immortal beings to man. Were these
beings necessarily, because immortal, omnipo
tent or superhuman in their powers ? I
should say they probably were possessed of
more than human potency in certain ways.
Immortality, even when robbed of everything
but the death-resisting principle, is in some
way very nearly married to invisibility in our
idea of it. The power of rendering itself in
visible to human eyes, that is, the ability to
make itself a nonentity to all appearances, is
an attribute of every imaginable god, or at
least of every god at all like those of the Greek
and Latin mythologies.

Now suppose certain beings, born of a mys
terious play of nature, possessed of these two
things, immortality and the power of rendering
themselves invisible, and what more is needed
as a basis upon which to build the fabric of
heathen polytheism ? Why not, then, take the
so-called gods to have been a race of such
immortals, without any other attributes of the
true Theos in them ? If such they were, how
natural for human imagination, operated upon
by the subtle influences of awe and wonder, to
add the rest. Indeed it seems to me hardly
fair, this laughing to scorn the beautiful theol
ogy of the ancients without so much as giving
it the benefit of a charitable doubt, and with
out even admitting that it may have rested on
a venial mistake arising out of some manifes
tations of nature now withdrawn or in abey
ance. But the gods may have been immaterial,
in the common sense, and yet not immortal in

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 77

the best meaning of the word. Certain condi
tions of mundane things might have been
necessary to their existence here. If we
should study nature closely for the purpose we
might discover those conditions.

And this fetches from its hiding-place my
theory. It may be called the grove theory.
No one can think of the gods as separable
from the woods and waters. The ancients ad
mitted this. They went further, dedicating to
each deity its grove or stream. It seems to
me that this meant more than mere empty
complimentary dedication. It was a recogni
tion and acknowledgment of the conditions
upon which the gods would remain with them.
In short, unsmitten, unshorn, pristine nature
could accommodate these mysterious beings,
and it only. The groves grown of virgin soil,
the uncultivated flowers and fruits, the* balm
and spice of perfect trees — these prepared the
air for the gods to breathe. Something, we
may not know what — the keen pure essence
of unchanged nature from some source now
practically dried up, may be — fed them and
kept them within the bounds of visibility. The
dryads disappeared perforce, it may well be
assumed, when their woods were desecrated,
and the naiads when their fountains were pol
luted. The fauns faded into shadows and
were blown away when the axe and saw had
felled the groves and fragrant thickets. The
satyr withdrew into the deepest recesses of the
forests as man advanced, and Apollo and
Diana fled away — whither ?

Possibly some secret potency existed in the
air that flowed through those virgin woods
and over those unpolluted streams which could

78 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

give to all those immortals the power of ren
dering themselves visible, and when it was
exhausted by man's encroachments they fell
away into invisibility. And if some hidden
cave in the world could now be found where
nature has never been disturbed by even the
simplest art, may be there might be discovered
one or two happy deities revelling in the mer
est pool, so to speak, of what was once the
great ocean of their " peculiar element." If
this theory is true the gods are invisible, not
dead, and they are invisible not from their
own choice, but because their " peculiar ele
ment " is exhausted which, while it lasted,
made visibility possible.

I have no certain recollection of having
been poring over this or any similar train of
semi-reasoning, nor have I the faintest knowl
edge of what I was thinking of, when my
guide, halting suddenly and knocking the
ashes from his pipe into the hollow of his
great brown hand, said, " Well, here we are."
At the sound of his rather gentle though deep
and sonorous voice, I looked around, feeling
as if I had been aroused from a dreamful slum
ber, without power to recall any definite idea
of my dreams.

Every one has experienced this feeling when
straying in an idle, musing way through some
still grove or quiet meadow. Suddenly, as if
by a spell of enchantment everything looks
strange. Even the sunlight is unlike itself.
The sough of the wind is peculiarly impressive.
Even the color of the grass is changed.
You rub your eyes ; but it is some time before
you see, hear and feel natural.

So with me just then. I was well aware, to be

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 79

sure, that starting from the guide's cabin we
had walked over a high ridge, almost a moun
tain, following for our way a zigzag path or
trail that led us back and forth among vast
fragments of variegated granite under wide-
spreading boughs of low cedar trees. Now,
however, we stood on the bank of a little river
whose water crept past us in a slow but re
markably limpid tide as clear as glass, into
which I gazed with an indistinct vision, and
feeling a vague sense of the strangeness of
everything about me. A pirogue lay moored
at our feet. The guide motioned me to get in.
I obeyed at once, but had time in so doing to
note how old and frail, indeed how rotten the
boat appeared to be. The guide accidentally
tossed the pipe-ashes from his hand down upon
one of the gunwales where they seemed natu
rally to disappear, mingling with the loose
mould and minute fungi of the decaying wood.
In this frail vessel we purposed passing over a
dangerous rapid of the stream some distance
below ; for it was the spirit of adventure had
brought me here. I was in no condition, how
ever, to realize the possibilities of the step I
was about to take. I shook myself, rubbed
my eyes and strove to get rid of this hazy
mood ; but succeeded only when the guide by
a vigorous paddle-stroke sent us straight out
to the stream's middle. Then I began to feel
naturally and fell to making a close study of
the guide and the boat.

What a taciturn, grimly selfish-looking fel
low the man was ! His face was not a bad
one, however, and his form was ease and
strength incarnate. You could not guess
such a man's age. Not a gray hair on his head,

8o BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES.

not a wrinkle, denoting years, in his brow or
cheeks, and yet you suspected he was old. It
might have been the rather hard glitter of his
calm, gray eyes, or the half stolid way in which
he kept closed his immense hirsute lips, which
suggested something of senility coupled with
unusual strength. His bodily movements, too,
though full of elasticity of a certain sort,
lacked the ready suppleness of youth, suggest
ing instead the half-automatic, perfunctory
agility of long experience. You occasionally
see such old men by the sea or in the moun
tains. They are men whom age cannot con
quer — the men of perfect health. But his boat
was not so impervious to time and exposure, it
seemed. A kind of dry rot had attacked it,
apparently years ago. This, however, seemed
to have added to its buoyancy, for it danced
upon the water like a bubble or a feather. I
could not help, as I glanced from man to boat,
imagining a sort of rapport between them, and
presently the odd fancy that, like the centaur
and the horse, they were really one, took hold
on my mind so forcibly that I could not re
strain a low laugh as we began to glide down
the stream, so ludicrously did the blending of
the guide's gray, old clothes with the sides and
bottom of the gray, old boat, in color and text
ure, enforce the whimsical thought.

It may as well be stated here that the stream
upon which we were now afloat ran past the
guide's cabin over on the other side of the
ridge. But to do so it had to make a complete
double round a great point, after dashing
through a deep, hidden valley, down stony
precipices and between the close-drawn walls
of a resounding gorge.

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 81

My seat was forward near the prow of the
boat, and I could look straight ahead over the
little, decaying staff which, in imitation of a
bowsprit, slanted off from the pirogue's beak.
A glance down the river showed me how near
to the dizzy escarpments of the mountain its
current flowed, whilst over against this vast
wall a wooded country, almost flat, swept off to
a range of low green hills a mile distant.

The guide propelled our frail craft with a
short, broad paddle which must have been
very old, for the wood of which it was made
had turned green and was curiously creased
with worm-furrows and slimy with fungus or
moss. Besides this paddle, a long cane rod,
for use when the process of polling was ne
cessary, lay at hand. But, so sensitive seemed
our ancient pirogue to even the least impulse,
there was little need of any engine, more than
the stream's own current, to propel us withal.
Noiselessly and evenly we slipped down the
tide, much like the shadowy figures of a dream,
it seemed to me, between the fern-braided
banks. We scarcely made a ripple as we
went. My habit of close observation soon
prevailed over the dreamy mood that had set
tled upon me, and I began a minute study of
the shores as they stole, by apparent motion,
to the rear of us. Below the wild tangles of
ferns and semi-fluviatic plants beautifully
waved lines of parachrose stones lay in blend
ing strata, as if half-welded by some process
of fluxion long since ended — a dim polychrome
rendered doubly effective by our motion. On
the side opposite to the ridge the bank was
quite low, giving us free insight to the farthest
6

82 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

glooms of the woods, where wild flowers of
many kinds grew in profusion.

We had proceeded but a few hundred yards
when I caught sight of a pretty, dappled fawn
peering out at us with its great, mellow eyes
from a clump of green shrubs. I now felt
deeply vexed with myself for allowing the un
reasonable importunities of the guide to cause
me to leave my trusty rifle behind at his cabin.
But a moment later, when the lissom, young
animal against which I was aiming imaginary
bullets sped away like the very spirit of merri-
ness, I did not regret the gun. The common
wild birds of the woods were everywhere.
Blue jays and yellow finches, fly-catchers,
nut-hatches and thrushes made a great chirp
ing and twittering along with the mingled
rustlings of their wings. I noted six or seven
varieties of woodpecker, among them the
ivory-bill and that great, scarlet-crested, black
king of the woods named by the naturalists
Hylotomus pileatus . Water fowls of the
smaller kinds flew up before us, and occasion
ally a blue heron or a small wader of the bit
tern kind took wing in its peculiarly stately
way.

A belted kingfisher, that most beautiful of
all our birds of the streams, suddenly appeared
in the air just in front of me, where he hov
ered for a moment as if doubtful whether to
fly over us and go up the river or to turn
about and retreat before us. He chose the
latter. As he did so he uttered that sharp
little laugh every angler has heard. O beauti
ful bird ! your laugh has an evil ring ! O
halcyon ! there is a great icicle in your heart,
no matter how fine the weather you bring.

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 83

By short flights this bird kept a certain distance
ahead of us, alighting now on a projecting
stone of the cliff on one hand, and now on a
reaching maple bough on the other, eyeing us
warily as we approached and always laughing
as it spread its gay pinions to float, rather
than fly, down the steady little wind which
drew along with the stream's course. We left
all the other birds behind us. The herons
and bitterns, describing the arc of a circle to
avoid us, invariably turned up the stream in
their flight, and the little sandpipers and shad
owy looking waders of smaller kinds merely
flitted from side to side of the water.

Sitting with my back to the guide and
watching the halcyon's manoeuvres, I began in
an idle way to generate a fantastic theory con
necting its flight with our own by a thread of
fatalistic destiny. He, the beautiful, happy
bird, was on the wind current ; we on the
water-stream. We were in a frail rotten
canoe ; he on his own splendid wings. How
delightfully easy for him to evade death or
even danger, whilst we, despite all exertions to
the contrary, might soon speed right down to
destruction ! An underlying stone too near
the surface could crush our craft into shreds.
This bird of the hard, metallic laugh might be
the demon of the stream leading us on to the
rapids, to shout and scream and jeer when we
were dashed to pieces in the canon.

I noted now, by a glance, that our velocity
was gradually increasing, and that we were
following the sinuations of a sort of central
current, which flowed among great bowlders
and angular fragments of granite. The guide
used the paddle merely as a rudder, and the

84 13 Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

cane, only now and then, to push us away
from a dangerous breaker. The day, which
had been a singularly fine one, was now fast
drawing to its close, the sun having fallen be
hind the ridge, and a soft bloom hung directly
over us — a shadow overtopped by the vast
reaches of yellow sunshine. Our flight, how
ever, would be short and the rapids would
swallow us, or happily we would swing round
the mountain's wall and slip clown the gentler
current beyond to the guide's cabin, before the
coming of twilight, possibly before sunset.

The guide had described to me, in his
grimly laconic way, how he had frequently
passed these rapids for the mere excitement
of the adventure. I was the first man he had
ever led into this cove and he was sure that
no human being, himself excepted, had ever
before set foot here. This communication
was sufficient of itself to brace me beyond any
fear, even if I had been a most nervous man,
instead of a resolute naturalist used to danger.
Therefore I looked forward to the catastrophe
of this little drama with a calm mind and even
pulse, toying, meanwhile, with the curious
fancy that the halcyon was luring us on to de
struction.

I was once talking with a great man, whose
profound knowledge and wise judgment would
seem to preclude trivial fancies from his mind,
and was surprised at hearing him tell how
often, in his moments of solitude, his imagina
tion or fancy would fasten upon some insignifi
cant thing as ominous or prophetic. A gay
beetle dancing in. the sunlight before him ; a
withered leaf blown across his path ; a sud
denly discovered violet or flower-de-luce ; the

THE THRESHOLD OP THE GODS. 85

peculiar tone of a bird's voice ; any, even the
least noteworthy thing, would hint to him of
the future. He would find himself trying his
fortune, so to speak, by little tests put in an
almost involuntary and wholly whimsical way,
to accidents and circumstances as they would
come of things as trivial as the mere breaking
of a twig or blowing away of a flower petal.
He related, with minute details, how once an
emerald-green, peculiarly brilliant scarabceus
kept itself by short, sudden flights, just ahead
of him in a woodland path, and how after he
had followed it some distance, wondering
what it was leading him to, he came upon a
huge rattle-snake, coiled ready for a spring.
The beetle had saved the life of a great states
man and a true man !

I could not console myself with the fancy
that the kingfisher would steer us safely
through the rapids ; for his voice was insincere,
and his very movements would forcibly suggest
sinister things. Such is human perversity,
moreover, that I preferred the evil interpreta
tion. I actually found myself gloating over
the anticipation of the halcyon's successful
stratagem. I even smiled as I saw, in fancy,
our boat dissolve into fibres and ourselves go
whirling through awful vortices mangled and
dead !

Nevertheless, I noted everything we passed,
and fixed in my memory with the power of a
trained concentration the changes in the
landscape bordering the stream. These
changes were constant, blending into each
other like colors on the artist's canvas. I im
agined that the trees and shrubs and ferns,
and the aquatic grasses into which the mar

86 /? Y- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES.

ginal ripples of the river leaped with low whis
perings, constantly grew brighter and greener
as we advanced Overhead the sky was
purely blue and clear, with just a hint of the
yellow sunlight flung athwart it. In mid-air,
above the mountain's shadow, there hung a
misty splendor, such as is often seen on very
hot days hovering over water. A fragrance,
which strengthened apace with our motion,
reached my sense, as if from some gradually
opened pot pourri of all sweet, spicy things.
The great, belted kingfisher seemed to feel
this as he led on, flinging back at us the chat
ter of his voice and the rich, silken clash of
his wings.

I was now aware of an obscure feeling of
restless expectancy beginning to infuse itself
through me. I turned half about to look at
my guide. He made a frightful grimace at me
for rocking the boat, and glancing down I saw
some minute sprays of water bubble over the
gunwale ! Out through the momentary scowl
of the guide's face his vast age seemed to leer
like a wild demon. Those bubbles leaping
over the boat's rotten side reminded me of
how easily it might swamp in the rapids.
With a little twinge of self-rebuke for my
thoughtlessness, I resumed my former posi
tion.

Within these last few moments of time,
some change of no doubtful sort, but still a
change which eludes expression even now,
had taken place in the general appearance of
all surrounding things. It may have been an
atmospheric or chromatic variance, it may
have been merely the mutations of the evening
shadows hovering in this low valley ; but, from

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 87

whatever cause, a something like the glamour
of a dream or of romance had settled down
upon stream and rocks and trees. An exhila
ration like that induced by a salt breeze, more
refined and subtile, however, took hold on me.
The motion of the boat was now quite rapid,
but smooth and noiseless.

I began to be impressed with the utter, the
primeval, the unchanged beauty of the land
scape. These woods, locked in by awful
precipices, this stream, full of dangerous falls,
had never been troubled by hunters or anglers,
or naturalists or tourists, nor yet by the insa
tiable makers of farms. Pristine power and
perfectness dwelt here as they did aeons ago.
I looked and saw the smooth, greenish-colored
bark of the trees, the deep expression of riant
vitality in the leaves ; I drew into my gratified
sense the strengthening bouquet of surround
ing nature, and then suddenly the inquiry,
from what source I cannot say, arose in my
mind, are the gods still here ? At first it was
a half-idle thought, blown across my mental
field like a rose petal across a garden ; but it
found a lodgment. I toyed with it and it
grew. It suited my mood and the mood of
nature.

The halcyon flitted on before us, and now,
far away, like the soft murmur of a- breeze, our
ears caught the pulsating sound of the rapids,
A deer, bearing young antlers, stood on the
bank and very steadily eyed us as we passed.
He did not seem to fear us, his gaze denoting
only a lively curiosity. Indeed he had no
cause to fear us, for all thought of the chase
was far from me, and as for my guide he had
enough to do caring for the boat.

88 B Y- WA YS AN'D BIRD-NO TES.

Are the gods still here ? The question fed
my fancy. I began, in a half-earnest, half-
idle way, to scrutinize every dim opening,
every shadowy recess of the woods, as we sped
by. I wove a cocoon of the old, silken webs
of poesy around about me, looking through the
sheeny film of which I hoped to assist the shy
deities in taking on visibility. If I could only
see one god, even though it flitted past me a
ghostly, diaphanous mockery of its former self,
what a joy it would be !

The wings of our luring halcyon were now
in almost constant motion, so swift was our
following, and the sound of the voice of the
waterfall was deepening and spreading. Some
little thrills of quietly ecstatic delight began to
trouble my senses. I have occasionally felt
the same when sailing before a smart breeze in
an open boat after a long absence from the
sea.

At some distance before us I saw a shining
line drawn, like a wavering gossamer, across
the surface of the river. Beyond it a silvery
mist swayed in the gloom of giant trees that
partially overshadowed the water. This line
was the break where the cataract began and
this mist was the spray from the agitated
stream in the canon ; but to my mind the
silvery thread was the index of something
more, and with a leap, so to speak, my imagi
nation reached the threshold of the gods ! The
line marked the boundary of the haunts of the
shining ones. Heavy and sweet the odors
drifted upon us, and in all the trees we heard
a satin rustle. The cardinal-birds and the
wood-thrushes suddenly ceased their singing.
Deeper and deeper we sank into the narrowing

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 89

dell, sweeter and softer the gloom grew apace.
I marked well the giant trees just beyond the
sheeny line, and saw through the spaces be
tween them shadowy mysteries flitting to and
fro_mysteries that a dash of sunlight would
have dissipated, that a puff of wind would have
lifted up and scattered like smoke. Faster
and faster we sped, wilder and wilder grew
the flight of the halcyon. He could not take
time now to light at all, but only to hover a
moment at eligible perching places, and then
hurry on before us.

What a thrill is dashed through a moment
of expectancy, a point of supreme suspense,
when by some time of preparation the source
of sensation is ready for a consummation— a
catastrophe! At such a time one's soul is
isolated so perfectly that it feels not the re
motest influence from any other of all the uni
verse. The moment preceding the old pa
triarch's first glimpse of the Promised Land
— that point of time between uncertainty and
certainty, between pursuit and capture, where-
into is crowded all the hopes of a lifetime, as
when the brave old sailor from Genoa first
heard the man up in the rigging utter the
shout of discovery — the moment of awful hope,
like that when Napoleon watched the charge
of the Old Guard at Waterloo, is not to be
described. There is but one such crisis for
any man. It is the yes or the no of destiny.
It comes, he lives a life-time in its span ; it
goes, and he never can pass that point again.

But there are crises, scarcely less absorb
ing, to which, after they are passed, one can
turn and almost live them over. These are
the crises into which no element of selfishness,

90 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

more than the mere modicum contained in the
anticipation of pleasurable sensations, has
entered, or crises of the imagination based
wholly on phantasmal exigencies. I reach
back the powers of my memory now, and they
fetch up out of the past, even to the minutest
detail, the whole of that little period of time
during which I waited, with bated breath and
condensed expectancy, to see a god !

The river was bearing us on at a rate of
speed which, but for the silent evenness of the
motion, would have been frightful under better
circumstances. But the wood of which the
pirogue was made — it must have been yellow
tulip — seemed so unsound and semi-disinte
grated that the wonder was it did not dissolve
into a flake of vegetable mould upon the water,
and thus let us sink !

A vast white bird, probably a snowy heron
the Garzetta candidissima of our naturalists,
swept majestically across from side to side of
the river, directly over the mysterious shining
line and just hitherward of the pale mist,
quickly losing itself among the trees. Again
I saw, or imagined, shadowy forms stealing
through rifts in the flower-sprent glooms of the
woods. But they were less satisfactory than
the dimmest forms of a dream. I could not
follow them a second of time.

A broad booming heralded our approach to
the cataract. We felt no motion, so steady
was our sweep, and yet we were leaving the
dreamy wind behind us. Halcyon, with erect
and dishevelled crest, led on in an ecstasy of
chirp and flutter. I became aware, through
some slight, ominously decisive movement of
the guide, that he was preparing for a supreme

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 91

effort. We were nearly opposite a grand
opening in those stately trees, out of which
seemed to issue the silvery line which cut the
river. I leaned forward, with suspended
breath, to catch a glimpse right down it as we
should pass. The gods were there, I knew
they were ; I should see some one of them, at
least, if only a sylvan faun or satyr, or a dryad
slowly withdrawing into the heart of a tree.
Deus ecce! Deus.

That great white bird came out of the shad
ows of the woods again, and curving its flight
down the stream seemed to melt into the mist.
A sensation of dewy coolness crept over me,
as if shaken from the rorid sandals of some
passing naiad. The bank of the river opposite
to the ridge's precipice now presented a gay,
almost fantastic appearance. Tall, aquatic
grasses, thinly interspersed with certain scar
let-spiked riparian weeds, were sown at the
water's verge ; their long slender stalks and
semi-translucent leaves, waving to the impulse
of air and water-ripple, sent forth a sort of
shimmer like that which Virgil intended to
describe with the phrase " Turn silvis scena
coruscis " — a waving motion with light flashing
and flickering through. Right opposite this a
narrow, vertical rent intersected the ridge, and
through it an almost level finger of the sun
reached to caress the grass. Just as we passed
I noted, by an instantaneous glance, a strange
and beautiful thing — a troop of dragon-flies,
purple-bodied and silver-winged, filing rapidly,
in open order of ones and twos, across the
sunlight into the dewy recesses of the river's
fringe. Each gaudy insect, as it flew, wavered
in the air so dreamily and eccentrically that

92 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-

somehow I was reminded by their course of
those shadowy, silvery lines in the blades of
Damascus daggers.

We slipped on and on, still following the
now madly careering halcyon. For the mer
est point of time, not long enough for an eye
to twinkle, we were opposite the rift in the
woods and trembling on the verge of mystery.
I looked down the open vista and saw some
thing, I know not what — a form or a shadow,
an image conjured up by my imagination, or
only a blending of the glooms and gleams by
force of distance and velocity — but a new ele
ment was added to my nature. I felt a great
thrill. A new joy took root in my heart. A
new flower blew open in my soul. Accipio
agnoscoque deos !

It seemed that down that aisle I could look
to the remotest age of time ; and out of it,
blowing into my eager face, I felt the un
changed, the unchangeable spirit of Eld !
Was it, or not, a face that I saw ? Can I ever
know? The flowing hair, like blown supple
ringlets of gold floss, the gray deep eyes, the
divinely smiling lips ; were they not there ?
And the shining body and agile limbs, did I
only fancy I saw them ? How shall I ever be
sure ? O ! Dea certe. An indescribable some
thing, as of that whole landscape melting and
vanishing, by a sudden and noiseless deflagra
tion, followed close upon this fortunate mo
ment. With a harsh, maniacal cry of delight,
the belted halcyon leaped over the coruscating
line into the silvery mist beyond. And, like
an arrow flung from the bent bow of the river,
we were whirled after him into the vast fanged
jaws of the canon.

THE THRESHOLD OF THE GODS. 93

I felt our pirogue leap and shiver ; I heard
awful noises, as of battles and storms and tu
multuous applaudings, as of a million clapping
hands, as we rushed down into the rent hill.
Sic, sicjuvat ire sub umbras ! All above us the
mist and spume boiled and rolled ; all below
us the mad waves leaped and fought; all
round us the gray, wet fragments of granite
offered destruction. Nature's wildest frenzy
of passion was bearing us down, down, down !
O, the calm madness that seized me ! It was
awe traced in marble — it was terror frozen in
ice ! O, the sweet vision, so suddenly mine,
so abruptly gone ! A mysterious joy, like the
memory of a heavenly dream, lingered in my
heart, down deeper than any fear of death
could go.

Deeper and deeper we plunged down be
tween the clank, fantastically grooved jaws of
the gorge, till the mist and darkness blended
into one, and the thunder of the stream in its
agony was appalling. Even this did not
drown the metallic laugh of the halcyon as it
led on through that horrid tumult. I felt a
wet wind rushing over me, I saw the spume
sparkle like phosphor, whilst the shark-like
teeth of the walls on either hand drew closer
upon me.

How deep the ecstasy below us ! How far-
reaching the immitigable storm-mist above us !
How old and worn the stolid stones about us !
O threshold of the gods, what a distance be
hind us ! O sweet, calm, every-day world,
how infinitely removed from us !

Finally we felt a mighty swell lift us and
savagely shake us. A heavy spray dashed
over us, and our frail vessel quivered and

94 ^ Y- WA YS AArD BIRD-NO TES.

quaked, as if in a convulsion of pain. Sud
denly the gorge closed up till the slimy walls
thereof oppressed us and its jagged teeth
grazed us on either side. But on we rushed,
tempest behind us, thunder before us, the
blackness of utter darkness all about us, and
at last, with a mighty explosion of all terrors,
we were hurled like a missile from some giant
engine — a very missile, indeed — forth from
the grim, stony lips of that awful fissure, reel
ing and spinning far out upon the swift, level
bosom of the little river lapsing into the open
country.

The evening farewell of the sun was glorify
ing the distant mountain lines, the sweet
maple trees on either side of us were waving
betwixt gloom and splendor, and the breeze
was a deep, tender sigh of relief.

" Unde hcec tarn clara repente
Tempestas ? "

The belted halcyon turned aside in his flight,
and perching upon a bough laughed his fill at
us as we drew past him. The roar of the rap
ids receded and faded, leaving at last in my
heart a tender melody which never can depart.
I had hovered on the THRESHOLD OF THE
GODS'

BROWSING AND NIBBLING.

I WAS once following a tireless guide
through a wild mountain region of the South,
when, in answer to a direct question, he de
livered himself as follows: —

"What makes me allus a-nibblin' an'
a-browsin' of the bushes an' things as I goes
along ? Well, I dunno, 'less hit's kase I've
sorter tuck a notion to. A feller needs a heap
o' nerve ef he 'spects to be much account for
a deer-hunter in these here hills, an' I kinder
b'lieve hit keeps a feller's heart stiddy an' his
blood pure for to nibble an' browse kinder
like a deer does. You know a deer is allus
strong an' active, an' hit is everlastin'ly a-
nibblin' an' a-browsin'. Ef hit's good for the
annymel hit orter be good for the feller."

This philosophy immediately gained a lodg
ment in my mind. I delightedly took up the
seeds of suggestion let fall by the strong-
limbed, steady-nerved mountaineer, and forced
them to rapid quickening and utmost growth.
The old alchemists in their search for the
elixir of life ought to have known that the
birds and the animals of the wild woods had
long ago discovered it. How many sick deer,
or bears, or partridges, have ever been found
by hunters or woodsmen ? For twenty years, as
boy and man, I have been an untiring and per
sistent roamer in the wildest nooks and cor
ners of our American forests ; and during this
period, I have never found a deer, a bear, a
squirrel, a turkey, a grouse, a quail, or any

96 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD- NO TES.

wild bird, suffering from any fatal ailment
other than wounds. When their food is
plentiful all kinds of wild things thrive. Of
course, when unusually hard winters come,
and food cannot be found, the non-migratory
birds and animals suffer, often to death, from
hunger and cold. But this is accident rather
than anything else. Take a healthy child into
the woods, and see how naturally and surely it
will fall to nibbling at the buds, and bark, and
roots of things. There seems to be an innate
hunger for this sort of food, lying dormant in
every human being until called into activity by
some association, accident, or exigency.

Now, I am not going into the dear old
theory of the botanical doctors touching na
ture's remedies for man's ailments. I am not
a physician, and I favor no special school of
medicine. But I do maintain that it is good
for man— and woman, too — to nibble and
browse. Go bite the bud of the spice-wood,
or the bark of the sassafras, and tell me
whether you feel a new element slip into your
nature. No sooner do you taste for the first
time this wild, racy flavor, than you recognize
its perfect adaptation to a need of your life.
Nor is this need a mere physical one. Some
how the fragrance and flavor that satisfy it
reach the thought-generating part of one, and
tinge one's imagination and fancy with new
colors.

I remember, with a steady delight, some days
spent with the ginseng-diggers of North Car
olina. It was there that I first tasted this
celebrated American root, and discovered a lik
ing for its charming, aromatic bitter-sweetness.
No wonder the Chinese prized it above gold !

BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 97

These ginseng-diggers — or " sang-diggers,"
as they are called — are queer folk ; very inter
esting in a way, ignorant, superstitious, strong,
stingy, and honest — a sort of mountain tribe
to themselves. I followed a company of them
around the jutting cliffs and fertile " benches "
of the Carolina mountain region, until I really
had grown to like their careless, nomadic life,
with its flavor of chestnuts and ginseng. In
the spring is the time for browsing; in the
autumn comes the nibbling season. The
squirrels begin eating the buds of the hickory
trees so soon as the sap has risen into them
sufficiently to make them swell. Your know
ing squirrel-hunter cleans up his rifle about
this time, and visits every hickory tree in his
neighborhood. Somewhat later the grand
tulip trees begin blooming, and then the squir
rels transfer their attention to them. A few
weeks of browsing in the spring woods will
make one acquainted with the characteristic
taste and fragrance of almost every tree, shrub,
and plant of the region.

True, there are a few — very few indeed —
poisonous things, and these must be avoided.
Nature has her evil streaks, running at wide
intervals through her opulence of good ; but
they are easily discoverable. Who would
ever be so obtuse to danger as to nibble at the
buds of the poison ivy ? This browsing-time
is also the season of our sweetest and most
charming flowers. While one is biting through
pungent barks and aromatic buds, one also
gets the benefit of perfumes as wild and witch
ing as are the blooms from which they exhale.
I do not know how to explain the influence of
the bitters and sweets, the acids and sub-acids,
7

98 BY-WAYS A ND BIRD- NO TES.

the aromas and perfumes of wild things ; nor
am I sure that explanation would be profitable,
if possible. To taste the perfectly distilled
honey that lurks in the red-clover bloom is a
sufficient demonstration of this influence. A
subtle thrill, elusive as it is fascinating, follows
the touch of the tongue to this infinitesimal
philter. It was made for the bumblebee ; but
your pastoral man may profit by the insect's
example. If Rossetti, while bending over a
woodspurge, had been less an artist and more
a poet and philosopher, he might have dis
covered more than he expresses in : —

" One thing then learnt remains to me, —
The woodspurge has a cup of three."

Compare the flowers of Tennyson and Keats
with those of Baudelaire —

" Des fleurs se pament dans un coin" —

and the whole fearful difference between the
sweets of nature and the filth and rottenness
where those sweets are wanting, will rush upon
your consciousness. There is something more
than the mere shimmer of rhetoric in Virgil's

" Turn silvis scena coruscis
Desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra."

There is in the words a suggestion of what
woodsy freshness and fragrance, of what spices
and resins, that grove may hold. Howells
brings to mind the same possibilities when,
in his poem called " Vagary," he sings—

" Deep in my heart the vision is,
Of meadow grass and meadow trees
Blown silver in the summer breeze."

There is a smack of browsing in such a verse
as —

BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 99

" But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the
meadow."

And when Keats forgets the Greek myths and
turns to pastoral memories, how true and fresh
and fine his note • —

" I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs ;

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, the fruit-tree wild."

But we poor clay mortals, who have never
been able to get within the charmed life of the
poets, can have our sip of honey-dew, and our
morsel of wild balsamic resin, our mouthful of
pungent buds, and our taste of aromatic roots,
notwithstanding our coarse natures, just as
well as these successors of the gods. Still, I
fancy that it is the literary man and the artist
who get the most out of our out-door browsing
and nibbling. Wild plums and haws and ber
ries, papaws, nuts, grapes, and all the fruits of
ungardened nature, have something in them to
feed originality. One cannot chew a bit of
slippery-elm bark without acknowledging the
racy charm of nature at first hand. Children
like all these things, because their tastes are
pure and natural. Poets like them, because
poets are grown-up children. Painters like
them, because painters affect to interpret
poetry and nature. Clods, like you and me,
reader, like them, because they are racy and
good ; because they take out of our mouths
the taste of artificial food, and because they
seem to strengthen our connection with un-
trimmed and uncultured nature. They are, in
their way of laying hold on our taste, like the
poetic myths of the Greeks. They cloy for a

loo B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

time, but when their season comes round again
the zest comes too

Was it not Adonis, as Shakespeare has it, to
whom the birds —

" Would bring mulberries, and ripe red cherries"?

To me the flavor of our American wild cher
ries has always been especially alluring. So,
too, the service-berries, with their wild red
wine, have tempted me to many a dangerous
feat of climbing. Often in the dense huckle
berry swamps of the South I have refused to
be frightened from my purple feast even by
the keen whir of the rattlesnake's tail, though
the deadly sound would make my faithful dog
desert me in cowardly haste.

Along the banks of the streams of Georgia
and South Carolina grows a grape, known by
the musical name of muscadine, which I esteem
as altogether the wildest and raciest of all
wild fruit. Its juice has the musty taste of
old wine along with a strange aromatic quality
peculiarly its own. On splendid moonlight
nights I have swung in the muscadine vines,
slowly feasting on the great purple globes,
while the raccoons fought savagely in the trees
hard by, and a clear river gently murmured
below. Next to the muscadine among wild
fruits I rate the papaw as best. It is gen
uinely wild, rich, racy, and, to me, palatable
and digestible. I once sent a box of papavvs
to a great Boston author, whose friendship I
chanced to possess, and was much disap
pointed to learn that the musty odor of the
fruit was very distasteful to him. He fancied
that the papaws were rotten ! I dare say he
never tasted them ; and if he had, their flavor

BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 101

would have been too rank and savage for his
endurance. :

The gums and resins of our woods are few.
The sweet-gum, or liquid amber, is the only
genuinely fine morsel of the sort to be found
within the boundaries of the United States.
It is a clear amber fluid (flowing from any cut
or wound in the tree), which soon hardens into
a stiff, translucent yellow wax, possessing a
pleasing aromatic taste and odor, strangely
fascinating. One does not care to eat it ; but,
once a lump of it goes into one's mouth, one
chews it until one's jaws are tired. I remem
ber, when I was a very little child, going to a
backwoods school in Missouri, where all the
pupils, both great and small, would chew
liquid amber from morning till night; the
teacher chewed tobacco.

Browsing and nibbling has led me to taste
the inner bark of -nearly every kind of tree
growing in American woods. The hickory
tree has a sap almost as sweet as that of the
maple, but it mingles with the sweet a pun
gency and a slightly acrid element of taste at
once pleasing and repellent to the pampered
tongue. The oaks have much tannin in their
bark, the astringency of which draws one's
lips like green persimmons ; but the very
innermost part, next the wood, is slightly
mucilaginous and faintly sweet. Speaking of
persimmons — after a few sharp frosts this
wild fruit becomes mellow and rich, but to the
last retains a certain drawing quality, a trace
of that astringency already mentioned, which
keeps it from being a favorite, save with the
opossums.

There is no other woodland influence, how-

102 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

ever, so strong and fine as the perfumes, odors,
and aromas. Of these each season has its
own — the perfume of spring flowers, the odors
of summer mosses and sweet punk, the aroma
of buds and barks and gums. Even in mid
winter, when a warm time comes, and the
snow melts, and the ground is thoroughly
thawed, there are woodsy odors borne about
by the drowsy winds. In fact, the fragrance
of January is sweeter and more subtly elusive
than that of May. Go nibble the brown,
pointed buds of the beech tree in midwinter,
and you will find how well the individuality of
the trees is condensed in those laminated little
spikes. You taste the perfume of tassels and
the fragrance of young leaves; there is an
aromatic hint of coming nuts. You may almost
taste the songs of the spring birds! What
words these buds are ! How prophetic !
We bite them, and, lo ! the spring rises in a
vision ! Its poem is read in advance.

I recollect a clear fountain of cold water
around which grew festoons of cress and
mint. I had been chasing the wild things
all the morning, as a true huntsman will,
and now I was tired and thirsty. At such
a time what could be more welcome than
mint and water ? How soothing the fragrant
flavor and the cooling draught ! Then came
the biting spiciness of the cress, to reinvigor-
ate my nerve withal. Out of my pouch I drew
a cake of maple sugar, and feasted like a god.

When winter begins to come on, the nuts
come too. I cannot understand the taste of
those who do not like the rich oily kernels
of the butternut, the hickory nut, and the
sweet acorns of the pine oak. Squirrels know

BROWSING AND NIBBLING. 103

which side of a nut is buttered. They have
long ago learned that it is the inside. From
Florida to Michigan one may run the gamut of
nuts, beginning with the lily-nuts, or water
chinquepins, and running up to the great
black-walnut, including every shade of flavor
and fatness. They are all good. They were
made to eat in the open air ; and he who takes
them, as the squirrels do, after vigorous ex
ercise in the woods, will find great comfort in
them. I cannot rank the artist or poet very
high whose stomach is too aristocratic for
wild berries, nuts, and aromatic bark. I fear
that such an one has long since allowed
that trace of savage vigor, which made him
of kin to Pan and Apollo, to slip away and be
lost. Shall we doubt that Burns got his sweet
strength and freshness, in a great measure,
out of the cool, fragrant loam his ploughshare
turned ? The gracious ways of nature are so
simple and so manifold. She gives up to us
by such subtle vehicles of conveyance the
precious essences of suggestion. She draws
us back from overculture to renew our virility
with her simples. She gives us dew instead
of philosophy, perfumes instead of science,
flowers in place of art, fruit in lieu of lectures,
and nuts instead of sermons.

In the manifest life of an individual no ele
ment is so pleasing as that trace of force
which suggests his kinship to wild nature.
Out of this springs a sweet stream of originality
and freshness, a sincerity and outrightness of
thought and action, of great value per se. I
have met men whose talk was spicy and aro
matic ; from whose lips simple words fell with a
new, racy meaning. Their thoughts were red-

1 04 B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES.

olent of the odors and essences of buds and
flowers, and sweet, mossy solitudes. Theirs
had been the oil of nuts instead of the oil of
the lamp.

There is no safety in culture if it leads to
artificiality. There must be a safety-valve to
any high-pressure system, social, moral, or in
tellectual. The connection with the sources
of nature must be kept perfect. Poetry,
painting, sculpture, and all the cognate ele
ments of high education and sweet intellectual
attainment, must become mere manifestations
of a diseased fancy and imagination whenever
this connection shall be permanently severed.
It matters little by what slender streams na
ture feeds us, so that we get the food at first
hand. History seems to teach us that utter
artificiality is the forerunner of decadence. On
the other hand, in the flowering time of a peo
ple's youth come their geniuses. England
can have no Shakespeare now, Germany no
Goethe, Italy no Dante. Culture has gone
too far. The wires are down between nature
and the leaders of fashion in fine art. True,
we have the microscope in the hands of hun
dreds of analysts and fact-gatherers ; but this
serves only the turn of the men who' despise
every element of nature that cannot be con
trolled for the furtherance of the demands of
artificial life.

Reader, let us go out occasionally to browse
and nibble, and gather the savage sweets of
primeval things ; to revel in the crude mate
rials of creation ; to get the essential oils, the
spices, the fragrance, the pungent elements
of originality.

OUT-DOOR INFLUENCES IN
LITERATURE.

THE earth is the great reservoir of phys
ical forces, and whilst no scientist has yet
been able to discover feow intimate or how per
fect is the connection between the mental and
the physical, there exists, no doubt, a correla
tion between the processes by which the body
and the soul are kept healthy and vigorous by
draughts on the great reserves of Nature.
One grows tired of books and cloyed with all
manner of art. Then comes a hunger and a
thirst for Nature. Real thought-gathering is
like berry-gathering — one must go to the wild
vines for the racy-flavored fruit. Art and Na
ture are really the antipodes of each other —
one is original, the other second-hand. When
we go from the library or the studio to the
woods and fields, we go to get back what
Art has robbed us of — the freshness of Nature.
Art presents compositions ; Nature offers the
original elements. The suggestions of Nature
come, as the flowers and leaves and breezes
come — out of the mysterious, invisible gener
ator ; but Art merely reflects its suggestions
back upon Nature.

What genuine poet or novelist has not caught
his charmingest conceits from some subtle and
indescribable influence of out-door things ?
In- door poets, like Dante G. Rossetti, always
lack the dewy freshness of Helicon, the thymy
fragrance of Hybla, no matter how much of

1 06 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES,

the true maker's labor limce may appear in
their works. Even Poe and Hawthorne dis
close too heavy a trace of the must and mould
of the closet. Each stands alone, inimitable,
in his field, but lacking that balmy, odorous
freshness of the morning woods and pastures,
when the convolvulus and the violet are in
bloom. We should have little faith in the
bird-song described by either one of those
wizards of romance.

" The skies they were ashen and sober,
The leaves they were crisped and sere,"

in all their works. Cheerfulness and enthusi
asm have always seemed to me to belong of
right to the best genius. Shakespeare exempli
fies it ; the sublime audacity of Napoleon I.
instances it. But Shakespeare was a poacher,
and Napoleon loved to dwell out of doors. I
hold that communion with Nature generates
lofty ideas, feeds noble ambitions. The only
way to lengthen a yard-measure is to gauge
each new length of cloth by the preceding one,
and not by the yardstick. The growth will be
slow, but amazingly sure. So in Art, if we
cast aside the standards and permit such ac
cretion as Nature suggests.

But there must be some excuse for going
out alone with Nature other than the avowed
purpose of filching her secrets and accumulat
ing her suggestions ; for, as a matter of fact,
nearly or quite all of the available literary or
artistic materials caught from her great reser
voirs come without the asking, and at the
moment when they are least expected. Then,
too, the human mind seems to have no volun
tary receptivity. The power of taking in new

INFL UENCES IN LITER A TURE. 1 07

elements seems most active in the brain when
the pleasurable excitement of a rational pas
time is upon it. The artist is often surprised,
while aimlessly sketching in the presence of
Nature ; at the sudden coming on of a genu
ine " inspiration" — a suggestion leaping out
of some accidental touch, or out of some elu
sive, shadowy change in the phases of things.

The direct study of Nature is dry, and its re
sults, however useful and entertaining, far from
satisfactory from a literary or artistic stand
point. As one can see an object better in the
night by not looking straight at it, so the in
direct view of Nature is best for the discovery
of those inspiring morsels upon which the gods
used to feed, and with which the poet, the
novelist, and the painter of to-day delight to
stimulate themselves. But the gods were hunt
ers and athletes, as well as lyrists and song
sters. They bent the bow with as much ease
and delight as they blew in the hollow reed or
thrummed on the stringed shell. They robbed
the wild bees of their honey, and chased the
deer over the hills ; they followed the streams
of Arcadia, and haunted the fountains and
glens of both Italy and Greece. The poets are
said to be the successors of the gods. The
gums and resins, the spices and saps, the per
fumes and subtle essences of Nature make their
nectar and ambrosia. It is the presence of
this flavor of Nature that discloses the work of
a genuine genius. No amount of cunning arti-
sanship can create, it can only build. Genius
works with animate materials and essences ;
its

" Conscious stones to beauty grow."

io8 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

In a bit of verse I once tried to express my
idea of the true poet : —

" He is a poet strong and true
Who loves wild thyme and honey-dew,
Who, like a brown bee, works and sings,
With morning freshness on his wings,
And a gold burden on his thighs,
The pollen-dust of centuries."

This pollen-dust is to be found in the old
woods as well as in the old books. The
flowers of poesy are but impressionist sketches
of the flowers of Nature. The little bloom of
the partridge-berry has sweeter perfume than
any lyric of Theocritus or Horace. From the
proper point of view the big, vigorous flower
of the tulip-tree is as full of racy, unused sug
gestions as it is of stamens. Virgil and Ten
nyson, Theocritus and Emerson, Sappho and
Keats, have filled their songs with the most
delicately elusive elements of Nature caught
from out-door life. They are the half-dozen
poets of the world who have come near in
their work to the methods of the bee. The
honey-cell and the poem are of divine art — the
honey and the idea of the poem are of divine
nature. Rossetti and Poe builded lovely cells,
but they had no wild-flower honey with which
to fill them ; theirs was a marvellous nectar,
but it was gathered from books and art. " Vol
umes of forgotten lore " served them, instead
of brooks, and fields, and woods, and birds,
and flowers.

Now, literature is not the whole of life,
nor is the study of Nature the whole secret of
literary inspiration. But recreation of body
and mind is drawn from obscure and various

INFLUENCES IN LITERATURE. 109

sources, and the well-rounded genius seems to
feed itself upon Nature much more than upon
books. A book is most useful as a literary
helper, when it may be used as a glass with
which to better view Nature. I would not be
understood as saying that all worthy literature
is or should be a mere interpretation of out
door life ; far from it. Out-door life, I may
say, furnishes the inspiration, the enthusiasm,
the freshness. It furnishes the water for the
clay, it gives the hand its certainty, the mind
its new leases upon youth. It does not make
the mind nor the hand ; it merely informs
them with the creative effluence of Nature, as
Thoreau would express it. It has a fertilizing
power — this lonely communion with the out
door forms of life — which one may trace in the
best works of the geniuses of all ages. Pan,
when he pursued the flying Syrinx, and at last
clasped an armful of reeds instead of the
nymph, very accurately typified the poet. He
took the reeds and made of them his pipe.
He had caught the idea of music from the
sounds of the rustling leaves and stems. If
you would like to fully understand the mean
ing of this myth of Pan and Syrinx go clasp
an armful of wild green reeds and hold your
ear close to them. You will hear the sound
of washing seas and rippling rivers and flow
ing breezes all blending together ; voices from
vast distances and snatches of immemorial
song will come to you. Like Pan you will
long for a pipe, that you may express what
has been suggested to you by the reeds.

Awhile ago I said that direct, conscious
study of Nature was not best for gathering
those impressions most valuable to the poet

no B Y- WA YS A ND BIRD-NO TES.

and artist. Thoreau is a striking example of
a poet spoiled by this direct study. Compare
his poetry with that of Keats or Tennyson or
Emerson, and it will be discovered that his ob
vious attitudinizing before Nature prevents
him from appearing sincere, simple, and fresh
in his conceits. It seems that the available
material which one gets from Nature, save
for scientific purposes, must be received aslant,
so to speak — must be discovered by indirect
vision — and while one is looking for some
thing else. Thus while Thoreau was besieg
ing Nature for her poetic essences, he failed to
find them, though Keats had stumbled upon
them apparently by accident*

" What melodies are these ?
They sound as through the whispering of trees."

If ever the songs of a poet

" Come as through bubbling honey,"
and

"In trammels of perverse deliciousness,"

the songs of Keats did, and in them we may
find in the best measure the influences of the
indirect study of Nature.

Now, there are few persons who, like Keats,
will absorb these influences without some stim
ulus other than the poet's love of solitude;
nor is solitude for its own sake wholesome.
On the contrary, it is inimical to healthy phys
ical and mental development. Keats* might
have lived to finish all his " divine fragments "
if he had been an enthusiastic canoeist, archer,
or bicyclist. He died of consumption at the
age of twenty-five years ! If William Cullen

INFL UENCES IN LITER A TURE. 1 1 1

Bryant had possessed Keats's genius, of if
Keats had had Bryant's physique ! Think of
the boy-author of Endymion singing till he was
eighty ! And yet such a thing might be if
recreation were regular and judicious. If
Keats were alive to-day he would not be ninety
years old, and yet his poems have been classics
for more than sixty years.

The study of Nature, as I have said, should
be indirect, in order to perfect recreation.
Some cheerful sport, to absorb one's direct at
tention, is the best aid to the end in view, and
to my mind the best sport is that which neces
sarily takes one into the woods and along the
streams, where wild flowers blow and wild
birds sing, and where the flavor of sap and the
fragrance of gums and resins are in the
breezes. If I were a poet I think I should be
one of that class described as

" Poets, a race long unconfined and free,
Still fond and proud of savage liberty."

I could not be the one of the garret and
the crust ; better a hollow tree and locusts and
wild honey. The redeeming feature of Walt
Whitman's deservedly tabooed, and yet deserv
edly admired, Leaves of Grass, is the sweet,
ever-recurring wood-note, the sincere voice of
Nature, half strangled as it is in incoherent
sounds — a feature that affects one like the
notes of a wood-thrush heard in the depths of
a dismal, swampy hollow. Too much time
spent in the streets and crowds of the cities —
too much knowledge of the brutal side of life
— has given us a Whitman, a Baudelaire, and
a Zola. Too much knowledge of Nature gave
us a Thoreau. It is a curious fact that, so

H2 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

soon as a people have grown beyond the study
and the love of out-door nature, their literature
begins to be what French literature now is —
a literature without any true poetry. Daudet,
for instance, is a poet, but he cannot make
poetry. His novels are spiced with intrigues
and immoralities, instead of with the flavor of
out-door life. Zola sees nothing but the
tragedies of the gutter and the brothel. He
never dreams of green fields and melodious
woods ; he finds nothing worthy of his art in
rural scenes or in honest, earnest life. He
never goes into solitude with Nature. The lit
erature of England, from Chaucer down to
Dickens and William Black, is full of the fra
grance, so to speak, of out-door life, and it will
be so as long as the English man and the
English woman remain true to their love of
all kinds of open-air pastimes. The deer, the
pheasant, the blackcock, the trout, and the
fox, have done much to fence the poetry and
fiction or our mother-country against the
French tendencies and influences.

But American literature is beginning to
feel, in a certain way, the effect of much love
of Parisian manners. Henry James, Jr., who
just now leads our novelists, is much more
French than American or English in his liter
ary methods. His theory is, that the aim of
the novelist is to represent life ; but he no
where recognizes " out-doors " or out-of-doors
things as a part of life. Life to him means
fashionable, social life — nothing more. The
life of which Hawthorne wrote isflasseto him.
From his stand-point he is right. If realism,
as the critics now define it, is a genuine revo
lution in literature, it may be a long while be-

1NFL UENCES IN LITER A TURE. 1 1 3

fore any otherfiction than Mr. James's very
pleasant sort will be in demand. He is master
of his method, and has made the most of his
theory. But, without finding fault with Mr.
James's charming novels, it may be asked if
they would not be better were it possible for
the author to inject into them something of
William Black's knowledge of out-door things,
and to give them the color and atmosphere de»
manded by the places where their scenes are
laid. Social atmosphere he does give to per
fection ; but of the air his people breathe he
knows nothing. He never sets his story in a
landscape ; its entourage is always an artificial
one ; he frames it, like an artist, with a frame ex
actly suited to its tone ; but it would look as
well in one place as another. In reading his
stories we are thoroughly charmed, and would
not know where to change a word ; but we
know all along that we are reading a story.
He does not take us away from the spot where
we are reading ; but he chains us to our chair
with the spell of his " representations of life "
until the end is reached.

Now, a little different treatment would
change all this. The color and the atmosphere
of the place should be added, as with the brush
of the painter, so that we would find ourselves
on the spot, feel the air, smell the perfumes,
see the varied features of the region round
about, as well as talk with the people and
share their life. Let it be understood that I
do not criticise Mr. James. He is a prince of
novelists. I merely attempt to show that he
might add to his charming stories the freshness
of the breezes, the bird-songs, and the flowers,
8

114 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

without abating in the least his placid realism
or endangering his reputation for merciless
analysis.

But even so delicately refined a novelist as
Mr. James loses less by the lack of a knowl
edge of out-door things than does the least of
minor poets. The singer must not, cannot,
rely upon any other reserve than Nature,
from which to draw the freshness and racy
flavor that every true poem must have. Still
it must be remembered that mere descriptive
writing, no matter how true to Nature, is not
what gives that " smack of Helicon " of which
Mr. Lowell speaks. The true critical test is
one that will discover any trace of the simplic
ity, the artlessness, and the self-sufficiency of
Nature. Whatever is truly fresh and original
in literature will be found to contain something
not acquired from books, nor from observation
of society, nor yet from introspection ; this
comes, one might say, from the soil and the
air by a growth like that of the flowers. I be
lieve it is due, in nearly every case, to out
door recreation. It is felt on almost every
page of Emerson, Tennyson, and William
Black, and it is just as charming in a story
like A Princess of Thule, as it is in In Memo-
riam or in Wood Notes. John Burroughs has
shown what a delightful study Nature may
be to him who plays with her for the mere
sake of the play. He has given us the ex
treme of what may be called wind-rustled
and dew-dashed literature. What a grand
novelist Henry James and John Burroughs
would make if they could be welded together !
Life would then be represented sympathet-

INFL UENCES IN LITER A TURE. 1 1 5

ically from centre to circumference — from the
heart of an oak to the outermost garment of
a "dude."

Mr. Hardy's novel, But yet a Woman, and
Mr. Crawford's Mr. Isaacs, leaped at once into
popular favor on account of the freshness that
was in them. In both stories a knowledge of
out-door life is blended with a keen insight
into the most interesting mysteries of the
human heart. Mr. Isaacs was not only a
master polo-player and a crack shot ; he was
also a philosopher and a lover of no common
sort. In But yet a Woman the descriptive
passages and the epigrammatic paragraphs
serve as a fixitive for the story, setting it per
manently, and giving it an air of its own. The
physical atmosphere is as wholesome and
sweet as the moral spirit is sane and pure.
One would suspect that the story had been
written in the open air, or, at least, in the
country, with the library windows wide open.
Indeed, sunshine and air are as antiseptic and
deodorizing in literature as in the field of phys
ical operations. Even Baudelaire occasion
ally, under the influence of a sea-breeze, wrote
such a poem as Parfum Exotique, or La Cheve-
lure. He had a charming knowledge of
marine effects, and it seems to me that his
verse

"Infinis bercements du loisir enbaume "

is enough of itself to immortalize him. It is
a whole poem. One sees the warm, creamy
tropical water, feels the long, lazy swell, the in
finite idle rocking, the balmy leisure, and
takes in, as by a breath, the illusive charm of
the ever-mysterious sea. Buchanan Read's

1 1 6 BY-WAYS A ND BIRD-NO TES.

Drifting might be condensed into that one
line —

" Infinis bercements du loisir embaume."

In fact, the few poems worthy the name, writ
ten by Baudelaire, were made out of the sweet,
warm shreds of his out-door life, while on a
voyage in the far East. Even in France, this
freshness of Nature is recognized and relished.
In Ntima Roumestan M. Daudet has, as one
might say, wafted the odors of Provence
through the streets of Paris. The critics felt
the atmospheric change, and went to the win
dows to see the mistral flurrying along the
boulevards. So, in America, when Bret Harte
and Joaquin Miller sent their stories and poems
over the mountains and deserts from our far
Pacific coast, it was their freshness — their
woodsy, dewy, out-door flavor that recom
mended them. A happy blending of the
bucolic with the latest fashionable tendencies
— a welding together of the pastoral and the
ultra-urban, made a great success oiAn Earn
est Trifler. It would be easy to multiply in
stances. The proofs are perfect that the in
fluences of out-door life upon literature are of
the subtlest and most interesting nature.
Whilst every one must admit the paramount
importance of human life in every form of lit
erary composition, still the side-light of out
door nature is absolutely necessary to the his
torian, the poet, and the novelist, and he who
neglects it fails in one of the prime require
ments of the best art. As well might the
painter draw a group of figures without color,
atmosphere, or background, and expect to
win the highest fame, as for the novelist or the

I NFL UENCES IN LITER A TURE. 1 1 7

poet to depend wholly upon human actions and
conversations for his effects. The moral of
all this need not be appended. Out-door
life is the great recreator and regenerator. Na
ture is steeped in the elixir which has power
to freshen and renew our highest facilities. If
" the proper study of mankind is man," still
it is safe to say that sound lungs, healthy
blood, a good appetite, and a clear brain, are
indispensable to such study, and are to be had
only by those who breathe pure air, digest their
food, and read the human heart by the light
of the sun.

A FORTNIGHT IN A PALACE OF
REEDS.

WHEN you reach the top of the bold hill
known as Cedar Loaf, you may see the Coo-
sawattee River winding away, in a direction
diagonal to the length of the valley below,
sparkling and rippling between its dense
fringes of canebrake. There are broad rifts
in the forests of pine, hickory, oak and tulip,
through which shine the grassy glades or min
iature prairies, peculiar to the North Georgia
region. The old Indian Ford, from which the
serpentine trail of the Cherokees used to
wriggle away like a snake, is still visible, its
steep approaches having somewhat the ap
pearance of abandoned otter-slides. Nowhere
in the world, I believe, can such beautiful fo
liage be found as that wherewith the forests
of this wild region bedecks itself in April.
The young hickory trees spread out marvellous
leaves, more than a span in width, and the yel
low tulip exaggerates both foliage and flowers.
The dogwood and sour-gum, the red-oak, the
maple and the chestnut, the cherry, the sasa-
fras and the lovely' sweet-gum all flourish in
fullest luxury of life and color. Wild flowers,
too, of almost endless varieties, leap into per
fect blossom early in spring along every hill
slope and in every valley, pocket, and ravine.

Not far from Indian Ford stood the Palace
of Reeds, built by Nature's own hand, on a
low bluff of the river's east bank. We found

IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 119

it — Will and I — while rambling in the valley,
and, by virtue of the right of discovery, quietly
appropriated it for our indwelling during the
fair weather of the delightful Georgian spring.
Imagine two wild plum trees in full sweet-
scented bloom standing twenty-five feet apart,
with a thick-leaved muscadine vine flung over
them like a richly wrought mantle. The boles
of the trees are gray and mossy, fluted like
antique pillars. The ground is flecked with
rugs of dark Southern moss through which the
violets and spring beauties have found their
way. The keen odor of sassafras and the
delicate perfume of tulip honey comes along
the air. You stand on the threshold of this
natural palace, and looking through the
tender gloom of its arched hall you see the
cool river flowing and singing on. There are
bees in the air, wild bees whose home is
in some great hollow plane-tree not far away.
You hear the dreamful hum of tiny wings.
You see the plum flowers shake and let fall
their golden pollen dust, and the -reeds, the
tall gold-and-green reeds, rise all around the
palace forming its walls. The earth is warm,
the sky is pure and cloudless. Deep in the
brake a hermit-thrush is calling. A vireo be
yond the river quavers mournfully.

The Palace of Reeds was handsomely fur
nished with a mossy log for sofa, two camp-
stools and a low canvas table. An easel stood
for most of the day in the clear light of the
west, opening just above the babbling water.
It is worth noting, because now it is a fra
grant memory, that the drawing-board was
of red cedar. The box of moist water-colors,
the bird-sketches, the portfolio of pencil notes,

1 20 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

the half-dozen well worn volumes scattered
about give a strange air to this woodland
bower. No farm or plantation is in sight.
If you can hear any sound of busy human life,
it is the singing of some merry negroes pro
pelling a corn-boat down the river. Usually
these boats passed us in the night. They
were a kind of long, low keel craft with stern
paddle and oars. Midway of the boat were
heaped the white sacks of corn. The tall
dusky oarsmen swayed to and fro singing
meanwhile some outlandish but strangely fas
cinating song.

Here by the flaring light of burning pine-
knots we read Keats and Theocritus, Shelley
and Ovid in turn. Our concurrent studies
were not plainly congruous, rather conflict
ing, one might think, for we studied Greek,
practised archery, collected birds-eggs, made
water-color drawings of plants and birds,
read poetry, boated, swam, practised taxi
dermy, fenced with reed foils, fished for bass,
and cooked admirable dinners ! A little way
off stood our cabin, or rather, our hut, into
which a sudden shower of rain now and then
drove us. When the nights were clear we
hung our hammocks in the palace, and slept
suspended in the perfumed breeze. Often I
awoke in the small hours and heard the rac
coons growling and chattering in the brake.
At such times the swash of the river had a
strangely soothing effect, a lullaby of fairy
land.

Will had a nocturnal habit. He would slip
forth, when the moon shone, long after I had
gone to sleep, and the twang of his bowstring
would startle me from quiet dreams as he let

IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 121

go a shaft at an owl or a night heron. Read
ing over some of the notes I made at the time
recalls the charmingly unique effect of certain
sounds heard at waking moments in those out
door resting-hours :

The leaping of bass, for instance, plash,
plash, at unequal intervals of time and distance,
breaking through the supreme quiet of mid
night, comes to one's ears with a liquid, bub
bling accompaniment, not at all like anything
else in the world. The mocking bird (Mimus
polyglottus} often starts from sleep in the scented
foliage of the sweet-gum to sing a tender med
ley to the rising moon. At such time his
voice reflects all the richness and shadowy
dreamfulness of night. It blends into one's
sense of rest and becomes an element of en
joyment after one has fallen again into
slumber.

Frogs are night's buffoons. " Croak, croak,
croak," you hear one muttering, and with your
eyes yet unopened and the silence and still
ness of sleep scarcely gone from you, you
wonder where he is sitting. On what green
tussock, with his big eyes jetting out and his
angular legs akimbo, does he squat ? Sud
denly " Chug ! " You know how he leaped
up, spread out his limbs, turned down his head
and struck into the water like a shot. You
chuckle grimly to yourself, turn over in your
hammock, and all is forgotten.

Then the screech-owl begins to whine in
its tremulous, querulous falsetto, snapping its
beak occasionally as if to remind the mice and
small birds of its murderous desires. The
big horned-owl laughs and hoots far away in
gloomy glens. The leaves rustle, the river

122 BY-WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

pours on, and the wind sinks and swells like
the breath of a mighty sleeper.

Perfumes, too, affect one strangely, on wak
ing, in the depth of night. There is a certain
decayed wood in the Southern forests which at
times gives forth a delicate, far-reaching aroma.
This, together with the occasional wafts of
sweet-gum odor and the peculiarly sharp smell
of pine resin, steals through the woodland
ways and touches the sleeper's senses until
he slowly awakes. Drowsily he lies, with his
eyes lightly closed, noting the tender shades
of sweetness as they come and go. But the
falling of a slight shower of rain, one of those
short, light, even down-comings of large drops,
which is not strong enough to break through
the leaf-canopy overheard, moves the out-door
slumberer to most exquisite enjoyment. He
opens his eyes and all his senses at once.
The air has sweet moisture in it, the darkness
is deep. Above, around, far and near, a tu
mult is in the leaves. The shower is scarcely
more than momentary in its duration, but it
is infinitely suggestive. There are millions of
voices calling from far and near. Vast organ
swells, tender aeolian strains, the thrumming-
of harp-strings and the exquisite quaverings of
the violin. Multitudes clapping hands and
crying from afar in applause. Then as the
cloud passes on, the throbbing sounds trail
after it, and at length it all dies out beyond
the hills.

So our nights were " filled with music " in
the Palace of Reeds.

Our days were the scenes of greater because
more active pleasures. We had a pirogue dug
out of a tulip log which we propelled on the

IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 123

river in our shooting, sketching and fishing
excursions. We endeavored to make pencil
studies of all the wild-birds in their natural at
titudes, drawing them in water-colors after
wards from specimens held captive. These
models we took in springes, traps, and snares
of various sorts, the horse-hair slip-noose be
ing the best for many birds. When the mul
berries are ripening you may capture wood
peckers readily by erecting a smooth, slender
pole projecting somewhat above the tree-top
and having horse-hair slip-nooses, thickly set
along its sides, for entangling their feet. The
same capillary arrangement on the branches
of trees especially haunted by any other bird
will prove a pretty certain means of ensnar
ing it. We took great pains not to hurt our
captive models and freed them as soon as pos
sible.

Sketching a wild bird in the freedom of the
woods and brakes is the utmost shorthand
known to the artist. It must be done with
all the dash and hurry of phonographic report
ing. Five seconds cover a very long stop in a
bird's movements, and some of them are never
' still for even that short period of time. I have
followed one bird, a species of warbler (Sylvia
vermivora,) for a full hour before I could get a
passable outline sketch. In and out among
the leaves, over and under and round and
round, it went flitting, peering, prying, a very
embodiment of restlessness. Such a chase has
in it a smack of excitement, and after it is all
over a leisurely survey of your sketch-book, leaf
by leaf, will be both amusing and instructive.
There is something of inspiration often found
lurking in lines dashed down upon the paper

1 24 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

in this hurried, almost frantic way. You have
also sometimes made comic pictures when you
least intended such things ! Here is a bird's
bill and a quick firm curve for the back of its
head ; the rest of the sketch flew away with the
original. On the next page stands a fly-catcher,
on one leg, minus a wing and having only the
hint of a tail ; but you have preserved the
characteristic attitude, and the sketch is valua
ble. You can work it up at your leisure.
Here is a pine-woodpecker, a pretty fair out
line, but there is no sign of an eye in the bird's
head and its feet grasp thin air. All these
notes, however hurried and uncertain, are
reminders of what your eyes have seen, bring
ing up at once vivid pictures of the gay wild
things which have flitted before you.

Sometimes a bird will be exceedingly ac
commodating. I recall now how one day I
crept, under cover of a tuft of wild sedge grass,
to within thirty feet of a log-cock (Hylotamus
pikatus), and worked out a most satisfactory
study, while it was quietly eating winged ants,
as they poured from a hole it had pecked in a
rotten stump.

. The yellow-billed cuckoo is a very difficult
bird to sketch, so shy and sly and so restless.
You will hear his queer, throbbing note in
some lone place, and you will slip along
hoping to see him. When you have nearly
reached the spot, lo, he has eluded you, and
his mournful voice caws out from deeper
shades further off among the tangled trees.
The wood-thrush and hermit-thrush are equally
evasive. By the way, Wilson claims that
the hermit-thrush is mute. I am sure this
is an error. One day while I lay in a cane-

IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 125

brake watching a green-heron's nest, a
low sweet " turlilee" much like the wood-
thrush's warble or thrill, called my eyes to a
bird not ten feet away from me. I was well
hidden and motionless, so that I was not dis
covered until after I had thoroughly identified
the hermit. It repeated the low, musical trill
several times, and when at -length I frightened
it by some movement, it flew away uttering a
keen squeak or chirp.

Having digressed thus far it is pardonable
to go a step further and declare that the blue-
jay sings. I have heard it sing a low, tender
wheedling song which seems never to have at
tracted the notice of naturalists. A wood-
duck had her nest in the hollow of a plane-
tree just across the little river from the palace.
I watched her go out and in. She made her
wings silent, so as not to attract notice, going
through the air with as little noise as an owl.
Her mate, a beautifully painted fellow, lin
gered about the brakes in the vicinity, occa
sionally uttering a sly quack. How the young
when hatched were conveyed safely to the
ground we failed to discover. One morning
they were in the river swimming beside their
mother as if they had always been there, dod-
dling their heads and arching their necks just
like old ducks.

There was an island a mile up the river
whither we often went, to fish off shore for
bass, and to sketch kildee-plover and sand
pipers. On one end of the island grew a
patch of cane and rush-grass into which we
tracked a fawn ; but the shy creature hid so
successfully that we could not find it. A wild
turkey had its nest in the edge of this jungle

126 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

early in the spring. It was also the nesting-
place of a pair of cardinal-grosbeaks, whose
Well-built home I discovered fitted neatly be
tween three strong reeds. Soon in the morn
ing the male would alight on the highest point
above the nest and whistle bravely, his plum
age shining like dull red fire

There is no craft like a dug-out, that genu
ine Indian pirogue, for perfect gentleness and
sweetness of motion. You sit on a seat hewn
in the stern and ply a short, rather broad
paddle. The long, slender boat is all before
you, the prow well up, like a pug nose. The
round, smooth bottom slips along almost on top
of the water, as if running over ice. In such a
pirogue we would paddle around the island
and troll far bass, often catching wonderfully
game fellows of over four pounds in weight.
This silent gliding of the dug-out makes it par
excellence the angler's craft. There is no rat
tling of rowlock and thole-pin, no oar-dip.
Your paddle goes in silently, it comes out with
not even the slightest ripple-break. The
bass and bream are utterly unaware of your
movements.

Speaking of bream, as the Southerners call
the blue-perch, it is a royal fish. You find
it in the eddies and swirls of those Georgian
brooks and rivers, a voracious feeder, taking
the worm with all the vigor of a trout. You
use a rather heavy reed for a rod, rigged with
a small reel. The larvae of wasps and angle
worms are the most killing baits. A bream
weighing ten ounces will give you a lively run,
testing your skill equal to a speckled trout of a
like size. It comes out of the water shining
with royal purple and yellowish waves of color.

IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 127

In shape it is shorter and broader, but resem
bles somewhat the rock-bass.

We sketched our fish while alive, and I find,
among many other curious reminders of the
palace, a pencil drawing of the great Southern
gar, a fish with a bill much like a snipe's.
This specimen we did not catch, but bought it
of an old negro, who, every Saturday, rain or
shine, visited our camp, coming from a planta
tion quarter some miles up the river. He was
a piper, a sort of African Pan, who blew lively
pieces of barbaric tunes out of reed joints
arranged in triangular form. He came to sell
us eggs of the guinea fowl, which I suspect he
stole, albeit they made very fine omelets. He
taught us a new and ingenious method of
snaring hares and birds. Our water-color
sketches were wonderful to his eyes, and he
babbled about them in a supremely droll way.

To dwellers in the Northern and Middle
States, it may seem strange, this out-door life,
but it must be remembered that the hills and
valleys of Cherokee Georgia, are dry and
warm from April to September, dews are light,
the air pure, and, for weeks together, the sky is
cloudless day and night. I recall a perfect
February, it must have been in 1859. Will
and I, then mere boys, staid out during the en
tire month and not a drop of rain fell. Every
day was warm and clear, the nights were cool
and pleasant. No clouds, scarcely any wind
— a month of rare dreamy weather, not unlike
northern Indian summer.

Many a night in July and August I have slept
in the open air under a tree, preferring it to a
cot or bed indoors. A hammock and a heavy
blanket, for the nights are chilly even in mid-

128 BY-WAYS A ND BIRD-NO T£S.

summer, with mere shelter from dew if any fall,
are all one needs for healthful rest.

Our bower among the reeds caught that
gentle current of air which nearly always flows
with the way of a river, and we were rarely dis
turbed by gnats or mosquitoes. There were
no dangerous wild beasts, very few poisonous
snakes, and, of course, nothing else to make
us fearful.

But we were not idle dreamers. We had in
view a definite object, toward which all our
studies and labors pointed. Alas, the cataclys-
mal years which soon came swept all away !
The best that can be gathered from fragment
ary remnants and vivid recollections is a sort
of dreamy pleasure in somewhat living over
again those days and nights of tranquil green
wood life. A little of science and a great deal
of nature we found out. We learned the ways
of the fish, the birds, the bees, the winds, the
clouds, the flowers. We translated the mean
ing of stream-songs and leaf-murmurs. In the
Palace of Reeds we knew utter freedom based
on older law than magna charta or any declara
tion of rights. When one is a supple boy in the
wildwood, healthy, happy, strong, with a long
bow in his hands and old romance all through
him, he is free as the winds and birds. Add to
this a strong purpose, an aim far ahead, and
what would you have more ?

Our indoor days, if those spent in the Palace
may be so called, would have appeared, to a
world-wise onlooker, somewhat tame ; but to
a poet they would have revealed the labors of
sincere, earnest souls, feeling their way through
youth's morning-rnist to the clear light.

I remember one hot May day, too sultry for

IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 129

any great physical exertion, we spent in the
most delightful way. Will was busy with The
ocritus, and kept up a running comment on the
oral translation to which he .was treating me,
while I, with leisurely care, was making a draw
ing in water-colors of a fine butcher-bird I had
captured the clay before. The wind came in
desultory throbs through our mossy hall, fetch
ing up from the river a touch of dampness and
the smell of water weeds. All the bird-voices
were hushed, or, if heard at all, they wasted
themselves in scattering squeaks and lazy
dreamful flutings. Shut away from the sun,
we were made aware of his extreme heat indi
rectly by the softened reflection from the water
and by that dusky dryness always observable
on the reed leaves and the blades of aquatic
grass when a spring day burns like midsummer.
We could hear the chattering cry of the king
fisher and an occasional plash, as the industri
ous bird plunged into the river after his prey.
Diagonally across the stream, near the other
bank, a small tree growing at the water's edge,
had caught a scraggily drift of logs and boughs,
round which a brown scum, with huge pyra
mids of white foam, was clinging. Some green
herons stood on projecting sticks, stretching
their puffy necks, or silently sulking, with
their sharp beaks elevated and their throats
knotted into balls upon their breasts. Among
some stones in a shallow place, a bright spot
ted water-snake lay in the ripple, holding up
his angular head and darting his malign tongue
in sheer wantonness of spirit.

Those idyls, as Will read them, fell from
his lips to immediately blend with the warm
lull, the glowing dream of Nature. Those flow-
9

1 30 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

ers of song joined well witn the flower-de-luce
and the wild geranium. Their racy fragrance
was of kin to the leaf-smell and resin odor.
Will's voice seemed, in some mysterious way,
to become the expression of the mood of Na
ture. A dream came upon me. I leaned
against the wall of reeds and felt the coolness
of their sappy stalks steal all through my frame.
My sketch faded from my sight and I but
vaguely noted the restless movements of my
captive shrike.

There are times when hearing a true lyric
read aloud is the quintessence of all rapture-
ful music. It is the expression of everything
ariose and thrillingly sweet which has ever
been played or written or sung, from Terpan-
der to Remenyi, from Anacreon to Aldrich.
I said something of this sort to Will in reply to
a kindred suggestion from him touching the
idyls. He arose and strung his bow, then,
holding his ear close to the cord, he twanged
it softly and replied : " You hear that low note.
Well, how many ages ago did man first hear
it? The piano, the violin, the lyre, every
stringed instrument is a growth from the long
bow. So some poet away off in yesterdays let
fall the first perfect seed of song, and its kind
will go on increasing in vigor and multiplying
in number forever."

Somewhere, in the depths of the brake, a
cat-bird began to trill and warble, and a big
bass leaped above the water of the river, beside
a half submerged log. The sun crept on and
rolled down the west. As the shadows length
ened the heat withdrew, giving place to re
freshing coolness. We watched the little
flurries of wind rimple the river's face. Great

IN A PALACE OF REEDS. 131

turtles came up out of the water and crawled
along on a sandy place. Two doves circled in
the air, sailing like sparrow-hawks, getting
lower and lower, until they lit upon a stone
in the shallows below us and drank thirstily.
We heard the woodpeckers pounding in the
woods behind the hill, the nuthatches crying
" ank, ank," in the great tulip tree hard by,
and high overhead, in the yellow glory of sun
light, a hen-hawk screaming. Odors arose
and passed down the waxing wind. The cane
leaves tipped each other lightly, and a whisper
ing of many voices arose from the rushes and
flags. So twilight thickened into night. The
stars crept out and the great horned owl and
the night-hawk crept out, too, with some solemn
bats and giant moths, that whirled and darted
above the reeds.

Such a fortnight in the woods as I have been
lightly sketching, will bring to him who rightly
uses it a rich return for whatever sacrifice it
compels. It is to Nature one must go for
ideas. Her lessons are rich with original
germs for the philosopher, the poet, the artist
or the romancer to vitalize his works withal.
No genuine bit of originality can be found, in
poem, picture or tale, which has not been
drawn from the secret depositories of Nature.
The woods and streams, the hills and winds
are but the indices to volumes, one leaf of
which would exhaust the literature of ages.
All eloquence, poetry, and painting can be
better understood when one is as free as the
winds and as happy as a brook. To know
what is supreme enjoyment, go into the woods
and, lying beside a rivulet in fair June weather,
read Theocritus till the bubbling stream and

132 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

the rhythmic idyls flow together in your mind
a perfect harmony of naturalness. Or, if you
are an artist, set up your easel by the brook,
or, with sketch-book in hand, follow the vireo
and wood-thrush from spot to spot until you
have noted something new, if it be but a new
attitude of the shy, shadowy things. Lie on
the cool earth and watch the wind wave the
trees and see the sunlight flit and flash through
their high tops like rare thoughts through a
poet's mind. Leap up and shout and sing.
Take off your hat and toss your hair in the
breeze. Plunge into the river and dive and
swim. Go sleep in a hammock in the Palace
of Reeds !

CUCKOO NOTES.

TAKEN at the right season, the mountainous
region of northern Georgia will furnish a prac
tically unworked field to the naturalist and
pedestrian tourist, whilst to the artist it must
become, sooner or later, a source of rich treas
ure. No other part of our country offers so
pleasing a variety of landscape features, from
the quiet repose of level river-fed valleys to
the grandeur of rocky peaks thrown up against
the bluest sky in the world.

This region is the Spring haunt of a large
number of our American birds, as it affords
the best possible nesting- and feeding-places
for them, especially those whose habits are in
sectivorous and arboreal ; besides, it is in the
direct line of migration from Florida and other
southern winter resorts to the great northern
summer habitat of those happy feathered aris
tocrats who can afford to oscillate with the sun.
The peculiarities of soil, the suddenness with
which Spring comes on, and the protection to
tender germs afforded by the curiously moun
tain-locked " pockets " and valleys, cause all
sorts of forest and field vegetation to leap
into vivid, lusty life early in April.

There is no word in our language so express
ive of the sudden appearance of leaf and
flower all over those brown hills and slate-
gray valleys, as gush. The rains practically
end with March, and the sun ushers in the suc
ceeding month with a fervor that would be un-

134 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

comfortable but for the ever-fresh breezes ; the
light vegetable mould of the thin forests warms
at once, and within a few days everything is
green with leaves and gay with flowers. Even
the oak-trees have scarcely time to show their
tassels before their leaves have broadened to
dimensions wholly beyond comparison with
those of oak foliage in any lower or higher lati
tude. An almost dazzling vividness flashes, so
to speak, from valley to hill-top, indicative of
an exceptional local climatic impulse. Every
thing grows with a riant haste, as if aware
that this ecstatic Spring vigor would soon ex
haust itself (as it nearly always does) and
leave the region to a long, dreamy Summer
drouth.

The migratory birds drop into this favored
district, just in time to get the full benefit of
its luxuriance, and are met by a clamorous and
querulous army of residents, whose domain is
too large to be successfully defended against
invaders. The wild orchards of plum and
haw that border the glades, the thickets of
young pines, the hickory groves and the dusky
forests of post-oak and black gum are at once
flooded with song. The semi-marsh lands
where the liquidamber * flourishes, and the
river " bottoms " where the tulip-tree and the
ash and elm grow to giant size, are the haunts
of the pileated woodpecker, the hermit-thrush,

* The sweet gum (Liquidamber styraciflua) is a
beautiful tree growing to perfection in the Southern
States, along the banks of small streams in wet land.
The gum or resinous balsam obtained by scarifying the
bole is of a clear amber color, is pleasing to the taste,
and gives forth a peculiarly agreeable odor. The tree
bears a flat oval berry of a dark blue color much sought
after by the golden-winged woodpecker.

CUCKOO NOTES. 135

and many another of the shyest and rarest of
our birds.

Nearly all the rivers and rivulets of North
Georgia are bordered with canebrakes and
overhanging trees, darkly cumbered and bowed
with the wildest masses of muscadine vines.
The canoe-voyager passing down the Oostanau-
la, the Connasauga, the Coosawattee or the
Salliquoy — streams as free and unconventional
as the savages who gave them their musical
names — will have exceptional opportunities
for studying nature at first hand.

It was down these rivers that the rich plant
ers, whose isolated plantations were scattered at
wide intervals along the " bottoms," used to
despatch their corn and wheat, their oats and
cotton, in keel-boats manned by the happiest
slaves who ever sighed for freedom. Many a
moon-lit night I have lain on my bed of cedar
boughs on a high, breezy bluff of the Coosa
wattee and heard those merry-hearted boatmen
go by with the current, playing the banjo and
fluting on the genuine Pan-pipe of graded reed-
joints.* Recalling the music, at this distance,
it seems to me the most barbaric and withal
the most fascinating imaginable. Usually, no
matter how bright the night, they had a fire of
pine-knots flaring at the boat's prow, near
which, on the rude floor of the forecastle, they

* This pipe is, in fact, identical with the Syrinx or
Pan-pipe of the ancients. I have seen and examined
many of them, formed of from five to seven reed-joints,
of graduated sizes, bound together in a row. The
music is made by blowing the breath into the open ends
of the teeds. There were some reed-blowers among
the slaves of North Georgia who executed certain char
acteristic negro melodies with surprising effect.

136 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

danced their vigorous hoe-downs, jigs and
jubah-shuffles.

The hill country is, for the most part, very
thinly settled, and many plantations once fer
tile and prosperous now lie waste, all over
grown with dew-berry vines and persimmon
thickets. Everywhere, however, the birds find
rich picking in the season of young leaves and
larvae, and all those perfumed and flowery
groves are charming nesting-places.

Rummaging among my ornithological notes,
I find enough material touching the habits and
haunts of our American cuckoos to make a lib
eral volume. Most of the memoranda refer
to North Georgia, and, in fact, the yellow-billed
cuckoo (Coccygus americanus) especially, is
more numerous there than anywhere else that
I know of. The habits of this bird as well as
those of the three or four other species found
in North America, are extremely interesting,
disconnected from any mere scientific view,
and the places these birds inhabit, and the
season during which they may be studied,
make the pursuit of knowledge touching them
a most delightful affair indeed.

The old nursery rhyme :

" One flew east, one flew west,
One flew to the Cuckoo's nest,"

should have read :

" One flew south to the cuckoo's nest,"

in order to conform to American facts ; for it
is below the Cumberland range of mountains
that one may find the paradise of cuckoos.
Of course even the yellow-bill comes far North
and nests in our apple orchards, forewarning

CUCKOO NOTES. 137

us of rain, as many good people think, by ut
tering its notably strange cry, once heard
never forgotten ; but yet it is on the northern
margin of the sub-tropic, among the dry, warm
hills of Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas,
that Coccygus most loves to dwell.

A cuckoo's nest is a very simple affair — at
first glance, a mere amorphous jumble of
twigs, catkins and leaf-ribs, apparently tossed
at hap-hazard on a low bough ; but it will bear
close study, for its architecture is characteris
tic of the bird's strange genius. How does
such a loose pile of sticks maintain its place
during a heavy wind? Careful examination
discloses a system of deftest weaving instead
of a careless or chance arrangement. The
work of a genius may appear rough and dis
jointed when in fact the subtlest art has made
it look so for the deepest purpose. We may
never determine how near is the relation be
tween the rarest human intelligence and the
instinct of animals, but I have not yet seen
the man who could build a cuckoo's nest !

From the Ohio valley down into Florida I
have tracked the cuckoo through all his sea
sons and haunts ; but, as I have already said,
it was in the hill-country of North Georgia that
I made the most of my notes. Thither, there
fore, let us go in the first days of April and be
on the ground when the strange, sly, shadow-
like bird comes up from the farther South.
He usually comes, with the wind in his favor,
drifting down into the fragrant groves on that
half-enervating, half-inspiring dream-breath
which the Spring puffs over the hills from the
gulf. The first notice given of his advent is
that pounding note, dolefully sounded in the

138 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

dusky depths of the woods, hearing which the
old plantation negroes used to sing their
watermelon rhymes :

" Plant yo' milions w'en de rain-crow holler,
Ef yo' doan dey wont be wo'f er quar' dollar !

Ki fo' de rain,

Ki fo' de crow,
Ye orter see how de wa'r milion grow ! "

It is not so remarkable, after all, that the
cuckoo is called Rain-crow throughout the en
tire area of its habitat, for he seems always
able to conjure up a shower within a day or
two of his first appearance in the spring. I
suspect that he holds his solemn voice until
the rain is at hand, so as to make a fine artis
tic unity out of it and the depressing gloom of
a rising storm-cloud.

The haw-groves that usually fringe the mar
gin of the mountain glades are the Yellow-
bill's favorite resorts when it first reaches the
hill-country from the south. Here it meets
the blue-jay, the brown-thrush and the cardi
nal-grosbeak, permanent residents and im
placable claimants of all the fruits and insects
of these favored spots.

A glade is a peculiarly Southern woodland
feature, not found in perfection north of Ten
nessee, a miniature prairie, surrounded by
scrubby trees and groves or thickets of plum
and haw-bushes, and covered, as a rule, with
wild wire-grass and tufts of sedge. Every one
who has spent much time in the wildwoods
has noted how few are the small birds inhabit
ing forests of tall thickly-growing timber ; but
these glades, set in the midst of immense
tracts of pine and oak woods, are oases of

CUCKOO NOTES. 139

bird-life, as one might say, where in the sing
ing season the air is shaken with a sweet tu
mult of voices. Here the persevering egg-
collector is sure to find the delicately-tinted
treasures with which he delights to decorate
his cabinet. The butcher-bird, the grosbeak,
the cat-bird, the wood-thrush, the brown-
thrush, the robin, the blue-jay, the mocking
bird and the cuckoos all like to build their
nests in the thorny arms of the haw and plum-
trees. All these birds are, in a degree, bit
ter foes of each other, allowing no opportu
nity of venting a little spite to go by unim
proved, but they rarely go to the length of
committing any irreparable wrong. True, the
blue-jay now and then robs a nest and the
shrike may impale a smaller bird on a thorn,
but these acts are the rare exceptions in the
mating and nesting time.

The cuckoo, however, must be closely
watched by all the rest or it will slip its egg
into a stranger's nest. Our American bird is
very sly in performing this parasitic trick, so
common to the European species, and is
guilty of a sin in connection therewith which
adds greatly to the ugliness of the main crime.
I am led to believe, on the strongest circum
stantial evidence, that the yellow-bill species,
at least, not only carries its egg to the nest of
another bird, but that it also invariably takes
away from the nest one of the eggs rightfully
there. This habit is a very curious and "in
teresting one. Our cuckoo always builds a
nest of its own and rears its brood with ex
emplary care. The eggs it scatters on occa
sion here and there in strange nests are prob
ably the result of over- fecundity, for at best

140 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

it appears to be erratic in its laying, the eggs
in its own nest varying greatly in number and
in development stage.

I have collected and arranged all the ob
tainable facts on this subject, and my conclu
sions in short are : That the cuckoo of North
America, more especially the Yellow-bill, may
be either slowly losing or slowly gaining the
egg-depositing or parasitic habit of the Old-
World species ; that it is exceedingly eccen
tric, in connection with this habit, acting from
the impulse of accidental necessity on account
of an irregular fecundity. Its nest-building
habit will not admit of its rearing a large
brood of young ; its eggs must, therefore, be
divided among the nests of its neighbors :
that is, whenever the over-supply comes on.
The bird itself, as regards the two species
(black-billed and yellow-billed) with which I am
well acquainted, is very strangely sly, furtive,
and erratic in all its actions, affecting a close
observer with the impression that it is all the
time laboring under some restrictions or lim
itations not common to birds in general. Its
movements are graceful, but there is in them
something that suggests unsubstantiality — the
lightness that comes of an ill-balanced nature.
Its form is elongated and so accentuated
by its slender, curving bill and disproportion-
ally developed tail, that it appears almost
serpent-like at times, as it creeps with a noise
less gliding motion through the foliage.
There is never any evidence of happiness in
its actions or in the sound of its voice. On
the contrary, the cuckoo appears to be the
embodiment of aimlessness, restlessness, and
unmeaning discontent. Its solemn, almost

CUCKOO NOTES. 141

gloomy, hazel eyes, and the peculiar way it
has of glaring half-stupidly at one when one
approaches it, adds much to this unbalanced
effect. In flying from one tree to another it
does not cut straight away through the air,
but dives downward, nearly to the ground,
sometimes, and then whirls along in a zig-zag,
erratic line, rising again at a sharp angle be
fore alighting. While in the air there is a
sparkle of white in its over-long tail, and a
sheen of greenish silver-gray along its neck
and back, while on its wings trembles the
glint of burnished copper blended with red
dish cinnamon tints.

While in repose it may be described as fol
lows: Bill black above, yellow below, long,
broad at base, gently curved ; feet lead-col
ored ; back, darkish olive-gray ; under parts,
white ; wings shot with vivid cinnamon, espe
cially on inner webs of quills; tail bearing
on central feathers a continuation of the color
of the back; outer tail-feathers tipped and
edged with clear, pure white. Total length,
11.50 inches ; alar extent, 16.00 inches.

Its nest when built in an orchard differs in
construction somewhat from its wildwood
architecture; but it may be easily identified
by the open, sketchy effect of its outlines, its
flatness and shallowness and the presence in
its texture of the tassels and spikes of amen
taceous trees carelessly woven through the
tangle of coarse twigs and fragments of leaves.
The eggs, deposited irregularly in the oval,
saucer-like cup, are of a very delicate greenish
shade of color not easy to describe. I have
found occasionally as many as seven in a nest,
though four is the usual number.

142 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

Our cuckoo is not an " egg-sucker," so far
as my observation goes. The popular tradi
tion giving him that villanous habit, has
arisen, no doubt, from the fact that he has
been seen with an egg in his mouth. I can
think of no wildwood effect more likely to
gain a lasting lodgment in one's memory than
the appearance of this bird flying along with
an egg between its mandibles, seeking some
other bird's nest in which to safely lodge this
surplus fruit of an erratic habit.

The Black-billed species (C. erythrophthal-
mus) is a little smaller than the Yellow-bill,
and far less singularly interesting. It lacks
the white sparkle in the tail and the bright
reddish copper wing-glint, as well as the dash
of yellow on the lower mandible ; otherwise it
is much the same in appearance with C. ameri-
canus.

I once had a bush-tent built of fragrant
pine and cedar boughs at the margin of a
glade, not far from the bank of the Coosa-
wattee, where I spent a fortnight in the sys
tematic study of the yellow-billed cuckoo, the
lesser shrike, the mocking-bird and the cat-
bin}. This period extended from about the
loth to the 25th of April. All around the
glade grew honey-locust trees, haw-bushes,
crab-apple and wild-plum thickets and dense
tangles of blackberry vines. Everything was
heavy with leaf and bloom ; fragrance loaded
the air, and the birds all appeared in a great
hurry to build. I could sit in my tent door
during the dewy morning hour and watch the
love-passages, the quarrels, the fights, the nest
ing troubles and triumphs of these gay things

CUCKOO NOTES. 143

with not a waft from the busy human world to
disturb my enjoyment.

A pair of yellow-billed cuckoos were build
ing a nest, after their desultory, aimless fash
ion, in a scrubby tree over which a mass of
the Southern green-briar vines had grown.
The bough upon which the beginnings of the
nest-skeleton appeared, was not more than
forty feet distant from my door, so that, bar
ring some slender intervening twigs, I had a
clear view of all the building processes. One
curious and noteworthy habit of the cuckoo
was observed, of which I have never seen
mention in any ornithological work. In carry
ing a limber twig or leaf-fragment, the bird
gripped one end of it with its foot and 'the
other with its bill ; a trick which enabled it to
pass through the tangled vines and branches
without much difficulty on account of its bur
den.

During my stay at this glade the nights were
rendered glorious by a strong moon and a
clear atmosphere. Several times I heard, be
tween midnight and dawn, the cry of the
Yellow-bill uttered in a suppressed tone from
the densest part of a thicket. It may have
been a mocking-bird. I tried in vain to be
sure, but I am inclined to think that the cuckoo
itself uttered the calls. If it was a mocking
bird the weird reserve-force apparent in the
expression and timbre of the imitative passage
did infinite credit to the famous low-country
songster's incomparable vocal powers.

It is strangely difficult to make out the exact
location of a bird by its cry at night, especially
in a wooded place. I tried to discover the
roosting-place of my cuckoos ; but watch them

1 44 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

closely as I could, they evaded me. They ap
peared not to care much for each other's
company, save when in a loving mood, and I
think they roosted without any reference to
companionship. Early in the morning, how
ever, the pair found each other out, and joined
in the labor of nest-building or the pursuit of
caterpillars and other leaf-eating insect forms,
with a reasonable show of conjugal unity of
purpose.

Their nest progressed very slowly and
jerkily. Now and again, for two or three days
together, nothing was done to it, then for two
or three hours the work would be unceasing.
They behaved themselves after the manner
of awkward and not very apt tyros in the art.
The male was even silly in some of his per
formances, time and again carrying away from
the nest a stick (that had previously been
worked into it witn great labor and care),
apparently in a fit of absent-mindedness.

This unaccountable listlessness or charac
teristic oddity of behavior is not confined to
the genus now under consideration, but runs
like a family taint through the whole catalogue
of cuculidce. The ground-cuckoo (Geococcyx
californianus) is an embodiment of drollness
and absurdity. The Ani (Crotophaga am)
is another very interesting kinsman of our bird ;
but instead of scattering its eggs among the
nests of other families it has the opposite
habit, several females laying their eggs and
together incubating them in the same nest !

The Cucuhis canorus of Linnaeus, which is
the cuckow or cuckoo of England and Africa,
has attracted more attention than any other
bird in the world. Some very strange facts

CUCKOO NOTES. 145

touching its history have been gathered. It
would indeed fill quite a volume if one should
give only a compendium of cuckoo literature,
most of which refers to the European bird.
Quite a discussion was precipitated into scien
tific circles when, some thirty years or more
ago, a distinguished gentleman propounded
the statement that a cuckoo invariably colored
her egg to coincide with those in the nest
chosen as the place of deposit. A cabinet of
eggs, claimed to be those of the cuckoo and
those of the birds in whose nests they had
been found, was arranged for the purpose of
demonstrating the apparent truth of the start
ling theory ; but notwithstanding many curi
ous facts, it could not be maintained.

It remains pretty well settled, however, that
the eggs of Cuculus canorus may now and
then vary in color, somewhat in accordance
with the hereditary individuality of the partic
ular bird, and that each female cuckoo may
instinctively choose, as a rule, to deposit her
egg in a nest with those of a bird laying eggs
of nearly or quite the same color.

So eccentric and variable is the Yellow-bill
in its habits, that it is not at all wonderful
that much doubt has existed as to whether it
is parasitic ; but I am convinced that it does,
irregularly, under stress of over-fecundity, slip
an egg occasionally into the nest of another
bird, and this habit and others characteristic
of the genus, appear to be imperfectly formed
as yet, or else they are being gradually aban
doned.

This apparent tendency towards sloughing
hereditary habits, or acquiring new ones, is
noticeable in several of our American birds,

10

1 46 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

notably in some species of woodpecker ; but
our cuckoos are the best instances for study.
A good binocular glass and a season or two
of patient observation will enable any intelli
gent person to detect a great deal of evidence
of this tendency in cuckoos. The yellow-
billed species carries its vacillating nature
on its sleeve, as it were, and forces it upon
consideration. The black-billed species is
scarcely less peculiar at most points ; if there
is a difference it is ot degree only. Even the
ground cuckoo (Geococcyx calif ornianus), is
almost absurdly peculiar and outrt in its
habits. Dr. Coues says : " They are singular
birds — cuckoos compounded of a chicken and
a magpie ! They prefer running on the ground
to flying, only using their wings as auxiliary
'outriggers' while darting along at almost
race-horse speed." Dr. Coues notes in the
nest of this species the same slightness and
apparent awkwardness of construction so
marked in all cuckoo nests, " As if," he says,
" the birds were just learning how to build."

Our Yellow-bill may be taken as the strong
est type of this strange family. Haunting our
bloom-burdened and odorous Spring groves,
like some restless spirit of remorse, furtively,
dreamily, but ever with a look of suppressed
pain, it has affected the popular mind as if
with a superstition borne upon its own wings
from some undiscovered country. Its voice
is considered ominous not only of rain and
storm, but of evil in all its mysterious and
undefined forms. Of course this is an idle
popular delusion ; but it serves to point out
the exceedingly well-defined power resident

CUCKOO NOTES. 147

in any form of mystery, even if but the quasi-
mystery of a cuckoo's ways !

Indeed, the bird, its habits, its individuality
and eccentricity of nesting and of oviposition,
and its half-mystified expression of the eye, its
hesitating, skulking flight, and its evident
lapses into absent-mindedness, may well serve
to impress one's imagination, at least, with a
suggestion of a transition state through which
Cuckoo is passing to a lower or higher grade
of character.

One day, as I was going down the Salliquoy,
a small tributary of the Coosawattee River, I
saw from my pirogue a cuckoo's nest oh a low
branch of a water-oak. The female was
crouching on the insecure looking pile of
sticks in utter terror, while a whole pack of
blue-jays were screeching and fluttering in the
foliage above it. I shall not soon forget the
expression of that bird's great solemn eyes.
Evidently the poor thing felt that a dreadful
fate was impending over it. But the fact was
that the blue-jays were worrying a little
screech-owl that had ventured into the day
light, and which was now cowering in its
stolid way on another branch of the tree near
the nest.

Our Cuckoo, though not notably combative,
will fight with great fury in defence of its
young, and the males engage in fierce silent
struggles for supremacy during the early part
of the mating season.

The nesting area of the Yellow-bill extends
from Florida to Michigan, and from the Atlan
tic coast to some line west of the Mississippi
River, and I am inclined to regard the black-
billed species as having nearly the same limits

1 48 BY- WA YS A ND BIRD- NO TES.

of habitat. To what distance Canada is in
vaded by either or both seems left in some
doubt.

Whilst the cuckoos of eastern North Amer
ica are technically frugiverous, they are not,
so far as my observation serves me, strictly
fruit-eating within the general and popular
meaning of the term. I have never seen
either of the two common species taste any of
the small fruits, wild or tame. They probably
eat seeds at need, but their chief food is in
sects — the caterpillars, moths, butterfly-eggs
and various larvae found on the leaves and
branches of trees.

The Cuckoo's habits may be studied to
advantage by any one who will take the trouble
to scan with care almost any apple-orchard in
Spring and be guided to the bird by that half-
solemn, half-comical cry uttered at intervals,
which may be phonetically rendered thus :
" Kauwk, kauwk, kauwk kuk — kuk — kuk — kuk
— k — k — k — k, kauwk, kauwk, kauwk!" In
uttering this singular call or cry, the bird be
gins slowly, the two or three leading notes
coming forth at nearly equal intervals, then
the succeeding ones are produced with rapidly
increasing quickness, until they run together
into a sort of rattling noise, succeeded by a
repetition of the opening cries. Loud, harsh,
peculiarly doleful, the voice of the rain-crow,
as the bird is vulgarly called, rings through
our woods and orchards, more especially in
cloudy weather, with an accent far from cheer
ing or pleasing. Hence has arisen the unwar
ranted ill-feeling existing in rural districts
against this very best bird-friend known to our
farmers and fruit-growers. The cuckoos

CUCKOO NOTES. 149

should be protected and their propagation en
couraged, as they are the saviours of our for
ests, our orchards, and our hedges.

Looking over my cuckoo-notes, I find re
minders in them of all the sweetest woodland
solitudes between the Great Lakes and the
Gulf. The bubbling of the cold trout-brooks
of the Leelenaw blends with the lazy swash of
the Pearl River and the Kissimmee.

But I must hasten to remark that, contrary to
what one is led to expect, in all the low country
of the South the cuckoos are scarce, even in
mid-winter. In the region of Lake Okeechobee
and on the outskirt of the Everglades close ob
servation failed to certainly note even the spe
cies C. seniculus or mangrove-cuckoo. From
the fact that the Yellow-bill is found on the
Pacific coast and in parts of the Southern
Rocky Mountains, it is probable that its winter
resort may be chiefly in Mexico and Central
America. In March I saw a few specimens
haunting the oak groves on the high-lands be
tween Tallahassee, Florida, and Thomasville,
Georgia, and I was told that their nests were
sometimes seen there.

So many cuckoo legends have gone afloat
— each adding something uncanny or roman
tic to the popular opinion of our harmless bird
— that I am tempted to close this paper with
one current in the southern mountainous region,
to the effect that the Yellow-bill cannot be killed
by a rifle-shot if its breast be turned towards
the shooter. I once attempted to demon
strate the fallacy of this claim for the benefit
of a hard-headed old mountaineer and was un
lucky enough to miss my bird !

" Ther' ! " he exclaimed, " what'd I tell ye !

1 50 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

ye mought es well shoot at a ghost, er a
spirit."

The secret of the matter is that the cuckoo's
breast is sheeny white and presents a very slen
der mark, which on account of its being just
the color of the silver fore-sight of the com
mon rifle, is very difficult to " draw a bead '
upon ; wherefore even the most expert marks
man is apt to miss it.

SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS.

OUR interest in wild song-birds must in
crease apace with the narrowing of our wooded
areas, and in proportion to the constant lessen
ing of our opportunities for ornithological
study at first hand. As our thrushes and
orioles and warblers one by one take flight,
we suddenly, in realizing our loss, feel in a
new way the sweetness of their voices. When
we were children, even if we lived in the heart
of the city, we often had glimpses of the
country with its great dense woods and its
green fields, its orchards, and its cottages
covered with morning-glory vines. In those
days the brown-thrush, the cat-bird, and the
cardinal grosbeak, sang in every thicket and
throughout every orchard. Now these charm
ing little lyrists are gone from many a former
haunt ; indeed there are wide areas of country,
where they used to nest and sing, in which
they never will be seen in a wild state again.

Not long since I returned, after twenty
years' absence, to a neighborhood in which
my infancy was spent. I remembered a cer
tain brook in a little field, a crooked lazy little
stream bordered with yellow willows and water
hazel, where the cat-bird loved to swing and
sing in shade and sun. It was with an inde
scribable regret that I found the willows and
hazel all gone and the brook, sunken under
ground, groping its way through tubular tiles.
Where wide woods of beech and sugar-trees

1 52 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

used to be, fields of wheat and corn lay green
and smooth almost to the horizon's rim. What
a loss the absent birds were felt to be ! In
fact, when, after much plaintive sauntering
over the altered grounds, I chanced to hear a
lonely purple finch twittering in a hedge of
bois (Tare, I felt a thrill of delight which was
like an electric message from my childhood's
days. In the streets of the village which had
shrunken, as if in some mysterious proportion
to the widening of the surrounding plains of
agricultural thrift, foraged a well-fed flock of
detestable English sparrows. This, I thought,
is advanced enlightenment — a covered ditch
for a brook, a .prim hedge in lieu of a wild
plum thicket, an orchard displacing an odor
ous grove of wild crab-apple and these pests
of sparrows usurping the homes of the cardi
nal-bird and the thrushes !

From almost any little country town, even
in the West, one must now, as a rule, make a
long flight into the most neglected nooks of
the rural neighborhoods, before one can find
the haunts of the more interesting songsters.
The elect few of the feathered choir, like the
choice spirits of the outer circle of young
poets, are fond of utter, limitless freedom ;
they do not relish the fragrance, however
sweet, of over-cultured gardens and bowers.
True enough, the blue-bird warbles very con
tentedly on the best kept fence-row as he
watches the ploughman turn up the tid-bits from
the furrow ; and it is an almost savage ten
derness that quavers from his throat as he
pounces upon the dislodged worm, his wings
gleaming like some precious, doubly purified

SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 153

gems fresh from the fabled fires of the em
pyrean.

Reading the above sentence over, I feel its
coarseness in the presence of a genuine blue
bird-sheen and blue-bird-warble reaching me
as I write. How artificial and insincere are
the verbal rhapsodies of the most natural of
our poets when set in the searching light of
unconscious nature! Why do not the blue
bird's notes, arranged always in the same
order and expressed always with precisely the
same tone, accent, and emphasis, become
stale ? Why does not the bird's manner grow
perfunctory ? Who ever did get weary of hear
ing over and over, from day to day, spring
after spring, those liquid bird-phrases that,
pitched to a strange minor, have been the
same since first an oscine throat was filled
with music ? We must all, even the most un
imaginative of us, acknowledge a little impulse
to gush and get rid of a fine fury of sentiment
about the time when a flash of green, a thrill
of warmth and balm, and a gush of bird-song
go across the fields and woods.

The man who can look into a bird's nest,
well-set with tender-hued eggs, without feeling
an inward smile, as if his soul were sweetly
pleased, has lost something that is the chief
ingredient of perfect sanity and simplicity.
What is usually meant by the word sentiment
ality is an abomination; but our human na
ture, in a state of absolute health, is furnished
with a myriad little well-springs of generous
sympathy and sweet responsiveness, that
should not be allowed to go dry. If the fra
grant, essential elements of a healthy soul
may be called sentiments, then let sentiment-

1 54 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

ality bubble like brooks in spring and gush
like the thrush's song in nesting time.

Bird-hunting and bird-loving folk get the
very best out of life in the way of sensuous
pleasures not in the least voluptuous or over-
stimulating. Just now, looking back over my
notes, observations and recollections of out
door life, my long association with most of our
minor song-birds appears something well worth
having experienced. Much of what I remem
ber is knowledge of a kind scarcely communi
cable by any literary or artistic means, or by
any method of natural expression. Once I
heard a blue-jay sing as sweetly as the mock
ing-bird when trilling in a tender minor key.
I could hardly believe my own sight and hear
ing as the beautiful, tricksy creature sat before
me with drooping crest and half-raised wings,
swaying his body lightly up and down and
uttering a low, almost bewildering flute medley,
full of the cadences of dreams.

Still the blue-jay is not reckoned among the
singing birds by those who are not close ob
servers. His common notes, though occasion
ally musical and sweet, are, as a rule, harsh
and ill-tempered ; a very imaginative person
might conclude that the dolefully tender song
I heard was the result of a fit of remorse, on
the blue-jay's part, for myriads of sins com
mitted against the nests, the eggs, and the
young of other and weaker birds. How often
I have witnessed acts of the most brutal cruelty
done by the jay in apparently the quietest
mood imaginable !

I recall an instance now : A sparrow had a
nest with young in a clump of lilac-bushes on
a Jawn in "front of a room I was occupying.

SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 155

One morning about sunrise, as I sat by a
window, writing, I heard the mother-bird
" chipping " dolefully, and I looked out just
in time to see a blue-jay kill, by a deft turn
of its powerful bill, the last remaining fledgling
of the brood. The assassin then proceeded
to tear up the tiny nest, after which he very
perfunctorily flew away ! Here was a case of
utter depravity — a piece of unmitigated out
rage for which there could have been no mo
tive aside from the impulse of a viciousness
incomparable. I went to the spot, and found
the young sparrows scattered on the ground,
dead in the midst of the shreds of the nest.
Each bird bore the livid pincer-like impres
sion of the jay's beak. I cannot account for
this well-known brutality of the jay ; it does not
appear to be always present with it, for I have
known it to live in perfect peace with other birds,
nesting in the same orchard and even in the
same tree. Its colors and its restless activity
make the blue-jay one of the most valuable
elements of almost every bit of thicket or
hedge throughout our Middle and Southern
States for nearly the whole year.

I am aware that many objections may be
urged to putting so harsh a screecher in the
catalogue of music-making birds; but it can
and does occasionally sing most superbly.
Moreover, upon being dissected, the blue-jay's
throat shows a very high state of development,
the muscular arrangement of the lower larynx
bearing every sign of great flexibility and of
delicate adjustment. It is a hardy bird, often
met with in midwinter far north of the fortieth
degree of latitude, apparently quite happy
among the sleety and snowy branches of the

1 56 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

leafless trees. It is a good nest-builder, and
provides for its young with a great show of
affection and industry It customarily keeps
near the ground, but I have observed large
flocks high up in the air, migrating southward
in autumn.

Turning from a provokingly dual subject —
the paradoxical nature of our jay — one feels
relieved in speaking of the genial and melodi
ous life of the brown-thrush. Next to the
mocking-bird the most famous singer of our
woods, this beautiful little fellow, with his
snuff-colored coat and dappled vest, is welcome
wherever he goes. My observations of his
habits extend over a wide area reaching from
Northern Indiana to Florida, and I have no
vicious trait of his character to record. In
the mountains of East Tennessee, and among
the hills of North Carolina and Georgia,
brown-thrushes are almost as common as are
blackbirds in the flat fields of Illinois. The
thickets that rim the glades, especially the wild
orchards of haw and crab-apple, plum and
honey-locust, are the favorite nesting-places
of this bird ; but he chooses the topmost tuft
of the tallest tree for his perch while singing.
His song, full-toned, loud, clear, varied, is
often mistaken by casual listeners for that of
the mocking-bird, though really far inferior to
it in both volume and compass, and scarcely
to be compared with it in purity of resonance.
In the far South, where all birds are given to
greater latitude of habit than in the North, the
brown-thrush now and then sings in the night,
a low, dreamy, lulling song, warbled as if with
a sleepy 'throat. In this too he follows, but
does not equal, the mocking-bird. I have

SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 157

habitually slept in a hammock while outing in
the Southern woods, and no words can convey
the singularly delicious sense of calm and
quiet luxury which comes of hearing, far in the
solemn night, the low, liquid, drowsy nocturne
of one or both of these charming musicians !

The brown-thrush has not had his full meed
of praise from our poets. As a conventional
figure, the nightingale — a bird quite unknown
to Americans — has retained its place on the
palette of our word-painters, much to the hurt
of our poetry. In fact, I fancy I can go
through American poetry and point out every
passage wherein an author has alluded to a
bird that he has never seen. How can any one
describe the fragrance of sweet-clover without
having it in his nostrils at the moment of writ
ing ? How can I write sincerely about the song
of the brown-thrush or the cat-bird, if I have
not the stimulus of that song in my brain ?

In the far-reaching tangles of wild grape
vines, found here and there in the beautiful
little valleys of North Georgia, the brown-
thrushes sing to the perfection of their powers
from the early days of April until the first of
June ; that is, they make the vine-masses their
home, and do their melodious gushing on the
very topmost boughs of the highest trees.
This is not over-statement ; it is one of the
most striking sights of the Southern woods to
see a brown-thrush at about sunrise, sitting on
the apex of the cone-shaped top of a giant
pine-tree, whilst its song falls in a shower of
fragmentary and ecstatic trills and quavers
over all the surrounding woods. This per
formance often extends over the space of an
hour or more, with but slight intermissions.

1 58 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

The nest of the brown-thrush is a straggling
mass of twigs, roots, bark, leaves, and weed-
stems, carelessly tumbled into a crotch near
the ground, or on the flat projection of a fence-
rail, sometimes even on the ground. Its eggs
are delicately pretty, whitish or pale green,
flecked thickly with brown, from four to six
in number.

North of the Cumberland Range of Mount
ains, the brown-thrush is migratory ; but in
parts of Tennessee and North Georgia I have
found it a permanent resident, especially in
the brushy valleys. It is a hardier bird than
the mocking-bird.

The cat-bird (what a name !) is one of the
finest singers in the world — beautiful, too;
but, for some mysterious reason, under a ban
of disgrace and contempt throughout its wide
habitat. You may know him by his dark
slate-colored coat and gray vest, his black cap
and chestnut-brown under tail-coverts, as well
as by his peculiar cat-like mew when irritated.
He is a lyrist of the dense thickets and brier
tangles, the musical deity of our blackberry
jungles and bois d'arc hedges. His song re
sembles that of the brown-thrush, but it is
slenderer and keener, trickling through the
leaves in a tenuous stream with ripples as
light as air.

The nest of this species is well constructed,
hung low, and its eggs are of a lovely deep
greenish blue.

The cardinal-grosbeak is one of our Ameri
can songsters, which, though much persecuted
by fanciers and imprisoned in cages, is not
justly appreciated. His brilliant red plumage
and smart manners have been much better

SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 159

studied than his sweet and powerful vocaliza
tion. His notes are few, but the compass and
volume of his voice, and the vivid force of ex
pression he commands, are without rival.
Not even the mocking-bird can equal him in
his one circle of execution. He sings with
true American energy, flinging out his notes
as if from a clarion. His attitudes are those
of unbounded self-confidence ; he appears to
claim the whole world as his own, as he stands
bolt upright on a bough, his crest erect, his
bold eyes flashing, and his voice leaping out
with the impulse of a diminutive steam-whistle.
He is a wary, shy, swift bird, but his color ex
poses him to the watchful collector, who is
ever eager to take him. The cardinal's nest
is well-built, usually set in a tangled place of
a thicket. Its eggs are of a mottled reddish-
brown color.

In the region of Tallulah Falls I met with
an old man whose chief business was snaring
red-birds (cardinals) for the sake of their skins,
which he sold to a New York firm for use in
millinery decorations. Most of his work was
done in the mating season, when with a trained
decoy-bird and a cage furnished with side-
springes, he took great numbers. The method
was to hang the cage, of open wire-work, with
a live male bird in it, on a bough in the midst
of a thicket. The springes at the sides of the
cage were so arranged that no sooner did a
visiting bird alight thereon than he was caught.
The captive left alone calls loudly and is an
swered by a female who comes near. This
excites the jealousy of her lord, who dashes at
the cage and dies. The old man had four of
these murderous contrivances, and was reaping

1 60 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

a considerable profit from them. He under
stood his business perfectly, going about it
with great energy, but evincing no enthusiasm
or especial feeling of any kind.

In the thickly settled States of the West the
orchards and hedges are, in spring-time, the
abodes of many singing birds. The field-spar
row is chief among these, showing off his ex
quisite vocal gifts about the time that the
young wheat is ankle high. His life is mostly
spent on the ground where he runs through
thick grass or cereal sward with a rapidity like
that of the ousel in water. When the lyrical
mood comes on he mounts to the top of a
stump, a hedge or a fence, and pours forth a very
sweet little carol, meantime elevating his head
to the full extent of his neck, and puffing out his
little throat after the manner of a toad.

The orioles and some of the warblers have
cheerful voices, but can scarcely be called fine
singers. They give a dash of freshness to our
groves when they arrive early from the South,
and, like our blue-bird, are always welcome.

Speaking of the blue-bird, he is uniquely
American. He has no kin on the other con
tinents. He appears to be a flake of the ce
rulean above, let fall, by a special dispensa
tion, upon our favored country. Like some
poets, he is always just about to sing, but never
does more than begin his song. His frag
ments are divine, however, suggesting a reserve
of something too sweet and fine for the com
mon winds to bear. His is a rhythmical na
ture, and his flight is a poem in itself. As he
goes trembling and wavering along through
the air and sunshine, he adds to a May-day
just the touch that makes it perfect. The

SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 161

blue-bird in its nest-habit offers for our study
one of those curious contradictions now and
then appearing in nature. Instead of building
a graceful nest, swung airily amid the fragrant
foliage, it dives into some gloomy, unsightly
hole in a rotten stump or tree, and there, like
the kingfisher in his subterraneous cavern,
rears its brood. Querulous, saucy, bold, this
beautiful little creature has endeared itself to
every observer.

Our indigo-bird, bluer than the last-named
singer, and almost as common, has attracted
comparatively little attention. Its song is
really fine, though delivered without expres
sion, or any show of interest. One must ap
proach very close to get the full sweetness of
the frail, faltering strain which can be heard
but a little distance. When it is caught in its
completeness, however, the melody is so child
ish and tender that one forgives the inartistic
manner of the delivery. The scientific name
of this bird is Passer ina cyanea, the specific
part meaning dark-blue, and it may be identi
fied easily by that color covering its head and
shimmering with a greenish gleam over its
back. Its nest is rather sketchy, built with
little care, and set in a low bush, usually at a
crotch. Its eggs are bluish white, sometimes
slightly freckled.

With a word about Wilson's thrush I must
close this paper. To my ear this bird's voice
is purer and richer than that of the famous
wood-thrush. Its shy habits, and the chary
parsimony with which it doles out its vocal
favors, have, no doubt, tended to prevent its
becoming popular, even with good observers.
There is a silvery ring in its higher notes and
ii

i6z B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES,

a watery gurgle in its lower ones, that give to
its song, usually heard in low, heavily wooded,
dusky semi-swamps, a peculiar vibration alto
gether indescribable. Its nest is a curious
mixture of sticks, leaves, grasses, and rootlets,
usually set on or near the ground. Its eggs
are greenish blue. Of all the thrushes this
appears to me to be the shyest and wildest,
and while its voice lacks that flexibility and
compass possessed by those of the brown-
thrush and the cat-bird, it certainly has the
advantage at the point of timbre and of liquid
ity. One can imagine nothing to compare
with some of its notes, unless it would be the
blending of the tones of a silver bell with the
bubbling of a brook over pebbles. Its song is
usually heard at a considerable distance, in
the twilight gloom of damp woods, and there
is a touching trace of melancholy in it that
makes it blend well with the environment.
Along the Wabash river, in the broad, wooded
" bottoms," I have heard it singing long after
sunset, and its voice is the first sound that
breaks the silence of the morning there.

One who has loved the woods and fields and
has spent much time in the pursuit of knowl
edge in the wild paths of nature, can look back
upon the days that are gone and see so many
bright visions — hear so many sweet sounds
and feel so many thrills through the nerves of
memory ! One can scarcely be called senti
mental if one gushes a little over one's sweet
experiences.

The next best thing to having cheerful and
healthful memories is the liberty of imparting
something of their effect to others ; and I do
not envy the man whose heart does not some-

SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 163

times quiver in unison with the bird-songs of
spring. The science of ornithology is very
fascinating and useful, but the unrecognized
and unnamed science of bird-loving is to the
more practical study what religion is to bi
ology—the explanation of the unexplainable.

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS.

ONE d*ay, when I was a little boy, I climbed
up the face of a rugged cliff, on a mountain
side in North Georgia, to get some richly-
colored lichens growing there. While I was
clinging desperately to a weather-soiled pro
jection, I chanced to see, in a small cleft near
my fingers, a gaping red-and-yellow mouth. A
chill like death swept over me and I came
near falling to certain destruction. Of course
I was well acquainted with all the snakes of
the region ; what mountain-lad was not ? — but
my acquaintance did not generate any desire
for familiarity with fangs and rattles, or dis
tended heads and forked, darting tongues. A
mere glance, as my eye flashed across the
dusky little crack or fissure, carried to my
brain the impression of a wide-open, repul
sive reptile mouth within three inches of my
bare straining fingers ! nor was the glimpse,
though momentary, too slight to fix forever in
my memory a certain deadly, swaying motion
which always immediately precedes the stroke
of a venomous snake. In the course of the
merest fraction of a second I recollected a
half-dozen instances of death from the fang-
wounds of Crotalus or of Toxicophis, and an
exhaustive anticipation of the throes of disso
lution I experienced to the full. Yet it was
not a snake, after all ! So inexplicable are the
tricks of the human brain, so strange are the
sudden flashes of what one might almost dare

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 165

call intuitive knowledge, that it is not possible
to say what value should be set upon mere
impressions such as that little gaping flesh-red
and yellow mouth left indelibly burned in my
memory. Science is plodding on towards the
solution of such questions as I here raise.
With the eyes of a healthy, impressible, imag
inative child I had seen a young bird gaping
over the rim of its nest, stolidly greedy for a
worm, and instantly I had grasped, without
knowing it, one of the most fascinating prob
lems of life.

It is the fashion for scientists to pretend to
ignore the value of the imagination, and to
loudly bawl for facts ; but all the knowing ones
wink under their bonnets and furtively indulge
in sublime guessing wherever the limitations
of knowledge are not set within the domain of
exactitude. Of course it would not become
me to say that a palaeozoic fish cannot be de
scribed accurately with no data at hand save
the fragment of a doubtful fin-spine upon
which to build the perfect anatomy, for has
not this been done, or something very like it ?
Still a rather lawless imagination can easily
enjoy the consternation with which certain
palaeontological pictures might be viewed by
their draughtsmen if the original whole could
suddenly appear in the place of the precious
fossil fragment. On the other hand, however,
some of the guesses of the comparative an
atomists may be flashes of truth revealed to
genius — that is to a simple and healthy mind:

It was years after my boyish adventure on the
cliffside that I recalled with startling vividness
its strange effect. Meantime I had been into
geology and biology and their cognate sciences.

1 66 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

and had studied with especial care and inter
est the subject of fossil birds. It now seemed
to me that my child-eyes had, in their swift
glance, seen far past that gaping young bird —
far past Archceopteryx and Odontopteryx and
Ichthyornis — to the original ancestor of the bird,
the ancient, honorable and unknown reptile.
I had received an impression of the archetype.
Sit down in the woods of spring-time and
listen to the brown-thrush or the cat-bird or,
better still, the mocking-bird, singing in the
fragrant boscage, and you may be sure that
you hear a lyre thousands upon thousands of
years old. The earth was a grand and beauti
ful ball of water and forests and grassy plains,
with swarms of birds and insects, and legions
of wild beasts and myriads of reptiles, a
long, dreamy, odorous and tuneful age before
man stood up in presence of his Maker and
was called good. It would be charming, if
one could but have the record of the ages all
arranged, to read the bird-songs backward (as
one may read backward through the songs of
man) to their first bubblings in the oldest
groves. Where was the first blue-bird song
uttered ? Where did the cerulean wings first
tremble among the young leaves of spring ?
It is said that science and poetry are not
friends, that they refuse to walk arm in arm,
that they scorn each other ; yet to my mind
science seems to dig up the freshest germs of
poesy, and to set free the eternal essences of
that creative force which electrifies and puts
in motion the dormant functions of genius.
Facts are dry enough and the jargon of the
doctors is not suited to enrich the poet's vo
cabulary, but between the facts hovers the

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 167

rare, pungent, strangely powerful suggestive-
ness of that which fills the atmosphere sur
rounding facts. The chief fallacy of the scien
tific attitude is that which leans with confi
dence on the prosy for the sake of its prose,
at the same time shrinking from the poetical
on account of its poetry. The geologist feels
in some way honor-bound to avoid coming to
a picturesque conclusion with his catalogue of
facts. The catalogue must remain a catalogue.
A sense of shame would accompany any
thought of connecting imagination with his
theory of the record of the rocks.

But, despite the geologists, there is a great
deal of picturesqueness and poetry in the dis
closures of the fossil beds. Set in matrices of
carbonate of lime, magnesia, silica, and the
oxides of iron, one may find the compressed
and fragmentary remains of a life that flour
ished before our hills and mountains were
made. This is a statement as trite, dry, and
lifeless as the fossils themselves. But when
one comes upon a mass of feathers disposed
about a strange bird-skeleton imbedded in rock
many thousands of years old, one may as well
think of what song Archceopteryx sang as of
what food it ate, or of how it used its long ver
tebrate tail. What colors had its wings and
breast and crest ? Were the rectrices that
flared out on each side of the twenty vertebrae
of that strange tail dyed with rainbow hues ?
These are the questions with which the scien
tist is ashamed to play ; but the poet may ask
them of the rocks, and work out the answers,
by the rules of the imagination, to his fullest
satisfaction.

In accordance with some unchangeable law

1 68 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

of the scientific guild, all the beauty of our age
must needs be traced back to an almost de
moniac source in the palaeozoic gardens of
monsters, where birds had awful teeth, and
where hideous saurian-like beings had wings
with which to flap wildly through the poison
ous air. Unfortunately enough the rocks
grimly stand up, and testify for the theory of
the scientists with a persistence and a lack of
poetical appreciation of the beautiful truly ex
asperating. That there were, in those days
when nature was over lusty and young, birds,
fishes and reptiles fearfully and wonderfully
made, cannot be for a moment doubted. It
would look, to one not thoroughly learned in
the records of the palaeozoic ages, as if the
creative power had been feeling its way, hesi
tating here, faltering there, gathering confi
dence from experience, and slowly finding out
the precious secrets of life-development.

Here and there, at wide intervals, as regards
both space and time, the rocks give up bird-
notes, so to. speak. The poet may, by holding
his ear close to the strange, blurred impres
sions in the stones, hear the cries, the hoarse
screams, the clanging trumpet-blasts of the
huge land-birds and water-fowl that haunted
the woods and streams and seas in that time
when nearly the whole earth was a tropical re
gion. He may hear the twitter of sparrows,
too, and the careless laugh of the kingfisher.

The slab containing the remains of Archce-
opteryx is in the British Museum. It is an ob
long piece of lithographic slate. The shreds
of the bird lie thereon in such confusion as
would mark the spot where an owl or a gos
hawk had eaten a blue-jay. The bones of the

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 169

head and of the sternum are not all present,
but the fragmentary wings lie in place, and one
leg with the foot attached is crooked back be
side the long twenty-jointed tail. The feath
ers are unmistakably those of a flying bird,
and the feet are formed for tree life. It must
have been a most remarkable figure in the air,
especially if its plumage was gay-colored, with
its long, wriggling caudal streamer floating
out behind, and its claw-tipped wings spread
on either side of its reptile-like body. One
may assume that its voice was a blending of
the tones of a toad and the notes of a crow —
the first rude elements of song. Almost un
imaginable ages have passed since the last sur
viving Archaopteryx was caught in a rock ma
trix and forced to mould a cast for the delecta
tion of poets and scientists. Indeed we must
refrain from attempting to span the gulf of
time between this lone relic and the next bird-
trace appearing in the earth's formations. No
more feathered vertebrate tails come to light.
Lapsing on towards the perfect form, the bird-
life, like that of certain reptiles, sloughed the
heavy caudal appendage and gathered closer
together the chief centres of its animal struct
ure. From the cretaceous formation of the
rocks, forward to the most recent disclosures
of the caves and peat bogs, this change seems
to have gone hand in hand with a general re
modelling of the whole sphere of mundane life.
For a vast period of time it appears that the
birds flourished, in monstrous development of
beak and teeth, the devouring demons of land
and sea. The eocene rocks furnish a wealth
of fragmentary fossils suggesting a variety of
bird-forms, mostly of giant size, waders and

170 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

swimmers as well as flyers, some of them with
jaws full of powerful teeth. It is in this period
that nature has made indelible sketches on the
rocks, lithographic studies of her great future
work, so to speak ; work that man is now so
recklessly destroying forever. In England
the eocene has furnished a hint of the king
fishers and the heron family. In France most
interesting discoveries have been made in the
Paris basin, and in formations of the same
horizon. Fossil feathers, fragmentary skele
tons, and even eggs, have been found, the last
mentioned in the marl deposits near Aix in
Provence. From lacustral beds in Auvergne
and Bourbonnais a great number of birds have
come to light, nearly fifty distinct species hav
ing been described. The marl of Ronzon has
given up an ancient plover, a gull, and a fla
mingo, very different from presently existing
species.

Coming to our own country we step at once
amongst the choicest records of the rocks.
Beginning with the Jurassic formation, we find
in the upper beds of the period in Wyoming
the remains of a bird somewhat larger than
our well-known great blue heron (Ardea hera-
dias). It was probably a toothed bird, but re
sembled the Ratitce in other respects, and was,
perhaps, not a flyer.

The cretaceous birds of America all appear
to be aquatic, and comprise some eight or a
dozen genera, and many species. Professor
Marsh and others have found in Kansas a
large number of most interesting fossil birds,
one of them, a gigantic loon-like creature, six
feet in length from beak to toe, taken from the
yellow chalk of the Smoky-Hill river region

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 171

and from calcareous shale near Fort Wallace,
is named Hesperornis regalis. Under the gen
eric name Hesperornis have been grouped a
number of species represented by skeletons
more or less lacking completeness, but nearly
enough perfect to show their affinities. A
genus Ichthyornis of most remarkable toothed
birds has been found in the middle cretaceous
rocks of Northwestern Kansas, and a number
of interesting remains have been taken from
the green sand and marl beds in New Jersey.
It would not serve any purpose to catalogue
here all the known fossil birds. I have hastily
sketched a broken outline by way of preface,
leading up to what geologists call the tertiary
rocks. Here we find the true ancestry of our
present birds — the rocks begin to sing and
twitter and chirp. Now we hear a far-away
chorus, the morning voices from the old, old
woods. A very breath of flowers and foliage
is suggested.

In the Museum of the Boston Society of
Natural History is preserved a beautiful speci
men from the insect-bearing-shale of Colorado,
containing a nearly complete skeleton (with
feather impressions of wings and tail) of a
bird belonging to the " oscine division of the
Passeres" a division which contains all the
singing birds now existing. This discovery of
an oscine bird in the fossil form, dating far
back of the age of man, leads the poet, not the
scientist, to ask whether it may not be possi
ble, and even probable, that some of the more
ancient fossil birds had that peculiar structure
of the lower larynx, or syrinx, necessary to the
songster. The oscines are not toothed birds,
and teeth have been considered an index of a

172 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

low order of birds ; but, on the other hand,
perfectly formed wings and a well-keeled ster
num are the salients of the highest bird-develop
ment, and Ichthyornis had these, despite its
teeth and fishy vertebrae. I venture to suspect
that if a fairly preserved fossil skeleton, includ
ing the bill, of a poll parrot could be found in
any of the mesozoic formations, no scientist
would be able, without any knowledge of the
parrot family save what the fossil afforded, to
discover the bird's curious vocal gifts.

The perching feet of Archceopteryx would
give it a leading characteristic of the passeres,
and it may have had the syrinx of the ostines,
despite its vertebrate, lizard-like tail ; and so,
too, Ichthyornis, notwithstanding its reptile
jaws and teeth and its bi-concave vertebrce,
may have been able to sing divinely. It was
a small bird, scarcely larger than a pigeon,
with a skeleton closely similar to those of the
highest ornithological types, saving the teeth and
bi-concave vertebrce ; and who shall dispute that
such a creature might have made the woods
ring with its voice. True, it has been thought
an aquatic bird, simply because the formation
in which its remains rested is of marine ori
gin, and on account of its teeth. There have
been great changes, great progress and great
retrogression, since the middle cretaceous pe
riod ; but my suggestion is complete without
knowing or caring about the voice of Ichthy
ornis. I have traced bird-song back into the
mesozoic age, and have set the music of the
rocks to ringing in the ears of my imaginative
readers. If, as embryology appears to teach,
the birds have come through the fish and rep
tile forms to their present beautiful state, by

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 173

some processes of progressive evolution, the
fact does not conflict with my dream. It
would seem that nature has often turned back
from a partly accomplished purpose, as if upon
discovering a shorter and better way, and it
may be that the voices of nightingale and
mocking-bird have not yet reached the perfec
tion belonging to some singer of aeons ago. The
syrinx of Archceopteryx may have been perfect,
and yet the bird itself, with its cumbersome
vertebrate appendage, may have been cast
aside in order to begin another line of experi
ment, so to speak, in the direction of physical
harmony. In such case the process would
probably begin from the first again. It may
appear that this really did take place ; for note
that, after a vast geological space of time fol
lowing the extermination of the highly organ
ized Archczopteryx, we see the lower orders
caught in the grip of the rocks, as if nature
were again toiling up, but by a different route,
to reach the level of the oscines, which appears
to have been accomplished when the Palceo-
spiza bella came forth in the tertiary age. This
species, buried in the shale amidst the insects
upon which it used to feed, may be taken as a
type of the fossil song-bird and should have
been named simply Melospiza, as the first of
that genus and of the family Fringillidce, just
as we say, Adam or Eve !

When we come to think of it, it is next to
miraculous that any traces of the palaeozoic
birds are left to us at all. Can we well con
ceive how a sparrow or a blue-jay of our time
shall be imprisoned in earth so as to be quar
ried out of a stone-bed some millions of years
hence ? Let us pause and reflect a moment

174 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES.

and we shall begin to wonder how so many re
mains of so-called aquatic birds found their
way into the middle cretaceous beds of Kansas
and Texas. Surely there must have been
myriads of birds in those days, else nature had
a better way then than now of taking her
dead into her bosom ?

The lower tertiary rocks of Wyoming Terri
tory have given up an ancient woodpecker,
Uintornis lucaris, a small species, not larger
than our flicker. He it was who drummed on
the dead trees in the lonely places of the woods
ages before the first germ that foreshadowed
man was forming under the smile of God.

Many of the ancient aquatic birds may have
built their nests in burrows, as our kingfishers
do, and various accidents may have shut them
up forever in their dens. It can be under
stood how the belted halcyon of to-day might
be hermetically sealed in his burrow by the
earth falling in upon him. Still I have heard
of but a single bone-fragment (amongst all the
fossil remains of birds) that has been referred
to the kingfisher, which argues that Halcyon
is a new bird in comparison with others exist
ing at this time, or else we have not yet
chanced to cut into the banks of the old, old
brooks where he used to dig out the burrow
for his nest.

What have been called sub-fossil remains
furnish us a number of giant birds from the
sands of Madagascar and from New Zealand.
So also the peat-bogs and fens hold the bones
of rare or extinct species, principally herons
and bitterns.

Since we have been forced to study orni
thology backwards, we may be said to have

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 175

just now reached the hither confine of the
ancient domain of the birds. A mere outcrop
here, a quarry there, with now and then a rail
way-cutting or a mining-drift or shaft, can
afford no more than casual glimpses of what is
pictured in the rocks. With Palceospiza as
the initial, or rather the closing sketch, what if
we could thumb the pages back through all
the forms to Archaopteryx and beyond, should
we not have a volume of almost weirdly unique
impressions ! I have imagined that we should,
in fact, find " a long series of editions of the
same volume, amended, remodelled, revised,
but ever showing the same great development
purpose. The owl was before Minerva, music
was before Pan, beauty was before Venus,
love was before the woman was made for
Adam ; the spirit of God walked in the dawn.
The labors of A. Milne-Edwards have, to
my mind, opened mines of rich suggestion to
the poet as well as the philosopher and scien
tist, and I am sure that there is as much stim
ulus for the imagination as there is food for
the mere reason in the discoveries of Prof.
Marsh. And yet I cannot join the group who
regard science as the basis of future poetry.
It is not science, but the atmosphere of sug
gestion that stirs the pages of science, that is
generative of poetry. If genius cannot see
past the hard, dry fossils of to-day, far back
into the living by-gone and catch those tints
that are faded forever from sea and land, then
genius fails at the cheapest test. It is a func
tion of science to restore the lost head and
breast bones to Archceopteryx, but it is the
privilege of the poet to restore the colors to its
feathers and to " flood its throat with song."

1 76 BY-WAYS A ND BIRD-NO TES.

I have an exalted admiration of science, and
place sincere trust in the outcome of its inves
tigations ; but I also sympathize most cordially
with him who wishes he could have angled for
Devonian fishes, or who sighs at the thought
of the bird-songs of the earth's morning
twilight.

But to return to our text. The curious sug-
gestiveness of these fossil fragments of birds
is not common to all the organic remains in
the rocks. The cast of a delicate wing-feather
in the shale of the hills, is a fertilizer of the
mind and a generator of strange visions.
How far that little quill has been borne down
the current of time ! Where was the nest with
its soft lining and its wonder of green or blue
or marbled eggs? Did the fragrant leaves
droop over and the May-wind breathe around?
Was there a brook hard by with its painted
pebbles and its liquid music ? Why was there
no sun-burnt boy — no bare-foot girl — no cabin
on the hill ? I know a sportsman or two
whom it would delight to shoot over a middle
cretaceous marsh or shore-meadow where a
good bag of Apatornis and Ichthyornis might
be had ! What a picnic it would be if one
could prepare an ample luncheon and invite
professors Gray, Coulter, Lesquereux, and
many others to meet one in a jungle of the
great Western Coal Basin before it was sub
merged ! What botanizing there would be !
As for me, I should like to tramp with Dr.
Elliott Coues in the haunts of Archceopteryx !
Let him collect skins while I make sketches ;
let him dissect fresh subjects while I listen to
the voices of the strange wilderness. I should
like to see the pollen of earth's first flowers

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 177

upon my shoes, and hear the runic notes that
have ripened into the song of the mocking
bird and the brown-thrush.

Below the surface of Professor Huxley's
comparisons of the Birds and the Reptiles
there is a strong current of most fascinating
poetry flowing back over the fossil-bearing
rocks. I take it that the first men were much
nearer to Nature than we are. It may be that
an hereditary far-fetched memory (so to speak)
of winged monsters, suggested the dragons
and griffins of early song. The crude but per
fectly natural imaginings of the savages of to
day, as well as the refined fantasies of the an
cients, seem to smack of this lingering hered
itament transmitted through a thousand
changes from the lower estate. Pan, the goat-
footed musician, is scarcely less monstrous,
when we view him soberly, than many of the
beings shut up in the stones.

Mr. Seeley has described a most interesting
bird of the eocene period, named Odontopteryx
toliapicus, probably a fish-eater, having "nearly
the habits of a cormorant, whose mouth was
rimmed with bony teeth set in the powerful
jaws. An expression of savage fierceness and
voracity has clung to this bird's head-bones
through countless ages of change. Not even
the relentless grip of the rocks for a million
of years could entirely quench the demoniac
spirit of the creature. In what sea or lake or
stream did it strike its prey ? On what windy
ocean crag did it rear its clamorous brood ?
I should like to have a look at its nest, if only
to compare it with those of the fish-eaters of
to-day, but much better should I enjoy a sail on
the waters it haunted, with the wind on my

1 78 BY- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES.

cheek and the sharp fragrance of the salt
marshes in my nostrils.

Some say that the poetry of the future will
be the songs of science, that we are now in
the state of transition from romance to the
real. So be it if it must ; but after all I should
rather sing with my face to the front, if I were
a poet. Science is noble and good, but the
progress of the soul is better. Genius is a
bird of morning, and its song is always the ex
ponent of the most recent pulse of human pas
sion, human knowledge of beauty, human
sympathy with the joys and sorrows of the
world. The rocks may give up the last secret
of their hearts ; the sea, too, may disgorge its
treasures ; but at last it is the soul of man that
is the poet's field of study— the soul that
walked with God upon chaos in the dark hour
before the dawn of creation, the soul that still
walks with him as the morning twilight slowly
broadens into perfect day. It is this soul that
longs backward and longs forward for the un
known, haunted all the time with some dreamy
memory of its ancient chrysalis state, and feel
ing all the time how close it is approaching to
the hour when its wings shall be full-grown.

Much has been spoken and written to dem
onstrate that the revelation of the rocks is or is
not in conflict with the revelations of the Bible.
To me the whole discussion has the ring of
blasphemy. Let science go on enlightening
our minds and let Christianity go on making
glorious the paths of men. There is room
and great need for both. Walking between
the two, with a hand on the shoulder of either,
let poesy gather the bird-songs and perfumes

BIRDS OF THE ROCKS. 179

of all the woods and fields from the beginning
to the end of time.

It is because colors have such priceless value
in the composition of the beauty our souls
crave, and because music, such as the birdb
make in the dewy woods of May, goes so far
towards filling the human heart with happi
ness, that I close this paper with the questions :

What colors had the plumage of Archceo-
pteryx ?

What song did Palaospiza sing ?

THE END.

14 DAY USE

RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWE!

LOAN DEPT.

This book is due on the last date stamped below, or

on the date to which renewed.
Renewed books are subject to immediate recall.

REC1BJLB

CCR 9 c iMhl

LD 21A-50m-ll,'62
(D3279slO)476B

General Library _
University of Calif orma
Berkeley

870