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B 3 1D7

THE SPRING OF
THE YEAR

DALLAS LORE SHARP

GIFT OF
L. A. Williams

SPRING OF THE YEAR - SHADBUSH (CHAPTER I)

THE

SPRING OF THE YEAR

BY ; ;J

DALLAS LORE SHARP

4UTHOR OF " THE LAY OF THE LAND," " THE FACE OF THE
FIELDS," " THE FALL OF THE YEAR," " WINTER," ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY

ROBERT BRUCE HORSFALL

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

TOe EitoermUe press Cambritip

-^fi

^ I -o*r

C,OP.YKAGJfIT» 1904,^1905; AND 1906, BY THE CHAPPLE PUBLISHING CO., LTD,

m-RiGjrr/ icjp^^V THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS BOOK COMPANY

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

TO MY SISTER
JENNIE

THE BEST OF COMPANIONS

IN THE WOODS AND FIELDS

THROUGH WHICH WE

WENT TO SCHOOL

700775

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ... ... . . . . . . ix

I. SPRING ! SPRING ! SPRING ! 1

II. THE SPRING RUNNING 7

III. AN OLD APPLE TREE . » 13

IV. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING . . 26
V. IF YOU HAD WINGS . . • . . . 1 . . . .33

VI. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO Do THIS SPRING ... 41
VII. THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN ...... 48

VIII. Is IT A LIFE OF FEAR? .60

IX. THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 76

X. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING . . 86

XI. TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 94

XII. AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE , . 115

XIII. WOODS MEDICINE . . . . . . . . 127

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS . ...... 137

ILLUSTRATIONS

SPRING OF THE YEAR — SHADBUSH Frontispiece

HYLAS PEEPING " SPRING!" 1

"THE EARLIEST BLOODROOT " . 4

THE TURKEY-HEN — "HALF A MILE FROM HOME" ... 8

CATFISH FAMILY . . . . . .12

SCREECH OWL — " OUT OVER THE MEADOW HE SAILS" . . 17
TREE-TOAD — " COMES FORTH TO THE EDGE OF HIS HOLE" 23
SKUNK-CABBAGE AND BUMBLEBEE

A SUNFISH OVER ITS NEST .29

CRESTED FLYCATCHER WITH SNAKE-SKIN 31

" ONE OF MY LITTLE BAND OF CROWS " - ^' • 33

YOUNG PAINTED TURTLE, FROGS' EGGS, SNAILS, AND WHIRLI-
GIG BEETLES 45

"ONE LIVE TOAD UNDER YOUR DOORSTEP" . . . . .46

PH(EBE AND HER YOUNG . • .55

PIKE AND MINNOWS 62

Fox BARKING — "UPON THE BARE KNOLL NEAR THE HOUSE" 66
PINE MARTEN AND CHIPMUNK 71

viii ILLUSTRATIONS

"UPON ONE OF THESE THE BUZZARD SAT HUMPED5' ... 79

YOUNG TURKEY BUZZARD 83

BROWN THRASHER — " OUR FINEST, MOST GIFTED SONGSTER" 87
PAINTED TURTLE — " BEGAN TO BURY HERSELF "... 103
CHIPMUNK EATING JUNE-BUGS 117

"TWO TUMBLE-BUGS TRYING TO ROLL THEIR BALL UP HILL" 127
"THE BOX TURTLES SCUFF CARELESSLY ALONG" . . 130

INTRODUCTION

IT has been my aim in the thirty-nine chapters
of the three books in this series to carry my
readers through the weeks of all the school
year, not however as with a calendar, for that would
be more or less wooden and artificial ; but by read-
ings, rather, that catch in a large way the spirit of
the particular season, that give something definite and
specific in the way of suggestions for tramps afield
with things to look for and hear and do. Naturally
many of the birds and animals and flowers mentioned,
as well as woods and aspects of sky and field, are
those of my own local environment — of my New
England surrounding — and so must differ in some
details from those surrounding you in your far South-
ern home or you on your distant Pacific coast, or
you in your rich and varied valley of the Mississippi,
or you on your wide and generous prairie. But the
similarities and correspondences, the things and
conditions we have in common, are more than our
differences. Our sun, moon, sky, earth — our land
— are the same, our love for this beautiful world is
the same, as is that touch of nature which we all feel
and which makes us all kin. Wherever, then, in these
books of the seasons, the things treated differ from

x INTRODUCTION

the things around you, read about those things for
information, and in your journeys afield fill in the
gaps with whatever it is that completes your land-
scape, or rounds out your cycle of the seasons, or
links up your endless chain of life.

While I have tried to be accurate throughout these
books, still it has not been my object chiefly to write
a natural history — volumes of outdoor facts; but
to quicken the imaginations behind the sharp eyes,
behind the keen ears and the eager souls of the mul-
titude of children who go to school, as I used to go

& ~ o

to school, through an open, stirring, beckoning world
of living things that I longed to range and under-
stand.

The best thing that I can do as writer, that you
can do as teacher, if I may quote from the last para-
graph — the keynote of these volumes — is to " go
into the fields and woods, go deep and far and fre-
quently, with eyes and ears and all your souls alert,"

MULLEIN HILL, May, 1912

THE SPEING OF THE YEAE

CHAPTER

" SPRING ! SPRING^!

- l

W~"HO is your spring messenger ? Is it bird
or flower or beast that brings your spring?
What sight or sound or smell spells
S-P-R-I-N-G to you, in big, joyous letters ?

Perhaps it is the frogs. Certainly I could not have
a real spring without the frogs. They have peeped
u Spring! " to me ev-
ery time I have had a
spring. Perhaps it is
the arbutus, or the
hepatica, or the pus-
sy - willow, or the
bluebird, or the yel-
low spice-bush, or, if
you chance to live in New England, perhaps it is
the wood pussy that brings your spring !

Beast, bird, or flower, whatever it is, there comes a
day and a messenger and — spring ! You know that
spring is here. It may snow again before night : no
matter; your messenger has brought you the news,
brought you the very spring itself, and after all

2 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

your waiting through the winter months are you
going to be discouraged by a flurry of snow ?

" All white and still lie stream and hill —

The winter dread and drear!

., t u<l -.' • • t"V^he» from the skies a bluebird flies,

'!«,«" V -4 V^-nd ^- spring is here! "

To.be sure, it is:bere, if the bluebird is your herald.

But how much faith in the weather you must have,
and how you must long for the spring before the
first bluebird brings it to you ! Some sunny March
day he drops down out of the blue sky, saying softly,
sweetly, " Florida, florida ! " as if calling the flowers ;
and then he is gone ! — gone for days at a time,
while it snows and blows and rains, freezes and
thaws, thaws, thaws, until the March mud looks
fitter for clams than for flowers.

So it is with the other first signs. If you want
springtime ahead of time, then you must have it in
your heart, out of reach of the weather, just as you
must grow cucumbers in a hothouse if you want
them ahead of time. But there comes a day when
cucumbers will grow out of doors ; and there comes
a day when the bluebird and the song sparrow and
all the other heralds stay, when spring has come
whether you have a heart or not.

What day is that in your out-of-doors, and what
sign have you to mark it ? Mr. John Burroughs says
his sign is the wake-robin, or trillium. When I was
a school-boy it used to be for me the arbutus ; but

SPRING! SPRING! SPRING! 3

nowadays it is the shadbush : I have no sure settled
spring until I see the shadbush beginning to open
misty white in the edge of the woods. Then I can
trust the weather ; I can open my beehives ; I can
plough and plant my garden ; I can start into the
woods for a day with the birds and flowers; for
when the shadbush opens, the great gate to the
woods and fields swings open — wide open to let
everybody in.

But perhaps you do not know what the shadbush
is? That does not matter. You can easily enough
find that out. Some call it June-berry; others call it
service-berry; and the botany calls it A-me-lan' chi-er
ca-na-deri 'sis ! But that does not matter either. For
this is not a botany lesson. It is an account of how
springtime comes to me, and when and what are its
signs. And I would have you read it to think how
springtime comes to you, and when and what are
its signs. So, if the dandelion, and not the shadbush,
is your sign, then you must read " dandelion " here
every time I write " shadbush."

There is an old saying, "He that would bring
home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth
of the Indies out " ; which is to say, those who
bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out
some kind of wealth in exchange. So you who would
enjoy or understand what my shadbush means to me
must have a shadbush of your own, or a dandelion,
or something that is a sign to you that spring is here.

4 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

Then, you see, my chapter in the book will become
your own.

There are so many persons who do not know one
bird from another, one tree from another, one flower
from another ; who would not know one season from
another did they not see the spring hats in the mil-
liner's window or feel the need of a
change of coat. I hope you are not
one of them. I hope you are
on the watch, instead, for the
first phcebe or the earliest
bloodroot, or are listening to
catch the shrill, brave peep-
ing of the little tree-frogs,
the hylas.

As for me, I am on the watch
for the shadbush. Oh, yes, spring
comes before the shadbush opens, but
it is likely not to stay. The wild geese
trumpet spring in the gray March skies
as they pass ; a February rain, after a
long cold season of snow, spatters your face with
spring ; the swelling buds on the maples, the fuzzy
kittens on the pussy-willows, the opening marsh-
marigolds in the meadows, the frogs, the bluebirds
— all of these, while they stay, are the spring. But
they are not sure to stay over night, here in New
England. You may wake up and find it snowing —
until the shadbush opens. After that, hang up your

SPRING! SPRING! SPRING! 5

sled and skates, put away your overcoat and mittens ;
for spring is here, and the honey-bees will buzz every
bright day until the October asters are in bloom.

I said if you want springtime ahead of time you
must have it in your heart. Of course you must.
If your heart is warm and your eye is keen, you can
go forth in the dead of winter and gather buds, seeds,
cocoons, and living things enough to make a little
spring. For the fires of summer are never wholly
out. They are only banked in the winter, smoulder-
ing always under the snow, and quick to brighten
and burst into blaze. There comes a warm day in
January, and across your thawing path crawls a
woolly-bear caterpillar ; a mourning-cloak butter-
fly flits through the woods, and the j uncos sing.
That night a howling snowstorm sweeps out of the
north ; the coals are covered again. So they kindle
and darken, until they leap from the ashes of winter
a pure, thin blaze in the shadbush, to burn higher
and hotter across the summer, to flicker and die
away — a line of yellow embers — in the weird
witch-hazel of the autumn.

At the sign of the shadbush the doors of my
springtime swing wide open. My birds are back, my
turtles are out, my long sleeping woodchucks are
wide awake. There is not a stretch of woodland or
meadow now that shows a trace of winter. Over the
pasture the bluets are beginning to drift, as if the
haze on the distant hills, floating down in the night,

6 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

had been caught in the dew-wet grass. They wash
the field to its borders in their delicate azure hue.
At the sign of the shadbush the doors of my mem-
ory, too, swing wide open, and I am a boy again in
the meadows of my old home. The shadbush is in
blossom, and the fish are running — the sturgeon
up the Delaware ; the shad up Cohansey Creek ;
and through the Lower Sluice, these soft, stirring
nights, the catfish are slipping. Is there any real
boy now in Lupton's Meadows to watch them come ?
Oh yes, doubtless ; and doubtless there ever shall be.
But I would go down for this one night, down in the
May moonlight, and listen, as I used to listen years
ago, for the quiet splash splash sf)lash, as the swarm-
ing catfish pass through the shallows of the main
ditch, up toward the dam at the pond.

At the sign of the shadbush how swiftly the tides
of life begin to rise ! How mysteriously their cur-
rents run ! — the fish swimming in from the sea,
the birds flying up from the South, the flowers open-
ing fresh from the soil, the insects coming out from
their sleep : life moving everywhere — across the
heavens, over the earth, along the deep, dim aisles of
the sea!

CHAPTER II

THE SPRING RUNNING

THIS title is Kipling's ; the observations that
follow are mine ; but the real spring run-
ning is yours and mine and Kipling's and
Mowgli the wolf-child's, whose running Kipling has
told us about. Indeed, every child of the earth has
felt it, has had the running — every living thing of
the land and the sea.

Everything feels it ; everything is restless, every-
thing is moving. The renter changes houses; the
city dweller goes " down to the shore " or up to the
mountains to open his summer cottage; the farmer
starts to break up the land for planting; the school-
children begin to squirm in their seats and long to
fly out of the windows ; and " Where are you going
this summer? " is on every one's lips.

They have all caught the spring running, the
only infection I know that you can catch from April
skies. The very sun has caught it, too, and is length-
ening out his course, as if he hated to stop and go
to bed at night. And the birds, that are supposed
to go to bed most promptly, they sleep, says the
good old poet Chaucer, with open eye, these April
nights, so bad is their case of spring running, —

" So priketh hem Nature in hir corages." l
1 So nature pricks (stirs) them in their hearts.

8 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

Their long journey northward over sea and land has
not cured them yet of their unrest. Only one thing
will do it (and I suppose we all should be glad), one
sovereign remedy, and that is family cares. But
they are yet a long way off.

Meantime watch your turkey-hen, how she saunters
down the field alone, how pensive she looks, how
lost for something to do and somewhere to go. She
is sick with this disease of spring. Follow her, keep-
ing out of sight
yourself, an dlo,
a nest, hidden
under

a pile of brush in a corner of the pasture fence, half
a mile from home !

The turkey-hen has wandered off half a mile to
build her nest ; but many wild birds have come on
their small wings all the way from the forests of the
Amazon and have gone on to Hudson Bay and the
Fur Countries, just to build their nests and rear
their young. A wonderful case of the spring run-
ning, you would say ; and still more wonderful is the
annual journey of the golden plover from Patagonia
to Alaska and back, eight thousand miles each way.
Yet there is another case that seems to me more
mysterious, and quite as wonderful, as the sea seems
more mysterious than the land.

THE SPRING RUNNING 9

It is the spring running of the fish. For when the
great tidal waves of bird-life begin to roll north-
ward with the sun, a corresponding movement begins
among the denizens of the sea. The cold-blooded
fish feel the stirring; the spring running seizes them,
and in they come through the pathless wastes of the
ocean, waves of them, shoals of them, — sturgeon,
shad, herring, — like the waves and flocks of wild
geese, warblers, and swallows overhead, — into the
brackish water of the bays and rivers and on (the
herring) into the fresh water of the ponds.

To watch the herring come up Weymouth Back
River into Herring Run here near my home, as I do
every April, is to watch one of the most interesting,
most mysterious movements of all nature. It was
about a century ago that men of Weymouth brought
herring in barrels of water by ox-teams from Taun-
ton River and liberated them in the pond at the
head of Weymouth Back River. These fish laid their
eggs in the grassy margins of the pond that spring
and went out down the river to the sea. Later on,
the young fry, when large enough to care for them-
selves, found their way down the river and out to sea.

And where did they go then ? and what did they
do? Who can tell? for who can read the dark book
of the sea? Yet this one thing we know they did,
for still they are doing it after all these hundred
years, — they came back up the river, when they
were full-grown, — up the river, up the run, up into

10 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

the pond, to lay their eggs in the waters where they
were hatched, in the waters that to them were home.

Something very much like this all the other fish
are doing, as are the birds also. The spell of
home is over land and sea, and has been laid upon
them all. The bird companies of the fall went
south at the inexorable command of Hunger ; but
a greater than Hunger is in command of the forces
of spring. Now our vast bird army of North Amer-
ica, five billion strong, is moving northward at the
call of Home. And the hosts of the sea, whose
shining billions we cannot number, — they, too, are
coming up, some of them far up through the shal-
low streams to the wood-walled ponds for a drink of
the sweet waters of Home.

As a boy I used to go down to the meadows at
night to hear the catfish coming, as now I go down
to the village by day to see the herring coming. The
catfish would swim in from the Cohansey, through
the sluices in the bank, then up by way of the meadow
ditches to the dam over which fall the waters of Lup-
ton's Pond.

It was a seven- or eight-foot dam, and of course
the fish could not climb it. Down under the splash-
ing water they would crowd by hundreds, their
moving bodies close-packed, pushing forward, all
trying to break through the wooden wall that blocked
their way. Slow, stupid things they looked ; but was
not each big cat head pointed forward? each slow,

THE SPRING RUNNING 11

cold brain trying to follow and keep up with each
swift, warm heart? For the homeward-bound heart
knows no barrier; it never stops for a dam.

The herring, too, on their way up the run are
stopped by a dam; but the town, in granting to cer-
tain men the sole rights to catch the fish, stipulated
that a number of the live herring, as many .as several
barrels full, should be helped over the dam each
spring that they might go on up to the pond to de-
posit their eggs. If this were not done annually, the
fish would soon cease to come, and the Weymouth
herring would be no more.

There was no such lift for the catfish under Lup-
ton's dam. I often tossed them over into the pond,
and so helped to continue the line; but perhaps there
was no need, for spring after spring they returned.
They were the young fish, I suppose, new each year,
from parent fish that remain inside the pond the year
round.

I cannot say now — I never asked myself before —
whether it is Mother or Father Catfish who stays with
the swarm (it is literally a swarm) of kitten catfish.
It may be father, as in the case of Father Stickleback
and Father Toadfish, who cares for the children. If
it is — I take off my hat to him. I have four of
my own ; and I think if I had eighteen or twenty
more I should have both hands full. But Father Cat-
fish ! Did you ever see his brood ?

I should say that there might easily be five hun-

12 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

dred young ones in the family, though I never have
counted them. But you might. If you want to try
it, take your small scoop-net of coarse cheesecloth,
or mosquito-netting, and go. down to the pond this
spring. Close along the margin you will see holes
in the shallow water running up under the over-
hanging grass and roots. The holes were made prob-
ably by the muskrats. It is in here that the old
catfish is guarding the brood.

As soon as you learn to know the holes, you can
cover the entrance with your net, and then by

jumping or stamp-
ing hard on the
ground above the

hole, you will drive out the old fish with a flop, the
family following in a fine, black cloud. The old fish
will swim away, then come slowly back to the scat-
tered swarm, to the little black things that look like
small tadpoles, who soon cluster about the parent
once more and wiggle away into the deep, dark
water of the pond — the strangest family group
that I know in all the spring world.

CHAPTER III

AN OLD APPLE TREE

BEYOND the meadow, perhaps half a mile
from my window, stands an old apple tree,
the last of an ancient line that once marked
the boundary between the " upper " and the "lower"
pastures. It is a bent, broken, hoary old tree, grizzled
with suckers from feet to crown. No one has pruned
it for half a century ; no one ever gathers its gnarly
apples — no one but the cattle who love to lie in its
shadow and munch its fruit.

The cows know the tree. One of their winding

paths runs under its low-hung branches ; and as I
frequently travel the cow-paths, I also find my way
thither. Yet I do not go for apples, nor just be-
cause the cow-path takes me. That old apple tree is
hollow, hollow all over, trunk and branches, as hol-
low as a lodging-house ; and I have never known it
when it was not " putting up " some wayfaring vis-
itor or some permanent lodger. So I go over, when-
ever 1 have a chance, to call upon my friends or pay
my respects to the distinguished guests.

This old tree is on the neighboring farm. It does
not belong to me, and I am glad ; for if it did, then
I should have to trim it, and scrape it, and plaster

14 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

up its holes, and put a burlap petticoat on it, all be-
cause of the gruesome gypsy moths that infest my
trees. Oh, yes, that would make it bear better ap-
ples, but what then would become of its birds and
beasts? Everybody ought to have one apple tree
that bears birds and beasts — and Baldwin apples,
too, of course, if the three sorts of fruit can be
made to grow on the same tree. But only the birds
and beasts grow well on the untrimmed, unscraped,
unplastered, unpetticoated old tree yonder between
the pastures. His heart is wide open to every small
traveler passing by.

Whenever I look over toward the old tree, I think
of the old vine-covered, weather-beaten house in
which my grandfather lived, where many a traveler
put up over night — to get a plate of grandmother's
buckwheat cakes, I think, and a taste of her keen
wit. The old house sat in under a grove of pin oak
and pine, — "Underwood" we called it, — a shel-
tered, sheltering spot ; with a peddler's stall in the
barn, a peddler's place at the table, a peddler's bed
in the herby garret, a boundless, fathomless feather-
bed, of a piece with the house and the hospitality.
There were larger houses and newer, in the neigh-
borhood ; but no other house in all the region, not
even the tavern, two miles farther down the pike,
was half so central, or so homelike, or so full of
sweet and juicy gossip. The old apple tree yonder
between the woods and the meadow is as central, as

AN OLD APPLE TREE 15

hospitable, and, if animals talk with one another,
just as full of neighborhood news as was grand-
father's roof-tree.

Of course you would never suspect it, passing by.
But then, no lover of wild things passes by — never
without first stopping, and especially before an old
tree all full of holes. Whenever you see a hole in a
tree, in a sand-bank, in a hillside, under a rail-pile
— anywhere out of doors, stop !

Stop here beside this decrepit apple tree. No, you
will find no sign swinging from the front, no door-
plate, no letter-box bearing the name of the family
residing here. The birds and beasts do not adver-
tise their houses so. They would hide their houses,
they would have you pass by ; for most persons are
rude in the woods and fields, breaking into the
homes of the wood-folk as they never would dream
of doing in the case of their human neighbors.

There is no need of being rude anywhere, no
need of being an unwelcome visitor even to the shy-
est and most timid of the little people of the fields.
Come over with me — they know me in the old apple
tree. It is nearly sundown. The evening is near,
with night at its heels, for it is an early March day.

We shall not wait long. The doors will open that
we may enter — enter into a home of the fields, and,
a little way at least, into a life of the fields, for, as
I have said, this old tree has a small dweller of some
sort the year round.

16 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

On this March day we shall be admitted by my
owls. They take possession late in winter and oc-
cupy the tree, with some curious fellow tenants, un-
til early summer. I can count upon these small
screech owls by February, — the forlorn month, the
seasonless, hopeless, lifeless month of the year, but
for its owls, its thaws, its lengthening days, its
cackling pullets, its possible bluebirds, and its being
the year's end! At least the ancients called Feb-
ruary, not December, the year's end, maintaining,
with some sense, that the making of the world was
begun in March, that is, with the spring. The owls
do not, like the swallows, bring the spring, but they
nevertheless help winter with most seemly haste into
an early grave.

If, as the dusk comes down, I cannot go over to
the tree, I will go to my window and watch. I can-
not see him, the grim-beaked baron with his hooked
talons, his ghostly wings, his night-seeing eyes, but
I know that he has come to his window in the apple-
tree turret yonder against the darkening sky, and
that he watches with me. I cannot see him swoop
downward over the ditches, nor see him quarter the
meadow, beating, dangling, dropping between the
flattened tussocks; nor can I hear him, as, back on
the silent shadows, he slants upward again to his
tower. Mine are human eyes, human ears. Even
the quick-eared meadow mouse did not hear until
the long talons closed and it was too late.

SCREECH OWL - " OUT OVER THE MEADOW HE SAILS "

18 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

But there have been times when, like some belated
traveler, I have been forced to cross this wild night-
land of his ; and I have felt him pass — so near at
times that he has stirred my hair, by the wind — dare I
say ? — of his mysterious wings. At other times I have
heard him. Often on the edge of night I have lis-
tened to his quavering, querulous cry from the elm-
tops below me by the meadow. But oftener I have
watched at the casement here in my castle wall.

Away yonder on the borders of night, dim and
gloomy, looms his ancient keep. I wait. Soon on the
deepened dusk spread his soft wings, out over the
meadow he sails, up over my wooded height, over
my moat, to my turret tall, as silent and unseen as
the soul of a shadow, except he drift across the face
of the full round moon, or with his weird cry cause
the dreaming quiet to stir in its sleep and moan.

Now let us go over again to the old tree, this time
in May. It will be curious enough, as the soft dusk
comes on, to see the round face of the owl in one
hole and, out of another hole in the broken limb
above, the flat, weazened face of a little tree-toad.

Both creatures love the dusk; both have come
forth to their open doors to watch the darkening;
both will make off under the cover of the night —
one for mice and frogs over the meadow, the other
for slugs and insects over the crooked, tangled limbs
o£ the apple tree.

It is strange enough to see them together, but it

AN OLD APPLE TREE 19

is stranger still to think of them together; for it is
just such prey as this little toad that the owl has
gone over the meadow to catch.

Why does he not take the supper ready here on
the shelf? There may be reasons that we, who do
not eat tree-toad, know nothing of ; but I am inclined
to believe that the owl has never seen his fellow
lodger in the doorway above, though he must often
have heard him trilling gently and lonesomely in the
gloaming, when his skin cries for rain!

Small wonder if they have never met ! for this
gray, squat, disk-toed little monster in the hole, or
flattened on the bark of the tree like a patch of li-
chen, may well be one of the things that are hidden
from even the sharp-eyed owl. It is always a source of
fresh amazement, the way that this largest of the
hylas, on the moss-marked rind of an old tree, can
utterly blot himself out before your staring eyes.

The common toads and all the frogs have enemies
enough, and it would seem from the comparative
scarcity of the tree-toads that they must have en-
emies, too ; but I do not know who they are. This
scarcity of the tree-toads is something of a puzzle,
and all the more to me, that, to my certain knowl-
edge, this toad has lived in the old Baldwin tree,
now, for five years. Perhaps he has been several
toads, you say, not one; for who can tell one tree-
toad from another ? Nobody ; and for that reason 1
made, some time ago, a simple experiment, in order

20 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

to see how long a tree-toad might live, unprotected,
in his own natural environment.

Upon moving into this house, about nine years
ago, we found a tree-toad living in the big hickory
by the porch. For the next three springs he reap-
peared, and all summer long we would find him, now
on the tree, now on the porch, often on the railing
and backed tight up against a post. Was he one or
many ? we asked. Then we marked him ; and for the
next four years we knew that he was himself alone.
How many more years he might have lived in the
hickory for us all to pet, I should like to know ; but
last summer, to our great sorrow, the gypsy moth
killers, poking in the hole, hit our little friend and
left him dead.

It was very wonderful to me, the instinct for
home — the love for home, I should like to call it —
that this humble little creature showed. Now, a toad
is an amphibian to the zoologist ; an ugly gnome
with a jeweled eye, to the poet; but to the naturalist,
the lover of life for its own sake, who lives next
door to his toad, who feeds him a fly or a fat grub
now and then, who tickles him to sleep with a rose
leaf, who waits as thirstily as the hilltop for him
to call the summer rain, who knows his going to
sleep for the winter, his waking up for the spring
— to such a one, I say, a tree-toad means more
than the jeweled eye and the strange amphibious
habits.

AN OLD APPLE TREE 21

This small tree-toad had a home, had it in a tree,
too, — in a hickory tree, — this toad that dwelt by
my house.

" East, west,
Hame »s best,"

croaked our tree-toad in a tremulous, plaintive song
that wakened memories in the vague twilight of more
old, unhappy, far-off things than any other voice I
ever knew.

These two tree-toads could not have been induced
to trade houses, the hickory for the apple, because a
house to a toad means home, and a home is never in
the market. There are many more houses in the land
than homes. Most of us are only real-estate dealers.
Many of us have never had a home ; and none of
us has ever had, perhaps, more than one, or could
have — that home of our childhood.

This toad seemed to feel it all. Here in the hickory
for four years (more nearly seven, I am sure) he
lived, single and alone. He would go down to the
meadow when the toads gathered there to lay their
eggs; but back he would come, without mate or
companion, to his tree. Stronger than love of kind,
than love of mate, constant and dominant in his slow
cold heart was his instinct for home.

If I go down to the orchard and bring up from
an apple tree some other toad to dwell in the hole
of the hickory, I shall fail. He might remain for the
day, but not throughout the night, for with the

22 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

gathering twilight there steals upon him an irresist-
ible longing ; and guided by it, as bee and pigeon
and dog and man are guided, he makes his sure way
back to his orchard home.

Would my toad of the Baldwin tree go back be-
yond the orchard, over the road, over the wide
meadow, over to the old tree, half a mile away, if I
brought him from there ? We shall see. During the
coming summer I shall mark him in some manner,
and bringing him here to the hickory, I shall then
watch the old apple tree yonder to see if he re-
turns. It will be a hard, perilous journey. But his
longing will not let him rest; and, guided by his
mysterious sense of direction, — for that one place,
— he will arrive, I am sure, or he will die on the

^ay-
Suppose he never gets back ? Only one toad less ?
A great deal more than that. There in the old Bald-
win he has made his home for I don't know7 how
long, hunting over its world of branches in the sum-
mer, sleeping down in its deep holes during the
winter — down under the chips and punk and cast-
ings, beneath the nest of the owls, it may be ; for
my toad in the hickory always buried himself so,
down in the debris at the bottom of the hole, where,
in a kind of cold storage, he preserved himself until
thawed out by the spring.

I never pass the old apple in the summer but that
I stop to pay my respects to the toad ; nor in the

AN OLD APPLE TREE 23

•winter that I do not pause and think of him asleep
in there. He is no longer mere toad. He has passed
into the Guardian Spirit of the tree, warring in the
green leaf against worm and grub and slug, and in
the dry leaf hiding himself, a heart of life, within
the thin ribs, as if to save the old shell of a tree to
another summer.

Often in the dusk, especially the summer dusk, I
have gone over to sit at his feet and learn some of
the things that my school-teachers and college pro-
fessors did not teach me.

Seating myself comfortably at the foot of the tree,
I wait. The toad comes forth to the edge
of his hole above me, settles himself
comfortably, and waits. And the /
lesson begins. The quiet of the
summer evening steals out
with the wood-shadows and
softly covers the fields. We
do not stir. An hour passes.
We do not stir. Not to stir
is the lesson — one of the primary lessons in this
course with the toad.

The dusk thickens. The grasshoppers begin to
strum; the owl slips out and drifts away; a whip-
poor-will drops on the bare knoll near me, clucks and
shouts and shouts again, his rapid repetition a thou-
sand times repeated by the voices that call to one
another down the long empty aisles of the swamp;

24 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

a big moth whirs about my head and is gone ; a bat
flits squeaking past; a firefly blazes, is blotted out
by the darkness, blazes again, and so passes, his tiny
lantern flashing into a night that seems the darker
for his quick, unsteady glow.

We do not stir. It is a hard lesson. By all my
other teachers I had been taught every manner of
stirring, and this strange exercise of being still takes
me where my body is weakest, and puts me almost
out of breath.

What ! out of breath by keeping still ? Yes, be-
cause I had been hurrying hither and thither, do-
ing this and that — doing them so fast for so many
years that I no longer understood how to sit down
and keep still and do nothing inside of me as well
as outside. Of course you know how to keep still,
for you are children. And so perhaps you do not need
to take lessons of teacher Toad. But I do, for I am
grown up, and a man, with a world of things to
do, a great many of which I do not need to do at
all — if only I would let the toad teach me all he
knows.

So, when I am tired, I will go over to the toad. I
will sit at his feet, where time is nothing, and the
worry of work even less. He has all time and no
task. He sits out the hour silent, thinking — I
know not what, nor need to know. So we will sit in
silence, the toad and I, watching Altair burn along
the shore of the horizon, and overhead Arcturus, and

AN OLD APPLE TREE 25

the rival fireflies flickering through the leaves of the
apple tree. And as we watch, I shall have time to
rest and to think. Perhaps I shall have a thought, a
thought all my own, a rare thing for any one to
have, and worth many an hour of waiting.

CHAPTER IV

A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING

OUT of the multitude of sights, which twelve
sights this spring shall I urge you to see?
Why the twelve, of course, that I always look
for most eagerly. And the first of these, I think, is
the bluebird.

" Have you seen a bluebird yet ? " some friend
will ask me, as March comes on. Or it will be, "I
have seen my first bluebird ! "as if seeing a first blue-
bird were something very wonderful and important.
And so it is ; for the sight of the first March blue-
bird is the last sight of winter and the first sight of
spring. The brown of the fertile earth is on its
breast, the blue of the summer sky is on its back,
and in its voice is the clearest, sweetest of all invi-
tations to come out of doors.

Where has he spent the winter ? Look it up. What
has brought him back so early ? Guess at it. What
does he say as he calls to you? Listen. What has
John Burroughs written about him ? Look it up
and read.

THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING

You must see the skunk-cabbage abloom in the
swamp. You need not pick it and carry it home for
the table — just see it. But be sure you see it. Get
down and open the big purple-streaked spathe, as it
spears the cold mud, and
look at the "spadix" cov-
ered with its tiny but per-
fect flowers. Now wait a
minute. The woods are
still bare ; ice may still be
found on the northern
slopes, while
here before
you, like a
wedge split-
ting the fro-
zen soil, like a
spear cleaving
through the
earth from the
other, the sum-
mer, side of
the world, is
this broad blade of life letting up almost the first
cluster of the new spring's flowers. Wait a moment
longer and you may hear your first bumblebee, as
he comes humming at the door of the cabbage for
a taste of new honey and pollen.

28 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

III

Among the other early signs of spring, you should
see a flock of red-winged blackbirds ! And what
a sight they are upon a snow-covered field ! For often
after their return it will snow again, when the bril-
liant, shining birds in black with their red epaulets
make one of the most striking sights of the season.

Another bird event that you should witness is the
arrival of the migrating warblers. You will be out
one of these early May days when there will be a
stirring of small birds in the bushes at your side,
in the tall trees over your head — everywhere! It is
the warblers. You are in the tide of the tiny migrants
— yellow warblers, pine warblers, myrtle warblers,
black-throated green warblers — some of them on
their way from South America to Labrador. You
must be in the woods and see them as they come.

You should see the "spice-bush" (wild allspice or
fever-bush or Benjamin-bush) in bloom in the damp
March woods. And, besides that, you should see with
your own eyes under some deep, dark forest trees the
blue hepatica and on some bushy hillside the pink
arbutus. (For fear I forget to tell you in the chapter
of things to do, let me now say that you should take
a day this spring and go " may-flowering.")

THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING

There are four nests that you should see this
spring: a hummingbird's nest, saddled upon the
horizontal limb of some fruit or forest tree, and
looking more like a wart on the limb than a nest ;
secondly, the nest, eggs rather, of a turtle buried in
the soft sand along the margin of a pond or out
in some cultivated field; thirdly, the nest of a sun-
fish (pumpkin-seed) in the shallow water close up

along the sandy shore of the pond; and fourthly,
the nest of the red squirrel, made of fine stripped
cedar bark, away up in the top of some tall pine
tree ! I mean by this that there are many other in-
teresting nest-builders besides the birds. Of all the
difficult nests to find, the hummingbird's is the most
difficult. When you find one, please write to me
about it.

VII

You should see a "spring peeper," the tiny Pick-
ering's frog — if you can. The marsh and the mead-
ows will be vocal with them, but one of the hardest

30 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

things that you will try to do this spring will be
to see the shrill little piper, as he plays his bagpipe
in the rushes at your very feet. But hunt until you
do see him. It will sharpen your eyes and steady
your patience for finding other things.

VIII

You should see the sun come up on a May morn-
ing. The dawn is always a wonderful sight, but
never at other times attended with quite the glory,
with quite the music, with quite the sweet fragrance,
with quite the wonder of a morning in May. Don't
fail to see it. Don't fail to rise with it. You will
feel as if you had wings — something better even
than wings.

You should see a farmer ploughing in a large field
— the long straight furrows of brown earth ; the
blackbirds following behind after worms ; the rip of
the ploughshare ; the roll of the soil from the smooth
mould-board — the wealth of it all. For in just such
fields is the wealth of the world, and the health of
it, too. Don't miss the sight of the ploughing.

Go again to the field, three weeks later, and see
it all green with sprouting corn, or oats, or one of a
score of crops. Then — but in " The Fall of the
Year " I ask you to go once more and see that field

THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING

all covered with shocks of ripened corn, shocks that
are pitched up and down its long rows of corn-butts
like a vast village of Indian tepees, each tepee full

of golden corn.

You should see, hanging from a hole in some old
apple tree, a long thin snake-skin ! It is the latch-
string of the great crested fly-
catcher. Now why does this bird
always use a snake-skin in his
nest? and why does he usually
leave it hanging loose outside
the hole ? Questions, these, for
you to think about. And if you
will look sharp, you will see in
even the commonest things ques-
tions enough to keep you think-
ing as long as you live.

XII

You should see a dandelion.
A dandelion ? Yes, a dandelion,
"fringing the dusty road with harmless gold." But
that almost requires four eyes — two to see the dan-
delion and two more to see the gold — the two eyes
in your head, and the two in your imagination. Do
you really know how to see anything ? Most persons
have eyes, but only a few really see. This is because
they cannot look hard and steadily at anything. The

32 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

first great help to real seeing is to go into the woods
knowing what you hope to see — seeing it in your
eye, as we say, before you see it in the out-of-doors.
No one would ever see a tree-toad on a mossy tree or
a whip-poor-will among the fallen leaves who did not
have tree-toads and whip-poor-wills in mind. Then,
secondly, look at the thing hard until you see in it
something peculiar, something different from any-
thing like it that you ever saw before. Don't dream
in the woods; don't expect the flowers to tell you
their names or the wild things to come up and ask
you to wait while they perform for you0

CHAPTER V

IF YOU HAD WINGS

IF you had wings, why of course you would
wear feathers instead of clothes, and you
might be a crow ! And then of course you
would steal corn, and run the risk of getting three
of your big wing feathers shot away.

All winter long, and occasionally during this
spring, I have seen one of ray little band of crows

flying about with a big
hole in his wing, — at
least three of his large
wing feathers gone, shot
away probably last sum-

mer, — which causes him to fly with a list or limp,
like an automobile with a flattened tire, or a ship
with a shifted ballast.

Now for nearly a year that crow has been hobbling
about on one whole and one half wing, trusting to

34 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

luck to escape his enemies, until he can get three
new feathers to take the places of those that are
missing. " Well, why does n't he get them ? " you
ask. If you were that crow, how would you get them ?
Can a crow, by taking thought, add three new feath-
ers to his wing?

Certainly not. That crow must wait until wing-
feather season comes again, just as an apple tree
must wait until apple-growing season comes to hang
its boughs with luscious fruit. The crow has nothing
to do with it. His wing feathers are supplied by Na-
ture once a year (after the nesting-time), and if a
crow loses any of them, even if right after the
new feathers had been supplied, that crow will have
to wait until the season for wing feathers comes
around once more — if indeed he can wait and does
not fall a prey to hawk or owl or the heavy odds of
winter.

But Nature is not going to be hurried on that ac<
count, nor caused to change one jot or tittle from
her wise and methodical course. The Bible says
that the hairs of our heads are numbered, So are
the feathers on a crow's body. Nature knows just
how many there are altogether ; how many there
are of each sort — primaries, secondaries, tertials,
greater coverts, middle coverts, lesser coverts, and
scapulars — in the wing; just how each sort is
arranged; just when each sort is to be moulted and
renewed. If Master Crow does not take care of his

IF YOU HAD WINGS 35

clothes, then he will have to go without until the
time fora new suit comes; for Mother Nature won't
patch them up as your mother patches up yours.

But now this is what I want you to notice and
think about : that just as an apple falls according
to a great law of Nature, so a bird's feathers fall ac-
cording to a law of Nature. The moon is appointed
for seasons ; the sun knoweth his going down ; and
so light and insignificant a thing as a bird's feather
not only is appointed to grow in a certain place at a
certain time, but also knoweth its falling off.

Nothing could look more haphazard, certainly,
than the way a hen's feathers seem to drop off at
moulting time. The most forlorn, undone, abject
creature about the farm is the half-moulted hen.
There is one in the chicken-yard now, so nearly
naked that she really is ashamed of herself, and so
miserably helpless that she squats in a corner all
night, unable to reach the low poles of the roost. It
is a critical experience with the hen, this moulting
of her feathers ; and were it not for the protection
of the yard it would be a fatal experience, so easily
could she be captured. Nature seems to have no
hand in the business at all ; if she has, then what a
mess she is making of it!

But pick up the hen, study the falling of the
feathers carefully, and lo! here is law and order,
every feather as important to Nature as a star, every
quill as a planet, and the old white hen as mightily

36 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

looked after by Nature as the round sphere of the
universe !

Once a year, usually after the nesting-season, it
seems a physical necessity for most birds to renew
their plumage.

We get a new suit (some of us) because our old
one wears out. That is the most apparent cause for
the new annual suit of the birds. Yet with them,
as with some of us, the feathers go out of fashion,
and then the change of feathers is a mere matter
of style, it seems.

For severe and methodical as Mother Nature
must be (and what mother or teacher or ruler, who
has great things to do and a multitude of little things
to attend to, must not be severe and methodical?)
— severe, I say, as Mother Nature must be in look-
ing after her children's clothes, she has for all that
a real motherly heart, it seems.

For see how she looks after their wedding gar-
ments— giving to most of the birds a new suit, gay
and gorgeous, especially to the bridegrooms, as if
fine feathers did make a fine bird ! Or does she do
all of this to meet the fancy of the bride, as the
scientists tell us? Whether so or not, it is a fact
that among the birds it is the bridegroom who is
adorned for his wife, and sometimes the fine feathers
come by a special moult — an extra suit for him !

Take Bobolink, for instance. He has two complete
moults a year, two new suits, one of them his wedding

IF YOU HAD WINGS 37

suit. Now, as I write, I hear him singing over the
meadow — a jet-black, white, and cream-buff lover,
most strikingly adorned. His wife, down in the grass,
looks as little like him as a sparrow looks like a black-
bird. But after the breeding-season he will moult
again, changing color so completely that he and his
wife and children will all look alike, all like spar-
rows, and will even lose their names, flying south
now under the name of "reedbirds."

Bobolink passes the winter in Brazil ; and in the
spring, just before the long northward journey be-
gins, he lays aside his fall traveling clothes and
puts on his gay wedding garments and starts north
for his bride. But you would hardly know he was
so dressed, to look at him ; for, strangely enough,
he is not black and white, but still colored like a
sparrow, as he was in the fall. Apparently he is.
Look at him more closely, however, and you will
find that the brownish-yellow color is all caused by
a veil of fine fringes hanging from the edges of the
feathers. The bridegroom wearing the wedding veil?
Yes ! Underneath is the black and white and cream-
buff suit. He starts northward ; and, by the time
he reaches Massachusetts, the fringe veil is worn off
and the black and white bobolink appears. Speci-
mens taken after their arrival here still show traces
of the brownish-yellow veil.

Many birds do not have this early spring moult
at all ; and with most of those that do, the great

38 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

wing feathers are not then renewed as are bobolink's,
but only at the annual moult after the nesting is
done. The great feathers of the wings are, as you
know, the most important feathers a bird has; and
the shedding of them is so serious a matter that
Nature has come to make the change according to
the habits and needs of the birds. With most birds
the body feathers begin to go first, then the wing
feathers, and last those of the tail. But the shedding
of the wing feathers is a very slow and carefully
regulated process.

In the wild geese and other water birds the wing
feathers drop out with the feathers of the body, and
go so nearly together that the birds really cannot
fly. On land you could catch the birds with your
hands. But they keep near or on the water and thus
escape, though times have been when it was neces-
sary to protect them at this season by special laws ;
for bands of men would go into their nesting-
marshes and kill them with clubs by hundreds !

The shedding of the feathers brings many risks
to the birds ; but Nature leaves none of her children
atterly helpless. The geese at this time cannot fly
because their feathers are gone ; but they can swim,
and so getaway from most of their natural enemieSo
On the other hand, the hawks that hunt by wing, and
must have wings always in good feather, or else perish,
lose their feathers so slowly that they never feel their
loss. It takes a hawk nearly a year to get a complete

IF YOU HAD WINGS 39

change of wing feathers, one or two dropping out
from each wing at a time, at long intervals apart.

Then here is the gosling, that goes six weeks in
down, before it gets its first feathers, which it sheds
within a few weeks, in the fall. Whereas the young
quail is born with quills so far grown that it is able
to fly almost as soon as it is hatched. These are real
mature feathers ; but the bird is young and soon
outgrows these first flight feathers, so they are
quickly lost and new ones come. This goes on till
fall, several moults occurring the first summer to
meet the increasing weight of the little quail's grow-
ing body.

I said that Nature was severe and methodical, and
so she is, where she needs to be, so severe that you
are glad, perhaps, that you are not a crow. But Na-
ture, like every wise mother, is severe only where
she needs to be. A crow's wing feathers are vastly
important to him. Let him then take care of them,
for they are the best feathers made and are put in
to stay a year. But a crow's tail feathers are not so
vastly important to him ; he could get on, if, like the
rabbit in the old song, he had no tail at all.

In most birds the tail is a kind of balance or steer-
ing-gear, and not of equal importance with the wings.
Nature, consequently, seems to have attached less
importance to the feathers of the tail. They are not
so firmly set, nor are they of the same quality or kind ;
for, unlike the wing feathers, if a tail feather is lost

40 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

through accident, it is made good, no matter when.
How do you explain that? Do you think I believe
that old story of the birds roosting with their tails
out, so that, because of generations of lost tails,
those feathers now grow expecting to be plucked
by some enemy, and therefore have only a temporary
hold?

The normal, natural way, of course, is to replace
a lost feather with a new one as soon as possible.
But, in order to give extra strength to the wing
feathers, Nature has found it necessary to check
their frequent change ; and so complete is the check
that the annual moult is required to replace a single
one. The Japanese have discovered the secret of this
check, and are able by it to keep certain feathers
in the tails of their cocks growing until they reach
the enormous length of ten to twelve feet.

My crow, it seems, lost his three feathers last sum-
mer just after his annual moult ; the three broken
shafts he carries still in his wing, and must continue
to carry, as the stars must continue their courses,
until those three feathers have rounded out their
cycle to the annual moult. The universe of stars and
feathers is a universe of law, of order, and of reason.

CHAPTER VI

A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO DO THIS SPRING

I DO not know where to begin — there are so
many interesting things to do this spring ! But,
while we ought to be interested in all of the
out-of-doors, it is very necessary to select some one
field, say, the birds or flowers, for special study.
That would help us to decide what to do this spring.

If there is still room under your window, or on
the clothes-pole in your yard, or in a neighboring
tree, nail up another bird-house. (Get "Methods of
Attracting Birds " by Gilbert H. Trafton.) If the
bird-house is on a pole or post, invert a large tin pan
over the end of the post and nail the house fast
upon it. This will keep cats and squirrels from dis-
turbing the birds. If the bird-house is in a tree, saw
off a limb, if you can without hurting the tree, and
do the same there. Cats are our birds' worst enemies.

Cats ! Begin in your own home and neighborhood
a campaign against the cats, to reduce their number
and to educate their owners to the need of keeping
them well fed and shut up in the house from early

42 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

evening until after the early morning ; for these are
the cats' natural hunting hours, when they do the
greatest harm to the birds.

This does not mean any cruelty to the cat — no
stoning, no persecution. The cat is not at fault. It is
the keepers of the cats who need to be educated. Out
of every hundred nests in my neighborhood the cats
of two farmhouses destroy ninety-five! The state
must come to the rescue of the birds by some new
rigid law reducing the number of cats.

Ill

Speaking of birds, let me urge you to begin your
watching and study early — with the first robins
and bluebirds — and to select some near-by park or
wood-lot or meadow to which you can go frequently.
There is a good deal in getting intimately acquainted
with a locality, so that you know its trees individ-
ually, its rocks, walls, fences, the very qualities of its
soil. Therefore you want a small area, close at hand.
Most observers make the mistake of roaming first
here, then there, spending their time and observa-
tion in finding their way around, instead of upon
the birds to be seen. You must get used to your
paths and trees before you can see the birds that flit
about them.

In this haunt that you select for your observation,
you must study not only the birds but the trees, and

THINGS TO DO THIS SPRING 43

the other forms of life, and the shape of the ground
(the u lay " of the land) as well, so as to know all
that you see. In a letter just received from a teacher,
who is also a college graduate, occurs this strange
description : " My window faces a hill on which
straggle brown houses among the deep green of
elms or oaks or maples, I don't know which." Per-
haps the hill is far away ; but I suspect that the
writer, knowing my love for the out-of-doors, wanted
to give me a vivid picture, but, not knowing one tree
from another, put them all in so I could make my
own choice !

Learn your common trees, common flowers, com-
mon bushes, common animals, along with the birds.

Plant a garden, if only a pot of portulacas, and
care for it, and watch it grow ! Learn to dig in the
soil and to love it. It is amazing how much and how
many things you can grow in a box on the window-
sill, or in a corner of the dooryard. There are plants
for the sun and plants for the shade, plants for the
wall, plants for the very cellar of your house. Get
you a bit of earth and plant it, no matter how busy
you are with other things this spring.

There are four excursions that you should make
this spring : one to a small pond in the woods ; one

44 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

to a deep, wild swamp; one to a wide salt marsh or
fresh-water meadow; and one to the seashore —
to a wild rocky or sandy shore uninhabited by
man.

There are particular birds and animals as well as
plants and flowers that dwell only in these haunts;
besides, you will get a sight of four distinct kinds of
landscape, four deep impressions of the face of
nature that are altogether as good to have as the
sight of four flowers or birds.

VII

Make a calendar of your spring (read " Nature's
Diary" by Francis H. Allen) — when and where you
find your first bluebird, robin, oriole, etc. ; when and
where you find your first hepatica, arbutus, saxi-
frage, etc.; and, as the season goes on, when and
where the doings of the various wild things take
place.

VIII

Boy or girl, you should go fishing — down to the
pond or the river where you go to watch the birds.
Suppose you do not catch any fish. That doesn't
matter; for you have gone out to the pond with a
pole in your hands (a pole is a real thing) ; you have
gone with the hope (hope is a real thing) of catch-
ing fish (fish are real things); and even if you
catch no fish, you will be sure, as you wait for the

THINGS TO DO THIS SPRING

fish to bite, to hear a belted kingfisher, or see a
painted turtle, or catch the breath of the sweet
leaf-buds and clustered catkins opening around the
wooded pond. It is a very good thing for the young
naturalist to learn to sit still. A fish-pole is a great
help in learning that necessary lesson.

One of the most interesting things you can do for
special study is to collect some frogs' eggs from the
pond and watch them grow £ into tadpoles
and on into frogs. There are jj glass vessels

made particularly
-y~ for such study (an
ordinary glass jar will
do). If you can afford a
^a // small glass aquarium, get one
and with a few green water-
plants put in a few minnows, a
snail or two, a young turtle, water-beetles, and
frogs' eggs, and watch them grow.

46 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

You should get up by half past three o'clock (at
the earliest streak of dawn) and go out into the new
morning with the birds ! You will hardly recognize
the world as that in which your humdrum days
(there are no such days, really) are spent! All is
fresh, all is new, and the bird-chorus! "Is it possi-
ble," you will exclaim, " that this can be the earth?"

Early morning and toward sunset are the best
times of the day for bird-study. But if there was
not a bird, there would be the sunrise and the sunset
— the wonder of the waking, the peace of the clos-
ing, day.

I am not going to tell you that you should make
a collection of beetles or butterflies (you should not

make a collection of birds or birds' eggs) or of
pressed flowers or of minerals or of arrow-heads or
of — anything. Because, while such a collection is
of great interest and of real value in teaching you
names and things, still there are better ways of study-
ing living nature. For instance, I had rather have

THINGS TO DO THIS SPRING 47

you tame a hop-toad, feed him, watch him evening
after evening all summer, than make any sort of
dead or dried or pressed collection of anything. Live
things are better than those things dead. Better
know one live toad under your doorstep than bottle
up in alcohol all the reptiles of your state.

XII

Finally you should remember that kindliness and
patience and close watching are the keys to the out-
of-doors; that only sympathy and gentleness and
quiet are welcome in the fields and woods. What,
then, ought I to say that you should do finally?

CHAPTER VII

THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN

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

And we do. Every part of the fourteen acres is
mine, yielding some kind of food or fuel or shelter.
And every foot, yes, every foot, is Nature's ; as entirely
hers as when the thick primeval forest stood here,
The apple trees are hers as much as mine, and she
has ten different bird families that I know of, living
in them this spring. A pair of crows and a pair of
red-tailed hawks are nesting in the wood-lot; there
are at least three families of chipmunks in as many
of my stone-piles ; a fine old tree-toad sleeps on the
porch under the climbing rose; a hornet's nest hangs
in a corner of the eaves; a small colony of swifts
thunder in the chimney ; swallows twitter in the hay-
loft ; a chipmunk and a half-tame gray squirrel feed
in the barn ; and — to bring an end to this bare be-
ginning— under the roof of the pig-pen dwell a
pair of phoebes.

THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 49

To make a bird-house of a pig-pen, to divide it
between the pig and the bird — this is as far as Na-
ture can go, and this is certainly enough to redeem
the whole farm. For she has not sent an outcast or
a scavenger to dwell in the pen, but a bird of char-
acter, however much he may lack in song or color.
Phoebe does not make up well in a picture; neither
does he perform well as a singer; there is little to
him, in fact, but personality — personality of a kind
and (may I say?) quantity, sufficient to make the
pig-pen a decent and respectable neighborhood.

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

There is a difference between being a " character"
and having one. My phcebe "lives over the pig,"
but I cannot feel familiar with a bird of his air and
carriage, who faces the world so squarely, who settles
upon a stake as if he owned it, who lives a prince
in my pig-pen.

Look at him ! How alert, able, free ! Notice the
limber drop of his tail, the ready energy it suggests.

50 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

By that one sign you would know the bird had force,
He is afraid of nothing, not even the cold; and he
migrates only because he is a fly-catcher, and is
thus compelled to. The earliest spring day, however,
that you find the flies buzzing in the sun, look for
phcebe. He is back, coming alone and long before
it is safe. He was one of the first of my birds to
return this spring.

And it was a fearful spring, this of which I am tell-
ing you. How Phcebe managed to exist those miser-
able March days is a mystery. He came directly to
the pen as he had come the year before, and his
presence in that bleakest of Marches gave the
weather its only touch of spring.

The same force and promptness are manifest in
the domestic affairs of the bird. One of the first to
arrive this spring, he was the first to build and bring
off a brood — or, perhaps, she was. And the size of
the brood — of the broods, for there was a second,
and a third !

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

These aerial bursts meant just one thing: she was
coming, was coming soon! Was she coming or was
he getting ready to go for her? Here he had been

THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 51

for nearly three weeks, his house-lot chosen, his mind
at rest, his heart beating faster with every sunrise.
It was as plain as day that he knew — was certain —
just how and just when something lovely was going
to happen. I wished I knew. I was half in love with
her myself; and I, too, watched for her.

On the evening of April 14th, he was alone as usual.
The next morning a pair of phoebes flitted in and
out of the windows of the pen. Here she was. Will
some one tell me all about it ? Had she just come
along and fallen instantly in love with him and his fine
pig-pen? It is pretty evident that he nested here
last year. Was she, then, his old mate? Did they
keep together all through the autumn and winter?
If so, then why not together all the way back from
Florida to Massachusetts?

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

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

Then I offered a suggestion. Out of a bit of stick,
branching at right angles, I made a little bracket
and tacked it up on one of the stringers. It ap-

52 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

pealed to them at once, and from that moment the
building went steadily on.

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

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

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

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

Wet weather followed the heavy rain until long
after the nest was finished. The whole structure was

THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 53

as damp and cold as a newly plastered house. It felt
wet to my touch. Yet I noticed that the birds were
already brooding. Every night and often during the
day I would see one of them in the nest — so deep
in, that only a head or a tail showed over the round
rim.

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

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

Our intimate friendship revealed a most pleas-
ing nature in phcebe. Perhaps such close and con-
tinued association would show like qualities in every
bird, even in the kingbird ; but I fear only a woman,
like Mrs. Olive Thome Miller, could find them in him.
Not much can be said of this flycatcher family, ex-

54 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

cept that it is useful — a kind of virtue that gets its
chief reward in heaven. I am acquainted with only
four of the other nine Eastern members, — crested
flycatcher, kingbird, wood pewee, and chebec, — and
each of these has some redeeming attribute besides
the habit of catching flies.

They are all good nest-builders, good parents, and
brave, independent birds ; but aside from phrebe and
pewee — the latter in his small way the sweetest
voice of the oak woods — the whole family is an odd
lot, cross-grained, cross-looking, and about as musical
as a family of ducks. A duck seems to know that
he cannot sing. A flycatcher knows nothing of his
shortcomings. He believes he can sing, and in time
he will prove it. If desire and effort count for any-
thing, he certainly must prove it in time. How long
the family has already been training, no one knows.
Everybody knows, however, the success each fly-
catcher of them has thus far attained. It would
make a good minstrel show, doubtless, if the family
would appear together. In chorus, surely, they would
be far from a tuneful choir. Yet individually, in
the wide universal chorus of the out-of-doors, how
much we should miss the kingbird's metallic twitter
and the chebec's insistent call !

There was little excitement for phoabe during this
period of incubation. He hunted in the neighborhood
and occasionally called to his mate, contented enough
perhaps, but certainly sometimes appearing tired.

PHCEBE AND HER YOUNG

56 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

One rainy day he sat in the pig-pen window looking
out at the gray, wet world. He was humped and
silent and meditative, his whole attitude speaking
the extreme length of his day, the monotony of the
drip, drip, drip from the eaves, and the sitting, the
ceaseless sitting, of his brooding wife. He might
have hastened the time by catching a few flies for
her or by taking her place on the nest ; but I never
saw him do it.

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

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

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

As they grew, I began to fear that they might try

THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 57

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

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

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

What happened? Was he killed? Caught by a
cat or a hawk ? It is possible ; and this is an easy and
kindly way to think of him. It is not impossible that
he may have remained as leader and protector to the
first brood ; or (perish the thought !) might he have
grown weary at sight of the second lot of five
eggs, of the long days and the neglect that they
meant for him, and out of jealousy and fickleness
wickedly deserted?

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

58 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

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

But she did well. Nine such young birds to her
credit since April. Who shall measure her actual use
to the world ? How does she compare in value with
the pig ? Weeks later I saw several of her brood
along the meadow fence hawking for flies. They
were not far from my cabbage-patch.

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

" Humble and inoffensive bird " he has been
called by one of our leading ornithologies — because
he comes to my pig-pen ! Inoffensive ! this bird
with the cabbage butterfly in his beak ! The faint
and damning praise ! And humble ? There is not

THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 59

a humble feather on his body. Humble to those who
see the pen and not the bird. But to me — why, the
bird has made a palace of my pig-pen !

The very pig seems less a pig because of this ex-
quisite association ; and the lowly work of feeding
the creature has been turned for me by Phoebe into
a poetic course in bird study.

CHAPTER VIII

IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR ?

THERE was a swish of wings, a flash of gray,
a cry of pain ; a squawking, cowering, scat-
tering flock of hens ; a weakly fluttering pul-
let; and yonder, swinging upward into the sky, a
marsh hawk, buoyant and gleaming silvery in the
sun. Over the trees he beat, circled once, and disap-
peared.

The hens were still flapping for safety in a
dozen directions, but the gray harrier had gone. A
bolt of lightning could hardly have dropped so unan-
nounced, could hardly have vanished so completely,
could scarcely have killed so quickly. I ran to the
pullet, but found her dead. The harrier's stroke, de-
livered with fearful velocity, had laid head and neck
open as with a keen knife. Yet a little slower and
he would have missed, for the pullet warded off the
other claw with her wing. The gripping talons
slipped off the long quills, and the hawk swept on
without his quarry. He dared not come back for it
at my feet ; so, with a single turn above the woods
he was gone.

The scurrying hens stopped to look about them.

IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 61

There was nothing in the sky to see. They stood
still and silent a moment. The rooster chucked.
Then one by one they turned back into the open
pasture. A huddled group under the hen-yard fence
broke up and came out with the others. Death had
flashed among them, but had missed them. Fear had
come, but it had gone. Within two minutes from
the fall of the stroke, every hen in the flock was in-
tent at her scratching, or as intently chasing the
gray grasshoppers over the pasture.

Yet, as the flock scratched, the high-stepping cock
would frequently cast up his eye toward the tree-
tops ; would sound his alarum at the flight of a robin ;
and if a crow came over, he would shout and dodge
and start to run. But instantly the shadow would
pass, and instantly Chanticleer—

" He looketh as it were a grym leoun,
And on hise toos he rometh up and doun;

Thus roial as a prince is in an halle."

He wasn't afraid. Cautious, alert, watchful he wasr
but not afraid. No shadow of dread lay dark and
ominous across the sunshine of his pasture. Shadows
came — like a flash ; and like a flash they vanished
away.

We cannot go far into the fields without sighting
the hawk and the snake, whose other names are
Death. In one form or another Death moves every-
where, down every wood-path and pasture-lane^

THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

through the black waters of the mill-pond, out under
the open of the April sky, night and day, and every
day^ the four seasons through.

I have seen the still surface of a pond break sud-
denly with a swirl, and flash a hundred flecks of
silver into the light, as the minnows leap from the

jaws of the terrible pike. Then a loud rattle, a streak
of blue, a splash at the centre of the swirl, and I
see the pike twisting and bending in the beak of
the terrible kingfisher. The killer is killed. But at the
mouth of the nest-hole in the steep sand-bank, sway-
ing from a root in the edge of the turf above, hangs
the terrible black snake, the third killer ; and the
belted kingfisher, dropping the pike, darts off with
a startled cry.

I have been afield at times when one tragedy has
followed another in such rapid and continuous suc-
cession as to put a whole shining, singing, blossom-
ing springtime under a pall. Everything has seemed
to cower, skulk, and hide, to run as if pursued.
There was no peace, no stirring of small life, n6t
even in the quiet of the deep pines ; for here a hawk
would be nesting, or a snake would be sleeping, or

IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 63

I would hear the passing of a fox, see perhaps his
keen, hungry face an instant as he halted, winding
me.

There is struggle, and pain, and death in the
woods, and there is fear also, but the fear does not
last long ; it does not haunt and follow and terrify;
it has no being, no shape, no lair. The shadow of
the swiftest scudding cloud is not so fleeting as this
Fear-shadow in the woods. The lowest of the animals
seem capable of feeling fear ; yet the very highest
of them seem incapable of dreading it. For them
Fear is not of the imagination, but of the sight, and
of the passing moment.

" The present only toucheth thee ! "

It does more, it throngs him — our little fellow
mortal of the stubble-field. Into the present is lived
the whole of his life — he remembers none of it ; he
anticipates none of it. And the whole of this life is
action ; and the whole of this action is joy. The mo-
ments of fear in an animal's life are few and vanish-
ing. Action and joy are constant, the joint laws of
all animal life, of all nature — of the shining stars
that sing together, of the little mice that squeak to-
gether, of the bitter northeast storms that roar across
the wintry fields.

I have had more than one hunter grip me excitedly,
and with almost a command bid me hear the music
of the baying pack. There are hollow halls in the

64 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

swamps that lie to the east and north and west of
me, that catch up the cry of the foxhounds, that
blend it, mellow it, round it, and roll it, rising and
falling over the meadows in great globes of sound,
as pure and sweet as the pearly notes of the veery
rolling round their silver basin in the summer dusk.
What music it is when the pack breaks into the
open on the warm trail ! A chorus then of tongues
singing the ecstasy of pursuit ! My blood leaps ; the
natural primitive wild thing of muscle and nerve and
instinct within me slips its leash, and on past with
the pack I drive, the scent of the trail single and
sweet in my nostrils, a very fire in my blood, motion,
motion, motion in my bounding muscles, and in my
being a mighty music, spheric and immortal !

" The fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motions swayed . . ."

But what about the fox, loping wearily on ahead ?
What part has he in the chorus? No part, perhaps,
unless we grimly call him its conductor. But the
point is the chomis — that it never ceases, the hounds
at this moment, not the fox, in the leading role.

"But the chorus ceases for me," you say. "My
heart is with the poor fox." So is mine, and mine is
with the dogs too. No, don't say " Poor little fox ! "
For many a night I have bayed with the pack, and
as often — of tener, I think — I have loped and dodged
and doubled with the fox, pitting limb against limb,
lung against lung, wit against wit, and always escap-

IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 65

ing. More than once, in the warm moonlight, I, the
fox, have led them on and on, spurring their lagging
muscles with a sight of my brush, on and on, through
the moonlit night, through the day, on into the moon
again, and on until — only the stir of my own foot-
steps has followed me. Then, doubling once more,
creeping back a little upon my track, I have looked
at my pursuers, silent and stiff upon the trail, and,
ere the echo of their cry has died away, I have
caught up the chorus and carried it single-throated
through the wheeling, singing spheres.

There is more of fact than of fancy to this. That
a fox ever purposely led a dog to run to death would
be hard to prove ; but that the dogs run themselves
to death in a single extended chase after a single fox
is a common occurrence here in the woods about the
farm. Occasionally the fox may be overtaken by the
hounds ; seldom, however, except in the case of a
very young one or of one unacquainted with the
lay of the land, a stranger that may have been
driven into the rough country here.

I have been both fox and hound ; I have run the
race too often not to know that both enjoy it at
times, fox as much as hound. Some weeks ago the
dogs carried a young fox around and around the
farm, hunting him here, there, everywhere, as if in
a game of hide-and-seek. An old fox would have led
the dogs on a long coursing run across the range.
But the young fox, after the dogs were caught and

THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

taken off the trail, soon sauntered up through the
mowing-field behind the barn, came out upon the
bare knoll near the house, and sat there in the moon-
light yapping down at Rex and Dewey, the house-
dogs in the two farms below. Rex is a Scotch collie,
Dewey a dreadful mix of dog-dregs. He had been
tail-ender in the pack for a while during the after-
noon. Both dogs an-
swered back at the
young fox. But he
could not egg them
on. Rex was too
fat, Dewey had
had enough ;

not so the

young fox. - ^:- 'Pf

It had been fun.

He wanted more

"Comeon?Dewey!"

he cried. " Come on, Rex, play tag again ! You 're

still < it.'"

I was at work with my chickens one spring day
when the fox broke from cover in the tall woods,
struck the old wagon-road along the ridge, and came
at a gallop down behind the hen-coops, with five
hounds not a minute behind. They passed with a
crash and were gone — up over the ridge and down

IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 67

into the east swamp. Soon I noticed that the pack
had broken, deploying in every direction, beating
the ground over and over. Reynard had given them
the slip — on the ridge-side, evidently, for there were
no cries from below in the swamp.

Leaving my work at noon, I went down to restake
my cow in the meadow. I had just drawn her chain-
pin when down the road through the orchard behind
me came the fox, hopping high up and down, his
neck stretched, his eye peeled for poultry. Spying a
white hen of my neighbor's, he made for her, clear
to the barnyard wall. Then, hopping higher for a
better view, he sighted another hen in the front yard,
skipped in gayly through the fence, seized her, and
loped across the road and away up the birch-grown
hills beyond.

The dogs had been at his very heels ten minutes
before. He had fooled them. And no doubt he had
done it again and again. They were even now yelp-
ing at the end of the baffling trail behind the ridge.
Let them yelp. It is a kind and convenient habit of
dogs, this yelping, one can tell so exactly where they
are. Meantime one can take a turn for one's self at
the chase, get a bite of chicken, a drink of water,
a wink or two of rest, and when the yelping gets
warm again, one is quite ready to pick up one's
heels and lead the pack another merry dance. The
fox is quite a jolly fellow.

This is the way the races out of doors are all run

68 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

off. Now and then they may end tragically. A fox,
cannot reckon on the hunter with a gun. He is rac-
ing against the pack of hounds. But, mortal finish
or no, the spirit of the chase is neither rage nor ter-
ror, but the excitement of a matched game, the
ecstasy of pursuit for the hound, the passion of es-
cape for the fox, without fury or fear — except for
the instant at the start and at the finish — when it
is a finish.

This is the spirit of the chase — of the race, more
truly; for it is always a race, where the stake is not
life and death, but rather the joy of winning. The
hound cares as little for his own life as for the life
of the fox he is hunting. It is the race, instead, that
he loves ; it is the moments of crowded, complete, su-
preme existence for him — " glory " we call it when
men run it off together. Death, and the fear of death,
the animals can neither understand nor feel. Only
enemies exist in the world out of doors, only hounds,
foxes, hawks — they, and their scents, their sounds
and shadows ; and not fear, but readiness only. The
level of wild life, of the soul of all nature, is a great
serenity. It is seldom lowered, but often raised to a
higher level, intenser, faster, more exultant.

The serrate pines on my horizon are not the
pickets of a great pen. My fields and swamps and
ponds are not one wide battle-field, as if the only
work of my wild neighbors were bloody war, and
the whole of their existence a reign of terror. This

IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 69

is a universe of law and order and marvelous bal-
ance ; conditions these of life, of normal, peaceful,
joyous life. Life and not death is the law ; joy and
not fear is the spirit, is the frame of all that breathes,
of very matter itself.

"And ever at the loom of Birth

The Mighty Mother weaves and sings;
She weaves — fresh robes for mangled earth;
She sings — fresh hopes for desperate things."

But suppose the fox were a defenseless rabbit,
what of fear and terror then ?

Ask any one who has shot in the rabbity fields of
southern New Jersey. The rabbit seldom runs in
blind terror. He is soft-eyed, and timid, and as gentle
as a pigeon, but he is not defenseless. A nobler set
of legs was never bestowed by nature than the little
cottontail's. They are as wings compared with the
bent, bow legs that bear up the ordinary rabbit-
hound. With winged legs, protecting color, a clear
map of the country in his head, — its stumps, rail-
piles, cat-brier tangles, and narrow rabbit-roads, —
with all this as a handicap, Bunny may well run his
usual cool and winning race. The balance is just as
even, the chances quite as good, and the contest
every bit as interesting to him as to Reynard.

I have seen a rabbit squat close in his form and
let a hound pass yelping within a few feet of him,
but waiting on his toes as ready as a hair-trigger
should he be discovered.

70 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

I have seen him leap for his life as the dog sighted
him, and, bounding like a ball across the stubble,
disappear in the woods, the hound within two jumps
of his flashing tail. I have waited at the end of the
wood-road for the runners to come back, down the
home-stretch, for the finish. On they go through
the woods, for a quarter, or perhaps a half a mile,
the baying of the hound faint and intermittent
in the distance, then quite lost. No, there it is again,
louder now. They have turned the course.

I wait.

The quiet life of the woods is undisturbed ; for
the voice of the hound is only an echo, not unlike
the far-off tolling of a slow-swinging bell. The
leaves stir as a wood mouse scurries from his stump ;
an acorn rattles down ; then in the winding wood-
road I hear the pit-pat, pit-pat, of soft furry feet,
and there at the bend is the rabbit. He stops, rises
high up on his haunches, and listens. He drops again
upon all fours, scratches himself behind the ear,
reaches over the cart-rut for a nip of sassafras, hops
a little nearer, and throws his big ears forward in
quick alarm, for he sees me, and, as if something
had exploded under him, he kicks into the air and
is off, — leaving a pretty tangle for the dog to un-
ravel, later on, by this mighty jump to the side.

My children and a woodchopper were witnesses re-
cently of an exciting, and, for this section of Mas-
sachusetts, a novel race, which, but for them, must

IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR?

certainly have ended fatally. The boys were coming
through the wood-lot where the man was chopping,
when down the hillside toward them rushed a little
chipmunk, his teeth a-chatter with terror ; for close
behind him, with the easy, wavy motion
of a shadow, glided a dark-brown ani-
mal, which the man took on the instant
for a mink, but which must have been
a large weasel or a pine marten. When
almost at the feet of the boys, and
about to be seized by the marten, the
squeaking chipmunk ran up a tree.
Up glided the marten, up for twenty
feet, when the chipmunk jumped. It
was a fearfully close call.

The marten did not dare to jump,
but turned and started down, when the
man intercepted him
with a stick.
Around and
around the
tree he

dodged, growling and snarling and avoid-

ing the stick, not a bit abashed, fpF stubbornly
holding his own, until forced to seek refuge among
the branches. Meanwhile, the terrified chipmunk
had recovered his nerve and sat quietly watching
the sudden turn of affairs from a near-by stump.
I frequently climb into the cupola of the barn

72 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

during1 the winter, and bring down a dazed junco
that would beat his life out up there against the
window-panes. He will lie on his back in my open
hand, either feigning death or really powerless with
fear. His eyes will close, his whole tiny body throb
convulsively with his throbbing heart. Taking him
to the door, I will turn him over and give him a
gentle toss. Instantly his wings flash ; they take him
zigzag for a yard or two, then bear him swiftly round
the corner of the house and drop him in the midst
of his fellows, where they are feeding upon the lawn.
He will shape himself up a little and fall to picking
with the others.

From a state of collapse the laws of his being
bring the bird into normal behavior as quickly and
completely as the collapsed rubber ball is rounded
by the laws of its being. The memory of the fright
seems to be an impression exactly like the dent in
the rubber ball — as if it had never been.

Memories, of course, the animals surely have; but
little or no power to use them. The dog will some-
times seem to cherish a grudge ; so will the elephant.
Some one injures or wrongs him, and the huge
beast harbors the memory, broods it, and awaits his
opportunity for revenge. Yet the records of these
cases usually show that the creature had been living
with the object of his hatred — his keeper, perhaps
— and that the memory goes no farther back than
the present moment, than the sight of the hated one.

IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR ? 73

At my railroad station I frequently see a yoke of
great sleepy, bald-faced oxen, that look as much
alike as two blackbirds. Their driver knows them
apart ; but as they stand there, bound to one an-
other by the heavy bar across their foreheads, it
would puzzle anybody else to tell Buck from Berry.
But not if he approach them wearing an overcoat.
At sight of me in an overcoat the off ox will snort
and back and thrash about in terror, twisting the
head of his yoke-fellow, nearly breaking his neck,
and trampling him miserably. But the nigh ox is
used to it. He chews and blinks away placidly, keeps
his feet the best he can, and does n't try to under-
stand at all why greatcoats should so frighten his
cud-chewing brother. I will drop off my coat and go
up immediately to smooth the muzzles of both oxen,
now blinking sleepily while the lumber is being
loaded on.

Years ago, the driver told me, the off ox was
badly frightened by a big woolly coat, the sight or
smell of which probably suggested to the creature
some natural enemy, a panther, perhaps, or a bear.
The memory remained, but beyond recall except in
the presence of its first cause, the greatcoat.

To us there are such things as terror and death,
but not to the lower animals except momentarily.
We are clutched by terror even as the junco was
clutched in my goblin hand. When the mighty fin-
gers open, we zigzag, dazed, from the danger ; but

74 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

fall to planning before the tremors of the fright
have ceased. Upon the crumbled, smoking heap of
San Francisco a second splendid city has arisen and
shall ever rise. Terror can kill the living, but it can-
not hinder them from forgetting, or prevent them
from hoping, or, for more than an instant, stop
them from doing. Such is the law of life — the law
of heaven, of my pastures, of the little junco, of my-
self. Life, Law, and Matter are all of one piece.
The horse in my stable, the robin, the toad, the
beetle, the vine in my garden, the garden itself,
and I together with them all, come out of the same
divine dust ; we all breathe the same divine breath ;
we have our beings under the same divine laws; only
they do not know that the law, the breath, and the
dust are divine. If, with all that I know of fear, I
can so readily forget it, and can so constantly feel
the hope and the joy of life within me, how soon for
them, my lowly fellow mortals, must vanish all sight
of fear, all memory of pain ! And how abiding with
them, how compelling, the necessity to live ! And
in their unquestioning obedience, what joy !

The face of the fields is as changeful as the face
of a child. Every passing wind, every shifting cloud,
every calling bird, every baying hound, every shape,
shadow, fragrance, sound, and tremor, are reflected
there. But if time and experience and pain come, they
pass utterly away ; for the face of the fields does not
grow old or wise or seamed with pain. It is always the

IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 75

face of a child, — asleep in winter, awake in spring and
summer, — a face of life and health always, as much
in the falling leaf as in the opening bud, as much
under the covers of the snow as in the greensward
of the spring, as much in the wild, fierce joy of fox
and hound as they course the turning, tangling paths
of the woodlands in their fateful race as in the song
of brook and bird on a joyous April morning.

CHAPTER IX

THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP

NO, I do not believe that any one of you ever
went into a swamp to find a turkey buzzard's
nest. Still, if you had been born on the
edge of a great swamp, as I was, and if the great-
winged buzzards had been soaring, soaring up in
your sky, as all through my boyhood they were
soaring up in mine, then why should you not have
gone some time into the swamp to see where they
make their nests — these strange cloud-winged crea-
tures ?

Boys are boys, and girls are girls, the world over;
and I am pretty sure that little Jack Horner and
myself were not the only two boys in all the world
to do great and wonderful deeds. Any boy with a
love for birds and a longing for the deep woods,
living close to the edge of the Bear Swamp, would
have searched out that buzzard's nest.

Although I was born within the shadows of the
Bear Swamp, close enough to smell the magnolias
along its margin, and lived my first ten years only a
little farther off, yet it was not until after twice
ten years of absence that I stood again within sight

THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 77

of it, ready for the first time to cross its dark bor-
ders and find the buzzard's nest.

Now here at last I found myself, looking down
over the largest, least trod, deepest-tangled swamp
in southern New Jersey — wide, gloomy, silent, and
to me, — for I still thought of it as I used to when
a child, — to me, a mysterious realm of black streams,
hollow trees, animal trails, and haunting shapes,
presided over by this great bird, the turkey buzzard.

For he was never mere bird to me, but some kind
of spirit. He stood to me for what was far off, mys-
terious, secret, and unapproachable in the deep, dark
swamp ; and, in the sky, so wide were his wings, so
majestic the sweep of his flight, he had always
stirred me, caused me to hold my breath and wish
myself to fly.

No other bird did I so much miss from my New
England skies when I came here to live. Only the
other day, standing in the heart of Boston, I glanced
up and saw, sailing at a far height against the bil-
lowy clouds, an aeroplane ; and what should I think
of but the flight of the vulture, so like the steady
wings of the great bird seemed the steady wings of
this great monoplane far off against the sky.

And so you begin to understand why I had come
back after so many years to the swamp, and why I
wanted to see the nest of this strange bird that had
been flying, flying forever in my imagination and
in my sky. But my good uncle, whom I was visit-

78 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

ing, when I mentioned iny quest, merely exclaimed,
"What in th moderation!"

You will find a good many uncles and other folk
who won't understand a good many things that you
want to do. Never mind. If you want to see a buz-
zard's nest, let all your relations exclaim while you
go quietly off alone and see it.

I wanted to find a buzzard's nest — the nest of
the Bear Swamp buzzard ; and here at last I stood ;
and yonder on the clouds, a mere mote in the dis-
tance, floated the bird. It was coming toward me
over the wide reach of the swamp.

Silent, inscrutable, and alien lay the swamp, and
untouched by human hands. Over it spread a quiet
and reserve as real as twilight. Like a mask it was
worn, and was slipped on, I know, at my approach.
I could feel the silent spirit of the place drawing
back away from me. But I should have at least
a guide to lead me through the shadow land, for out
of the lower living green towered a line of limb-
less stubs, like a line of telegraph-poles, their bleached
bones gleaming white, or showing dark and gaunt
against the horizon, and marking for me a path far
out across the swamp. Besides, here came the buzzard
winding slowly down the clouds. Soon its spiral
changed to a long pendulum-swing, till just above
the skeleton trees the great bird wheeled and, brac-
ing itself with its flapping wings, dropped heavily
upon one of the headless tree-trunks.

THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 79

It had come leisurely, yet I could
see that it had come with a direct-
ness and purpose that was unmistak-
able and also meaningful. It had
discovered me in the distance, and,
while still invisible to my eyes,
had started down to perch
upon that giant stub in order
to watch me. It was suspicious,
and had come to watch me,
because somewhere beneath its
perch, I felt sure, lay a hollow
log, the creature's den, hold-
ing its two eggs or its young.
A buzzard has something
like a soul.

Marking the direction
of the stub, and its
probable distance, I
waded into the deep un-
derbrush, the buzzard
perched against the sky
for my guide, and, for
my quest, the stump or
hollow log that held the
creature's nest.

The rank ferns and
ropy vines swallowed
me up, and shut out at

80 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

times even the sight of the sky and the buzzard. It
was not until half an hour's struggle that, climbing
a pine-crested swell in the low bottom, I sighted the
bird again. It had not moved.

I was now in the real swamp, the old uncut forest.
It wa§ a land of tree giants : huge tulip poplar and
swamp white oak, so old that they had become soli-
tary? their comrades having fallen one by one ; while
some of them, unable to loose their grip upon the soil,
which had widened and tightened through centuries,
were still standing, though long since dead. It was
upon one of these that the buzzard sat humped.

Directly in my path stood an ancient swamp white
oak, the greatest tree, I think, that I have ever seen.
It was not the highest, nor the largest round, per-
haps, but in years and looks the greatest. Hoary,
hollow, and broken-limbed, his huge bole seemed
encircled with the centuries.

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

Above him to twice his height loomed a tulip pop-
lar, clean-boled for thirty feet and in the top all
green and gold with blossoms. It was a resplendent
thing beside the oak, yet how unmistakably the
gnarled old monarch wore the crown ! His girth more
than balanced the poplar's greater height; and, as
for blossoms, he had his tiny-flowered catkins ; but
nature knows the beauty of strength and inward
majesty, and has pinned no boutonniere upon the oak,

THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 81

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

Then I saw an interesting sight. The pine, in its
fall, had snatched with its wide-reaching, multitudi-
nous roots at the shallow bottom and torn out a giant
fistful of earth, leaving a hole about two feet deep and
more than a dozen feet wide. The sand thus lifted
into the air had gradually washed down into a mound
on each side of the butt, where it lay high and dry
above the level of the wet swamp. This the swamp
birds had turned into a great dust-bath. It was in
constant use, evidently. Not a spear of grass had
sprouted in it, and all over it were pits and craters
of various sizes, showing that not only the partridges
but also the quail and such small things as the
warblers bathed here, — though I can't recall ever
having seen a warbler bathe in the dust. A dry bath
in the swamp was something of a luxury, evidently.
I wonder if the buzzards used it?

I went forward cautiously now, and expectantly,
for I was close enough to see the white beak and

82 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

red wattled neck of my buzzard guide. The buzzard
saw me, too, and began to twist its head and to
twitch its wing-tips nervously. Then the long, black
wings began to open, as you would open a two-foot
rule, and, with a heavy lurch that left the dead stub
rocking, the bird dropped and was soon soaring
high up in the blue.

This was the locality of the nest; now where
should I find it? Evidently I was to have no further
help from the old bird. The underbrush was so thick
that I could hardly see farther than my nose. A
half -rotten tree-trunk lay near, the top end resting
across the backs of several saplings that it had borne
down in its fall. I crept up on this for a look around,
and almost tumbled off at finding myself staring
directly into the dark, cavernous hollow of an im-
mense log lying on a slight rise of ground a few
feet ahead of me.

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

Leaping from my perch, I scrambled forward to
the mouth of the hollow log and was greeted with
hisses from far back in the dark. Then came a thump-
ing of bare feet, more hisses, and a sound of snap*
ping beaks. I had found my buzzard's nest!

YOUNG TURKEY BUZZARD

84 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

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

But they had, and what they hatched was another
wonder. Nature never intended a young buzzard
for any eye but his mother's, and she hates the sight
of him. Elsewhere I have told of a buzzard that
devoured her eggs at the approach of an enemy, so
delicately balanced are her unnamable appetites and
her maternal affections!

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

O O

In order to examine them, I crawled into the den
— not a difficult act, for the opening measured four
feet and a half across at the mouth. The air was
musty inside, yet surprisingly free from odor. The
floor was absolutely clean, but on the top and sides

THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 85

of the cavity was a thick coating of live mosquitoes,
most of them gorged, hanging like a red-beaded
tapestry over the walls.

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

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

CHAPTER X

A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING

THE frogs ! You can have no spring until you
hear the frogs. The first shrill notes, heard
before the ice is fairly out of the marshes,
will be the waking call of the hylas, the tiny tree-
frogs that later on in the summer you will find in the
woods. Then, as the spring advances and this sil-
very sleigh-bell jingle tinkles faster, other voices
will join in — the soft croak of the spotted leopard
frogs, the still softer melancholy quaver of the com-
mon toad, and away down at the end of the scale the
deep, solemn bass of the great bullfrog saying, " Go
round ! Better go round ! "

You must hear, besides the first spring notes of the
bluebird and the robin, four bird songs this spring.
First (1) the song of the wood thrush or the hermit
thrush, whichever one lives in your neighborhood.
No words can describe the purity, the peacefulness,
the spiritual quality of the wood thrush's simple
" Come to me." It is the voice of the
tender twilight, the voice of the tran-

THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING 87

quil forest, speaking to you. After the thrush (2)
the brown thrasher, our finest, most gifted songster,

as great a singer, I think (and I have often heard
them both), as the Southern mockingbird. Then (3)
the operatic catbird. She sits lower down among
the bushes than the brown thrasher, as if she knew
that, compared with him, she must take a back seat;
but for variety of notes and length of song, she has
few rivals. I say she, when really I ought to say he,
for it is the males of most birds that sing, but the cat-
bird seems so long and slender, so dainty and femi-
nine, that I think of this singer as of some exquisite
operatic singer in a woman's role. Then (4) the
bobolink ; for his song is just like Bryant's bubbling
poem, only better ! Go to the meadows in. June and

88 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

listen as he comes lilting and singing over your
head.

Ill

There are some birds that cannot sing: the belted
kingfisher, for instance ; he can only rattle. You
must hear him rattle. You can do as well yourself if
you will shake a " pair of bones " or heave an anchor
and let the chain run fast through the hawse-hole.
You then must hear the downy woodpecker doing
his rattling rat-ta-tat-tat-tat-tat (across the page and
back again), as fast as rat-ta-tat can tat. How he
makes the old dead limb or fence-post rattle as he
drums upon it with his chisel bill. He can be heard
half a mile around.

Then high-hole, the flicker (or golden-winged
woodpecker), you must hear him yell, Up-up-up-up-up
up-up-up-up-up-up , — a ringing, rolling, rapid kind
of yodel that echoes over the spring fields.

You must hear the nighthawk and the whip-poor-
will. Both birds are to be heard at twilight, and the
whip-poor-will far into the night. At the very break
of dawn is also a good time to listen to them.

At dusk you will see (I have seen him from the
city roofs in Boston) a bird about the size of a pigeon
mounting up into the sky by short flights, crying
peent, until far over your head the creature will sud-
denly turn and on half-closed wings dive headlong

THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING 89

toward the earth, when, just before hitting the
ground, upward he swoops, at the same instant
making a weird booming sound, a kind of hollow

O O '

groan with his wings, as the wind rushes through
their large feathers. This diver through the dim
ocean of air is the nighthawk. Let one of the
birds dive close to your head on a lonely dusky
road, and your hair will try to jump out from under
your hat.

The whip-poor-will's cry you all know. When you
hear one this spring, go out into the twilight and
watch for him. See him spring into the air, like a
strange shadow, for flies; count his whip-poor-wills
(he may call it more than a hundred times in as many
seconds !). But hear a circle of the birds, if possible,
calling through the darkness of a wood all around

you !

There is one strange bird song that is half song and
half dance that perhaps most of you may never be able
to hear and see ; but as it is worth going miles to hear,
and nights of watching to witness, I am going to set
it here as one of your outdoor tasks or feats: you
must hear the mating song of the woodcock. I have
described the song and the dance in " Roof and
Meadow," in the chapter called " One Flew East
and One Flew West." Mr. Bradford Torrey has an
account of it in his "Clerk of the Woods," in the
chapter named " Woodcock Vespers." To hear the

90 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

song is a rare experience for the habitual watcher
in the woods, but one that you might have the first
April evening that you are abroad.

Go down to your nearest meadow — a meadow
near a swampy piece of woods is best — and here,
along the bank of the meadow stream, wait in the
chilly twilight for the speank, speank, or the peent,
peent, from the grass — the signal that the song is
about to begin.

One of the dreadful — positively dreadful —
sounds of the late spring that I hear day in and day
out is the gobbling, strangling, ghastly cries of
young crows feeding. You will surely think some-
thing is being murdered. The crying of a hungry
baby is musical in comparison. But it is a good
sound to hear, for it reminds one of the babes in the
woods — that a new generation of birds is being
brought through from babyhood to gladden the
world. It is a tender sound ! The year is still

young.

VII

You should hear the hum of the honey-bees on a
fresh May day in an apple tree that is just coming
into perfect bloom. The enchanting loveliness of
the pink and white world of blossoms is enough to
make one forget to listen to the hum-hum-hum-

THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING 91

humming-ing-ing-ing-ing of the excited bees. But
hear their myriad wings, fanning the perfume into
the air and filling the sunshine with the music of
work. The whir, the hum of labor — of a busy fac-
tory, of a great steamship dock — is always music
to those who know the blessedness of work ; but it
takes that knowledge, and a 'good deal of imagination
besides, to hear the music in it. Not so with the bees.
The season, the day, the colors, and perfumes — they
are the song ; the wings are only the million-stringed
seolian upon which the song is played.

VIII

You should hear the grass grow. What ! I re-
peat, you should hear the grass grow. I have a friend,
a sound and sensible man, but a lover of the out-of-
doors, who says he can hear it grow. But perhaps it
is the soft stir of the working earthworms that he
hears. Try it. Go out alone one of these April
nights ; select a green pasture with a slope to the
south, at least a mile from any house, or railroad ; lay
your ear flat upon the grass, listen without a move
for ten minutes. You hear something — or do you
feel it ? Is it the reaching up of the grass ? is it the
stir of the earthworms? is it the pulse of the throb-
bing universe? or is it your own throbbing pulse?
It is all of these, I think ; call it the heart of the
grass beating in every tiny living blade, if you wish
to. You should listen to hear the grass grow.

92 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

The fires have gone out on the open hearth.
Listen early in the morning and toward evening for
the rumbling, the small, muffled thunder, of the
chimney swallows, as they come down from the open
sky on their wonderful wings. Don't be frightened.
It is n't Santa Glaus this time of year ; nor is it the
Old Nick ! The smothered thunder is caused by the
rapid beating of the swallows' wings on the air in
the narrow chimney-flue, as the birds settle down
from the top of the chimney and hover over their
nests. Stick your head into the fireplace and look
up ! Don't smoke the precious lodgers out, no matter
how much racket they make.

Hurry out while the last drops of your first May
thunder-shower are still falling and listen to the
robins singing from the tops of the trees. Their
liquid songs are as fresh as the shower, as if the rain-
drops in falling were running down from the trees
in song — as indeed they are in the overflowing
trout-brook. Go out and listen, and write a better
poem than this one that I wrote the other afternoon
when listening to the birds in our first spring
shower : —

The warm rain drops aslant the sun

And in the rain the robins sing;
Across the creek in twos and troops,

The hawking swifts and swallows wing.

THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING 93

The air is sweet with apple bloom,

And sweet the laid dust down the lane,

The meadow's marge of calamus,
And sweet the robins in the rain.

O greening time of bloom and song!

O fragrant days of tender pain!
The wet, the warm, the sweet young days

With robins singing in the rain.

CHAPTER XI

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ

I TOOK down, recently, from the shelves of a
great public library, the four volumes of Ag-
assiz's " Contributions to the Natural History
of the United States." I doubt if anybody but the
charwoman, with her duster, had touched those vol-
umes for twenty-five years. They are a monumental
work, the fruit of vast and heroic labors, with colored
plates on stone, showing the turtles of the United
States, and their life-history. The work was published
more than half a century ago, but it looked old
beyond its years — massive, heavy, weathered, as if
dug from the rocks ; and I soon turned with a sigh
from the weary learning of its plates and diagrams
to look at the preface.

Then, reading down through the catalogue of
human names and of thanks for help received, I
came to a sentence beginning: —

" In New England I have myself collected largely ;
but I have also. received valuable contributions from
the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burlington ; . . .
from Mr. D. Henry Thoreau of Concord; . . . and
from Mr. J. W. P. Jenks of MiddleboroV And then
it hastens on with the thanks in order to get to the

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 95

turtles, as if turtles were the one and only thing of
real importance in all the world.

Turtles are important — interesting; so is the late
Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burlington. Indeed any
reverend gentleman who would catch turtles for
Agassiz must have been interesting. If Agassiz had
only put a chapter into his turtle book about him!
and as for the Mr. Jenks of Middleboro' (at the end
of the quotation) I know that he was interesting; for
years later, he was an old college professor of mine.
He told me some of the particulars of his turtle contri-
butions, particulars which Agassiz should have found
a place for in his big book. The preface says merely
that this gentleman sent turtles to Cambridge by the
thousands — brief and scanty recognition. For that
is not the only thing this gentleman did. On one
occasion he sent, not turtles, but turtle eggs to Cam-
bridge — broiight them, I should say ; and all there
is to show for it, so far as I could discover, is a
small drawing of a bit of one of the eggs !

Of course, Agassiz wanted to make that drawing,
and had to have afresh turtle egg to draw it from.
He had to have it, and he got it. A great man, when
he wants a certain turtle egg, at a certain time, al-
ways gets it, for he gets some one else to get it for
him. I am glad he got it. But what makes me sad
and impatient is that he did not think it worth while
to tell us about the getting of it.

It would seem, naturally, that there could be noth-

96 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

ing unusual or interesting about the getting of tur-
tle eggs when you want them. Nothing at all, if you
should chance to want the eggs as you chance to
find them. So with anything else. But if you want
turtle eggs when you want them, and are bound to
have them, then you must — get Mr. Jenks, or some-
body else to get them for you.

Agassiz wanted those turtle eggs when he wanted
them — not a minute over three hours from the min-
ute they were laid. Yet even that does not seem ex-
acting, hardly more difficult than the getting of hens'
eggs only three hours old. Just so, provided the pro-
fessor could have had his private turtle-coop in
Harvard College Yard ; and provided he could have
made his turtles lay. But turtles will not respond,
like hens, to meat-scraps and the warm mash. The
professor's problem was not to get from a mud
turtle's nest in the back yard to his work-table in
the laboratory; but to get from the laboratory in
Cambridge to some pond when the turtles were lay-
ing, and back to the laboratory within the limited
time. And this might have called for nice and dis-
criminating work — as it did.

Agassiz had been engaged for a long time upon
his "Contributions." He had brought the great work
nearly to a finish. It was, indeed, finished but for
one small yet very important bit of observation : he
had carried the turtle egg through every stage of
its development with the single exception of one —

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 97

the very earliest. That beginning stage had brought
the " Contributions" to a halt. To get eggs that were
fresh enough to show the incubation at this period
had been impossible.

There were several ways that Agassiz might have
proceeded : he might have got a leave of absence
for the spring term, taken his laboratory to some
pond inhabited by turtles, and there camped until
he should catch the reptile digging out her nest.
But there were difficulties in all of that — as those
who are college professors and naturalists know.
As this was quite out of the question, he did the
easiest thing — asked Mr. Jenks of Middleboro to
get him the eggs. Mr. Jenks got them. Agassiz knew
all about his getting of them ; and I say the strange
and irritating thing is, that Agassiz did not think
it worth while to tell us about it, at least in the
preface to his monumental work.

It was many years later that Mr. Jenks, then a
gray-haired college professor, told me how he got
those eggs to Agassiz.

" I was principal of an academy, during my younger
years," he began, " and was busy one day with my
classes, when a large man suddenly filled the door-
way of the room, smiled to the four corners of the
room, and called out with a big, quick voice that he
was Professor Agassiz.

" Of course he was. I knew it, even before he had
had time to shout it to me across the room.

98 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

" Would I get him some turtle eggs ? he called.
Yes, I would. And would I get them to Cambridge
within three hours from the time they were laid? Yes,
I would. And I did. And it was worth the doing.
But I did it only once.

" When I promised Agassiz those eggs, I knew
where I was going to get them. I had got turtle eggs
there before — at a particular patch of sandy shore
along a pond, a few miles distant from the acad-
emy.

" Three hours was the limit. From the railroad
station to Boston was thirty-five miles ; from the
pond to the station was perhaps three or four miles;
from Boston to Cambridge we called about three
miles. Forty miles in round numbers ! We figured
it all out before he returned, and got the trip down
to two hours, — record time : — driving from the
pond to the station ; from the station by express train
to Boston ; from Boston by cab to Cambridge. This
left an easy hour for accidents and delays.

" Cab and car and carriage we reckoned into our
time-table ; but what we did n't figure on was the
turtle." And he paused abruptly.

" Young man," he went on, his shaggy brows
and spectacles hardly hiding the twinkle in the eyes
that were bent severely upon me, " young man,
when you go after turtle eggs, take into account the
turtle. No ! No ! that 's bad advice. Youth never
reckons on the turtle — and youth seldom ought to.

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 99

Only old age does that ; and old age would never
have got those turtle eggs to Agassiz.

"It was in the early spring that Agassiz came to
the academy, long before there was any likelihood
of the turtles' laying. But I was eager for the quest,
and so fearful of failure that I started out to watch
at the pond, fully two weeks ahead of the time that
the turtles might be expected to lay. I remember
the date clearly : it was May 14th.

"A little before dawn — along near three o'clock
— I would drive over to the pond, hitch my horse
near by, settle myself quietly among some thick
cedars close to the sandy shore, and there I would
wait, my kettle of sand ready, my eye covering the
whole sleeping pond. Here among the cedars I would
eat my breakfast, and then get back in good season
to open the academy for the morning session.

" And so the watch began.

"I soon came to know individually the dozen or
more turtles that kept to my side of the pond.
Shortly after the cold mist would lift and melt away,
they would stick up their heads through the quiet
water ; and as the sun slanted down over the ragged
rim of tree-tops, the slow things would float into the
warm lighted spots, or crawl out and doze comfort-
ably on the hummocks and snags.

" What fragrant mornings those were ! How fresh
and new and unbreathed ! The pond odors, the
woods odors, the odors of the ploughed fields — of

100 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

water-lily, and wild grape, and the dew-laid soil ! 1
can taste them yet, and hear them yet — the still,
large sounds of the waking day — the pickerel break-
ing the quiet with his swirl; the kingfisher drop-
ping anchor ; the stir of feet and wings among the
trees. And then the thought of the great book be-
ing held up for me ! Those were rare mornings !

" Bat there began to be a good many of them, for
the turtles showed no desire to lay. They sprawled
in the sun, and never one came out upon the sand
as if she intended to help on the great professor's
book. The story of her eggs was of small concern
to her; her contribution to the Natural History of
the United States could wait.

" And it did wait. I began my watch on the 14th
of May ; June 1st found me still among the cedars,
still waiting, as I had waited every morning, Sun-
days and rainy days alike. June 1st was a perfect
morning, but every turtle slid out upon her log, as if
egg-laying might be a matter strictly of next year.

" I began to grow uneasy, — not impatient yet,
for a naturalist learns his lesson of patience early,
and for all his years ; but I began to fear lest, by
some subtile sense, my presence might somehow be
known to the creatures ; that they might have gone
to some other place to lay, while I was away at the
schoolroom.

" I watched on to the end of the first week, on to
the end of the second week in June, seeing the mists

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 101

rise and vanish every morning, and along with them
vanish, more and more, the poetry of my early morn-
ing vigil. Poetry and rheumatism cannot long dwell
together in the same clump of cedars, and I had
begun to feel the rheumatism. A month of morning
mists wrapping me around had at last soaked through
to my bones. But Agassiz was waiting, and the
world was waiting, for those turtl^iegjg^ an<f*J
would wait. It was all I could ,do, .for tljerje is, no,
use bringing a china nest-egg td*a Jtu*r£le$&lm'i§"ii£)V
open to any such delicate suggestion.

" Then came a mid-June Sunday morning, with
dawn breaking a little after three : a warm, wide-

O '

awake dawn, with the level mist lifted from the level
surface of the pond a full hour higher than I had
seen it any morning before.

" This was the day. I knew it. I have heard per-
sons say that they can hear the grass grow ; that
they know by some extra sense when danger is nigh.
For a month I had been watching, had been brood-
ing over this pond, and now I knew. I felt a stirring
of the pulse of things that the cold-hearted turtles
could no more escape than could the clods and I.

" Leaving my horse unhitched, as if he, too, un-
derstood, I slipped eagerly into my covert for a look
at the pond. As I did so, a large pickerel ploughed
a furrow out through the spatter-docks, and in his
wake rose the head of a large painted turtle. Swing-
ing slowly round, the creature headed straight for

102 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

the shore, and, without a pause, scrambled out on
the sand.

" She was nothing unusual for a turtle, but her
manner was unusual and the gait at which she
moved ; for there was method in it and fixed pur-
pose. On she came, shuffling over the sand toward
the higher open fields, with a hurried, determined
sfee-saw thut was- taking her somewhere in particular,
and that was bound to get her there on time.
••': ?•] held my breath. Had she been a dinosaurian
making Mesozoic footprints, I could not have been
more fearful. For footprints in the Mesozoic mud,
or in the sands of time, were as nothing to me when
compared with fresh turtle eggs in the sands of this
pond.

"But over the strip of sand, without a stop, she
paddled, and up a narrow cow-path into the high
grass along a fence. Then up the narrow cow-path,
on all fours, just like another turtle, I paddled, and
into the high wet grass along the fence.

" I kept well within sound of her, for she moved
recklessly, leaving a wide trail of flattened grass be-
hind. I wanted to stand up, — and I don't believe
I could have turned her back with a rail, — but I
was afraid if she saw me that she might return in-
definitely to the pond ; so on I went, flat to the
ground, squeezing through the lower rails of the
fence, as if the field beyond were a melon-patch. It
was nothing of the kind, only a wild, uncomfortable

"TAIL FIRST, BEGAN TO BURY HERSELF"

104 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

pasture, full of dewberry vines, and very discourag-
ing. They were excessively wet vines and briery. I
pulled my coat-sleeves as far over my fists as I could
get them, and with the tin pail of sand swinging
from between my teeth to avoid noise, I stumped
fiercely, but silently, on after the turtle.

" She was laying her course, I thought, straight
down the length of this dreadful pasture, when, not
far from the fence, she suddenly hove to, warped
herself short about, and came back, barely clearing
me. I warped about, too, and in her wake bore
down across the corner of the pasture, across the
powdery public road, and on to a fence along a field
of young corn.

" I was somewhat wet by this time, but not so
wet as I had been before wallowing through the
deep, dry dust of the road. Hurrying up behind a
large tree by the fence, I peered down the corn-rows
and saw the turtle stop, and begin to paw about in
the loose, soft soil. She was going to lay!

" I held on to the tree and watched, as she tried
this place, and that place, and the other place.
But the place, evidently, was hard to find. What
could a female turtle do with a whole field of possi-
ble nests to choose from ? Then at last she found it,
and, whirling about, she backed quickly at it and,
tail first, began to bury herself before my staring
eyes.

" Those were not the supreme moments of my life;

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 105

perhaps those moments came later that day ; but those
certainly were among the slowest, most dreadfully
mixed of moments that I ever experienced. They
were hours long. There she was, her shell just show-
ing, like some old hulk in the sand alongshore. And
how long would she stay there ? and how should I
know if she had laid an egg?

" I could still wait. And so I waited, when, over
the freshly awakened fields, floated four mellow
strokes from the distant town clock.

" Four o'clock ! Why there was no train until
seven ! No train for three hours ! The eggs would
spoil ! Then with a rush it came over me that this
was Sunday morning, and there was no regular seven
o'clock train, — none till after nine.

" I think I should have fainted had not the turtle
just then begun crawling off. I was weak and dizzy;
but there, there in the sand, were the eggs ! and
Agassiz ! and the great book ! Why, I cleared the
fence — and the forty miles that lay between me
and Cambridge — at a single jump ! He should have
them, trains or no. Those eggs should go to Agas-
siz by seven o'clock, if I had to gallop every mile
of the way. Forty miles ! Any horse could cover it
in three hours, if he had to ; and, upsetting the
astonished turtle, I scooped out her long white eggs.

" On a bed of sand in the bottom of the pail I
laid them, with what care my trembling fingers al-
lowed ; filled in between them with more sand ; so

106 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

with layer after layer to the rim ; and covering all
smoothly with more sand, I ran back for my horse.

" That horse knew, as well as I, that the turtles
had laid, and that he was to get those eggs to Agas-
siz. He turned out of that field into the road on two
wheels, a thing he had not done for twenty years,
doubling me up before the dashboard, the pail of
eggs miraculously lodged between my knees.

" I let him out. If only he could keep this pace
all the way to Cambridge! — or even half way there,
I would have time to finish the trip on foot. I
shouted him on, holding to the dasher with one hand,
holding the pail of eggs with the other, not daring
to get off my knees, though the bang on them, as
we pounded down the wood-road, was terrific. But
nothing must happen to the eggs ; they must not
be jarred, or even turned over in the sand before
they came to Agassiz.

" In order to get out on the pike it was necessary
to drive back away from Boston toward the town.
We had nearly covered the distance, and were round-
ing a turn from the woods into the open fields, when,
ahead of me, at the station it seemed, I heard the
quick, sharp whistle of a locomotive.

" What did it mean ? Then followed the puff,
puff, puff, of a starting train. But what train?
Which way going ? And jumping to my feet for a
longer view, I pulled into a side road that paralleled
the track, and headed hard for the station.

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 107

" We reeled along. The station was still out of
sight, but from behind the bushes that shut it from
view, rose the smoke of a moving engine. It was
perhaps a mile away, but we were approaching, head
on, and, topping a little hill, I swept down upon a
freight train, the black smoke pouring from the
stack, as the mighty creature pulled itself together
for its swift run down the rails.

66 My horse was on the gallop, following the
track, and going straight toward the coming train.
The sight of it almost maddened me — the bare
thought of it, on the road to Boston ! On I went;
on it came, a half — a quarter of a mile between us,
when suddenly my road shot out along an unfenced
field with only a level stretch of sod between me
and the engine.

" With a pull that lifted the horse from his feet,
I swung him into the field and sent him straight as
an arrow for the track. That train should carry me
and my eggs to Boston !

" The engineer pulled the whistle. He saw me
stand up in the rig, saw my hat blow off, saw me
wave my arms, saw the tin pail swing in my teeth,
and he jerked out a succession of sharp Halts ! But
it was he who should halt, not I ; and on we went,
the horse with a flounder landing the carriage on
top of the track.

" The train was already grinding to a stop ; but
before it was near a standstill, I had backed off the

108 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

track, jumped out, and, running down the rails with
the astonished engineers gaping at me, had swung
aboard the cab.

" They offered no resistance ; they had n't had
time. Nor did they have the disposition, for I looked
strange, not to say dangerous. Hatless, dew-soaked,
smeared with yellow mud, and holding, as if it were
a baby or a bomb, a little tin pail of sand !

" ' Crazy,' the fireman muttered, looking to the
engineer for his cue.

" I had been crazy, perhaps, but I was not crazy
now.

" ' Throw her wide open/ I commanded. ' Wide
open ! These are fresh turtle eggs for Professor
Agassiz of Cambridge. He must have them before
breakfast.'

" Then they knew I was crazy, and, evidently
thinking it best to humor me, threw the throttle
wide open, and away we went.

" I kissed my hand to the horse, grazing uncon-
cernedly in the open field, and gave a smile to my
crew. That was all I could give them, and hold my-
self and the eggs together. But the smile was enough.
And they smiled through their smut at me, though
one of them held fast to his shovel, while the other
kept his hand upon a big ugly wrench. Neither of
them spoke to me, but above the roar of the sway-
ing engine I caught enough of their broken talk to
understand that they were driving under a full head

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 109

of steam, with the intention of handing me over
to the Boston police, as perhaps the safest way of
disposing of me.

" I was only afraid that they would try it at the
next station. But that station whizzed past without
a bit of slack, and the next, and the next ; when it
came over me that this was the through freight,
which should have passed in the night, and was
making up lost time.

" Only the fear of the shovel and the wrench kept
me from shaking 'hands with both men at this dis-
covery. But I beamed at them ; and they at me. I
was enjoying it. The unwonted jar beneath my feet
was wrinkling my diaphragm with spasms of delight.
And the fireman beamed at the engineer, with a look
that said, ' See the lunatic grin ; he likes it ! '

" He did like it. How the iron wheels sang to me
as they took the rails ! How the rushing wind in my
ears sang to me ! From my stand on the fireman's
side of the cab I could catch a glimpse of the track
just ahead of the engine, where the ties seemed to
leap into the throat of the mile-devouring monster.
The joy of it 1 of seeing space swallowed by the
mile !

" I shifted the eggs from hand to hand and thought
of my horse, of Agassiz, of the great book, of my
great luck, — luck, — luck, — until the multitudi-
nous tongues of the thundering train were all chim-
ing Muck! luck! luck!' They knew! they under-

110 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

stood! This beast of fire and tireless wheels was
doing its best to get the eggs to Agassiz !

" We swung out past the Blue Hills, and yonder
flashed the morning sun from the towering dome of
the State House. I might have leaped from the cab
and run the rest of the way on foot, had I not
caught the eye of the engineer watching me nar-
rowly. I was not in Boston yet, nor in Cambridge
•either. I was an escaped lunatic, who had held up a
train, and forced it to carry me from Middleboro to
Boston.

" Perhaps I had overdone the lunacy business.
Suppose these two men should take it into their
heads to turn me over to the police, whether I
would or no ? I could never explain the case in time
to get the eggs to Agassiz. I looked at my watch.
There were still a few minutes left in which I might
explain to these men, who, all at once, had become
my captors. But how explain? Nothing could avail
against my actions, my appearance, and my little
pail of sand.

"I had not thought of my appearance before.
Here I was, face and clothes caked with yellow mud,
my hair wild and matted, my hat gone, and in my full-
grown hands a tiny tin pail of sand, as if I had been
digging all night with a tiny tin shovel on the shore !
And thus to appear in the decent streets of Boston
of a Sunday morning !

" I began to feel like a lunatic. The situation

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 111

was serious, or might be, and rather desperately
funny at its best. I must in some way have shown
my new fears, for both men watched me more sharply.

" Suddenly, as we were nearing the outer freight-
yard, the train slowed down and came to a stop. I
was ready to jump, but still I had no chance. They
had nothing to do, apparently, but to guard me. I
looked at my watch again. What time we had made!
It was only six o'clock, — a whole hour left in
which to get to Cambridge!

" But I didn't like this delay. Five minutes —
ten — went by.

" ' Gentlemen/ I began, but was cut short by an
express train coining past. We were moving again,
on — into a siding — on to the main track — on with
a bump and a crash and a succession of crashes,
running the length of the train — on, on at a turtle's
pace, but on, — when the fireman, quickly jumping
for the bell-rope, left the way to the step free, and —

" I never touched the step, but landed in the soft
sand at the side of the track, and made a line for
the freight-yard fence.

"There was no hue or cry. I glanced over my
shoulder to see if they were after me. Evidently
their hands were full, or they did n't know I had
gone.

" But I had gone ; and was ready to drop over
the high board-fence, when it occurred to me that I
might drop into a policeman's arms. Hanging my

112 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

pail in a splint on top of a post, I peered cautiously
over — a very wise thing to do before you jump a
high board-fence. There, crossing the open square
toward the station, was a big, burly fellow with a
club — looking for me !

" I flattened for a moment, when some one in the
freight-yard yelled at me. I preferred the policeman,
and, grabbing my pail, I slid softly over to the street.
The policeman moved on past the corner of the sta-
tion out of sight. The square was free, and yonder
stood a cab.

''Time was flying now. Here was the last lap.
The cabman saw me coming, and squared away. I
waved a dollar-bill at him, but he only stared the
more. A dollar can cover a good deal, but I was too
much for one dollar. I pulled out another, thrust
them both at him, and dodged into the cab, calling,
6 Cambridge!'

" He would have taken me straight to the police-
station, had I not said, ' Harvard College. Professor
Agassiz's house ! I've got eggs for Agassiz,' push-
ing another dollar up at him through the hole.

" It was nearly half past six.

" ( Let him go ! ' I ordered. e Here 's another dol-
lar if you make Agassiz's house in twenty minutes.
Let him out ; never mind the police! '

"He evidently knew the police, or there were
none around at that time on a Sunday morning. We
went down the sleeping streets, as I had gone down the

TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 113

wood-roads from the pond two hours before, but
with the rattle and crash now of a fire brigade.
Whirling a corner into Cambridge Street, we took
the bridge at a gallop, the driver shouting out some-
thing in Hibernian to a pair of waving arms and a
belt and brass buttons.

" Across the bridge with a rattle and jolt that put
the eggs in jeopardy, and on over the cobble-stones,
we went. Hall: standing, to lessen the jar, I held the
pail in one hand and held myself in the other, not
daring to let go even to look at my watch.

" But I was afraid to look at the watch. I was
afraid to see how near to seven o'clock it might be.
The sweat was dropping down my nose, so close was
I running to the limit of my time.

" Suddenly there was a lurch, and I dived forward,
ramming my head into the front of the cab, coming
up with a rebound that landed me across the small
of my back on the seat, and sent half of my pail of
eggs helter-skelter over the floor.

" We had stopped. Here was Agassiz's house;
and without taking time to pick up the eggs that
were scattered, I jumped out with my pail and
pounded at the door.

" No one was astir in the house. But I would stir
some one. And I did. Right in the midst of the
racket the door opened. It was the maid.

" * Agassiz,' I gasped, ' I want Professor Agassiz,
quick ! ' And I pushed by her into the hall.

114 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

" ' Go 'way, sir. I '11 call the police. Professor
Agassiz is in bed. Go 'way, sir ! '

" ( Call him — Agassiz — instantly, or I '11 call him
myself.'

" But I did n't ; for just then a door overhead was
flung open, a great white-robed figure appeared on
the dim landing above, and a quick loud voice called
excitedly, —

"' Let him in ! Let him in. I know him. He has
my turtle eggs ! '

" And the apparition, slipperless, and clad in any-
thing but an academic gown, came sailing down the
stairs.

"The maid fled. The great man, his arms ex-
tended, laid hold of me with both hands, and drag-
ging me and my precious pail into his study, with a
swift, clean stroke laid open one of the eggs, as the
watch in my trembling hands ticked its way to seven
— as if nothing unusual were happening to the his-
tory of the world."

CHAPTER XII

AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE

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

They were acorn-shells, I thought; yet June
seemed rather late in the season for acorns, and,
looking closer, I discovered that the pile was entirely
composed of June-bug shells — wings and hollow
bodies of the pestiferous beetles !

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

So I had n't. He had always been too commont

116 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

Flying squirrels were more worth while, because
there were none on the farm. Now, however, I deter-
mined to cultivate the acquaintance of Chipmunk,
for there might be other discoveries awaiting me.
And there were.

A narrow strip of grass separated the orchard and
my garden-patch. It was on my way to the garden
that I most often stopped to watch this chipmunk,
or rather the pair of them, in the orchard wall. June
advanced, the beetles disappeared, and the two chip-
munks in the wall were now seven, the young ones
almost as large as their parents, and both young and
old on the best of terms with me.

For the first time in four years there were pros-
pects of good strawberries. Most of my small patch
was given over to a new variety, one that I had
originated; and I was waiting with an eagerness
which was almost anxiety for the earliest berries.

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

Gardening has its disappointments, its seasons of
despair — and wrath, too. Had a toad showed him-

CHIPMUNK EATING JUNE-BUGS

118 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

self at that moment, he might have fared badly, for
more than likely, I thought, it was he who had stolen
my berries. On the garden wall sat a friendly chip-
munk eying me sympathetically.

A few days later several fine berries were ripe, and
I was again on my way to the garden when I passed
the chipmunks in the orchard. A shining red spot
among the vine-covered stones of their wall brought
me to a stop. For an instant I thought that it was my
rose-breasted grosbeak, and that I was about to get a
clew to its nest. Then up to the slab where he ate the
June-bugs scrambled the chipmunk, and the rose-red
spot on- the breast of the supposed grosbeak dissolved
into a big scarlet-red strawberry. And by its long
wedge shape I knew it was one of my new variety.

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

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

Alarmed? Yes, and I was wrathful, too. The taste
for strawberries is innate, original; you can't be
human without it. But joy in chipmunks is a culti-
vated liking. What chance in such a circumstance

AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE 119

has the nature-lover with the human man? What
shadow of doubt as to his choice between the chip-
munks and the strawberries ?

I had no gun and no time to go over to my neigh-
bor's to borrow his. So I stationed myself near by
with a fistful of stones, and waited for the thieves
to show themselves. I came so near to hitting one of
them with a stone that the sweat started all over me.
After that there was no danger. I had lost my nerve.
The little scamps knew that war had been declared,
and they hid and dodged and sighted me so far off
that even with a gun I should have been all summer
killing the seven of them.

Meantime, a good rain and the warm June days
were turning the berries red by the quart. They had
more than caught up to the chipmunks. I dropped
my stones and picked. The chipmunks picked, too ;
so did the toads and the robins. Everybody picked.
It was free for all. We picked them and ate them,
jammed them, and canned them. I almost carried
some over to my neighbor, but took peas instead.

The strawberry season closed on the Fourth of
July ; and our taste was not dimmed, nor our natural
love for strawberries abated ; but all four of the
small boys had hives from over-indulgence, so boun-
tifully did Nature provide, so many did the seven
chipmunks leave us !

Peace between me and the chipmunks had been
signed before the strawberry season closed, and the

120 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

pact still holds. Other things have occurred since to
threaten it, however. Among them, an article in a
recent number of an out-of-door magazine, of wide
circulation. Herein the chipmunk family was most
roundly rated, in fact condemned to annihilation be-
cause of its wicked taste for birds' eggs and for the
young birds. Numerous photographs accompanied
the article, showing the red squirrel with eggs in
his mouth, but no such proof (even the red squirrel
photographs, I strongly believe, were done from a
stuffed squirrel) of Chipmunk's guilt, though he was
counted equally bad and, doubtless, will suffer with
Chickaree at the hands of those who have taken the
article seriously.

I believe that would be a great mistake. Indeed,
I believe the article a deliberate falsehood, concocted
in order to sell the made-up photographs. Chipmunk
is not an egg-sucker, else I should have found it out.
But of course that does not mean that no one else
has found it out. It does mean, however, that if
Chipmunk robs at all he does it so seldom as to call
for no alarm or retribution.

There is scarcely a day in the nesting-season when
I fail to see half a dozen chipmunks about the walls,
yet I have never noticed one even suspiciously near
a bird's nest. In an apple tree, scarcely six jump?
from the home of the family in the orchard wall, a
brood of tree swallows came to wing this spring ;
while robins, chippies, and red-eyed vireos — not to

AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE 121

mention a cowbird, which I wish they had devoured
— have also hatched and flown away from nests that
these squirrels might easily have rifled.

It is not often that one comes upon even the red
squirrel in the very act of robbing a nest. But the
black snake, the glittering fiend! and the dear
house cats ! If I run across a dozen black snakes in
the early summer, it is safe to say that six of them
are discovered to me by the cries of the birds that
they are robbing. So is it with the cats. No creature
larger than a June-bug, however, is often distressed
by a chipmunk. In a recent letter to me Mr. Bur-
roughs says : —

"•No, I never knew the chipmunk to suck or de-
stroy eggs of any kind, and I have never heard of
any well-authenticated instance of his doing so.
The red squirrel is the sinner in this respect, and
probably the gray squirrel also."

It will be difficult to find a true bill against him.
Were the evidence all in, I believe that instead of a
culprit we should find Chipmunk a useful citizen.
Does not that pile of June-bug bodies on the flat
stone leave me still in debt to him ? He may err
occasionally, and may, on occasion, make a nuisance
of himself — but so do my four small boys, bless
them ! And, well, — who doesn't? When a family
of chipmunks, which you have fed all summer on
the veranda, take up their winter quarters inside the
closed cabin, and chew up your quilts, hammocks,

122 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

table-cloths, and whatever else there is of chewable
properties, then they are anathema.

The havoc certain chipmunks in the mountains
once made among our possessions was dreadful. But
instead of exterminating them root and branch, a big
box was prepared the next summer and lined with
tin, in which the linen was successfully wintered.

But how real was the loss, after all ? Here was a
rough log cabin on the side of Thorn Mountain.
What sort of table-cloth ought to be found in such a
cabin, if not one that has been artistically chewed
by chipmunks? Is it for fine linen that we take to
the woods in summer? The chipmunks are well
worth a table-cloth now and then — well worth, be-
sides these, all the strawberries and all the oats they
can steal from my small patch.

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

And I get them, in spite of the chipmunks, though
I don't like to guess at the quantity of oats they have
carried off — anywhere, I should say, from a peck to a

AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE 123

bushel, which they have stored as they tried to store
the berries, somewhere in the big recesses of the
stone wall.

All this, however, is beside the point. It is n't a
case of oats and berries against June-bugs. You
don't haggle with Nature after that fashion. The
farm is not a market-place where you get exactly
what you pay for. You must spend on the farm all
you have of time and strength and brains ; but you
must not expect in return merely your money's worth.
Infinitely more than that, and oftentimes less. Farm-
ing is like virtue, — its own reward. It pays the man
who loves it, no matter how short the crop of oats and
corn.

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

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

124 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

and, despite his wings, lower order of beings. Chick
adee is often curious about me ; he can be coaxed to
eat from my hand. Chipmunk is more than curious;
he is interested ; and it is not crumbs that he wants,
but friendship. He can be coaxed to eat from my lips,
sleep in my pocket, and even come to be stroked.

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

The family in the orchard wall have grown very
familiar. They flatter me. One or another of them,
sitting upon the high flat slab, sees me coming. He
sits on the very edge of the crack, to be truthful;
and if I take a single step aside toward him, he flips,
and all there is left of him is a little angry squeak
from the depths of the stones. If, however, I pass
properly along, do not stop or make any sudden mo-
tion, he sees me past, then usually follows me, espe-
cially if I get well off and pause.

During a shower one day I halted under a large
hickory just beyond his den. He came running after
me, so interested that he forgot to look to his foot-
ing, and just opposite me slipped and bumped his
nose hard against a stone — so hard that he sat up
immediately and vigorously rubbed it. Another time
he followed me across to the garden and on until he
came to the barbed-wire fence along the meadow.

AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE 125

Here he climbed a post and continued after me by way
of the middle strand of the wire, wriggling, twisting,
even grabbing the barbs, in his efforts to maintain
his balance. He got midway between the posts, when
the sagging strand tripped him and he fell with a
splash into a shallow pool below. No, he did not
drown, but his curiosity did get a ducking.

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

I mowed the oats as soon as they began to yellow,
cocking them to cure for hay. It was necessary to
let them " make " for six or seven days, and all this
time the chipmunks raced back and forth between
the cocks and the stone wall. They might have
hidden their gleanings in a dozen crannies nearer at
hand; but evidently they had a particular store-
house, near the home nest, where the family could
get at their provisions in bad weather without com-
ing forth.

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

How many trips they made between this crib and

126 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

the oat-patch, how many kernels they carried in
their pouches at a trip, and how big a pile they had
when all the grains were in, — these are more of the
things I should like to know.

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

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

CHAPTER XIII

WOODS MEDICINE

THE real watcher in the woods usually goes
off by himself. He hates to have anybody
along; for Anybody wants to be moving all
the time, and Anybody wants to be talking all the
time, and Anybody wants to be finding a circus, or
a zoo, or a natural history museum in the middle of
the woods, else Anybody wishes he had stayed at
home or gone to the ball-game.

Now I always say to
r Mr. Anybody when
he asks me to
take him into
the woods, " Yes,
come along, if you
can stand stock-still
for an hour, without
budging ; if you can
keep stock-still for

128 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

an hour, without talking ; if you can get as excited
watching two tumble-bugs trying to roll their ball
up hill, as you do watching nine baseball men try-
ing to bat their ball about a field."

The doctor pulled a small blankbook out of his vest
pocket, scribbled something in Latin and Chinese (at
least it looked like Chinese), and then at the bottom
wrote in English, "Take one teaspoonful every
hour " ; and, tearing off the leaf, handed it to the
patient. It was a prescription for some sort of med-
icine.

Now I am going to give you a prescription, — for
some woods medicine, — a magic dose that will cure
you of blindness and deafness and clumsy-footed-
ness, that will cause you to see things and hear
things and think things in the woods that you have
never thought or heard or seen in the woods before.
Here is the prescription : —

WOOD CHUCK, M. D.,

MULLEIN HILL.
Office Hours :
5.30 A.M. until Breakfast.

No moving for one hour . . .
No talking for one hour . . .
No dreaming or thumb-twiddling the while . , .

Sig: The dose to be taken from the top of a stump with
a bit of sassafras bark or a nip of Indian turnip
every time you go into the woods.

WOOD CHUCK.

WOODS MEDICINE 129

I know that this compound will cure if you begin
taking it early enough — along, I should say, from
the Fifth to the Eighth Grades. It is a very diffi-
cult dose to take at any age, but it is almost impos-
sible for grown-ups to swallow it ; for they have so
many things to do, or think they have, that they
can't sit still a whole hour anywhere — a terrible
waste of time! And then they have been talking for
so many years that to stop for a whole hour might
— kill them, who knows ! And they have been work-
ing nervously with their hands so long that their
thumbs will twiddle, and to sleep they will go the
minute they sit down, in spite of themselves. It is
no use to give this medicine to grown-ups. They
are what Dr. Wood Chuck calls " chronics " — hope-
less burners who will never sit down upon a stump,
who, when the Golden Chariot comes for them, will
stand up and drive all the way to heaven.

However, I am not giving this medicine to grown-
ups, but to you. Of course you will make a bad face
over it, too ; for, young or old, it is hard to sit still
and even harder to keep still — I mean not to talk.
I have closely watched four small boys these sev-
eral years now, and I never knew one of them to
sit still for a whole hour at home — not once in
his whole life! And as for his tongue! he might
tuck that into his cheek, hold it down between his
teeth, crowd it back behind his fist — no matter.
The tongue is an unruly member. But let these four

130

THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

boys get into the woods, and every small pale-face
of them turns Indian instinctively, tip-toeing up and
down the ridges with lips as close-sealed as if some
finger of the forest were laid upon them. So it must
be with you when you enter the fields and woods.
The wood-born people are all light-footed and cau-
tious in their stir-
ring. Only the
box turtles scuff
carelessly along;
and that is be-
cause they can
shut themselves
up — head, paws,
tail — inside their

lidded shells,
and defy their
enemies.

The skunk,
however, is
sometimes care-
less in his go-
ing ; for he
knows that he will neither be crowded nor jostled
along the street, so he naturally behaves as if all
the woods were his. Yet, how often do you come
upon a skunk ? Seldom — because, he is quite as
unwilling to meet you as you are to meet him ; but
as one of your little feet makes as much noise in

WOODS MEDICINE 131

the leaves as all four of his, he hears you coming
and turns quietly down some alley or in at some bur-
row and allows you to pass on.

Louder than your step in the woods is the sound
of your voice. Perhaps there is no other noise so
far-reaching, so alarming, so silencing in the woods
as the human voice. When your tongue begins, all
the other tongues cease. Songs stop as by the snap
of a violin string; chatterings cease ; whisperings
end — mute are the woods and empty as a tomb,
except the wind be moving aloft in the trees.

Three things all the animals can do supremely
well : they can hear well ; they can see motion well ;
they can wait well.

If you would know how well an animal can wait,
scare Dr. Wood Chuck into his office, then sit down
outside and wait for him to come out. It would be a
rare and interesting thing for you to do. No one has
ever done it yet, I believe ! Establish a world's record
for keeping still ! But you should scare him in at the
beginning of your summer vacation so as to be sure
you have all the waiting-time the state allows : for you
may have to leave the hole in September and go back
to school.

When the doctor wrote the prescription for this
medicine, " No moving for an hour," he was giving
you a very small, a homeopathic dose of patience, as
you can see; for an hour at a time, every wood-
watcher knows, will often be only a waste of time,

132 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

unless followed immediately by another hour of
the same.

On the road to the village one day, I passed a
fox-hunter sitting atop an old stump. It was about
seven o'clock in the morning,

" Hello, Will ! " I called, " been out all night?"

"No, got here 'bout an hour ago," he replied.

I drove on and, returning near noon, found Will
still atop the stump.

"Had a shot yet?" I called.

" No, the dogs brought him down 'tother side the
brook, and carried him over to the Shanty field."

About four o'clock that afternoon I was hurry-
ing down to the station, and there was Will atop
that same stump.

"Got him yet?" I called.

"No, dogs are fetching him over the Quarries now"
— and I was out of hearing.

It was growing dark when I returned; but there
was Will Hall atop the stump. I drew up in the road.

"Grown fast to that stump, Will?" I called.
" Want me to try to pull you off?"

" No, not yet," he replied, jacking himself pain-
fully to his feet. "Chillin' up some, ain't it?" he
added shaking himself. " Might 's well go home, I
guess" — when from the direction of Young's Mead-
ows came the eager voice of his dogs; and, waving
me on, he got quickly back atop the stump, his
gun ready across his knees.

WOODS MEDICINE 138

I was nearly home when, through the muffle of
the darkening woods, I heard the quick bang ! bang !
of Will's gun.

Yes, he got him, a fine red fox. And speaking to
me about it one day, he said, —

" There 's a lot more to sittin' still than most folks
thinks. The trouble is, most folks in the woods can't
stand the monopoly of it."

Will's English needs touching up in spots ; but
he can show the professors a great many things
about the ways of the woods.

And now what does the doctor mean by " No
dreaming or thumb-twiddling" in the woods? Just
this : that not only must you be silent and motionless
for hours at a time, but you must also be alert —
watchful, keen, ready to take a hint, to question,
guess, and interpret. The fields and woods are not
full of life, but full only of the sounds, shadows, and
signs of life.

You are atop of your stump, when over the ridge
you hear a slow, quiet rustle in the dead leaves — a
skunk ; then a slow, loud rustle — a turtle ; then a
quick, loud — one-two-tliree — rustle — a chewink;
then a tiny, rapid rustle — a mouse ; then a long,
rasping rustle — a snake ; then a measured, gallop-
ing rustle — a squirrel; then a light-heavy, hop-thump
rustle — a rabbit; then — and not once have you
seen the rustlers in the leaves beyond the ridge; and
not once have you stirred from your stump.

134 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR,

Perhaps this understanding of the leaf-sounds
might be called " interpretation " ; but before you
can interpret them, you must hear them; and no
dozing, dreaming, fuddling sitter upon a stump has
ears to hear.

As you sit there, you notice a blue jay perched
silent and unafraid directly over you — not an ordi-
nary, common way for a blue jay to act. "Why?"
you ask. Why, a nest, of course, somewhere near !
Or, suddenly round and round the trunk of a large
oak tree whirls a hummingbird. "Queer," you say.
Then up she goes — and throwing your eye ahead
of her through the tree-tops you chance to intercept
her bee-line flight — a hint ! She is probably gather-
ing lichens for a nest which she is building some-
where near, in the direction of her flight. A whirl!
a flash ! — as quick as light! You have a wonderful
story !

Now do not get the impression that all one needs
to do in order to become acquainted with the life of
the woods is to sit on a stump a long time, say noth-
ing, and listen hard. All that is necessary — rather,
the ability to do it is necessary ; but in the woods or
out it is also necessary to exercise common sense.
Guess, for instance, when guessing is all that you
can do. You will learn more, however, and learn it
faster, generally, by following it up, than by sitting
on a stump and guessing about it.

At twilight, in the late spring and early summer,

WOODS MEDICINE 135

we frequently hear a gentle, tremulous call from the
woods or from below in the orchard. " What is it? "
I had been asked a hundred times, and as many times
had guessed that it might be the hen partridge cluck-
ing to her brood ; or else I had replied that it made
me think of the mate-call of a coon, or that I half
inclined to believe it the cry of the woodchucks, or
that possibly it might be made by the owls. In fact,
I did n't know the peculiar call, and year after year I
kept guessing at it.

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

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

136 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR

in the tree beyond, silhouetted against the moonlit
sky, two round bunches, — young owls evidently, —
which were the explanation of the calls. These two,
and another young one, were found in the orchard
the following day.

I rejoined the guessers on the porch and gave
them the satisfying fact, but only after two or three
years of guessing about it. I had laughed once at
some of my friends over on the other road who had
bolted their front door and had gone out of the
door at the side of the house for precisely twenty-
one years because the key in the front-door lock
wouldn't work. They were intending to have it
fixed, but the children being little kept them busy ;
then the children grew up, and of course kept them
busier ; got married at last and left home — all but
one daughter. Still the locksmith was not called to
fix that front door. One day this unmarried daugh-
ter, in a fit of impatience, got at that door herself,
and found that the key had been inserted just
twenty-one years before — upside down !

There I had sat on the porch — on a stump, let
us say, and guessed about it. Truly, my key to this
mystery had been left long in the lock, upside down,
while I had been going in and out by the side door.

No, you must go into the fields and woods, go deep
and far and frequently, with eyes and ears and all
your souls alert !

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

CHAPTER I

TO THE TEACHER

Put the question to your scholars individually : Who is your mes-
senger of spring ? Make the reading of this book not an end in itself,
but only a means toward getting the pupils out of doors. Never let
the reading stop with the end of the chapter, any more than you
would let your garden stop with the buying of the seeds. And how
eager and restless a healthy child is for the fields and woods with
the coming of spring ! Do not let your opportunity slip. Go with
them after reading this chapter (re-reading if you can the first chap-
ter in " The Fall of the Year" ) out to some meadow stream where
they can see the fallen stalks and brown matted growths of the
autumn through which the new spring shoots are pushing, green
with vigor and promise. The seal of winter has been broken ; the
pledge of autumn has been kept ; the life of a new summer has
started up from the grave of the summer past. Here by the stream
under your feet is the whole cycle of the seasons — the dead stalks,
the empty seed-vessels, the starting life.

Let the children watch for the returning birds and report to you ;
have them bring in the opening flowers, giving them credit (on the
blackboard) for each new flower found; go with them (so that they
will not bring the eggs to you) to see the new nests discovered, teach-
ing them by every possible means the folly and cruelty of robbing
birds' nests, of taking life ; while at the same time you show them
the beauty of life, its sacredness, and manifold interests.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 1

Have you ever seen a " spring peeper " peeping ? You will
hear, these spring nights, many distinct notes in the marshes,

138 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

and when you have seen all of the lowly musicians you will be a
fairly accomplished naturalist. Let the discovery of " Who 's Who
among the Frogs " this spring be one of your first outdoor studies.
The picture shows you Pickering's hyla, blowing his bagpipe.
Arbutus: trailing arbutus (Epigcea repens), sometimes called
ground-laurel, and mayflower, fishflower (in New Jersey).
hepatwa: liver-leaf (Hepatica triloba).

Spice-bush : wild allspice, fever-bush, Benjamin-bush (Benzoin
cestivale}.

Wood-pussy • the skunk, who comes out of his winter den very
early in spring, and whose scent is one of the characteristic odors
of a New England spring.

PAGE 2

Ail white and still : The whole poem will be found on the last page
of " Winter," the second book in this series.

tnllium: the wake-robin. Read Mr. Burroughs's book "Wake-
Robin," — the first of his outdoor books.

PAGE 4

phoebe .• See the chapter called " The Palace in the Pig-Pen."
bloodroot : Sanguinaria canadensis, See the picture on this page.
So named because of the red-orange juice in the root-stalks, used
by the Indians as a stain.

marsh-marigolds : The more common but incorrect name is " cow-
slip." The marsh-marigold is Caltha palustris and belongs with
the buttercup and wind-flower to the Crowfoot Family. The
cowslip, a species of primrose, is a European plant and belongs
to the Primrose Family.

PAGE 5

woolly-bear : caterpillar of the Isabella tiger moth, the common

caterpillar, brown in the middle with black ends, whose hairs

look as if they had been clipped, so even are they.

mourning-cloak: See picture, page 77 of "Winter," the second

book of this series. The antiopa butterfly.

j uncos : the common slate-colored "snowbirds."

witch-hazel: See picture, page 28 of "The Fall of the Year";

read description of it on pages 31-33 of the same volume.

bluets : or " innocence " (Houstonia ccerulea).

PAGE 6

the Delaware ? the Delaware River, up which they come in order

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 139

to lay their eggs. As they come up they are caught in nets and

their eggs or " roe " salted and made into caviar.

Cohansey Creek : a small river in New Jersey.

Lupton's Meadows ; local name of meadows along Cohansey Creek.

CHAPTER II

TO THE TEACHER

Read Kipling's story in " The Second Jungle Book " called " The
Spring Running." Both Jungle Books ought to be in your school
library. Spring is felt on the ocean as well as over the land; life is all
of one piece; the thrill we feel at the touch of spring is felt after his
manner and degree by bird and beast and by the fish of the sea. Go
back to the last paragraph of chapter I for the thought. Here I have
expanded that thought of the tides of life rising. See the picture of
the herring on their deep sea run on page 345 of the author's
" Wild Life Near Home." Let the chapter suggest to the pupils
the mysterious powers of the minds of the lower animals.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 7

Mowgli: Do you know Mowgli of "The Jungle Book"?

Chaucer: the "Father of English Poetry." This is one of the

opening lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
PAGE 8

migrating birds : See " The Great Tidal Waves of Bird Life " by

D. Lange, in the " Atlantic Monthly " for August, 1909.
PAGE 9

The cold-blooded : said of those animals lower than the mammals

and birds, that have not four-chambered hearts and the complete

double blood-circulation.

Weymouth Back River: of Weymouth, Massachusetts.
PAGE 10

catfish : or horn-pout or bull-pout, see picture, page 12.
PAGE 11

stickleback : The little male stickleback builds a nest, drives the

female into it to lay her eggs, then takes charge of the eggs until

the fry hatch out and go off for themselves,

140 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

CHAPTER III

TO THE TEACHER

You will try to get three suggestions out of this chapter for your
pupils : First, that an old tree with holes may prove to be the most
fruitful and interesting tree in the neighborhood, that is to say,
nothing out of doors is so far fallen to pieces, dead, and worthless
as to be passed by in our nature study. (Read to them " Second
Crops " in the author's " A Watcher in the Woods.") Secondly : the
humble tree-toad is well worth the most careful watching, for no one
yet has told us all of his life-story. Thirdly: one of the benefits of
this simple, sincere love of the out-of-doors will come to us as rest,
both in mind and body, as contentment, too, and clearer understanding
of what things are worth while.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 14

burlap petticoat : a strip of burlap about six inches wide tied with

a string and folded over about the trunks of the trees under

which the night-feeding gypsy moth caterpillars hide by day.

The burlaps are lifted and the worms killed.

a peddler's stall : In the days of the author's boyhood peddlers

sold almost everything that the country people could want.
PAGE 16

grim-beaked baron : the little owl of the tree.

keep: an older name for castle ; sometimes for the dungeon.
PAGE 20

for him to call the summer rain : alluding to his evening and his

cloudy-day call as a sign of coming rain.
PAGE 22

castings : the disgorged lumps of hair and bones of the small

animals eaten by the owls.
PAGE 24

Altair and Arcturus : prominent stars in the northern hemisphere

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 141

CHAPTER IV

TO THE TEACHER

See the suggestions for the corresponding chapter in " The Fall
of the Year," the first volume in this series. Lest you may not have
that book at hand, let me repeat here the gist of what I said there :
that you make this chapter the purpose of one or more field excur-
sions with the class — in order to see with your own eyes the charac-
teristic sights of spring as recorded here ; secondly, that you use this,
and chapters vi and x, as school tests of the pupils' knowledge and
observation of his own fields and woods ; and thirdly, let the items
mentioned here be used as possible subjects for the pupils' further
study as themes for compositions, or independent investigations out
of school hours. The finest fruit the teacher oan show is a school full
of children personally interested in things. And what better things
than live things out of doors ?

CHAPTER V

TO THE TEACHER

I might have used a star, or the sun, or the sea to teach the lesson
involved here, instead of the crow and his three broken feathers.
But these three feathers will do for your pupils as the falling apple
did for Sir Isaac Newton. The point of the chapter is: that the
feathers like the stars must round out their courses ; that this uni-
verse is a universe of law, of order, and of reason, even to the wing
feathers of a crow. Try to show your pupils the beauty and wonder
of order and law (not easy to do) as well as the beauty and wonder
of shapes and colors and sounds, etc.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 34

primaries, secondaries, tertials : Turn to your dictionary under
" Bird " (or at the front of some good bird book) and study out
just which feathers of the wing these named here are.

142 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

PAGE 35

half-moulted hen : Pick her up and notice the regular and system-
atic arrangement of the young feathers. Or take a plucked hen
and draw roughly the pin-feather scheme as you find it on her
body.
PAGE 37

reed-birds : The bobolink is also called " rice-bird >? from its habit
of feeding in the rice-fields of the South on its fall migration.

CHAPTER VI

FOR THE PUPIL

Do not stop doing or seeing or hearing when you have done, seen,
and heard the few things suggested in this chapter and in chapters
iv and x ; for these are only suggestions, and merely intended to
give you a start, as if your friend had said to you upon your visiting
a new city, "Now, don't fail to see the Common and the old State
House, etc. ; and don't fail to go down to T Wharf, etc.," — knowing
that all the time you would be doing and seeing and hearing a thou-
sand interesting things.

CHAPTER VII

TO THE TEACHER

I called this chapter when I first wrote it "The Friendship of
Nature " — a much used title, but entirely suggestive of the thought
aad the lesson in the story here. This was first written about six
years ago, and to-day, May 12, 1912, that pair of phcebes, or another
pair, have their nest out under the pig-pen roof as they have had every
year since I have known the pen. Repeat and expand the thought as
I have put it into the mouth of Nature in the first paragraph — " We
will share them [the acres] together." Instill into your pupils' minds
the large meaning of obedience to Nature's laws and love for her and
all her own. Show them also how ready Nature is (and all the birds
and animals and flowers) to be friendly; and how even a city door-
yard may hold enough live wild things for a small zoo. This chapter

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 143

might well be made use of by the city teacher to stir her pupils to
see what interesting live things their city or neighborhood has, al-
though the woods and open fields are miles away.

FOR THE PUPIL

PAGE 48

a hornet's nest : the white-faced hornet, that builds the great cone-
shaped paper nests.

swifts thunder in the chimney: See chapter vn (and notes) in
" Winter." For the " thunder " see section ix in chapter X of
this book.

PAGE 49

cabbage 'butterfly ; a pest ; a small whitish butterfly with a few
small black spots. Its grubs eat cabbage.

PAGE 54

the crested flycatcher : is the largest of the family; builds in holes ;
distinguished by its use of cast-off snake-skins in its nests.
kingbird : Everybody knows him, for it is usually he who chases
the marauding crows; he builds, out in the apple tree if he can,
a big, bulky nest with strings a-flying from it : also called "bee-
martin," a most useful bird.

wood pewee : builds on the limbs of forest trees a most beautiful
nest, much like a hummingbird's, only larger. Pewee's soft, pen-
sive call of " pe-e-e-wee " in the deep, quiet, dark-shrouded sum-
mer woods is one of the sweetest of bird notes.
chebec: a little smaller than a sparrow ; builds a beautiful nest in
orchard trees and says " chebec, chebec, chebec."

PAGE 58

One had died : After phoebe brings off her first brood sprinkle a
little tobacco-dust or lice-powder, such as you use in the hen-
yard, into the nest to kill the vermin. Otherwise the second and
third broods may be eaten alive by lice or mites.

CHAPTER VIII

TO THE TEACHER

In " Winter " I put a chapter called " The Missing Tooth," showing
the dark and bitter side of the life of the wild things; here I have

144 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

taken that thought as most people think of it (see Burroughs's essay,
"A Life of Fear" in "Riverby ") and in the light of typical exam-
ples tried to show that wild life is not fear, but peace and joy. The
kernel of the chapter is found in the words: "The level of wild
life, the soul of all nature, is a great serenity." Let the pupils watch
and report instances of fear (easy to see) and in the same animals
instances of peace and joy.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 60

gray harrier : so named because of his habit of flying low and
" harrying," that is, hunting, catching small prey on or near the
ground. " Harry " comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for army,

PAGE 61

" He looketk as it were a grym leoun : from Chaucer's description
of the Cock in the story of the Cock and the Fox.

PAGE 62

terrible pike: closely related to the pickerel.

kingfisher: builds in holes in sand-banks near water. Its peculiar

rattle sounds like the small boys' "clapper."

PAGE 63

" The present only toucheth thee!" Burns's poem "To a Mouse."

PAGE 64

" The fair music that all creatures made" : from Milton's poem "To
a Solemn Music," " solemn " meaning " orchestral " music.

PAGE 65

then doubling once more: This is all figurative language. I am
thinking of myself as the fox. The dogs have run themselves to
death on my trail, and I am turning back, "doubling," to have a
look at them and to rejoice over their defeat.

PAGE 71

pine marten .• The marten is so rare in this neighborhood that I
am inclined to think the creature was the large weasel.

PAGE 73

the heavy bar across their foreheads : a very unusual way of yoking
oxen in the United States. The only team I ever saw here so yoked,

PAGE 74

San Francisco: alluding to the earthquake and fire which nearly
wiped out the city in 190G.

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 145

CHAPTER IX

FOR THE PUPIL

The picture of the young buzzard is as true as a photograph; the
humped-up drawing of the old bird looks precisely as she did atop
her dead tree, watching iny approach. This vulture rarely soars into
New England skies ; down South, especially along the coast, the
smaller black vulture (Catharista urubu) is found very tame and in
great abundance ; while in the far Southwest lives the great condor.
PAGE 80

tulip poplar : tulip-tree (Liriodendron tulipifera).
"For it had bene an auncient tree " ; from Edmund Spenser's " Shep-
herd's Calendar."
PAGE 85

a dozen kinds of cramps : Perhaps you will say I didn't find much
in finding the buzzard's nest, and got mostly cramps ! Yes, but I
also got the buzzard's nest — a thing that I had wanted to see for
many years. It was worth seeing, however, for its own sake.
Even a buzzard is interesting. See the account of him in " Wild
Life Near Home," the chapter called " A Buzzard's Banquet."

CHAPTER XI

TO THE TEACHER

The point of the story is the enthusiasm of the naturalists for their
work — work that to the uncaring and unknowing seemed not even
worth while. But all who do great things do them with all their
might. No one can stop to count the cost whose soul is bent on great
things.

FOR THE PUPIL

PAGE 94

Burlington: in Vermont.

Concord and Middleboro* : in Massachusetts.

Zadoc Thompson : a Vermont naturalist.

D. Henry Thoreau : better known as Henry D. Thoreau ; author

of " Walden," etc.

146 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

/. W. P. Jenks: for many years head of Pierce Academy,
Middleboro, and later Professor of Agricultural Zoology in Brown
University.

PAGE 96

Contributions: used in place of the whole name: Go yourself into
the public library and read this and look at the four large volumes.

PAGE 101

spatter-docks: yellow pond-lily (Nuphar advena).

PAGE 102

dinosaurian : one of the fossil reptile monsters of the Mesozoic,
or " middle," period of the earth's history, before the age of man.

CHAPTER XII

TO THE TEACHER

In this story I have tried to settle the difficult question of debit
and credit between me and the out-of-doors. Shall we exterminate
the red squirrels, the hawks, owls, etc., is a question that is not so
easily answered as one might think. The fact is we do not want to
exterminate any of our native forms of life — we need them all,
and owe them more, each of them, for the good they do us, than they
owe us for the little harm they may do us. Read this over with the
children with its moral and economic lesson in view. Send to the
National Association of Audubon Societies, New York City, for their
free leaflets upon this matter. The Pennsylvania Department of Agri-
culture, Harrisburg, Pa., has a bulletin upon this same subject which
will be sent free upon application.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 115

June-bug : the very common brown beetle whose big white grubs
you dig up under the sod and in composts.

PAGE 118

rose-breasted grosbeak : one of the most beautiful of our birds,
and a lovely singer.

PAGE 120

Chickaree : the common name of the red squirrel. The red squir-
rel does not need to be destroyed.

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 147

tree swallows: They build in holes in orchard trees, etc.; to be dis-
tinguished on the wing from the barn swallows by their white
bellies and plain, only slightly forked tails.
chippies : the little chipping sparrow, or hair-bird.
red-eyed vireos : the most common of the vireos ; see picture of its
nest on page 40 of " Winter."

PAGE 121

cowbird: the miserable brown-headed blackbird that lays its egg or
eggs in smaller birds' nests and leaves its young to be fed by the
unsuspecting foster-mother. As the young cowbird is larger than
the rightful young, it gets all the food and causes them to starve.

PAGE 122

Thorn Mountain : one of the smaller of the White Mountains .;
it overlooks the village of Jackson, N. H.

CHAPTER XIII

TO THE TEACHER

If you have read through " The Fall of the Year " and "Winter "
and to this chapter in " The Spring of the Year," you will know
that the upshot of these thrice thirteen readings has been to take
you and your children into the woods ; you will know that the last
paragraph of this last chapter is the aim and purpose and key of all
three books. You must go into the woods, you must lead your chil-
dren to go, deep and far and frequently. The Three R's first — but
after them, before dancing, or cooking, or sewing, or manual train-
ing, or anything, send your children out into the open, where they
belong. The school can give them nothing better than the Three R's,
and can only fail in trying to give them more, except it give them
the freedom of the fields. Help Nature, the old nurse, to take your
children on her knee.

FOR THE PUPIL
PAGE 128

Here is the prescription: Think you can swallow it ? Go out and try
PAGE 129

Golden Chariot : In what Bible story does the Golden Chariot

descend ? and whom does it carry away ?

pale-face : an Indian name for the white man.

148 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS

PAGE 130

box turtles : They are sometimes found as far north as the woods
of Cape Cod, Massachusetts ; but are very abundant farther south.
PAGE 133

Chewink : towhee, or ground-robin; to be distinguished by his loud
call of " chewink " and his vigorous scratching among the leaves

THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATJi
STAMPED BELOW

AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS

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THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY
WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH
DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY
OVERDUE.

10 1937

APR 28 '40

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

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