[Transcriber's Note: In this text, the spelling _racoon_ is usedconsistently instead of _raccoon_. I have kept this and any other unusualspellings, retaining the character of the original. ]

Roof and Meadow

By Dallas Lore Sharp

Author of "A Watcher in the Woods"

With Illustrations By Bruce Horsfall

SCHOOL EDITION

[Illustration]

NEW YORK

The Century Co. 

1911

Copyright, 1903, 1904, by THE CENTURY CO. 

Copyright, 1902, 1903, by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. 

Copyright, 1903, by THE CHAPPLE PUBLISHING CO. (Ltd. ). 

Copyright, 1902, 1903, by W. W. POTTER CO. (Ltd. ). 

Copyright, 1902, 1903, by PERRY MASON COMPANY

_Published April, 1904. _

TO

MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

 PAGE

BIRDS FROM A CITY ROOF 1THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK 19THREE SERMONS 31THE MARSH 45CALICO AND THE KITTENS 77THE SPARROW ROOST 91"MUX" 107RACOON CREEK 121THE DRAGON OF THE SWALE 147

BIRDS FROM A CITY ROOF

[Illustration]

ROOF AND MEADOW

BIRDS FROM A CITY ROOF

I laid down my book and listened. It was only the choking gurgle of abroken rain-pipe outside: then it was the ripple and swish of a meadowstream. To make out the voices of redwings and marsh-wrens in the raspingnotes of the city sparrows behind the shutter required much moreimagination. But I did it. I wanted to hear, and the splash of the waterhelped me. 

The sounds of wind and water are the same everywhere. Here at the heart ofthe city I can forget the tarry pebbles and painted tin whenever myrain-pipes are flooded. I can never be wholly shut away from the opencountry and the trees so long as the winds draw hard down the alley pastmy window. 

But I have more than a window and a broken rain-pipe. Along with my fiveflights goes a piece of roof, flat, with a wooden floor, a fence, and amillion acres of sky. I couldn't possibly use another acre of sky, exceptalong the eastern horizon, where the top floors of some twelve-storybuildings intercept the dawn. 

With such a roof and such a sky, when I must, I can, with effort, get wellout of the city. I have never fished nor botanized here, but I have beena-birding many times. 

 Stone walls do not a prison make, nor city streets a cage--if one have a roof. 

A roof is not an ideal spot for bird study. I would hardly, out ofpreference, have chosen this with its soot and its battlement of gaseouschimney-pots, even though it is a university roof with the great gildeddome of a state house shining down upon it. One whose feet have alwaysbeen in the soil does not take kindly to tar and tin. But anything open tothe sky is open to some of the birds, for the paths of many of themigrants lie close along the clouds. 

Other birds than the passing migrants, however, sometimes come withinrange of my look-out. The year around there are English sparrows andpigeons; and all through the summer scarcely an evening passes when a fewchimney-swallows are not in sight. 

With the infinite number and variety of chimneys hedging me in, Inaturally expected to find the sky alive with swallows. Indeed, I thoughtthat some of the twenty-six pots at the corners of my roof would beinhabited by the birds. Not so. While I can nearly always find a pair ofswallows in the air, they are surprisingly scarce, and, so far as I know, they rarely build in the heart of the city. There are more canaries in myblock than chimney-swallows in all my sky. 

The swallows are not urban birds. The gas, the smoke, the shriekingventilators, and the ceaseless sullen roar of the city are hardly to theirliking. Perhaps the flies and gnats which they feed upon cannot live inthe air above the roofs. The swallows want a sleepy old town with bigthunderful chimneys, where there are wide fields and a patch of quietwater. 

Much more numerous than the swallows are the night-hawks. My roof, infact, is the best place I have ever found to study their feeding habits. These that flit through my smoky dusk may not make city nests, though thefinding of such nests would not surprise me. Of course a night-hawk's_nest_, here or anywhere else, would surprise me; for like her cousin, thewhippoorwill, she never builds a nest, but stops in the grass, the gravel, the leaves, or on a bare rock, deposits her eggs without even scratchingaside the sticks and stones that may share the bed, and in three days isbrooding them--brooding the stones too. 

It is likely that some of my hawks nest on the buildings in theneighborhood. Night-hawks' eggs have occasionally been found among thepebbles of city roofs. The high, flat house-tops are so quiet and remote, so far away from the noisy life in the narrow streets below, that thebirds make their nests here as if in a world apart. The twelve-andfifteen-story buildings are as so many deserted mountain heads to them. 

None of the birds build on my roof, however. But from early spring theyhaunt the region so constantly that their families, if they have familiesat all, must be somewhere in the vicinity. Should I see them like thisabout a field or thicket in the country it would certainly mean a nest. 

The sparrows themselves do not seem more at home here than do thesenight-hawks. One evening, after a sultry July day, a wild wind-storm burstover the city. The sun was low, glaring through a narrow rift between thehill-crests and the clouds that spread green and heavy across the sky. Icould see the lower fringes of the clouds working and writhing in thewind, but not a sound or a breath was in the air about me. Around me overmy roof flew the night-hawks. They were crying peevishly and skimmingclose to the chimneys, not rising, as usual, to any height. 

Suddenly the storm broke. The rain fell as if something had given wayoverhead. The wind tore across the stubble of roofs and spires; andthrough the wind, the rain, and the rolling clouds shot a weird, yellow-green sunlight. 

I had never seen a storm like it. Nor had the night-hawks. They seemed tobe terrified, and left the sky immediately. One of them, alighting on theroof across the street, and creeping into the lee of a chimney, huddledthere in sight of me until the wind was spent and a natural sunlightflooded the world of roofs and domes and spires. 

Then they were all awing once more, hawking for supper. Along with thehawking they got in a great deal of play, doing their tumbling andcloud-coasting over the roofs just as they do above the fields. 

Mounting by easy stages of half a dozen rapid strokes, catching flies bythe way, and crying _peent-peent_, the acrobat climbs until I look a merelump on the roof; then ceasing his whimpering _peent_, he turns on bowedwings and falls--shoots roofward with fearful speed. The chimneys! Quick!

Quick he is. Just short of the roofs the taut wings flash a reverse, thereis a lightning swoop, a startling hollow wind-sound, and the rushing birdis beating skyward again, hawking deliberately as before, and utteringagain his peevish nasal cry. 

This single note, the only call he has besides a few squeaks, is far froma song; farther still is the empty-barrel-bung-hole sound made by the airin the rushing wings as the bird swoops in his fall. The night-hawk, alias"bull-bat, " does not sing. What a name bull-bat would be for a singingbird! But a "voice" was never intended for the creature. Voice, beak, legs, head--everything but wings and maw was sacrificed for a mouth. Whata mouth! The bird can almost swallow himself. Such a cleft in the headcould never mean a song; it could never be utilized for anything but afly-trap. 

We have use for fly-traps. We need some birds just to sit around, lookpretty, and warble. We will pay them for it in cherries or in whateverthey ask. But there is also a great need for birds that kill insects. Andfirst among these are the night-hawks. They seem to have been designed forthis sole purpose. Their end is to kill insects. They are more likemachines than any other birds I know. The enormous mouth feeds an enormousstomach, and this, like a fire-box, makes the power that works theenormous wings. From a single maw have been taken eighteen hundred wingedants, to say nothing of the smaller fry that could not be identified andcounted. 

But if he never caught an ant, never one of the fifth-story mosquitos thatlive and bite till Christmas, how greatly still my sky would need him! Hisflight is song enough. His cry and eery thunder are the very voice of thesummer twilight to me. And as I watch him coasting in the evening dusk, that twilight often falls--over the roofs, as it used to fall for me overthe fields and the quiet hollow woods. 

There is always an English sparrow on my roof--which does not particularlycommend the roof to bird-lovers, I know. I often wish the sparrow anentirely different bird, but I never wish him entirely away from the roof. When there is no other defense for him, I fall back upon his being abird. Any kind of a bird in the city! Any but a parrot. 

A pair of sparrows nest regularly in an eaves-trough, so close to the roofthat I can overhear their family talk. Round, loquacious, familiar CockSparrow is a family man--so entirely a family man as to be nothing else atall. He is a success, too. It does me good to see him build. He tore theold nest all away in the early winter, so as to be ready. There came awarm springish day in February, and he began. A blizzard stopped him, butwith the melting of the snow he went to work again, completing the nest bythe middle of March. 

He built for a big family, and he had it. Not "it" indeed, but _them_; forthere were three batches of from six to ten youngsters each during thecourse of the season. He also did a father's share of work with thechildren. I think he hated hatching them. He would settle upon the roofabove the nest, and chirp in a crabbed, imposed-upon tone until his wifecame out. As she flew briskly away, he would look disconsolately around atthe bright busy world, ruffle his feathers, scold to himself, and thencrawl dutifully in upon the eggs. 

I knew how he felt. It is not in a cock sparrow to enjoy hatching eggs. Irespected him; for though he grumbled, as any normal husband might, stillhe was "drinking fair" with Mrs. Sparrow. He built and brooded and foragedfor his family, if not as sweetly, yet as faithfully, as his wife. Hedeserved his blessed abundance of children. 

Is he songless, sooty, uninteresting, vulgar? Not if you live on a roof. He may be all of this, a pest even, in the country. But upon my roof, forweeks at a stretch, his is the only bird voice I hear. Throughout thespring, and far into the summer, I watch the domestic affairs in theeaves-trough. During the winter, at nightfall, I see little bands andflurries of birds scudding over and dropping behind the high buildings tothe east. They are sparrows on the way to their roost in the elms of anold mid-city burial-ground. 

I not infrequently spy a hawk soaring calmly far away above the roof. Notonly the small ones, like the sharp-shinned, but also the larger, wilderspecies come, and winding up close to the clouds, circle and circle there, trying apparently to see some meaning in the maze of moving, intersectinglines of dots below yonder in the cracks of that smoking, rumbling blur. 

In the spring, from the trees of the Common, which are close, but, exceptfor the crown of one noble English elm, are shut away from me, I hear anoccasional robin and Baltimore oriole. Very rarely a woodpecker will goover. The great northern shrike is a frequent winter visitor, but by illchance I have not been up when he has called at the roof. 

One of these fiend birds haunts a small court only a block away, which isinclosed in a high board fence, topped with nails. He likes the courtbecause of these nails. They are sharp; they will stick clean through thebody of a sparrow. Sometimes the fiend has a dozen sparrows run throughwith them, leaving the impaled bodies to flutter in the wind and finallyfall away. 

In sight from my roof are three tiny patches of the harbor; sometimes afourth, when the big red-funneled liner is gone from her slip. Down tothe water of the harbor in flocks from the north come other wintervisitors, the herring and black-backed gulls. Often during the winter Ifind them in my sky. 

One day they will cross silently over the city in a long straggling line. Again they will fly low, wheeling and screaming, their wild sea-voicesshrill with the sound of storm. If it is thick and gray overhead, thesnow-white bodies of the herring-gulls toss in the wind above the roofslike patches of foam. I hear the sea--the wind, the surf, the wild, fiercetumult of the shore--whenever the white gulls sail screaming into mywinter sky. 

I have never lived under a wider reach of sky than that above my roof. Itoffers a clear, straight, six-minute course to the swiftest wedge of wildgeese. Spring and autumn the geese and ducks go over, and their passage isthe most thrilling event in all my bird calendar. 

It is because the ducks fly high and silent that I see them so rarely. They are always a surprise. You look, and there against the dull sky theymove, strange dark forms that set your blood leaping. But I never see astring of them winging over that I do not think of a huge thousand-leggercrawling the clouds. 

My glimpses of the geese are largely chance, too. Several times, throughthe open window by my table, I have heard the faint, far-off honking, andhave hurried to the roof in time to watch the travelers disappear. Onespring day I was upon the roof when a large belated flock came over, headed north. It was the 20th of April, and the morning had broken verywarm. I could see that the geese were hot and tired. They were barelyclearing the church spires. On they came, their wedge wide and straggling, until almost over me, when something happened. The gander in the leadfaltered and swerved, the wedge lines wavered, the flock rushed togetherin confusion, wheeled, dropped, then broke apart, and honking wildly, turned back toward the bay. 

It was instant and complete demoralization. A stronger gander, I think, could have led the wedge unbroken over the city to some neighboring pond, where the weakest of the stragglers, however, must have fallen from sheerexhaustion. 

Scaling lower and lower across the roofs, the flock had reached thecenter of the city and had driven suddenly into the roar and confusion ofthe streets. Weary from the heat, they were dismayed at the noise, theirleader faltered, and, at a stroke, the great flying wedge went to pieces. 

There is nothing in the life of birds quite so stirring to the imaginationas their migration: the sight of gathering swallows, the sudden appearanceof strange warblers, the call of passing plovers--all are suggestive ofinstincts, movements, and highways that are unseen, unaccountable, andfull of mystery. Little wonder that the most thrilling poem ever writtento a bird begins:

 Whither, midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way?

The question, the mystery in that "certain flight" I never felt so vividlyas from my roof. Here I have often heard the reed-birds and the water-fowlpassing. Sometimes I have heard them going over in the dark. One night Iremember particularly, the sky and the air were so clear and the geese sohigh in the blue. 

Over the fields and wide silent marshes such passing is strange enough. But here I stood above a sleeping city of men, and far above me, so farthat I could only hear them, holding their northward way through thestarlit sky, they passed--whither? and how guided? Was the shining dome ofthe State House a beacon? Did they mark the light at Marblehead?

THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK

[Illustration]

THE HUNTING OF THE WOODCHUCK

 ... The chylde may Rue that ys vn-born, it wos the mor pitte. 

There was murder in my heart. The woodchuck knew it. He never had had athought before, but he had one now. It came hard and heavily, yet itarrived in time; and it was not a slow thought for a woodchuck, either--just a trifle better, indeed, than my own. 

This was the first time I had caught the woodchuck away from his hole. Hehad left his old burrow in the huckleberry hillside, and dug a new holeunder one of my young peach-trees. I had made no objection to hishuckleberry hole. He used to come down the hillside and waddle into theorchard in broad day, free to do and go as he pleased; but not since hebegan to dig under the peach-tree. 

I discovered this new hole when it was only a foot deep, and promptlyfilled it with stones. The next morning the stones were out and the cavitytwo feet deeper. I filled it up again, driving a large squarish piece ofrock into the mouth, tight, certainly stopping all further work, as Ithought. 

There are woodchucks that you can discourage and there are those that youcan't. Three days later the piece of rock and the stones were piled aboutthe butt of the tree and covered with fresh earth, while the hole ran inout of sight, with the woodchuck, apparently, at the bottom of it. 

I had tried shutting him out, now I would try shutting him in. It wascruel--it would have been to anything but a woodchuck; I was ashamed ofmyself for doing it, and went back the following day, really hoping tofind the burrow open. 

Never again would I worry over an imprisoned woodchuck; but then I shouldnever again try to destroy a woodchuck by walling up his hole, any morethan Br'er Fox would try to punish the rabbit by slinging him a secondtime into the brier-patch. 

The burrow was wide open. I had stuffed and rammed the rocks into it, andburied deep in its mouth the body of another woodchuck that my neighbor'sdog had killed. All was cleared away. The deceased relative wasgone--where and how I know not; the stones were scattered on the fartherside of the tree, and the passage neatly swept of all loose sand andpebbles. 

Clearly the woodchuck had come to stay. I meant that he should move. Icould get him into a steel trap, for his wits are not abiding; they comeonly on occasion. Woodchuck lives too much in the ground and tooconstantly beside his own door to grow very wise. He can always betrapped. So can any one's enemy. You can always murder. But no gentlemanstrikes from behind. I hate the steel trap. I have set my last one. Theywould be bitter peaches on that tree if they cost the woodchuck what Ihave seen more than one woodchuck suffer in the horrible jaws of such atrap. 

But is it not perfectly legitimate and gentlemanly to shoot such awoodchuck to save one's peaches? Certainly. So I got the gun andwaited--and waited--and waited. Did you ever wait with a gun until awoodchuck came out of his hole? I never did. A woodchuck has just senseenough to go into his hole--and stay in. 

There were too many woodchucks about and my days were too precious for meto spend any considerable part of my summer watching with a gun for thisone. Besides, I have been known to fire and miss a woodchuck, anyway. 

So I gave up the gun. It was while thinking what I could do next that Icame down the row of young peach-trees and spied the woodchuck out in theorchard, fifty yards away from his hole. He spied me at the same instant, and rose upon his haunches. 

At last we were face to face. The time had come. It would be a fight tothe finish; and a fair fight, too, for all that I had about me in the wayof weapons was a pair of heavy, knee-high hunting-boots, that I had puton against the dew of the early morning. All my thought and energy, all myhope, centered immediately in those boots. 

The woodchuck kept his thoughts in his head. Into his heels he put whatspeed he had; and little as that was, it counted, pieced out with thehead-work. 

Back in my college days I ran a two-mile race--the greatest race of theday, the judges said--and just at the tape lost two gold medals and theglory of a new intercollegiate record because I didn't use my head. Two ofus out of twenty finished, and we finished together, the other fellowtwisting and falling forward, breaking the string with his side, while I, pace for pace with him--didn't think. 

For a moment the woodchuck and I stood motionless, he studying thesituation. I was at the very mouth of his burrow. It was coming to suredeath for him to attempt to get in. Yet it was sure death if he did notget in, for I should run him down. 

Had you been that woodchuck, gentle reader, I wonder if you would havetaken account of the thick-strewn stones behind you, the dense tangle ofdewberry-vines off on your left, the heavy boots of your enemy and hisunthinking rage?

I was vastly mistaken in that woodchuck. A blanker, flabbier face neverlooked into mine. Only the sudden appearance of death could have broughtthe trace of intelligence across it that I caught as the creature droppedon all fours and began to wabble straight away from me over the area ofrough, loose stones. 

With a jump and a yell I was after him, making five yards to his one. Hetumbled along the best he could, and, to my great surprise, directly awayfrom his hole. It was steep downhill. I should land upon him in half adozen bounds more. 

On we went, reckless of the uneven ground, momentum increasing with everyjump, until, accurately calculating his speed and the changing distancebetween us, I rose with a mighty leap, sailed into the air and camedown--just an inch too far ahead--on a round stone, turned my ankle, andwent sprawling over the woodchuck in a heap. 

The woodchuck spilled himself from under me, slid short about, andtumbled off for home by way of the dewberry-patch. 

He had made a good start before I was righted and again in motion. Now itwas steep, very steep, uphill--which did not seem to matter much to thewoodchuck, but made a great difference to me. Then, too, I had counted ona simple, straightaway dash, and had not saved myself for this lap andclimbing home-stretch. 

Still I was gaining, --more slowly this time, --with chances yet good ofovertaking him short of the hole, when, in the thick of thedewberry-vines, I tripped, lunged forward three or four stumbling strides, and saw the woodchuck turn sharp to the right in a bee-line for hisburrow. 

I wheeled, jumped, cut after him, caught him on the toe of my boot, andlifting him, plopped him smoothly, softly into his hole. 

It was gently done. And so beautifully! The whole feat had something ofthe poetic accuracy of an astronomical calculation. And the perfectlylovely dive I helped him make home!

I sat down upon his mound of earth to get myself together and to enjoy itall. What a woodchuck! Perhaps he never could do the trick again; but, then, he won't need to. All the murder was gone from my heart. He hadbeaten the boots. He had beaten them so neatly, so absolutely, that simpledecency compelled me then and there to turn over that Crawford peach-tree, root and stem, to the woodchuck, his heirs and assigns forever. 

By way of celebration he has thrown out nearly a cart-load of sand fromsomewhere beneath the tree, deepening and enlarging his home. My Swedishneighbor, viewing the hole recently, exclaimed: "Dose vuudshuck, I t'inkhim kill dem dree!" Perhaps so. As yet, however, the tree grows on withouta sign of hurt. 

But suppose the tree does die? Well, there is no certainty of its bearinggood fruit. There was once a peddler of trees, a pious man and a Quaker, who made a mistake, selling the wrong tree. Besides, there are other treesin the orchard; and, if necessary, I can buy peaches. 

Yes, but what if other woodchucks should seek other roof-trees in thepeach row? They won't. There are no fashions, no such emulations, out-of-doors. Because one woodchuck moves from huckleberries to apeach-tree is no sign that all the woodchucks on the hillside are going toforsake the huckleberries with him. Only humans are silly enough for that. 

If the woodchucks should come, all of them, it would be extremelyinteresting--an event worth many peaches. 

THREE SERMONS

[Illustration]

THREE SERMONS

I

 Thou shalt not preach. 

The woods were as empty as some great empty house; they were hollow andsilent and somber. I stood looking in among the leafless trees, heavy inspirit at the quiet and gloom, when close by my side spoke a tiny voice. Istarted, so suddenly, so unexpectedly it broke into the wide Decembersilence, so far it echoed through the empty forest halls. 

"What!" I exclaimed, turning in my tracks and addressing a smallbrown-leafed beech. "What! little Hyla, are you still out? You! with asnow-storm brewing and St. Nick due here to-morrow night?" And then fromwithin the bush, or on it, or under it, or over it, came an answer, _Peep, peep, peep!_ small and shrill, dropping into the silence of the woods andstirring it as three small pebbles might drop into the middle of a widesleeping pond. 

It was one of those gray, heavy days of the early winter--one of thevacant, spiritless days of portent that wait hushed and numb before acoming storm. Not a crow, nor a jay, nor a chickadee had heart enough tocheep. But little Hyla, the tree-frog, was nothing daunted. Since the lastweek in February, throughout the spring and the noisy summer on till thisdreary time, he had been cheerfully, continuously piping. This was hislast call. 

_Peep, peep, peep!_ he piped in February; _Peep, peep, peep!_ in August;_Peep, peep, peep!_ in December. But did he?

"He did just that, " replies the scientist, "and that only. "

"Not at all, " I answer. 

"What authority have you?" he asks. "You are not scientific. You aremerely a dreaming, fooling hanger-on to the fields and woods; one of thosewho are forever hearing more than they hear, and seeing more than theysee. We scientists hear with our ears, see with our eyes, feel with ourfingers, and understand with our brains--"

"Just so, just so, " I interrupt, "and you are a worthy but often a prettystupid set. Little Hyla in February, August, and December cries _Peep, peep, peep!_ to you. But his cry to me in February is _Spring, spring, spring!_ And in December--it depends; for I cannot see with my eyes alone, nor hear with my ears, nor feel with my fingers only. You can, and socould Peter Bell. To-day I saw and heard and felt the world all gray andhushed and shrouded; and little Hyla, speaking out of the silence anddeath, called _Cheer, cheer, cheer!_"

II

It is not because the gate is strait and the way narrow that so few getinto the kingdom of the Out-of-Doors. The gate is wide and the way isbroad. The difficulty is that most persons go in too fast. 

If I were asked what virtue, above all others, one must possess in orderto be shown the mysteries of the kingdom of earth and sky, I should say, there are several; I should not know which to name first. There are, however, two virtues very essential and very hard to acquire, namely, theability to keep quiet and to stand still. 

Last summer a fox in two days took fifteen of my chickens. I saw therascal in broad day come down the hill to the chicken-yard. I greatlyenjoy the sight of a wild fox; but fifteen chickens a sight was too high aprice. So I got the gun and chased about the woods half the summer foranother glimpse of the sinner's red hide. I saw him one Sunday as we weredriving into the wood road from church; but never a week-day sight for allmy chasing. 

Along in the early autumn I got home one evening shortly after sundown. Ihad left several cocks of hay spread out in the little meadow, and thoughit was already pretty damp, I took the fork, went down, and cocked it up. 

Returning, I climbed by the narrow, winding path through the pines, outinto the corner of my pasture. It was a bright moonlight night, andleaning back upon the short-handled fork, I stopped in the shadow of thepines to look out over the softly lighted field. 

Off in the woods a mile away sounded the deep, mellow tones of twofoxhounds. Day and night all summer long I had heard them, and all summerlong I had hurried to this knoll and to that for a shot. But the foxalways took the other knoll. 

The echoing cries of the dogs through the silent woods were musical. Soonthey sounded sharp and clear--the hounds were crossing an open stretchleading down to the meadow behind me. As I leaned, listening, I heard nearby a low, uneasy murmuring from a covey of quails sleeping in the brushbeside the path, and before I had time to think what it meant, a foxtrotted up the path I had just climbed, and halted in the edge of theshadows directly at my feet. 

I stood as stiff as a post. He sniffed at my dew-wet boots, backed away, and looked me over curiously. I could have touched him with my fork. Thenhe sat down with just his silver-tipped brush in the silver moonlight, tostudy me in earnest. 

The loud baying of the hounds was coming nearer. How often I had heard it, and, in spite of my lost chickens, how often I had exclaimed, "Poor littletired fox!" But here sat "poor little tired fox" with his tongue in hishead, calmly wondering what kind of stump he had run up against this time. 

I could only dimly see his eyes, but his whole body said: "I can't make itout, for it doesn't move. But so long as it doesn't move I sha'n't bescared. " Then he trotted to this side and to that for a better wind, somewhat afraid, but much more curious. 

His time was up, however. The dogs were yelping across the meadow on hiswarm trail. Giving me a last unsatisfied look, he dropped down the path, directly toward the dogs, and sprang lightly off into the thicket. 

The din of their own voices must have deafened the dogs, or they wouldhave heard him. Round and round they circled, giving the fox ample timefor the study of another "stump" before they discovered that he haddoubled down the path, and still longer time before they crossed the widescentless space of his side jump and once more fastened upon his trail. 

III

Back in my knickerbocker days I once went off on a Sunday-school picnic, and soon, replete with "copenhagen, " I sauntered into the woods alone inquest of less cloying sport. I had not gone far when I picked up a daintylittle ribbon-snake, and having no bag or box along, I rolled him up in myhandkerchief, and journeyed on with the wiggling reptile safely caged ontop of my head under my tight-fitting hat. 

After a time I began to feel a peculiar movement under the hat, notexactly the crawling of a normal snake, but more like that of a snake withlegs. Those were the days when all my soul was bent on the discovery of anew species--of anything; when the whole of life meant a journey to theAcademy of Natural Sciences with something to be named. For just aninstant flashed the hope that I had found an uncursed snake, one of theoriginal ones that went on legs. I reached for the hat, bent over, andpulled it off, and, lo! not a walking snake. Just an ordinary snake, butwith it a live wood-frog!

This, at least, was interesting, the only real piece of magic I have everdone. Into my hat had gone only a live snake, now I brought forth thesnake and a live frog. This was a snake to conjure with; so I tied him upagain and finally got him home. 

The next Sunday the minister preached a temperance sermon, in which hesaid some dreadful things about snakes. The creatures do seem in somedark, horrible way to lurk in the dregs of strong drink: but the ministerwas not discriminating; he was too fierce and sweeping, saying, amongother things, that there was a universal human hatred for snakes, and thatone of the chief purposes of the human heel was to bruise their scalyheads. 

I was not born of my Quaker mother to share this "universal human hatredfor snakes"; but I did get from her a wild dislike for sweeping, generalstatements. After the sermon I ventured to tell the preacher that therewas an exception to this "universal" rule; that all snakes were not addersand serpents, but some were just innocent snakes, and that I had acollection of tame ones which I wished he would come out to see. 

He looked astonished, skeptical, then pained. It was during the days, Ithink, of my "probation, " and into his anxious heart had come the thought, Was I "running well"? But he dismissed the doubt and promised to walk overin the morning. 

His interest amazed me. But, then, preachers quite commonly are differenton Monday. As we went from cage to cage, he said he had read howboa-constrictors eat, and wouldn't I show him how these snakes eat?

We had come to the cage of the little ribbon-snake from the picnic grove, and had arrived just in time to catch him crawling away out of a hole thathe had worked in the rusty mosquito-netting wire of the cover. I caughthim, put him back, and placed a brickbat over the hole. 

I knew that this snake was hungry, because he had had nothing to eat fornearly a week, and the frog which appeared so mysteriously with him in myhat was the dinner that he had given up that day of his capture in hiseffort to escape. 

The minister looked on without a tremor. I took off the brick that hemight see the better. The snake was very long and small around and thetoad, which I had given him, was very short and big around, so that whenit was all over there was a bunch in the middle of the snake comparable tothe lump a prime watermelon would make in the middle of a small boy ifswallowed whole. 

While we were still watching, the snake, having comfortably (for a snake)breakfasted, saw the hole uncovered and stuck out his head. We made nomove. Slowly, cautiously, with his eye upon us, he glided out, up to thebig bunch of breakfast in his middle. This stuck. Frantically he squirmed, whirled, and lashed about, but in vain. He could not pull through. He hadeaten too much. 

There was just one thing for him to do if he would be free: give up thebreakfast of toad (which is much better fare according to snake standardsthan pottage according to ours), as he had given up the dinner of frog. Would he sell his birthright?

Perhaps a snake cannot calculate; perhaps he knows no conflict ofemotions. Yet something very like these processes seemed to go on withinthe scaly little reptile. He ceased all violent struggle, laid his lengthupon the netting, and _seemed_ to think, to weigh the chances, to countthe cost. 

Soon he softly drew back into the cage. A series of severe contortionsfollowed; the obstructing bunch began to move forward, up, farther andfarther, until at last, dazed, squeezed, and half smothered, but entirelyalive and unhurt, the toad appeared and once more opened his eyes to theblessed light. 

The snake quickly put his head through the hole, slipped out again, andglided away into his freedom. He had earned it. The toad deserved hisliberty too, and I took him into the strawberry-patch. 

The minister looked on at it all. Perhaps he didn't learn anything. But Idid. 

THE MARSH

[Illustration]

THE MARSH

 And breathe it free, and breathe it free, By rangy marsh, in lone sea-liberty. 

I

It was a late June day whose breaking found me upon the edge of the greatsalt-marshes which lie behind East Point Light, as the Delaware Bay liesin front of it, and which run in a wide, half-land, half-bay border downthe cape. 

I followed along the black sandy road which goes to the Light until closeto the old Zane's Place, --the last farm-house of the uplands, --when Iturned off into the marsh toward the river. The mosquitos rose from thedamp grass at every step, swarming up around me in a cloud, and streamingoff behind like a comet's tail, which hummed instead of glowed. I was theonly male among them. It was a cloud of females, the nymphs of thesalt-marsh; and all through that day the singing, stinging, smotheringswarm danced about me, rested upon me, covered me whenever I paused, sothat my black leggings turned instantly to a mosquito brown, and all mydress seemed dyed alike. 

Only I did not pause--not often, nor long. The sun came up blisteringlyhot, yet on I walked, and wore my coat, my hands deep down in the pocketsand my head in a handkerchief. At noon I was still walking, and kept onwalking till I reached the bay shore, when a breeze came up, and drove thesinging, stinging fairies back into the grass, and saved me. 

I left the road at a point where a low bank started across the marsh likea long protecting arm reaching out around the hay-meadows, dragging themaway from the grasping river, and gathering them out of the vast undrainedtract of coarse sedges, to hold them to the upland. Passing along the bankuntil beyond the weeds and scrub of the higher borders, I stood with thesky-bound, bay-bound green beneath my feet. Far across, with sailsgleaming white against the sea of sedge, was a schooner, beating slowly upthe river. Laying my course by her, I began to beat slowly out into themarsh through the heavy sea of low, matted hay-grass. 

There is no fresh-water meadow, no inland plain, no prairie with thisrainy, misty, early morning freshness so constant on the marsh; no otherreach of green so green, so a-glitter with seas of briny dew, soregularly, unfailingly fed:

 Look how the grace of the sea doth go About and about through the intricate channels that flow Here and there, Everywhere, Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes, And the marsh is meshed with a million veins!

I imagine a Western wheat-field, half-way to head, could look, in the dewof morning, somewhat like a salt-marsh. It certainly would have at timesthe purple-distance haze, that atmosphere of the sea which hangs acrossthe marsh. The two might resemble each other as two pictures of the sametheme, upon the same scale, one framed and hung, the other not. It is theframing, the setting of the marsh that gives it character, variety, tone, and its touch of mystery. 

For the marsh reaches back to the higher lands of fences, fields of corn, and ragged forest blurs against the hazy horizon; it reaches down to theriver of the reedy flats, coiled like a serpent through the green; itreaches away to the sky where the clouds anchor, where the moon rises, where the stars, like far-off lighthouses, gleam along the edge; and itreaches out to the bay, and on, beyond the white surf-line of meeting, on, beyond the line where the bay's blue and the sky's blue touch, on, far on. 

Here meet land and river, sky and sea; here they mingle and make themarsh. 

A prairie rolls and billows; the marsh lies still, lies as even as asleeping sea. Yet what moods! What changes! What constant variety ofdetail everywhere! In The Marshes of Glynn there was

 A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade, Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade, but not in these Maurice River marshes. Here, to-day, the sun was blazing, kindling millions of tiny suns in the salt-wet blades; and instead ofwaist-high grass, there lay around me acres and acres of the fine richhay-grass, full-grown, but without a blade wider than a knitting-needle ortaller than my knee. It covered the marsh like a deep, thick fur, like awonderland carpet into whose elastic, velvety pile my feet sank and sank, never quite feeling the floor. Here and there were patches of highersedges, green, but of differing shades, which seemed spread upon the grasscarpet like long-napped rugs. 

Ahead of me the even green broke suddenly over a shoal of sand into tall, tufted grasses, into rose, mallow, and stunted persimmon bushes, foaming, on nearer view, with spreading dogbane blossoms. Off toward the bayanother of these shoals, mole-hill high in the distance, ran across themarsh for half a mile, bearing a single broken file of trees--sentinelsthey seemed, some of them fallen, others gaunt and wind-beaten, watchingagainst the sea. 

These were the lookouts and the resting-places for passing birds. Duringthe day, whenever I turned in their direction, a crow, a hawk, or somesmaller bird was seen upon their dead branches. 

Naturally the variety of bird life upon the marsh is limited; but there isby no means the scarcity here which is so often noted in the forests andwild prairies of corresponding extent. Indeed, the marsh was birdy--richin numbers if not in species. Underfoot, in spots, sang the marsh-wrens;in larger patches the sharp-tailed sparrows; and almost as wide-spread andconstant as the green was the singing of the seaside sparrows. Overheadthe fish-hawks crossed frequently to their castle nest high on the top ofa tall white oak along the land edge of the marsh; in the neighborhood ofthe sentinel trees a pair of crows were busy trying (it seemed to me) tofind an oyster, a crab--something big enough to choke, for just oneminute, the gobbling, gulping clamor of their infant brood. But the deardevouring monsters could not be choked, though once or twice I thought bytheir strangling cries that father crow, in sheer desperation, had broughtthem oysters with the shells on. Their awful gaggings died away at dusk. Besides the crows and fish-hawks, a harrier would now and then comeskimming close along the grass. Higher up, the turkey-buzzards circled allday long; and once, setting my blood leaping and the fish-hawks screaming, there sailed over, far away in the blue, a bald-headed eagle, his snowyneck and tail flashing in the sunlight as he careened among the clouds. 

In its blended greens the marsh that morning offered one of the mostsatisfying drinks of color my eyes ever tasted. The areas of differentgrasses were often acres in extent, so that the tints, shading from thelightest pea-green of the thinner sedges to the blue-green of the rushes, to the deep emerald-green of the hay-grass, merged across their broadbands into perfect harmony. 

As fresh and vital as the color was the breath of the marsh. There is nobank of violets stealing and giving half so sweet an odor to my nostrils, outraged by a winter of city smells, as the salty, spray-laden breath ofthe marsh. It seems fairly to line the lungs with ozone. I know howgrass-fed cattle feel at the smell of salt. I have the concentrated thirstof a whole herd when I catch that first whiff of the marshes after awinter, a year it may be, of unsalted inland air. The smell of itstampedes me. I gallop to meet it, and drink, drink, drink deep of it, myblood running redder with every draught. 

II

I had waded out into the meadow perhaps two hundred yards, leaving a darkbruised trail in the grass, when I came upon a nest of the long-billedmarsh-wren. It was a bulky house, and so overburdened its frail sedgesupports that it lay almost upon the ground, with its little round doorwaywide open to the sun and rain. They must have been a young couple whobuilt it, and quite inexperienced. I wonder they had not abandoned it;for a crack of light into a wren's nest would certainly addle the eggs. They are such tiny, dusky, tucked-away things, and their cradle is so deepand dark and hidden. There were no fatalities, I am sure, following myefforts to prop the leaning structure, though the wrens were just as surethat it was all a fatality--utterly misjudging my motives. As a rule, Ihave never been able to help much in such extremities. Either I arrive toolate, or else I blunder. 

I thought, for a moment, that it was the nest of the long-billed's cousin, the short-billed marsh-wren, that I had found--which would have been a gemindeed, with pearly eggs instead of chocolate ones. Though I was out forthe mere joy of being out, I had really come with a hope of discoveringthis mousy mite of a wren, and of watching her ways. It was like hoping towatch the ways of the "wunk. " Several times I have been near these littlewrens; but what chance has a pair of human eyes with a skulking fourinches of brownish streaks and bars in the middle of a marsh! Such birdsare the everlasting despair of the naturalist, the salt of his earth. Thebelief that a pair of them dwelt somewhere in this green expanse, that Imight at any step come upon them, made me often forget the mosquitos. 

When I reached the ridge of rose and mallow bushes, two wrens beganmuttering in the grass with different notes and tones from those of thelong-billed. I advanced cautiously. Soon one flashed out and whipped backamong the thick stems again, exposing himself just long enough to show me_stellaris_, the little short-billed wren I was hunting. 

I tried to stand still for a second glimpse and a clue to the nest; butthe mosquitos! Things have come to a bad pass with the bird-hunter, whoseonly gun is an opera-glass, when he cannot stand stock-still for an hour. His success depends upon his ability to take root. He needs light feet, adivining mind, and many other things, but most of all he needs patience. There are few mortals, however, with mosquito-proof patience--one thatwould stand the test here. Remembering a meadow in New England wherestellaris nested, I concluded to wait till chance took me thither, andpassed on. 

This ridge of higher ground proved to be a mosquito roost--a thousandhere to one in the deeper, denser grass. As I hurried across I noted withgreat satisfaction that the pink-white blossoms of the spreading dogbanewere covered with mosquito carcasses. It lessened my joy somewhat to find, upon examination, that all the victims were males. Either they had drunkpoison from the flowers, or else, and more likely, they had been unable tofree their long-haired antennæ from the sticky honey into which they haddipped their innocent beaks. Several single flowers had trapped three, andfrom one blossom I picked out five. If we could bring the dogbane to brewa cup which would be fatal to the females, it might be a good plant toraise in our gardens along with the eucalyptus and the castor-oil plants. 

Everywhere as I went along, from every stake, every stout weed and toppingbunch of grass, trilled the seaside sparrows--a weak, husky, monotonoussong, of five or six notes, a little like the chippy's, more tuneful, perhaps, but not so strong. They are dark, dusky birds, of a grayisholive-green hue, with a conspicuous yellow line before the eye, andyellow upon the shoulder. 

There seems to be a sparrow of some kind for every variety of land betweenthe poles. Mountain-tops, seaside marshes, inland prairies, swamps, woods, pastures--everywhere, from Indian River to the Yukon, a sparrow nests. Yetone can hardly associate sparrows with marshes, for they seem out of placein houseless, treeless, half-submerged stretches. These are the haunts ofthe shyer, more secretive birds. Here the ducks, rails, bitterns, coots, --birds that can wade and swim, eat frogs and crabs, --seem naturallyat home. The sparrows are perchers, grain-eaters, free-fliers, andsingers; and they, of all birds, are the friends and neighbors of man. This is no place for them. The effect of this marsh life upon the flightand song of these two species was very marked. Both showed unmistakablevocal powers which long ago would have been developed under the stimulusof human listeners; and during all my stay (so long have they crept andskulked about through the low marsh paths) I did not see one rise ahundred feet into the air, nor fly straight away for a hundred yards. They would get up just above the grass, and flutter and drop--a puttering, short-winded, apoplectic struggle, very unbecoming and unworthy. 

By noon I had completed a circle and recrossed the lighthouse road in thedirection of the bay. A thin sheet of lukewarm water lay over all thissection. The high spring tides had been reinforced by unusually heavyrains during April and May, giving a great area of pasture and hay landback, for that season, to the sea. Descending a copsy dune from the road, I surprised a brood of young killdeers feeding along the drift at the edgeof the wet meadow. They ran away screaming, leaving behind a pair ofspotted sandpipers, "till-tops, " that had been wading with them in theshallow water. The sandpipers teetered on for a few steps, then rose at myapproach, scaled nervously out over the drowned grass, and, circling, alighted near where they had taken wing, continuing instantly with theirhunt, and calling _Tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet_, and teetering, alwaysteetering, as they tiptoed along. 

If perpetual motion is still a dream of the physicist, he might get anidea by carefully examining the way the body of till-top is balanced onits needle legs. If till-tops have not been tilting forever, and shall notgo on tilting forever, it is because something is wrong with the mechanismof the world outside their little spotted bodies. Surely the easiest, least willed motion in all the universe is this sandpiper's teeter, teeter, teeter, as it hurries peering and prying along the shore. 

Killdeers and sandpipers are noisy birds; and one would know, after half aday upon the marsh, even if he had never seen these birds before, thatthey could not have been bred here. For however

 candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free

the marsh may seem to one coming suddenly from the wooded uplands, it willnot let one enter far without the consciousness that silence and secrecylie deeper here than in the depths of the forest glooms. The true birds ofthe marsh, those that feed and nest in the grass, have the spirit of thegreat marsh-mother. The sandpiper is not her bird. It belongs to theshore, living almost exclusively along sandy, pebbly margins, the marginsof any, of almost every water, from Delaware Bay to the tiny bubblingspring in some Minnesota pasture. Neither is the killdeer her bird. Theupland claims it, plover though it be. A barren, stony hillside, or even alast year's corn-field left fallow, is a better-loved breast to thekilldeer than the soft brooding breast of the marsh. There are nograss-birds so noisy as these two. Both of them lay their eggs in pebblenests; and both depend largely for protection upon the harmony of theircolors with the general tone of their surroundings. 

I was still within sound of the bleating killdeers when a rather large, greenish-gray bird flapped heavily but noiselessly from a muddy spot inthe grass to the top of a stake and faced me. Here was a child of themarsh. Its bolt-upright attitude spoke the watcher in the grass; then asit stretched its neck toward me, bringing its body parallel to the ground, how the shape of the skulker showed! This bird was not built to fly nor toperch, but to tread the low, narrow paths of the marsh jungle, silent, swift, and elusive as a shadow. 

It was the clapper-rail, the "marsh-hen. " One never finds such acombination of long legs, long toes, long neck and bill, with this longbut heavy hen-like body, outside the meadows and marshes. The grass oughtto have been alive with the birds: it was breeding-time. But I think thehigh tides must have delayed them or driven them elsewhere, for I did notfind an egg, nor hear at nightfall their colony-cry, so common at dusk anddawn in the marshes just across on the coast about Townsend's Inlet. Thereat sunset in nesting-time one of the rails will begin to call--a loud, clapping roll; a neighbor takes it up, then another and another, thecircle of cries widening and swelling until the whole marsh is a-clatter. 

Heading my way with a slow, labored stroke came one of the fish-hawks. Shewas low down and some distance away, so that I got behind a post beforeshe saw me. The marsh-hen spied her first, and dropped into the grass. Onshe came, her white breast and belly glistening, and in her talons a bigglistening fish. It was a magnificent catch. "Bravo!" I should haveshouted--rather I shouldn't; but here she was right over me, and theinstinct of the boy, of the savage, had me before I knew, and leaping out, I whirled my cap and yelled to wake the marsh. The startled hawk jerked, keeled, lifted with a violent struggle, and let go her hold. Down fell thewrithing, twisting fish at my feet. It was a splendid striped bass, weighing at least four pounds, and still live enough to flop. 

I felt mean as I picked up the useless thing and looked far away to thegreat nest with its hungry young. I was no better than the bald eagle, thelazy robber-baron, who had stolen the dinner of these same young hawks theday before. 

Their mother had been fishing up the river and had caught a tremendouseel. An eel can hold out to wriggle a very long time. He has no vitals. Even with talon-tipped claws he is slippery and more than a clawful; sothe old hawk took a short cut home across the railroad-track and thecorner of the woods where stands the eagle tree. 

She could barely clear the tree-tops, and, with the squirming of the eelabout her legs, had apparently forgotten that the eagle lived along thisroad, or else in her struggle to get the prize home she was risking theold dragon's being away. He was not away. I have no doubt that he had beenwatching her all the time from some high perch, and just as she reachedthe open of the railroad-track, where the booty would not fall among thetrees, he appeared. His first call, mocking, threatening, commanding, shotthe poor hawk through with terror. She screamed; she tried to rise andescape; but without a second's parley the great king drove down upon her. She dropped the fish, dived, and dodged the blow, and the robber, with arushing swoop that was glorious in its sweep, in its speed and ease, caught the eel within a wing's reach of me and the track. 

I did not know what to do with my spoil. Somewhat relieved, upon lookingaround, to find that even the marsh-hen had not been an eye-witness to myknightly deed, I started with the fish and my conscience toward thedistant nest, determined to climb into it and leave the catch with thehelpless, dinnerless things for whom it was intended. 

I am still carrying that fish. How seldom we are able to restore the bareexaction, to say nothing of the fourfold! My tree was harder to climb thanZacchæus's. Mine was an ancient white oak, with the nest set directly uponits dead top. I had stood within this very nest twelve years before; buteven with the help of my conscience I could not get into it now. Not thatI had grown older or larger. Twelve years do not count unless they carryone past forty. It was the nest that had grown. Gazing up at it, I readilybelieved the old farmer in the Zane's house who said it would take a pairof mules to haul it. He thought it larger than one that blew down in themarsh the previous winter, which made three cart-loads. 

One thinks of Stirling and of the castles frowning down upon the Rhine ashe comes out of the wide, flat marsh beneath this great nest, crowningthis loftiest eminence in all the region. But no château of the Alps, nobeetling crag-lodged castle of the Rhine, can match the fish-hawk's nestfor sheer boldness and daring. Only the eagles' nests upon the fiercedizzy pinnacles in the Yosemite surpass the home of the fish-hawk inunawed boldness. The aery of the Yosemite eagle is the most sublimelydefiant of things built by bird, or beast, or man. 

A fish-hawk will make its nest upon the ground, or a hummock, a stump, abuoy, a chimney--upon anything near the water that offers an adequateplatform; but its choice is the dead top of some lofty tree where thepathway for its wide wings is open and the vision range is free for milesaround. 

How dare the bird rear such a pile upon so slight and towering a support!How dare she defy the winds, which, loosened far out on the bay, comedriving across the cowering, unresisting marsh! She is too bold sometimes. I have known more than one nest to fall in a wild May gale. Many a nest, built higher and wider year after year, while all the time its deadsupport has been rotting and weakening, gets heavy with the wet of winter, and some night, under the weight of an ice-storm, comes crashing to theearth. 

Yet twelve years had gone since I scaled the walls and stood within thisnest; and with patience and hardihood enough I could have done it againthis time, no doubt. I remember one nest along Maurice River, perched sohigh above the gums of the swamp as to be visible from my home across amile of trees, that has stood a landmark for the oystermen this score ofyears. 

The sensations of my climb into this fish-hawk's nest of the marsh arevivid even now. Going up was comparatively easy. When I reached the forksholding the nest, I found I was under a bulk of sticks and corn-stalkswhich was about the size of an ordinary haycock or an unusually largewash-tub. By pulling out, pushing aside, and breaking off the sticks, Iworked a precarious way through the four feet or more of debris andscrambled over the edge. There were two eggs. Taking them in my hands, soas not to crush them, I rose carefully to my feet. 

Upright in a hawk's nest! Sixty feet in the air, on the top of a gaunt oldwhite oak, high above the highest leaf, with the screaming hawks about myhead, with marsh and river and bay lying far around! It was a moment ofexultation; and the thrill of it has been transmitted through the years. My body has been drawn to higher places since; but my soul has neverquite touched that altitude again, for I was a boy then. 

Nor has it ever shot swifter, deeper into the abyss of mortal terror thanfollowed with my turning to descend. I looked down into empty air. Feetforemost I backed over the rim, clutching the loose sticks and feeling fora foothold. They snapped with the least pressure; slipped and fell if Ipushed them, or stuck out into my clothing. Suddenly the sticks in myhands pulled out, my feet broke through under me, and for an instant Ihung at the side of the nest in the air, impaled on a stub that caught myblouse as I slipped. 

There is a special Providence busy with the boy. 

This huge nest of the fish-hawks was more than a nest; it was a castle invery truth, in the sheltering crevices of whose uneven walls a smallcommunity of purple grackles lived. Wedged in among the protruding stickswas nest above nest, plastering the great pile over, making it almostgrassy with their loose flying ends. I remember that I counted more thantwenty of these crow-blacks' nests the time I climbed the tree, and thatI destroyed several in breaking my way up the face of the structure. 

Do the blackbirds nest here for the protection afforded by the presence ofthe hawks? Do they come for the crumbs which fall from these greatpeople's table? Or is it the excellent opportunity for social life offeredby this convenient apartment-house that attracts?

The purple grackles are a garrulous, gossipy set, as every one knows. Theyare able-bodied, not particularly fond of fish, and inclined to seek theneighborhood of man, rather than to come out here away from him. They makevery good American rooks. So I am led to think it is their love of"neighboring" that brings them about the hawk's nest. If this surmise iscorrect, then the presence of two families of English sparrows among themmight account for there being only eight nests now, where a decade agothere were twenty. 

I was amused--no longer amazed--at finding the sparrows here. The seed ofthese birds shall possess the earth. Is there even now a spot into whichthe bumptious, mannerless, ubiquitous little pleb has not pushed himself?If you look for him in the rain-pipes of the Fifth Avenue mansions, he isthere; if you search for him in the middle of the wide, silent salt-marsh, he is there; if you take--but it is vain to take the wings of the morning, or of anything else, in the hope of flying to a spot where the stumpylittle wings of the English sparrow have not already carried him. 

There is something really admirable in the unqualified sense of ownership, the absolute want of diffidence, the abiding self-possession and coolnessof these birds. One cannot measure it in the city streets, where everybodyjostles and stares. It can be appreciated only in the marsh: here in thesilence, the secrecy, the withdrawing, where even the formidable-lookingfiddler-crabs shy and sidle into their holes as you pass; here, where thesparrows may perch upon the rim of a great hawk's nest, twist their necks, ogle you out of countenance, and demand what business brought you to themarsh. 

I hunted round for a stone when one of them buttonholed me. He wasn'tinsolent, but he was impertinent. The two hawks and the blackbirds flewoff as I came up; but the sparrows stayed. They were the only ones inpossession as I moved away; and they will be the only ones in possessionwhen I return. If that is next summer, then I shall find a colony oftwenty sparrow families around the hawk's nest. The purple grackles willbe gone. And the fish-hawks? Only the question of another year or so whenthey, too, shall be dispossessed and gone. But where will they go toescape the sparrows?

III

From a mile away I turned to look back at the "cripple" where towered thetall white oak of the hawks. Both birds were wheeling about the castlenest, their noble flight full of the freedom of the marsh, their piercingcries voicing its wildness. And how free, how wild, how untouched by humanhands the wide plain seemed! Sea-like it lay about me, circled southwardfrom east to west with the rim of the sky. 

I moved on toward the bay. The sun had dropped to the edge of the marsh, its level-lined shafts splintering into golden fire against the curtainedwindows of the lighthouse. It would soon be sunset. For some time therehad been a quiet gurgling and lisping down in the grass, but it had meantnothing, until, of a sudden, I heard the rush of a wave along the beach:the tide was coming in. And with it came a breeze, a moving, briny, bay-cooled breeze that stirred the grass with a whisper of night. 

Once more I had worked round to the road. It ran on ahead of me, up abushy dune, and forked, one branch leading off to the lighthouse, theother straight out to the beach, out against the white of the breakingwaves. 

The evening purple was deepening on the bay when I mounted the dune. Bandsof pink and crimson clouded the west, a thin cold wash of blue veiled theeast; and overhead, bayward, landward, everywhere, the misting and theshadowing of the twilight. 

Between me and the white wave-bars at the end of the road gleamed a patchof silvery water--the returning tide. As I watched, a silvery streamletbroke away and came running down the wheel track. Another streamlet, lagging a little, ran shining down the other track, stopped, rose, andcreeping slowly to the middle of the road, spread into a second gleamingpatch. They grew, met--and the road for a hundred feet was covered withthe bay. 

As the crimson paled into smoky pearl, the blue changed green and gold, and big at the edge of the marsh showed the rim of the moon. 

Weird hour! Sunset, moonrise, flood-tide, and twilight together weavingthe spell of the night over the wide waking marsh. Mysterious, sinisteralmost, seemed the swift, stealthy creeping of the tide. It wassurrounding and crawling in upon me. Already it stood ankle-deep in theroad, and was reaching toward my knees, a warm thing, quick and moving. Itslipped among the grasses and into the holes of the crabs with a smotheredbubbling; it disturbed the seaside sparrows sleeping down in the sedge andkept them springing up to find new beds. How high would it rise? Behind meon the road it had crawled to the foot of the dune. Would it let methrough to the mainland if I waited for the flood?

It would be high tide at nine o'clock. Finding a mound of sand on theshore that the water could hardly cover, I sat down to watch thetide-miracle; for here, surely, I should see the wonder worked, so widewas the open, so full, so frank the moon. 

In the yellow light I could make out the line of sentinel trees across themarsh, and off on the bay a ship, looming dim in the distance, coming onwith wind and tide. There were no sounds except the long regular wash ofthe waves, the stir of the breeze in the chafing sedges, and the creepystepping of the water weaving everywhere through the hidden paths of thegrass. Presently a night-hawk began to flit about me, then another andanother, skimming just above the marsh as silent as the shadows. What wasthat? Something moved across the moon. In a moment, bat-like and hugeagainst the great yellow disk, appeared a marsh-owl. He was coming to lookat me. What was I that dared remain abroad in the marsh after the risingof the moon? that dared invade this eery realm, this night-spread, tide-crept, half-sealand where he was king? How like a goblin he seemed! Ithought of Grendel, and listened for the splash of the fen-monster's stepsalong the edge of the bay. But only the owl came. Down, down, down hebobbed, till I could almost feel the fanning of his wings. How silent! Hislong legs hung limp, his body dangled between those soft wide wings withinreach of my face. Yet I heard no sound. Mysterious creature! I was gladwhen he ceased his ghostly dance about me and made off. 

It was nine o'clock. The waves had ceased to wash against the sand, forthe beach was gone; the breeze had died away; the stir of the water in thegrass was still. Only a ripple broke now and then against my littleisland. The bay and the marsh were one. 

 How still the plains of the waters be! The tide is in his ecstasy. The tide is at his highest height: And it is night. 

CALICO AND THE KITTENS

[Illustration]

CALICO AND THE KITTENS

One spring day I found myself the sole help of two blind, nakedinfants--as near a real predicament as a man could well get. What did itmatter that they had long tails and were squirrels? They were infants justthe same; and any kind of an infant on the hands of any mere man is a realtragedy. 

As I looked at the two callow things in the grass, a dismay and weakhelplessness quite overcame me. The way they squirmed and shivered andsqueaked worked upon me down even to my knees. I felt sick and foolish. Both of their parents were dead. Their loose leaf-nest overhead had beenriddled with shot. I had climbed up and found them; I had brought themdown; I must--feed them! The other way of escape were heathen. 

But how could I feed them? Nipples, quills, spoons--none of them would fitthese mites of mouths. What a miserable mother I was! How poorly equippedfor foundlings! They were dying for lack of food; and as they pawed aboutand whimpered in my hands I devoutly wished the shot had put them all outof misery together. I was tempted to turn heathen and despatch them. 

Unhappy but resolute, I started homeward, determined to rear thosesquirrels, if it could be done. On my way I remembered--and it came to mewith a shock--that one of my neighbor's cats had a new batch of kittens. They were only a few days old. Might not Calico, their mother, be inducedto adopt the squirrels!

Nothing could be more absurd. The kittens were three times larger than thesquirrels. Even had they been the same size, did I think the oldthree-colored cat could be fooled? that she might not know a kitten ofhers from some other mother's--squirrel? I was desperate indeed. Calicowas a hunter. She had eaten more gray squirrels, perhaps, than I had everseen. She would think I had been foraging for her--the mother of sevengreen kittens!--and would take my charges as titbits. Still I wasdetermined to try. 

My neighbor's kittens were enough and to spare. One of Calico's lastyear's lot still waited a good home; and here were seven more to be caredfor. Might not two of these be spirited away, far away; the two squirrelssubstituted, and the old cat be none the wiser?

I went home by way of my neighbor's, and found Calico in the basementcurled up asleep with her babies. She roused and purred questioningly aswe bent over the basket, and watched with concern, but with no anxiety, astwo of her seven were lifted out and put inside a hat upon a table. Shewas perfectly used to having her kittens handled. True, strange things hadhappened to them. But that was long ago; and there had been so very manykittens that no one mother could remember about them all. She trustedus--with an ear pricked and eyes watchful. But they were safe, and in aprideful, self-conscious, young-mother way she began to wash the five. 

Some one stood between her and the hat when the kittens were lifted outand the squirrels were put in their place. Calico did not see. For a timeshe thought no more about them; she was busy washing and showing theothers. By and by it began to look as though she had forgotten that therewere more than five. She could not count. But most mothers can _number_their children, even if they cannot count, and soon Calico began tofidget, looking up at the hat which the hungry, motherless squirrels keptrocking. Then she leaped out upon the floor, purring, and bounded upon thetable, going straight to the young squirrels. 

There certainly was an expression of surprise and mystification on herface as she saw the change that had come over those kittens. They hadshrunk and faded from two or three bright colors to a single pale pink. She looked again and sniffed them. Their odor had changed, too. She turnedto the watchers about the table, but they said nothing. She hardly knewwhat to think. She was half inclined to leave them and go back to thebasket, when one of the squirrels whimpered--a genuine, universal babywhimper. That settled it. She was a mother, and whatever else these thingsin the hat might be, they were babies. That was enough, especially as sheneeded just this much baby here in the hat to make good what was lackingin the basket. 

With a soft, caressing purr she stepped gently into the hat, took one ofthe squirrels by the neck, brought it to the edge of the table, and laidit down for a firmer hold; then sprang lightly to the floor. Over to thebasket she walked and dropped it tenderly among her other babies. Then, having brought the remaining one and deposited that with the samemother-care, she got into the basket herself and curled downcontentedly--her heart all whole. 

And this is how strange a thing mother-love is! The performance wasscarcely believable. Could she be so love-blind as not to see what theywere and not eat them? But when she began to lick the little interlopersand cuddle them down to their dinner as if they were her own genuinekittens, there could be no more doubt or fear. 

The squirrels do not know to this day that Calico is not their realmother. From the first they took her mother's milk and mother's love asrightfully and thanklessly as the kittens, growing, not like the kittensat all, but into the most normal of squirrels, round and fat andsplendid-tailed. 

Calico clearly recognized some difference between the two kinds ofkittens, but _what_ difference always puzzled her. She would clean up akitten and comb it slick, then turn to one of the squirrels and wash it, but rarely, if ever, completing the work because of some disconcertingun-catlike antic. As the squirrels grew older they also grew friskier, andsoon took the washing as the signal for a frolic. As well try to wash abubble. They were bundles of live springs, twisting out of her paws, dancing over her back, leaping, kicking, tumbling as she had never seen akitten do in all her richly kittened experience. 

I don't know why, but Calico was certainly fonder of these two freaks thanof her own normal children. Long after the latter were weaned she nursedand mothered the squirrels. I have frequently seen them let into thekitchen when the old cat was there, and the moment they got through thedoor they would rush toward her, dropping chestnuts or cookies by the way. She in turn would hurry to meet them with a little purr of greeting fullof joy and affection. They were shamefully big for such doings. Thekittens had quit it long ago. Calico herself, after a while, came to feelthe impropriety of mothering these strapping young ones, and in a weak, indulgent way tried to stop it. But the squirrels were persistent andwould not go about their business at all with an ordinary cuff. She wouldput them off, run away from them, slap them, and make believe to bite; butnot until she did bite, and sharply too, would they be off. All thisseemed very strange and unnatural; yet a stranger thing happened one day, when Calico brought in to her family a full-grown gray squirrel which shehad caught in the woods. She laid it down on the floor and called thekittens and squirrels to gather around. They came, and as the squirrelssniffed at the dead one on the floor there was hardly a mark ofdifference in their appearance. It might have been one of Calico's ownnursing that lay there dead, so far as any one save Calico could see. Andwith her the difference, I think, was more of smell than of sight. But sheknew her own; and though she often found her two out among the trees ofthe yard, she never was mistaken, nor for an instant made as if to hurtthem. 

Yet they could not have been more entirely squirrel had their own squirrelmother nurtured them. Calico's milk and love went all to cat in her ownkittens, and all to squirrel in these that she adopted. No single hair oftheirs turned from its squirrel-gray to any one of Calico's three colors;no single squirrel trait became the least bit catlike. 

Indeed, as soon as the squirrels could run about they forsook theclumsy-footed kittens under the stove and scampered up back of thehot-water tank, where they built a nest. Whenever Calico entered thekitchen purring, out would pop their heads, and down they would come, understanding the mother language as well as the kittens, and usuallybeating the kittens to the mother's side. 

So far from teaching them to climb and build nests behind water-tanks, their foster-mother never got over her astonishment at it. All they neededfrom her, all they needed and would have received from their own squirrelmother, was nourishment and protection until their teeth and legs grewstrong. Wits were born with them; experience was sure to come to them; andwith wits and experience there is nothing known among squirrels of theirkind that these two would not learn for themselves. 

And there was not much known to squirrels that these two did not know, apparently without even learning. As they grew in size they increasedexceedingly in naughtiness, and were banished shortly from the kitchen toan ell or back woodshed. They celebrated this distinction by dropping somehickory-nuts into a rubber boot hanging on the wall, and then gnawing ahole through the toe of the boot in order to extract the hidden nuts. Wasit mischief that led them to gnaw through rather than go down the top? Ordid something get stuffed into the top of the boot after the nuts weredropped in? And did the squirrels _remember_ that the nuts were in there, or did they _smell_ them through the rubber?

One woodshed is big enough only for two squirrels. The family movedeverything out but the wood, and the squirrels took possession for thewinter. Their first nest had been built behind the hot-water tank. Theyknew _how_ to build without any teaching. But knowing how is not all thereis to know about building; knowing _where_ is very important, and thisthey had to learn. 

Immediately on coming to the woodshed the squirrels began their winternest, a big, bulky, newspaper affair, which they placed up in thenorthwest corner of the shed directly under the shingles. Here they slepttill late in the fall. This was the shaded side and the most exposedcorner of the whole house; but all went well until one night when theweather suddenly turned very cold. A strong wind blew from the northwesthard upon the squirrels' nest. 

The next day there was great activity in the woodshed--a scampering oflively feet, that began early in the morning and continued far towardnoon. The squirrels were moving. They gathered up their newspaper nestand carried it--diagonally--across the shed from the shaded northwest tothe sunny southeast corner, where they rebuilt and slept snug throughoutthe winter. 

Calico did not teach them this; neither would their own squirrel motherhave taught them. They knew how, to begin with. They knew _where_ afterone night of experience, which in this case had to be a night of shivers. 

THE SPARROW ROOST

[Illustration]

THE SPARROW ROOST

An early December twilight was settling over Boston, a thick foggy murkthat soaked down full of smoke and smell and chill. The streets were oozywith a wet snow which had fallen through the afternoon and had beentrodden into mud; and draughty with an east wind, that would have passedunnoticed across the open fields, but which drew up these narrow flues andsent a shiver down one's back in spite of coats. It was half-past five. The stores were closing, their clerks everywhere eddying into the noisystreams of wheels and hoofs still pouring up and down. The traffic tidehad turned, but had not yet ebbed away. 

And this was evening! the coming night! I moved along with the crowd, homesick for the wideness and quiet of the country, for the soughing ofthe pines, the distant bang of a barn door, the night cry of guineas fromsome neighboring farm, when, in the hurry and din, I caught the cry ofbird voices, and looking up, found that I had stumbled upon a birdroost--at the very heart of the city! I was in front of King's ChapelBurial Ground, whose half-dozen leafless trees were alive with noisysparrows. 

The crowd swept on. I halted behind a waste-barrel by the iron fence andforgot the soughing pines and clacking guineas. 

Bird roosts of this size are no common find. I remember a huge fireplacechimney that stood near my home, into which a cloud of swallows used toswarm for a few nights preceding the fall migration; I lived some yearsclose to the pines at the head of Cubby Hollow, where great flocks ofcrows slept nightly throughout the winter; but these, besides now andagain a temporary resting-place, a mere caravansary along the route of themigrants, were all I had happened upon. Here was another, bordering a citystreet, overhanging the street, with a blazing electric light to get intobed by!

Protected by the barrel from the jostle on the sidewalk, I waited by theancient graveyard until the electric lights grew bright, until everyfussing sparrow was quiet, until I could see only little gray balls andblurs in the trees through the misty drizzle that came down with thenight. Then I turned toward my own snug roost, five flights up, next theroof, and just a block away, as the sparrows fly, from this roost oftheirs. I was glad to have them so near me. 

The windows of my roost look out over roofs of slate, painted tin, andtarry pebbles, into a chimney-fenced plot of sky. Occasionally, during thewinter, a herring-gull from the harbor swims into this bit of smoky blue;frequently a pigeon, sometimes a flock, sails past; and in the summerdusk, after the swallows quit it, a city-haunting night-hawk climbs out ofthe forest of chimney-pots, up, up above the smoke for his boomingroofward swoop. But winter and summer, save along through June, thesparrows, as evening falls, cut across the sky field on their way to theroost in the old burial-ground. There go two, there twoscore in awhirling, scudding flurry, like a swift-blown bunch of autumn leaves. Formore than an hour they keep passing--till the dusk turns to darkness, tillall are tucked away in bed. 

One would scarcely recognize the birds as they sweep past in theseflurries, their flight is so unlike their usual clumsy scuttle as they getout of one's way along the street. They are lumpish and short-winged onthe street; they labor and lumber off with a sidewise twist to theirbodies that reminds one of a rheumatic old dog upon the trot. Whatsuggestion of grace or swiftness about them upon the ground? But watchthem in their evening flight. It is a revelation. They rise above thehouses and shoot across my sky like a charge of canister. I can almosthear them whizz. Down by the cemetery I have seen them dash into view highup in the slit of sky, dive for the trees, dart zigzag like a madlyplunging kite, and hurl themselves, as soft as breaths, among thebranches. 

This is going to bed with a vengeance. I never saw any other birds get toroost with such velocity. It is characteristic, however; the sparrow neverdoes anything by halves. The hurry is not caused by any mite of anxiety orfear, rather from pure excess of spirit; for after rearing three broodsduring the summer, he has such a superabundance of vim that a winter offoraging and fighting is welcome exercise. The strenuous life is his kindof life. When the day's hunt is over and he turns back to his bed, why notrace it out with his neighbors? And so they come--chasing, dodging, tagging neck and neck, all spurting to finish first at the roost. 

We may not love him; but he has constitution and snap. And these things docount. 

One April morning, the 6th, I went down to the roost at three o'clock. Thesparrows were sleeping soundly. It was yet night. Had the dawn beenreaching up above the dark walls that shut the east away from the hightree-tops, the garish street light would have kept it dim. The trees weresilent and stirless, as quiet as the graves beneath them--more quiet; infact; for there issued from a grated hole among the tombs the sound of ananvil, deep down and muffled, but unmistakably ringing, as if GovernorWinthrop were forging chains in his vault. Then came a rush, a deadenedroar, and an emanation of dank gaseous breath, such as the dead alonebreathe. 

It was only the passing of a tool-car in the subway underneath thecemetery, and the hammering of a workman at a forge in a niche of thetunnel. But, rising out of the tombs, it was gruesome and unearthly in thenight-quiet. 

The sparrows did not mind the sound. Maybe it ascended as a pleasantmurmur to them and shaped their dreams, as dream-stuff drifts to theirsweet-voiced cousins in the meadows with the lap and lave of the streams. A carriage rolled by. The clank of hoofs disturbed none of them. Some oneslammed the door of an apothecary-shop across the street, and hurried off. Not a sparrow stirred. 

I was trying to see whether the birds slept with their heads beneath theirwings. Apparently they did, for I could not make out a head, though someof the sleepers hung over the street within ten feet of the lamp-post. Butthey were all above the light, with only their breasts out of the shadows, and to be certain I must make a bird move. Finding that the noises werenot likely to arouse them, I threw a stick against one of the laden limbs. There were heads then, plenty of them, and every one, evidently, had beenturned back and buried in the warm wing-coverts. 

My stick hit very near the toes of one of the sparrows, and he flew. Therewas a twitter, then a stir all over the tree; but nothing furtherhappening, they tucked in their heads again and went back to bed. 

I waited. At four o'clock they still slept. The moon had swung out frombehind the high buildings and now hung just above the slender spire ofPark Street Church, looking down into the deep, narrow street gulch. A catpicked her way among the graves, sprang noiselessly to the top of a flattomb beneath the sparrows, and watched with me. The creature brought thewilderness with her. After all, this was not so far removed from thewoods. In the empty street, beneath the silent, shuttered walls, withsomething still of the mystery of the night winds in the bare trees, thescene, for an instant, was touched with the spell of the dark and theuntamed. 

After a swift warming walk of fifteen minutes I returned to the roost. There were signs of waking now: a flutter here, a twitter there, thenquiet again, with no general movement until half-past four, when the citylights were shut off. Then, instantly, from a dozen branches sounded loud, clear chirps, and every sparrow opened his eyes. The incandescent bulbsabout the border of the roost were moon and stars to them, lights in thefirmament of their heaven to divide the night from the day. When theyblazed forth, it was evening--bedtime; when they went out, it wasmorning--the time to wake up. 

The softness of dusk, how unknown to these city dwellers! and the freshsweet beauty of the dawn!

Morning must have begun to break along near four o'clock, for the coldgray across the sky was already passing into pearl. The country birds hadbeen up half an hour, I am sure. However, the old cemetery was wide enoughawake now. There was chirping everywhere. It grew louder and more generalevery moment, till shortly the six thousand voices, and more, were raisedin the cheerful din--the matin, if you please, for as yet only a few ofthe birds were fighting. 

But the fight quickly spread. It is the English sparrow's way of wakingup; his way of whetting his appetite for breakfast; his way of digestinghis dinner; his way of settling his supper--his normal waking way. 

To the clatter of voices was added the flutter of wings; for the birds hadbegun to shift perches, and to exchange slaps as well as to callnames--the movement setting toward the tree-tops. None of the sparrows hadleft the roost. The storm of chatter increased and the buzz of wingsquickened into a steady whir, the noise holding its own with that of theice-wagons pounding past. The birds were filling the top-most branches, agathering of the clans, evidently, for the day's start. The clock inScollay Square station pointed to five minutes to five, and just beforethe hour struck, two birds launched out and spun away. 

The exodus had commenced. The rest of Boston was not stirring yet. It wasstill early; hardly a flush of warmth had washed the pearl. But thesparrows had many matters to attend to before all the milkmen and bakersgot abroad: they must take their morning dust-bath, for one thing, in theworn places between the cobble-stones, before the street-sprinkler beganits sloppy rounds. 

There was a constant whirl out of the tree-tops now. Occasionally a birdflew off alone, but most of them left in small flocks, just as I shouldsee them return in the evening. Doubtless the members of these flocks werethe birds belonging to certain neighborhoods, those that nested and fedabout certain squares, large door-yards, and leafy courts. They may indeedhave been families that were hatched last summer. 

The birds that left singly went away, as a rule, over the roofs toward thedenser business sections of the city, while the bands, as I had noticedthem come in at night, took the opposite course, toward Cambridge andCharlestown. Not more than one in a hundred flew south across the city. 

Of course there are sparrows all over Boston. There is no street toonarrow, too noisy, too dank with the smell of leather for them. They seemas numerous where the rush of drays is thickest as in the openbreathing-places where the fountains play. They are in every quarter, yetthose to the east and south of the old burial-ground do not belong to theroost. Perhaps they have graveyards of their own in their sections, thoughI have been unable to find them. So far as I know, this is the only roostin or about Boston. And this is the stranger since so few of the totalnumber of the Boston sparrows sleep here. A careful estimate showed methat there could not have been more than six or seven thousand in theroost. One would almost say there were as many millions in Boston. Andwhere do these millions sleep? For the most part, each one alone behindhis sign-board or shutter near his local feeding-grounds. 

Now, why should the sparrows of the roost prefer King's Chapel BurialGround to the Old Granary, a stone's throw up the street? I passed theOld Granary yard on my way to the roost and found the trees empty. Isearched the limbs with my glass; there was not a sparrow to be seen. Still, the Granary is the less exposed of the two. It may not formerlyhave been so; but at present high sheltering walls bend about the treeslike a well. Years ago, perhaps, when the sparrows began to roost in thetrees at King's Chapel, the Old Granary elms were more open to the winds, and now force of habit and example keep the birds returning to the firstlodge. 

Back they come, no matter what the weather. There are a thousand cozycorners into which a sparrow might creep on a stormy night, where even thewinds that know their way through Boston streets could not search him out. But the instinct to do as he always has done is as strong in the sparrow, in spite of his love for pioneering, as it is in the rest of us. He wasbrought here to roost as soon as he could fly, when the leaves were on andthe nights delicious. If the leaves go and the nights change, what ofthat? Here he began, here he will continue to sleep. Let it rain, blow, snow; let the sleet, like a slimy serpent, creep up the trunk and wraparound the twigs: still he will hold on. Many a night I have seen themsleeping through a driving winter rain, their breasts to the storm, theirtails hanging straight down, shedding every drop. If a gale is blowing, and it is cold, they get to the leeward of the tree, as close to the trunkas possible, and anchor fast, every bill pointing into the wind, everyfeather reefed, every tail lying out on the flat of the storm. 

As I watched the bands starting from the tree-tops of the roost I wonderedif they really crossed the river into Cambridge and Charlestown. A fewmornings later I was again up early, hastening down to the West BostonBridge to see if I could discover the birds going over. As I started out Isaw bunches moving toward the river with a free and easy flight, butwhether I reached the bridge too late, or whether they scattered and wentover singly, I do not know. Only now and then did a bird cross, and heseemed to come from along the shore rather than from above the house-tops. 

I concluded that the birds of the roost were strictly Bostonians. Oneevening, however, about a week later, as I was upon this bridge comingfrom Cambridge, a flock of sparrows whizzed past me, dipped over the railto the water, swung up above the wall of houses, and disappeared towardthe roost. They were on their way from Cambridge, from the classic elms ofHarvard campus, who knows, to the elms of the ancient burial-ground. 

It was five that April morning when the first sparrow left the roost. Byhalf-past five the trees were empty, except for the few birds whosehunting-ground included the cemetery. By this time the city, too, hadyawned, and rubbed its eyes, and tumbled out of bed. 

"MUX"

[Illustration]

"MUX"

No, "Mux" is not an elegant name--not to to be compared with Ronald orClaudia, for instance; and I want to say it is not the name of one of mychildren, though its owner was once a member of my household. Mux was atame half-grown coon, with just the ordinary number of rings around histail, but with the most extraordinary amount of mischief in his littlecoon soul. Perhaps he had no real soul, and I should have located hismischief somewhere else. If so, then I should say in his feet. I never sawany other feet so expressive. The essence of the little beast seemedconcentrated in his lore paws. If they made trouble, whose fault was it?They were designed for trouble. You could see this purpose in them asplainly as you could see the purpose in a swallow's wings. Whenever Muxran across the yard these paws picked up trouble out of the turf, just asif the grass were trouble-filings, and Mux a kind of four-footed magnet. He never went far before they clogged and stopped him. 

One day, the first day that Mux was given the liberty of the yard, whoshould he run foul of but Tom! The struggle had to come sometime, and itwas just as well that it came thus early, while Tom and Mux were on anequal footing as to size, for Mux was young and growing. 

Tom was boss of the yard. Every farmer's dog that went to town by our gateknew enough to pass by on the other side. Tom had grown a little lordlyand opinionated. He was sleeping in the sun on the shed-step as Mux ambledup. At sight of the coon Tom rose in more than his usual feline mightinessand cast such a look of surprise, scorn, and annihilating intent upon theinterloper as ought to have struck terror to the stoutest heart. But Muxhardly seemed to understand. On he came, right into certain destruction, avery lamb of innocence and meekness. O you unsuspecting little stranger!Don't you see this awful monster swelling, swelling into this hideoushump? No, Mux did not see him. Tom was raging. His teeth gleamed; his eyesblazed green; his claws worked in a nervous way that made my flesh creep. He was vanishing, not, like the Cheshire Cat, into a long lovely grin, butvanishing from a four-legged cat into a yellow, one-legged hump. All thatwas left of him now was hump. 

Mux was only a few feet away. Tom began to advance, not directly, but justa trifle on the bias, across Mux's bows so to speak, as if to give him abroadside. They were within range. Tom was heaving to. I trembled for theyoung coon. Suddenly there was a hiss, a flash of yellow in the air, and--a very big surprise awaiting Thomas! That little coon was no stupidafter all. He had not rolled up his sleeves, nor doubled up his fists, norput a chip upon his shoulder; but he knew what was expected of him, justthe same. He snapped instantly upon his back, received the cat with allfour of his feet, and gave Mr. Tom such a combing down that his golden furwent flying off like thistle-down in autumn. 

It was all over in less than half a minute. I think Tom must have made anew record for himself in the running high jump when he broke away fromhis ring-tailed antagonist. He struck out across the yard and landedmidway up the clothes-post with a single bound. And Mux? He ambled onaround the yard, as calm and unconcerned as if he had only stopped toscratch himself. 

Much of this unconcern, however, was a quiet kind of swagger. When hethought no one fiercer than a chicken or the humbled Mr. Tom was looking, he would shuffle across the yard with his coat collar turned up, his hatover his eye, his elbows angled--just as if he had been born and bred onthe Bowery instead of in the Bear Swamp. He was king of the yard, but Icould see that he wore his crown uneasily. He kept a bold front, acceptedevery challenge, and even went out of his way to pick a quarrel; yet hequaked at heart continually. He feared and hated the noises of the yard, particularly the crowing of our big buff cochin rooster and the screamingof the guineas. This was one of the swamp-fears that he had brought withhim and could not outlive. It haunted him. If he had a conscience, itsonly warnings were of coming noises great and terrible. 

But Mux had no conscience, unless it was one that troubled him only whenhe was out of mischief. His face was never so long and so solemn as when Ihad caught him in some questionable act or spoiled some wayward plan. 

Mux, however, was possessed by a much stubborner spirit than thisinteresting mischief-devil. Upon one point he was positively demented--theonly four-footed maniac I ever knew. He had gone crazy on the subject ofdirt, mad to wash things, especially his victuals. 

He was not particular about what he ate; almost anything that could beswallowed would do, provided that it could be washed, and washed byhimself, after his own approved fashion. 

If I gave him half of my apple, he would squat down by his wash-tub andbegin to hunt for dirt. He would look the apple over and over, pickaround the blossom end, inspect carefully, then pull out the stem, ifthere happened to be a stem, dig out the seeds and peek into the core, then douse it into the water and begin to wash. He would rub with mightand main for a second or two, then rinse it, take a bite, and douse itback again for more scrubbing, until it was scrubbed and chewed away. 

Even when the water was thick with mud, this crazy coon persisted inwashing his clean cake and cabbage therein. Indeed, the muddier the water, the more vigorously would he wash. The habit was a part of him, as real athing in his constitution as the black ring in his fur. It was a verydirty habit, here in captivity, even if it went by the name of washing. Ofcourse Mux could not be blamed for his soiled wash-water. That was myfault; only I couldn't be changing it every time he soaked up a fistful ofearth in his endeavor to wash something to eat out of it. No; he was notat fault, altogether, for the mud in his tub. Out in the Bear Swamp, thestreams that wandered about under the great high-spreading gums, and losttheir way in the shadows, were crystal-clear and pure; and out there itwas intended that he should dwell, and in those sweet streams that heshould wash. But what a modicum of wit, of originality the little beasthad, that, because he was born a washer, wash he must, though he washed inmud, nay, though he washed upon the upturned bottom of his empty tub!--forthis is what Mux did sometimes. 

I never blamed Aunt Milly for insisting upon this rather ill-sounding nameof "Mux" for the little coon. She was standing by his cage, shortly afterhis arrival, watching him eat cabbage. He washed every clean white pieceof it in his oozy tub before tasting it, coating the bits over with mud asyou do the lumps of fondant with chocolate in making "chocolate creams. "Aunt Milly looked at him for some time with scornful face and finallyexclaimed:

"Umph! Dat animile am a dumb beast shu'! Rubbin' dirt right inter cleancabbage! Sich muxin'! mux, mux, mux! Dat a coon? Dat ain't no coon. Dat'sa mux!" And she scuffed off to the house, mumbling, "De muxinest thing Idone evah seen. " Hence his name. 

If there is one sweetmeat sweeter than all others to a coon, it is afrog. It was not mere chance that Mux was born in the edge of the BearSwamp, close to the wide marshes that ran out to the river. This was thegreat country of the frogs--the milk-and-honey country to the ring-tailedfamily in the hollow gum. But Mux had never tasted frog. He had not beenweaned when I kidnapped him. One day, wishing to see if he knew what afrog was, I carelessly offered him a big spotted fellow that I had caughtin the meadow. 

Did he know a frog? He fairly snatched the poor thing from me, killed it, and started around the cage with it in his mouth, dancing like a cannibal. His long, serious face was more thoughtful and solemn, however, thanusual. I was puzzled. I had heard of dancing at funerals. Either this wassuch a dance, or else some wild orgy to propitiate the spirits thatpreside over the destiny of coons. 

Throughout this gruesome rite Mux held the frog in his mouth, and Iwatched, expecting, hoping every moment that he would swallow it. Suddenlyhe stopped, sat down by his tub, pulled some dead grass out of it, plunged the frog in, and began to scrub it--began to scrub the frog in theoozy contents of that tub, when the poor amphibian had been soaking inspring-water ever since it was a tadpole!

No matter. The frog must be washed. And washed it was. It was scouredfirst with all his might, then placed in the bottom of the tub, underwater, held down by one fore paw, until the maniac could get in with hishind feet upon it, and then danced upon; from here it was laid upon thefloor of the cage and kneaded until as limp as a lump of dough; thenlifted daintily, it was shaken round and round in the water, rinsed andwrung, and minutely inspected, and--swallowed. 

I felt justified in keeping this animal caged. He was not fit to run looseeven in the Bear Swamp. Perhaps I have done him wrong in this story of thefrog. Frogs may need washing, after all, despite the fact that they arenever out of the bath-tub long enough to dry off once in their wholelives. Mux knew more about frogs than I, doubtless. But Mux insisted uponwashing oysters. 

Now there are few people clothed in sane minds who do not like rawoysters. Mark this, however: when you see a person wash raw oysters, keepout of his way; he has lost either his wits or his morals. The only twocreatures I ever knew to wash raw oysters were Mux and an oyster-dealer inCambridge Street, Boston. I saw this dealer take up a two-gallon can thathad just arrived at his store, and dump the dark salty shell-fish into agreat colander, stick the end of a piece of rubber hose in among them, turn the water on? and stir and soak them. How white they got! How fatthey got! How their ghastly corpses swelled!

Mux did not wash his to see them swell, but simply that he might take nochances with dirt--or poison, for I used to think sometimes that hethought I was trying to poison him. He was desperately fond of oysters. But who could cast his pearls, or, to be scientifically and literallycorrect, his mothers of pearls, before such a swine? Mux had just oneplateful of oysters while I was his keeper. They were nice plump fellows, and when I saw the maniac soak one all stringy and tasteless I poured hiswash-water out. Was he to be balked that way! No, no. He took oysternumber two, flopped it into the empty tub, scoured it around on the muddybottom, looked it over as carefully as he had done stringy number one, andswallowed sandy, muddy number two with just as much relish. 

This was too much. I cuffed him and took away the tub. This I suppose waswrong, for I understand you must never oppose crazy persons. Well, Muxhelped himself to oyster number three. There was no water, no tub. Butwhat were oysters for if not to be washed? And who was he but _Procyonlotor_--_Procyon_ "the washer"? Can the leopard change his spots or theracoon his habits? Can he? Shall he? I could almost hear him mutteringunder his breath, "To be, or not to be: that is the question. " Then hedarted a triumphantly malicious glance at me, retreated to the back of hiscage, thrust his oyster out of sight beneath the straw of his bed, andwashed it--washed the oyster in the straw, washed it into a fistful ofsticks and chaff, and gloated as he swallowed it. 

RACOON CREEK

[Illustration]

RACOON CREEK

 Into the wode to her the briddes sing. 

I

Over the creek, and clearing it by a little, hung a snow-white, stirlessmist, its under surface even and parallel with the face of the water, itsupper surface peaked and billowed half-way to the tops of theshore-skirting trees. 

As I dipped along, my head was enveloped in the cloud; but bending overthe skiff, I could see far up the stream between a mist-ceiling and awater-floor, as through a long, low room. How deep and dark seemed thewater! And the trees how remote, aërial, and floating! as if growing inthe skies, with no roots' fast hold of the earth. Filling the valley, conforming to every bend and stretch of the creek, lay the breath of thewater, motionless and sheeted, a spirit stream, hovering over the sluggishcurrent a moment, before it should float upward and melt away. It wascold, too, as a wraith might be, colder than the water, for the June sunhad not yet risen over the swamp. 

At the bridge where the road crossed was a dam which backed the creek outinto an acre or more of pond. Not a particle of mud discolored the water;but it was dark, and as it came tumbling, foaming over the moss-edgedgates it lighted up a rich amber color, the color of strong tea. In thehalf chill of the dawn the old bridge lay veiled in smoking spray, in athin, rising vapor of spicy odors, clean, medicinal odors, as of thebrewing of many roots, the fragrance of shores of sedges, ferns, andaromatic herbs steeped in the slow, soft tide. And faint across the creek, the road, and the fields lay the pondy smell of spatter-docks. 

I pushed out from the sandy cove and lay with a reach of the lusty docksbetween me and either shore. It was early morning. The yellow, dew-laidroad down which I came still slumbered undisturbed; the village cows hadnot been milked, and the pasture slope, rounding with a feminine grace ofcurve and form, lay asleep, with its sedgy fingers trailing in the water;even the locomotive in the little terminal round-house over the hill wasnot awake and wheezing. But the creek people were stirring--except thefrogs. They were growing sleepy. The long June night they had improved, soberly, philosophically; and now, seeing nothing worth while in the dawnof this wonder day, they had begun to doze. But the birds were alive, fullof the crisp June morning, of its overflow of gladness, and were tellingtheir joy in chorus up and down both banks of the creek. 

 Hearkneth thise blisful briddes how they singe. 

Do you mean out in Finsbury Moor, Father Chaucer? They were sweet alongthe banks of the Walbrook, I know, for among them "maken melodye" were theskylark, ethereal minstrel! and the nightingale. But, Father Chaucer, youshould have heard the wood-thrushes, the orchard-orioles--this wholemorning chorus singing along the creek! No one may know how blissful, howwide, how thrilling the singing of birds can be unless he has listenedwhen the summer mists are rising over Racoon Creek. 

There is no song-hour after sun rise to compare with this for spirit andvolume of sound. The difference between the singing in the dusk and in thedawn is the difference between the slow, sweet melody of a dirge and thetriumphant, full-voiced peal of a wedding march. Even one who has alwayslived in the country can scarcely believe his ears the first time he isafield in June at the birds' awaking-hour. 

Robins led the singing along the creek. They always do. In New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, --everywhere it is the same, --they out-number allrivals three to one. It is necessary to listen closely in order todistinguish the other voices. This particular morning, however, thewood-thrushes were all arranged up the copsy hillside at my back, and soreinforced each other that their part was not overborne by robin song. Oneof the thrushes was perched upon a willow stub along the edge of thewater, so near that I could see every flirt of his wings, could almostcount the big spots in his sides. Softly, calmly, with the purest joy hesang, pausing at the end of every few bars to preen and call. His song wasthe soul of serenity, of all that is spiritual. Accompanied by the lower, more continuous notes from among the trees, it rose, a clear, pure, wonderful soprano, lifting the whole wide chorus nearer heaven. 

Farther along the creek, on the border of the swamp, the red-shoulderedblackbirds were massed; chiming in everywhere sang the catbirds, white-eyed vireos, yellow warblers, orchard-orioles, and Marylandyellowthroats; and at short intervals, soaring for a moment high over theother voices, sounded the thrilling, throbbing notes of the cardinal, broken suddenly and drowned by the roll of the flicker, the wild, weirdcry of the great-crested flycatcher, or the rapid, hay-rake rattle of thebelted kingfisher. 

All at once a narrow breeze cut a swath through the mist just across mybows, turned, spread, caught the severed cloud in which I was drifting, and whirled it up and away. The head of the pond and the upper creek werestill shrouded, while around me only breaths of the white flecked thewater and the spatter-docks. The breeze had not stirred a ripple; thecurrent here in the broad of the pond was imperceptible; and I laybecalmed on the edge of the open channel, among the rank leaves and goldenknobs of the docks. 

A crowd of chimney-swallows gathered over the pond for a morning bath. Half a hundred of them were wheeling, looping, and cutting about me in aperfect maze of orbits, as if so many little black shuttles had borrowedwings and gone crazy with freedom. They had come to wash--a very properthing to do, for there are few birds or beasts that need it more. It washighly fitting for sooty little Tom, seeing he had to turn into something, to become a Water Baby. And if these smaller, winged sweeps of ourAmerican chimneys are contemplating a metamorphosis, it ought to be towarda similar life of soaking. 

They must have been particularly sooty this morning. One plunge apiece, sofar from sufficing, seemed hardly a beginning. They kept diving in overand over, continuing so long that finally I grew curious to know how manydips they were taking, and so, in order to count his dives, I singled oneout, after most of the flock had done and gone off to hawk. How many hehad taken before I marked him, and how many more he took after I lost himamong the other birds, I cannot say; but, standing up in the skiff, Ifollowed him around and around until he made his nineteenth splash, --inless than half as many minutes, --when I got so groggy that his twentiethsplash I came near taking with him. 

The pond narrows toward the head, and just before it becomes a creek againthe channel turns abruptly through the docks in against the right shore, where the current curls and dimples darkly under the drooping branches ofgreat red maple; then it horseshoes into the middle, coming down throughsmall bush-islands and tangled brush which deepen into an extensive swamp. 

June seemed a little tardy here, but the elder, the rose, and the panicledcornel were almost ready, the button-bushes were showing ivory, while thearrow-wood, fully open, was glistening snowily everywhere, its tiny flowercrowns falling and floating in patches down-stream, its over-sweet breathhanging heavy in the morning mist. My nose was in the air all the way formagnolias and water-lilies, yet never a whiff from either shore, soparticular, so unaccountably notional are some of the high-caste flowerswith regard to their homes. 

The skiff edged slowly past the first of the islands, a mere hummock abouta yard square, and was turning a sharp bend farther up, when I thought Ihad a glimpse of yellowish wings, a mere guess of a bird shadow, droppingamong the dense maple saplings and elder of the islet. 

Had I seen or simply imagined something? If I had seen wings, then theywere not those of the thrasher, --the first bird that came to mind, --forthey slipped, sank, dropped through the bushes, with just a hint ofdodging in their movement, not exactly as a thrasher would have moved. 

Drifting noiselessly back, I searched the tangle and must have beenlooking directly at the bird several seconds before cutting it out fromthe stalks and branches. It was a least bittern, a female. She wasclinging to a perpendicular stem of elder, hand over hand, wren fashion, her long neck thrust straight into the air, absolutely stiff andstatuesque. 

We were less than a skiff's length apart, each trying to outpose andoutstare the other. I won. Human eyes are none the strongest, neither ishuman patience, yet I have rarely seen a creature that could outwait aman. The only steady, straightforward eye in the Jungle wasMowgli's--because it was the only one with a steady mind behind it. Assoon as the bird let herself look me squarely in the eye, she knew she wasdiscovered, that her little trick of turning into a stub was seen through;and immediately, ruffling her feathers, she lowered her head, poked outher neck at me, and swaying from side to side like a caged bear, tried toscare me, glaring and softly growling. 

Off she flopped as I landed. The nest might be upon the ground or lodgedamong the bushes; but the only ground space large enough was covered layerover layer with pearly clam-shells, the kitchen-midden of some muskrat;and the bushes were empty. I went to the other islets, searched bog andtangle, and finally pulled away disappointed, giving the least bitterncredit for considerable mother-wit and woodcraft. How little wit shereally had appeared on my return down-creek that afternoon. 

I had now entered the high, overhanging swamp, where the shaggy trees, thelooping vines, and the rank, pulpous undergrowth grew thick on both sides, reaching far back, a wet, heavy wilderness without a path, except for thesilent feet of the mink and the otter, and the more silent feet of thecreek, here a narrow stream winding darkly down through the shadows. 

Every little while along the rooty, hummocky banks of the creek I wouldpass a muskrat's slide. Here was one at the butt of a tulip-poplar, itsplatform wet and freshly trodden, its "dive" shooting sheer over a rootinto the stream. Farther on stood a large tussock whose top was trampledflat and covered with sedge-roots. I could not resist putting my nose downfor a sniff, so good is the smell of a fresh trail, so close are we to therest of the pack. In the thick of the swamp I stopped a moment to examinethe footprints of an otter at a shallow, shelving place along the bank, where, opening through the skunk-cabbage and Indian turnip, and coveredalmost ankle-deep with water, was the creature's runway. 

I had moved leisurely along, yet not aimlessly. The whole June day wasmine to waste; but it would not be well wasted if nothing more purposefulthan wasting were in mind. 

One does not often drift to a port. Going into the woods to see anythingis a very sure way of seeing little or nothing; and taking the path toanywhere is certain to lead one nowhere in particular. Many interested, nature-loving people fail to enjoy the out-of-doors simply because theyhave no definite spot to reach, no flower, bird, or bug to find when theyenter the fields and woods. Going forth "to commune with nature" soundsvery fine, but it is much more difficult work than conversing with theSphinx. In order to draw near to nature I require a pole with a hook andline on the end of it. While I watch the float and wait, if there is anycommunion, it is nature who holds it with me through the medium of thepole. I need to have an errand to do; some berries to pick, a patch ofpotatoes to hoe (a very small patch); an engagement to keep, likeThoreau, with a tree, if I hope to squander with profit even the laziestsummer day. 

I was heading up-stream toward a deep sandy-sided pool that was bottomed, or rather unbottomed, by the shadows of overhanging beeches. The pool wasalive with racoon-perch. A few mornings before this, a boy from aneighboring farm had come to fish here and had found a fisher ahead ofhim. He was just about to cast, when back under the limbs of the beechesthe water broke, and a mink rose to the surface with a fine perch twistingin her jaws. Straight toward the boy she swam till within reach of hisrod, when she recognized the human in him, turned a back-dive somersault, and vanished. 

Would she be fishing again this morning? I hoped so. It was her hour--thehour of the rising mist; visitors rarely found their way to the pool; andI knew the appearance of the boy had given her no lasting alarm. 

Floating around the bend, I pulled in among the shore bushes by a bit ofgrape-vine, and sitting down upon it, made my boat fast. I had plannedthe trip with the hope of seeing this mink; so I waited, quite hidden, though having the pool in full view. An hour passed, but no mink appeared. Another hour, and the sun was breaking upon the beeches, and the mist wasgone; yet no mink came to fish. And what mink would? Of course you musthave it in mind to see a mink fish if you wish to see anything; but theday you really catch the mink fishing will likely be the day you went outto watch for muskrats. 

So an hour's waiting is rarely fruitless. The mink did not come, butanother and quite as expert a fisher did. All the way up the creek I hadbeen hearing the throaty _ghouw-bhouw_ of a great blue heron off in theswamp. It was he that came for perch. 

The flapping of the great blue heron is a sight good for the soul--anunheard-of motion these days, so moderate, unhurried, and time-contemning!The wing-beats of this one, as he came dangling down upon the meadowopposite me, have often given me pause since. If I could have the wings ofthe great blue heron and flap to my fishing now and again!

On alighting, however, he was instantly all nerve and tension. With theutmost caution he came over the high sedges on his stilt-like legs to thebrink of the creek and posed. I doubt if a frog or a minnow could havetold he was a thing of life. Stiff as a stub, every muscle taut, allalert, he stood, till--flash! and the long pointed bill pinned a perch, afoot and a half beneath the water. He had quite made out a breakfast, when, stepping upon a tall tussock, he stood face to face with me--a humanspectator! It was only for a moment that I could keep motionless enough topuzzle him. Some muscle must have twitched, for he understood and leapedinto the air with a croak of mortal fright. 

II

The creek was roped off by the sagging fox grape-vines, and barred, fromthis point on, by the alders, so that I gave up all attempt at fartherascent. I had already given up the mink; yet I waited under the beeches. 

It was blazing overhead, growing hotter and closer all the time, withhardly breeze enough to disturb the sleep of the leaf shadows on thesleepy stream. A rusty, red-bellied water-snake, in a mat of briers nearby, relaxed and straightened slowly out, --and softly, that I might not beattracted, --stretching himself to the warmth. I could have broken his backwith my paddle, and perhaps, by so doing, saved the nestlings of a pair ofMaryland yellowthroats fidgeting about near him. He had eaten many a youngbird of these bushes, I was sure--yet only circumstantially sure. Catchinghim in the act of robbing a nest would have been different; I should havefelt justified then in despatching him. But to strike him asleep in thesun simply because he was a snake would have robbed the spot of part ofits life and spirit and robbed me of serenity for the rest of the day. Ishould not have been, able to enjoy the quiet again until I had said myprayers and slept. 

And as between the hawks and other wild birds, we need not interfere. While the water-snake was spreading himself, a small hawk, asharp-shinned, I think, came beating over the meadow and was met by avigilance committee of red-shouldered blackbirds. He did not stop to eatany of them, but darted up, and they after him. On up he went, round andround in a rapid, mounting spiral, till only one of the daring redwingsfollowed. I watched. Up they went, higher than I had ever seen a blackbirdventure before. And against such unequal odds! But the hawk was scared andhad not stopped to look back. He circled; the blackbird cut across insideand caught him on almost every round. And still higher in pure bravado theredwing forced him. I began to tremble for the plucky bird, when I saw himturn, half fold his shining wings, and shoot straight down--a meteor ofjet with fire flying from its opposite sides--down, down, while I held mybreath. Suddenly the wings flashed, and he was scaling a steep incline;another flash, a turn, and he was upon a slower plane--had thrown himselfagainst the air and settled upon the swaying top of a brown cattail. 

A quiet had been creeping over the swamp and meadow. The dry rasp of adragon-fly's wings was loud in the grass. The stream beneath the beechesdarkened and grew moody as the light neared its noon intensity; thebeech-leaves hung limp and silent; a catbird settled near me with droppedtail and head drawn in between her shoulders, as mute as the leaves; theMaryland yellowthroat broke into a sharp gallop of song at intervals, --hewould have to clatter a little on doomsday, if that day fell in June, --butthe intervals were far apart. The meadow shimmered. No part of the horizonwas in sight--only the sky overhanging the little open of grass, and thiswas cloudless, though far from blue. 

Perhaps there was not a real sign of uneasiness anywhere except in myboat; yet I felt something ominous in this silent, stifled noon. Afterall, I ought to have scotched the rusty, red-bellied water-snake leeringat me now. The croak of the great blue heron sounded again; then far away, mysterious and spirit-like, floated a soft _qua, qua, qua_--the cry of theleast bittern out of the heart of the swamp. 

I loosed the grape-vine, put in my paddle, and turned down-stream, with anurgent desire to get out of the swamp, out where I could see about me. Imade no haste, lest the stream, the swamp, the something that made meuneasy, should know. Not that I am superstitious, though I should havebeen had I lived when the land was all swamp and wood and prairie; and Ishould be now were I a sailor. My boat slipped swiftly along under thethick-shadowing trees, and rounding a sharp bend, brought me to the openpond, to the sky, and to a sight that explained my disquietude. The west, half-way to the zenith, was green--the black-and-blue green of bruisedflesh. Out of it shot a fork of lightning, and behind it rumbled muffledthunder. 

There was no time to descend the pond. I could already hear the windacross the silence and suspense. It was one of the supreme moments of thesummer. The very trees seemed breathless and awe-struck. Pushing quicklyto the wooded shore, I drew out the boat, turned it over, and crawledunder it just as the leaves stirred with the first cool, wet breath. 

There was an instant's lull, a tremor through the ground; then the rendingand crunching of the wind monster in the oaks, the shriek of the forestvictim--and the wind was gone. The rain followed with fearful violence, the lightning sizzled and cracked among the trees, and the thunder burstjust above the boat--all holding on to finish the wind's work. 

It was soon over. The leaves were dripping when I crept out of my shell;the afternoon sun was blinking through a million gleaming tears, and thestorm was rumbling far away, behind the swamp. A robin lighted upon abranch over me, and set off its load of drops, which rattled down on myboat's bottom like a charge of shot. I glided into the stream. Down thepond where I had seen the sullen clouds was now an indescribable freshnessand glory of shining hills and shining sky. The air had been washed andwas still hanging across the heavens undried. The maple-leaves showedsilver; the flock of chimney-swifts had returned, and among them, twinkling white and blue and brown, were tree-swallows and barn-swallowssqueaking in their flight like new harness; a pair of night-hawks playedback and forth across the water, too, awakened, probably, by the thunder, or else mistaken in the green darkness of the storm, thinking it thetwilight; and the creek up and down as far as I could hear was ringingwith bird-calls. 

There had been a perceptible rise and quickening of the current. It wasslightly roiled and carried a floatage of broken twigs, torn leaves, withhere and there a golden-green tulip-petal, like the broken wings ofbutterflies. 

I was in no hurry now, in no disquietude. The swamp and the storm were atmy back. Before me lay the pond, the pastures, and the roofs of a humanvillage--all bathed in the splendor of the year's divinest hour. It hadnot been a perfect day, but these closing hours were perfect, so perfectthat they redeemed the whole, and not that day only: they were perfectenough to have redeemed the whole of creation travailing till then inpain. 

Because I turned from all this sunset glory to find out what little birdwas making the very big fuss near by, and because, parting the foliage ofan arrow-wood bush, I looked with exquisite pleasure into the nest of awhite-eyed vireo, does it mean that I am still unborn as to soul? For somereason it was a relief to look away from that west of vast and burningcolor to the delicately dotted eggs in the tiny cradle--the same relieffelt in descending from a mountain-top to the valley; in turning from thesweep of the sea to watch beach-fleas hopping over the sand; in givingover the wisdom of men for the gabble of my little boys. 

How the vireo scolded! and her mate! He half sang his threat and defiance. "Come, get out of this! Come; do you hear?" he cried over and over, as Ipeeked into the nest. It was a thick-walled, exquisite bit of a basket, rimmed round with green, growing moss, worked over with shredded bark andfragments of yellow wood from a punky stump across the stream, andsuspended by spider-webs upon two parallel twigs about three feet abovethe water. It was not consciously worked out by the birds, of course, butthe patch of yellow-wood fragments on the side of the nest exactly matchedthe size and color of the fading cymes of arrow-wood blossoms all over thebush, so that I mistook the little domicile utterly on first parting theleaves. A crow or a snake would never have discovered it from that side. 

Paddling down, I was soon out of earshot of the scolding vireos, but thelittle cock's vigorous, ringing song followed me to the head of the pond. Flying heavily over from the meadows with folded neck and dangling legscame a little green heron--the "poke. " I spun round behind a big clump ofelder to watch him; but he saw me, veered, gulped aloud, and pulled offwith a rapid stroke up the creek. 

As I turned, my eye fell upon a soft, yellowish something in therose-bushes across the docks. I was slow to believe. It was too good to becredited all at once. Within three paddle-lengths of my boat, in a patchof dark that must be a nest, stood my least bittern. 

I sat still for several seconds, tasting the joy of my discovery andanticipating the look into the nest. Then, upon my knees in the bow of theskiff, I pulled up by means of the stout dock-leaves until almost able totouch the bird, when she walked off down a dead stalk to the ground, clucking and growling at me. 

It wasn't a nest to boast of; but she might boast of her eggs, for therewas more of eggs than of nest--a great deal more. A few sticks had beenlaid upon the ends of the bending rose-bushes, and this flimsy, inadequateplatform was literally covered by the five dirty-white eggs. The hen hadto stand on the bushes straddling the nest in order to brood. How she evergot as close to the nest as that without spilling its contents was hard tosee; for I took an egg out and had the greatest difficulty in putting itback, so little room was there, so near to nothing for it to rest upon. 

Working back into the channel, I gave the skiff to the easy current anddrew slowly along toward the foot of the pond. 

The sun had gone down behind the hill; the flame had faded from the sky, and over the rim of the circling slopes poured the soft, cool twilight, with a breeze as soft and cool, and a spirit that was prayer. Driftingacross the pond as gently as the gray half-light fell a shower of lintfrom the willow catkins. The swallows had left; but from the leafydarkness of the copse in front of me, piercing the dreamy, foamy roar ofthe distant dam, came the notes of a wood-thrush, pure, sweet, andpeaceful, speaking the soul of the quiet time. My boat grated softly onthe sandy bottom of the cove and swung in. Out from the deep shadow of thewooded shore, out over the pond, a thin white veil was creeping--themist, the breath of the sleeping water, the spirit of the stream. And awayup the creek a distorted, inarticulate sound--the hoarse, guttural croakof the great blue heron, the weird, uncanny cry of the night, the mock, the menace of the tangled, untamed swamp!

THE DRAGON OF THE SWALE

[Illustration]

THE DRAGON OF THE SWALE

My path to Cubby Hollow ran along a tumbling worm-fence, down a gravellyslope, and across a strip of swale, through which flowed the stream thatfarther on widened into the Hollow. A small jungle of dog-roses, elder, and blackberry tangled the banks of the stream, spreading into flanks ofcinnamon-fern that crept well up the hillsides. 

As I descended the gravelly slope, my path led through the ferns into atunnel of vines, to a rail over the water, and on up to the woods. By themiddle of June the tangle, except by the half-broken path, was almostrabbit-proof. The rank ferns waved to my chin, and were so thick thatthey left little trace of my passing until late in the summer. 

This bit of the swale from the lower edge of the gravelly slope to theedge of the woods on the opposite slope was the lair of a dragon. My pathcut directly across it. 

Perhaps the dragon had been there ever since I had known the swale, andsummer after summer had allowed me to cross unchallenged. I do not know. Ionly know that one day he rose out of the ferns before me--the longest, ugliest, boldest beast that ever withstood me in the quiet walks abouthome. 

It was a day in early July, hot and very close. I was wading the sunkentrail, much as one "treads water, " my head not always above the surface ofthe fronds, when, suddenly, close to my side the ferns in a single spotwere violently shaken. Instantly ahead of me they whirled again' andbefore I could think, off across the path was another rush and whirl--thenstirless silence. 

I knew what it meant. These were not the sudden, startled leaps of threeanimals, but the lightning movements of one. I had crossed the path of aswamp black-snake, and judging from the speed and whirl, it was a snake ofuncommon size. 

The path, a few paces farther on, opened into a small patch of low grass. Just as I was getting through the brake to this spot I stopped short witha chill. In the ferns near me shrilled a hissing whistle, a weird, creepywhistle that made me cold--a fierce, menacing sound, all edge, and so thinthat it slivered every nerve in me. And then, without a stir in the brake, up out of the low grass in front of me rose a blue-black, glittering head. 

I have little faith in the spell of a snake's eye, yet for a moment I washeld by the subtle, masterful face that had risen so unexpectedly, socoolly before me. It was lifted a foot out of the grass. The head upon itslithe, round neck was poised motionless, but set as with a hair-spring. The flat, pointed face was turned upon me, so that I could see a patch ofwhite upon the throat. Evidently the snake had just sloughed an old skin, for the sunlight gleamed iridescent on the shining jet scales. It was nota large head; it lacked the shovel-nose and the heavy, horrid jaws of therattle-snake. But it was clean-cut, with power in every line of jaw andneck; with power and speed and certainty in the pose, so easy, ready, anderect. There was no fear in the creature's eye, something rather ofaggressiveness, and of such evil cunning that I stood on guard. 

Afraid of a snake? of a black-snake! No. I think, indeed, there are fewpersons who really do fear snakes. It is not fear, but nerves. I havetamed more black-snakes than I have killed. I should not care a straw ifone bit me. Yet, for all of that, the meeting with any black-snake is sounlocked for as always to be unnerving. But let a huge one whip about youin the brake, chill you with an unearthly hissing whistle, then suddenlyrise in front of you, glittering, challenging, sinister! You will beabashed. I was; and I shall never outgrow the weakness. 

It was a big snake. I had not been mistaken in its size. There is nothingon earth that shrinks as a _dead_ snake; and this one, so far as I know, is still alive; yet, allowing generously for my imagination, I am surethe creature measured six feet. His neck, just behind the jaws, was nearlythe size of a broom-handle, which meant a long, hard length curved out inthe ferns behind. It was a male; I could tell by the peculiar musk on theair, an odor like cut cucumbers. 

Fully a minute we eyed each other. Then I took a step forward. Theglittering head rose higher. Off in the ferns there beat a warningtattoo--the loud whir of the snake's tail against a skunk-cabbage leaf. 

In my hand was a slender dogwood switch that I had been poking into theholes of the digger-wasps up the hillside. If one thing more than anotherwill turn a snake tail to in a hurry it is the song of a switch. Expectingto see this overbold fellow jump out of his new skin and lunge off intothe swale, I leaned forward and made the stick sing under his nose. But hedid not jump or budge. He only bent back out of range, swayed from side toside, and drew more of his black length out into the low grass to betterhis position. 

The lidless eyes and scale-cased face of a snake might seem incapable ofmore than one set expression. Can hate and fear show there? Theycertainly can, at least to my imagination. If ever hate and fear mantled aface, they did this one in the grass. The sound of the switch onlymaddened the creature. He had too long dictated terms in this part of theswale to crawl aside for me. 

Nor would I give way to him. But I ceased switching, drew back a step, andlooked at him with more respect than I ever before showed a snake. 

The curved neck straightened at that, the glinting head swayed forward, and shivering through me as the swish of a stick never shivered through asnake, sounded that unearthly hissing whistle. For a second--for just thefraction of a second that it takes to jump--I was, not scared, butshocked; and I slipped on something underfoot. In three directions Iwallowed the ferns before I got to my feet to watch the snake again, andby that time the snake was gone. 

I found myself somewhat muddy and breathing a little hard; but I was notwholly chagrined. I had heard and seen a black-snake whistle. I had nevereven known of the habit before. 

Since then I have seen one other snake do it, and I think I have heardthe sound three or four times. It is almost indescribable. The jaws wereclosed as it was made, not even the throat moving, that I could see. Theair seemed to be blown violently through the nostrils, though sounding asif driven through the teeth--a shrilling hiss, fine and piercing, whichone not so much hears as feels, crisping cold along his nerves. 

It may seem strange, but I believe this whistle is a mating-call. Even theforked tongue (or maybe the nose) of a snake grows vocal with love. Ifonly the Sphinx had not possessed a heart of stone! No matter about itslips; with a heart to know the "spring running" we should have heard itsstory long ago. Perhaps, after all, the college sophomore was not mixinghis observations and Sunday-school memories when he wrote, describing thedawn of a spring morning (I quote from his essay): "Beneath in the waterthe little fishes darted about the boat; above the little birds twitteredin the branches; while off on a sunny log in the pond the soft, sibilantcroak of the mud-turtle was heard on the shore. " If we could happen uponthe mud-turtle mad with love, I am sure we should find that he had avoice--a "soft, sibilant croak, " who knows?

I had long known the tradition among the farmers of the black-snake'strailing its mate, following her by scent through grass and brush, persistent and sure as a sleuth-hound, until at last she is won. I hadbeen told of this by eyewitnesses over and over, but I had always put itdown as a snake story, for these same witnesses would also tell me thehoop-snake story, only it was their grandfathers, always, who had seenthis creature take its tail in its mouth and roll, and hit and kill afifty-dollar apple-tree (the tree was invariably worth fifty dollars). Ihad small faith in the trailing tale. 

One day, the summer after my encounter in the ferns, I was sitting upon aharrow at the edge of the gravelly field that slopes to the swale, when alarge black-snake glided swiftly across the lane and disappeared in thegrass beyond. It had been gone perhaps a minute, when I heard another stirbehind me, and turning, saw high above the weeds and dewberry-vines theneck and head of a second black-snake. 

He was coming swiftly, evenly, carrying his gleaming head over a foot fromthe ground, and following hard upon the trail of the first snake. He hitvery near the smooth, flowing mark in the dust of the lane. Here she hadcrossed. Here he was about to cross when he caught sight of me. 

For a startled instant he stiffened, threw himself on the defensive, andshowed a white patch under his chin, an ugly, blazing light in his eye, and a peculiarly aggressive attitude that there was no mistaking. I hadseen this snake before. I knew him. He was the dragon of the swale. 

Only pausing, he whirled, struck the track, and sped on, his round blackbody stretching from rut to rut of the lane. A hundred feet beyond in thegrass I saw his glittering head rise and sway with a swimming motion as hetrailed the long, lithe beauty that was leading him this lightning raceacross the fields. 

This was not the last time he crossed my path. He never withstood meagain; but he thwarted me several times. Once as I was descending theslope I saw him gliding down from a low cedar. The distressing cries oftwo chippies told me what he had been doing in the tree; I did not need tolook at the half-dislodged nest. Then and there I vowed to kill him, butfrom that moment I never set eyes on him again. His evil work, however, went on. In a clump of briers across the stream was the nest of a pair ofredbirds that I was watching. One day just before the young could fly theywere carried off. I knew who did it. On the same side, up under the fenceby the woods, a litter of rabbits was destroyed. The snake killed them. Itwas he, too, who ate the eggs of the bluebirds in the old apple-tree alongthe fence in the adjoining field. 

There must be a dragon in the way, I suppose--in the way even of naturestudy. There are unpleasant, perhaps unnecessary, and evilcreatures--snakes!--in the fields and woods, which we must be willing tomeet and tolerate for the love within us. Tick-seeds, beggar-needles, mud, mosquitos, rain, heat, hawks, and snakes haunt all our paths, hindering ussometimes, though never really blocking the way. 

But the dragon in the swale--ought I to tolerate him? No. There aremoments when I should be glad to kill him, yet I doubt if the swale wouldbe quite so wild and thrilling a spot if I knew there was no dragon tomeet me as I crossed. But the redbirds, bluebirds, rabbits? I see noshrinking in their numbers because of the snake. A few of them breed asthey always have along the swale. There are worse enemies than the dragon, though he is bad enough.