Transcriber's Note: Alternative spelling for chippie/chippy has been retained as it appears in the original publication, and if you cannot read "Phœbe" clearly please change the encoding of your text reader to UTF-8. 

 UNDER THE MAPLES

 [Illustration: _Copyright, 1921, by Charles F. Lummis. All rights reserved. _

 THE LAST PORTRAIT OF JOHN BURROUGHS

 (March 23, 1921; six days before his death) Made at Pasadena Glen, California, by his long-time friend Charles F. Lummis]

 UNDER THE MAPLES

 BY JOHN BURROUGHS

 [Illustration: The Riverside Press]

 BOSTON AND NEW YORK

 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

 The Riverside Press Cambridge

 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFACE

It was while sitting in his hay-barn study in the Catskills and lookingout upon the maple woods of the old home farm, and under the maples atRiverby, that the most of these essays were written, during the last twoyears of the author's life. And it was to the familiar haunts near hisHudson River home that his thoughts wistfully turned while wintering inSouthern California in 1921. As he pictured in his mind the ice breakingup on the river in the crystalline March days, the return of the birds, the first hepaticas, he longed to be back among them; he was there inspirit, gazing upon the river from the summer-house, or from the verandaof the Nest, or seated at his table in the chestnut-bark Study, or busywith his sap-gathering and sugar-making. 

Casting about for a title for this volume, the vision of maple-trees anddripping sap and crisp March days playing constantly before his mind, one day while sorting and shifting the essays for his new book, hesuddenly said, "I have it! We'll call it _Under the Maples_!"

His love for the maple, and consequently his pleasure in having hit uponthis title, can be gathered from the following fragment found among hismiscellaneous notes: "I always feel at home where the sugar maple growsIt was paramount in the woods of the old home farm where I grew up. Itlooks and smells like home. When I bring in a maple stick to put on myfire, I feel like caressing it a little. Its fiber is as white as alily, and nearly as sweet-scented. It is such a tractable, satisfactorywood to handle--a clean, docile, wholesome tree; burning withoutsnapping or sputtering, easily worked up into stovewood, fine of grain, hard of texture, stately as a forest tree, comely and clean as a shadetree, glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness in summer, sugar in itsveins, gold in its foliage, warmth in its fibers, and health in it theyear round. "

 CLARA BARRUS

 _The Nest at Riverby_ _West Park on the Hudson_ _New York_

 CONTENTS

 I. THE FALLING LEAVES 1

 II. THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST 11

 III. THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS 32

 IV. BIRD INTIMACIES 39

 V. A MIDSUMMER IDYL 69

 VI. NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE 79

 VII. WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT 101

 VIII. A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY 109

 IX. UNDER GENIAL SKIES 127 I. A Sun-Blessed Land 127 II. Lawn Birds 129 III. Silken Chambers 132 IV. The Desert Note 143 V. Sea-Dogs 148

 X. A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES 152 I. Nature's Wireless 152 II. Maeterlinck on the Bee 156 III. Odd or Even 163 IV. Why and How 165 V. An Insoluble Problem 167 VI. A Live World 169 VII. Darwinism and the War 172 VIII. The Robin 175 IX. The Weasel 177 X. Misinterpreting Nature 179 XI. Natural Sculpture 181

 XI. RUMINATIONS 184 I. Man a Part of Nature 184 II. Marcus Aurelius on Death 185 III. The Interpreter of Nature 186 IV. Original Sources 190 V. The Cosmic Harmony 191 VI. Cosmic Rhythms 193 VII. The Beginnings of Life 194 VIII. Spendthrift Nature 195

 XII. NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD 197 I. Sunrise 197 II. Nature's Methods 199 III. Heads and Tails 205 IV. An Unsavory Subject 206 V. Chance in Animal Life 208 VI. Mosquitoes and Fleas 210 VII. The Change of Climate in Southern California 210 VIII. All-Seeing Nature 212

 INDEX 217

UNDERTHE MAPLES

I

THE FALLING LEAVES

The time of the falling of leaves has come again. Once more in ourmorning walk we tread upon carpets of gold and crimson, of brown andbronze, woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate textureswhile we slept. 

How beautifully the leaves grow old! How full of light and color aretheir last days! There are exceptions, of course. The leaves of most ofthe fruit-trees fade and wither and fall ingloriously. They bequeaththeir heritage of color to their fruit. Upon it they lavish the hueswhich other trees lavish upon their leaves. The pear-tree is often anexception. I have seen pear orchards in October painting a hillside inhues of mingled bronze and gold. And well may the pear-tree do this, itis so chary of color upon its fruit. 

But in October what a feast to the eye our woods and groves present! Thewhole body of the air seems enriched by their calm, slow radiance. Theyare giving back the light they have been absorbing from the sun allsummer. 

The carpet of the newly fallen leaves looks so clean and delicate whenit first covers the paths and the highways that one almost hesitates towalk upon it. Was it the gallant Raleigh who threw down his cloak forQueen Elizabeth to walk upon? See what a robe the maples have throwndown for you and me to walk upon! How one hesitates to soil it! Thesummer robes of the groves and the forests--more than robes, a vitalpart of themselves, the myriad living nets with which they havecaptured, and through which they have absorbed, the energy of the solarrays. What a change when the leaves are gone, and what a change whenthey come again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The dry, inert bark, the rough, wirelike twigs change but little from summer to winter. Whenthe leaves come, what a transformation, what mobility, whatsensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand delicate veined handsreaching forth and waving a greeting to the air and light, making aunion and compact with them, like a wedding ceremony. How young the oldtrees suddenly become! what suppleness and grace invest their branches!The leaves are a touch of immortal youth. As the cambium layer beneaththe bark is the girdle of perennial youth, so the leaves are the facialexpression of the same quality. The leaves have their day and die, butthe last leaf that comes to the branch is as young as the first. Theleaves and the blossom and the fruit of the tree come and go, yet theyage not; under the magic touch of spring the miracle is repeated overand over. 

The maples perhaps undergo the most complete transformation of all theforest trees. Their leaves fairly become luminous, as if they glowedwith inward light. In October a maple-tree before your window lights upyour room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days its presence helps todispel the gloom. The elm, the oak, the beech, possess in a much lessdegree that quality of luminosity, though certain species of oak attimes are rich in shades of red and bronze. The leaves of the trees justnamed for the most part turn brown before they fall. The great leaves ofthe sycamore assume a rich tan-color like fine leather. 

The spider weaves a net out of her own vitals with which to capture herprey, but the net is not a part of herself as the leaf is a part of thetree. The spider repairs her damaged net, but the tree never repairs itsleaves. It may put forth new leaves, but it never essays to patch up theold ones. Every tree has such a superabundance of leaves that a few moreor less or a few torn and bruised ones do not seem to matter. When theleaf surface is seriously curtailed, as it often is by some insect pest, or some form of leaf-blight, or by the ravages of a hail-storm, thegrowth of the tree and the maturing of its fruit is seriously checked. To denude a tree of its foliage three years in succession usuallyproves fatal. The vitality of the tree declines year by year till deathensues. 

To me nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacyof the mechanism by which it grows and lives, the fine hairlike rootletsat the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top. Therootlets absorb the water charged with mineral salts from the soil, andthe leaves absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as if the treewere almost made of matter and spirit, like man; the ether with itsvibrations, on the one hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds, on the other--earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy oak, the giganticsequoia, are each equally finely organized in these parts that take holdupon nature. We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense theyare; but all are delicate feeders in their mechanism of absorption fromthe earth and air. 

The tree touches the inorganic world at the two finest points of itsstructure--the rootlets and the leaves. These attack the great crudeworld of inorganic matter with weapons so fine that only the microscopecan fully reveal them to us. The animal world seizes its food in masseslittle and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs itsnourishment molecule by molecule. 

A tree does not live by its big roots--these are mainly for strengthand to hold it to the ground. How they grip the rocks, fittingthemselves to them, as Lowell says, like molten metal! The tree's lifeis in the fine hairlike rootlets that spring from the roots. Darwin saysthose rootlets behave as if they had minute brains in their extremities. They feel their way into the soil; they know the elements the plantwants; some select more lime, others more potash, others more magnesia. The wheat rootlets select more silica to make the stalk; the pearootlets select more lime: the pea does not need the silica. Theindividuality of plants and trees in this respect is most remarkable. The cells of each seem to know what particular elements they want fromthe soil, as of course they do. 

The vital activity of the tree goes on at three points--in the leaves, in the rootlets, and in the cambium layer. The activity of the leaf androotlet furnishes the starchy deposit which forms this generativelayer--the milky, mucilaginous girdle of matter between the outer barkand the wood through which the tree grows and increases in size. Generation and regeneration take place through this layer. I have calledit the girdle of perpetual youth. It never grows old. It is annuallyrenewed. The heart of the old apple-tree may decay and disappear, indeedthe tree may be reduced to a mere shell and many of its branches may dieand fall, but the few apples which it still bears attest the fact thatits cambium layer, at least over a part of its surface, is stillyouthful and doing its work. It is this layer that the yellow-belliedwoodpecker, known as the sapsucker, drills into and devours, thusdrawing directly upon the vitality of the tree. But his ravages arerarely serious. Only in two instances have I seen dead branches on anapple-tree that appeared to be the result of his drilling. 

What we call the heart of a tree is in no sense the heart; it has novital function, but only the mechanical one of strength and support. Itadds to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms. The trunk of atree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engagedin active business, the great mass of the population being retired andadding solidity and permanence to the social organism. The rootlets of aplant or a tree are like the laborers in the field that produce for usthe raw material of our food, while the leaves are like our many devicesfor rendering it edible and nourishing. The rootlets continue theiractivity in the fall, after the leaves have fallen, and thus gorge thetree with fluid against the needs of the spring. In the growing tree orvine the sap, charged with nourishment, flows down from the top to theroots. In the spring it evidently flows upward, seeking the air throughthe leaves. Or rather, we may say that the crude sap always flowsupward, while the nutritive sap flows downward, thus giving the tree akind of double circulation. 

A tree may be no more beautiful and wonderful when we have come to aknowledge of all its hidden processes, but it certainly is no less so. We do not think of the function of the leaves, nor of the bark, nor ofthe roots and rootlets, when we gaze upon a noble oak or an elm; weadmire it for its form, its sturdiness, or its grace; it is akin toourselves; it is the work of a vast community of cells like those thatbuild up our own bodies; it is a fountain of living matter rising up outof the earth and splitting up and spreading out at its top in a spray ofleaves and flowers; and if we could see its hidden processes we shouldrealize how truly like a fountain it is. While in full leaf a current ofwater is constantly flowing through it, and flowing upward againstgravity. This stream of water is truly its life current; it enters atthe rootlets under the ground and escapes at the top through the leavesby a process called transpiration. All the mineral salts with which thetree builds up its woody tissues, --its osseous system, so to speak, --theinstruments with which it imprisons and consolidates the carbon which itobtains from the air, are borne in solution in this stream of water. Itsfunction is analogous to that of the rivers which bring the produce andother material to the great cities situated upon their banks. A cloud ofinvisible vapor rises from the top of every tree and a thousandinvisible rills enter it through its myriad hairlike rootlets. The treesare thus conduits in the circuit of the waters from the earth to theclouds. Our own bodies and the bodies of all living things perform asimilar function. Life cannot go on without water, but water is not afood; it makes the processes of metabolism possible; assimilation andelimination go on through its agency. Water and air are the two tiesbetween the organic and the inorganic. The function of the one is mainlymechanical, that of the other is mainly chemical. 

As the water is drawn in at the roots, it flows out at the top, to whichpoint it rises by capillary attraction and a process called osmosis. Neither of them is a strictly vital process, since both are found in theinorganic world; but they are in the service of what we call a vitalprinciple. Some physicists and biochemists laugh at the idea of a vitalprinciple. Huxley thought we might as well talk about the principle ofaqueosity in water. We are the victims of words. The sun does not shootout beams or rays, though the eye reports such; but it certainly sendsforth energy; and it is as certain that there is a new activity inmatter--some matter--that we call vital. 

Matter behaves in a new manner; builds up new compounds and begetsmyriads of new forms not found in the inorganic world, till it finallybuilds up the body and mind of man. Death puts an end to this activityalike in man and tree, and a new kind of activity sets in--adisorganizing activity, still with the aid of water and air and livingorganisms. It is like the compositor distributing his type after thebook is printed. The micro-organisms answer to the compositor, but theyare of a different kind from those which build up the body in the firstinstance. But the living body as a whole, with its complex ofcoördinating organs and functions--what attended to that? The cellsbuild the parts, but what builds the whole?

How many things we have in common with the trees! The same mysteriousgift of life, to begin with; the same primary elements--carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on--in our bodies; and many of the same vitalfunctions--respiration, circulation, absorption, assimilation, reproduction. Protoplasm is the basis of life in both, and the cell isthe architect that builds up the bodies of both. Trees are rooted menand men are walking trees. The tree absorbs its earth materials throughthe minute hairs on its rootlets, called fibrillæ, and the animal bodyabsorbs its nutriment through analogous organs in the intestines, calledlacteals. 

Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid trees" often comes to mymind. They are the words of a poet who sees hidden relations andmeanings everywhere. He knows how fluid and adaptive all animate natureis. The trees are wrapped in a kind of slumber in winter, and they arereservoirs of living currents in summer. If all living bodies cameoriginally out of the sea, they brought a big dower of the sea withthem. The human body is mainly a few pinches of earth salts held insolution by several gallons of water. The ashes of the living tree bulksmall in comparison with the amount of water it holds. Yes, "theslumbering and liquid trees. " They awaken from their slumber in thespring, the scales fall from their buds, the fountains within them areunsealed, and they again become streams of living energy, breaking intoleaf and bloom and fruit under the magic of the sun's rays. 

II

THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST

I

How closely every crack and corner of nature is packed with life, especially in our northern temperate zone! I was impressed with thisfact when during several June days I was occupied with road-mending onthe farm where I was born. To open up the loosely piled and decayinglaminated rocks was to open up a little biological and zoölogicalmuseum, so many of our smaller forms of life harbored there. Fromchipmunks to ants and spiders, animal life flourished. We disturbed thechipmunks in their den a foot and a half or more beneath the looselypiled rocks. There were two of them in a soft, warm nest of dry, shredded maple-leaves. They did not wait to be turned out of doors, butwhen they heard the racket overhead bolted precipitately. Two livingtogether surprised me, as heretofore I had never known but one in a den. Near them a milk snake had stowed himself away in a crevice, and in thelittle earthquake which we set up got badly crushed. Two littlered-bellied snakes about one foot long had also found harbor there. 

The ants rushed about in great consternation when their eggs weresuddenly exposed. In fact, there was live natural history under everystone about us. Some children brought me pieces of stone, which theypicked up close by, which sheltered a variety of cocoon-buildingspiders. One small, dark-striped spider was carrying about its ball ofeggs, the size of a large pea, attached to the hind part of its body. This became detached, when she seized it eagerly and bore it about heldbetween her legs. Another fragment of stone, the size of one's hand, sheltered the chrysalis of some species of butterfly which was attachedto it at its tail. It was surprising to see this enshrouded creature, blind and deaf, wriggle and thrash about as if threatening us with itswrath for invading its sanctuary. One would about as soon expect to seean egg protest. 

Thus the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere. Every solitude tohim is peopled. Every morning or evening walk yields him a harvest toeye or ear. 

The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter orsummer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, hispleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is openbefore him and he has only to turn the leaves. 

A friend sitting on my porch in a hickory rocking-chair the other daywas annoyed by one of our small solitary wasps that seemed to want tooccupy the chair. It held a small worm in its legs. She would "shoo" itaway, only to see it back in a few seconds. I assured her that it didnot want to sting her, but that its nest was somewhere in the chair. And, sure enough, as soon as she quieted down, it entered a smallopening in the end of one of the chair arms, and deposited its worm, andpresently was back with another, and then a third and a fourth; andbefore the day was done it came with little pellets of mud and sealed upthe opening. 

II

My morning walk up to the beech wood often brings me new knowledge andnew glimpses of nature. This morning I saw a hummingbird taking its bathin the big dewdrops on a small ash-tree. I have seen other birds bathein the dew or raindrops on tree foliage, but did not before know thatthe hummer bathed at all. 

I also discovered that the webs of the little spiders in the road, whensaturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning, exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minutespherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow. In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped apace or two to the other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course Icould not see the completed bow in so small an area. These fragments areas unapproachable as the bow in the clouds. I also saw that where asuspended dewdrop becomes a jewel, or displays rainbow tints, you cansee only one at a time--to the right or left of you. It also is afragment of a rainbow. Those persons who report beholding a greatdisplay of prismatic effects in the foliage of trees, or in the grassafter a shower, are not to be credited. You may see the drops glisteningin the sun like glass beads, but they will not exhibit prismatic tints. In only one at a time will you see rainbow tints. Change your position, and you may see another, but never a great display of prismatic tints atone time. 

In my walk the other morning I turned over a stone, looking for spidersand ants. These I found, and in addition there were two cells of one ofour solitary leaf-cutters, which we as boys called "sweat bees, " becausethey came around us and would alight on our sweaty hands and arms as ifin quest of salt, as they probably were. It is about the size of a honeybee, of lighter color, and its abdomen is yellow and very flexible. Itcarries its pollen on its abdomen and not upon its thighs. These cellswere of a greenish-brown color; each of them was like a miniature barrelin which the pollen with the egg of the bee was sealed up. When the egghatches, the grub finds a loaf of bread at hand for its nourishment. These little barrels were each headed up with a dozen circular bits ofleaves cut as with a compass, exactly fitting the cylinder, one upon theother. The wall of the cylinder was made up of oblong cuttings fromleaves, about half an inch wide, and three quarters of an inch long, adozen of them lapped over one another, and fitted together in the mostworkmanlike manner. 

In my boyhood I occasionally saw this bee cutting out hernesting-material. Her mandibles worked like perfect shears. When she hadcut out her circular or her oblong patches, she rolled them up, and, holding them between her legs, flew away with them. I have seen hercarry them into little openings in old rails, or old posts. About theperiod of hatching, I do not know. 

III

Swallows, in hawking through the air for insects, do not snap their gameup as do the true flycatchers. Their mouths are little nets which theydrive through the air with the speed of airplanes. A few mornings agothe air was cold, but it contained many gauzy, fuzzy insects from thesize of mosquitoes down to gnats. They kept near the ground. I happenedto be sitting on the sunny side of a rock and saw the swallows sweeppast. One came by within ten feet of me and drove straight on to a veryconspicuous insect which disappeared in his open mouth in a flash. Howmany hundreds or thousands of such insects they must devour each day!Then think of how many insects the flycatchers and warblers and otherinsect-eating birds must consume in the course of a season!

IV

We little suspect how the woods and wayside places swarm with life. Wesee little of it unless we watch and wait. The wild creatures arecautious about revealing themselves: their enemies are on the lookoutfor them. Certain woods at night are alive with flying squirrels which, except for some accident, we never see by day. Then there are the nightprowlers--skunks, foxes, coons, minks, and owls--yes, and mice. 

The wild mice we rarely see. The little shrew mole, which I know isactive at night, I have never seen but once. I once set a trap, calledthe delusion trap, in the woods by some rocks where I had no reason tosuspect there were more mice than elsewhere, and two mornings later itwas literally packed full of mice, half a dozen or more. 

Turn over a stone in the fields and behold the consternation among thesmall folk beneath it, --ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders, --allobjecting to the full light of day, not because their deeds are evil, but because the instinct of self-preservation prompts this course. As Iwrite these sentences, a chipmunk, who has his den in the bank by theroadside near by, is very busy storing up some half-ripe currants whichgrew on a bush a few yards away. Of course the currants will ferment androt, but that consideration does not disturb him; the seeds will keep, and they are what he is after. In the early summer, before any of thenuts and grains are ripened, the high cost of living among the lesserrodents is very great, and they resort to all sorts of makeshifts. 

V

In regard to this fullness of life in the hidden places of nature, Darwin says as much of the world as a whole:

 Well may we affirm that every part of the world is inhabitable. Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains--warm mineral springs--the wide expanse and depth of the ocean, the upper regions of the atmosphere, and even the surface of perpetual snow--all support organic beings. 

Never before was there such a lover of natural history as Darwin. In theearth, in the air, in the water, in the rocks, in the sand, in themud--he scanned the great biological record of the globe as it was neverscanned before. During the voyage of the Beagle he shirked no hardshipsto add to his stores of natural knowledge. He would leave thecomfortable ship while it was making its surveys, and make journeys ofhundreds of miles on horseback through rough and dangerous regions toglean new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geology or botany orzoölogy or anthropology for himself, and he was happy. At a greataltitude in the Andes the people had shortness of breath which theycalled "puna, " and they ate onions to correct it. Darwin says, with atwinkle in his eye, "For my part I found nothing so good as the fossilshells. "

His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of natural-history knowledge. Was any country ever before so searched and sifted for its biologicalfacts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods, everywhere hisinsatiable eye penetrated. One re-reads him always with a differentpurpose in view. If you happen to be interested in insects, you read himfor that; if in birds, you read him for that; if in mammals, in fossils, in reptiles, in volcanoes, in anthropology, you read him with each ofthese subjects in mind. I recently had in mind the problem of thesoaring condor, and I re-read him for that, and, sure enough, he hadstudied and mastered that subject, too. If you are interested in seeinghow the biological characteristics of the two continents, North andSouth America, agree or contrast with each other, you will find whatyou wish to know. You will learn that in South America thelightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in NorthAmerica; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snapsitself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; thatthe obscene fungus, or _Phallus_, taints the tropical forests, as asimilar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; andthat the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spidersfor their young, just as in North America. Of course there are newspecies of animal and plant life, but not many. The influence ofenvironment in modifying species is constantly in his mind. 

VI

The naturalist can content himself with a day of little things. If hecan read only a word of one syllable in the book of nature, he will makethe most of that. I read such a word the other morning when I perceived, when watching a young but fully fledged junco, or snowbird, that itsmarkings Were like those of the vesper sparrow. The young of birdsalways for a brief period repeat the markings of the birds of the parentstem from which they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our robins havespeckled breasts, betraying their thrush kinship. And the young juncoshows, in its striped appearance of breast and back, and the lateralwhite quills in the tail, its kinship to the grass finch or vespersparrow. The slate-color soon obliterates most of these signs, but thewhite quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits of itsforbears. The vesper sparrow nests upon the ground in the open fields, but the junco chooses a mossy bank or tussock by the roadside, or in thewoods, and constructs a very artistic nest of dry grass and hair whichis so well hidden that the passer-by seldom detects it. 

Another small word I read about certain of the rocks in my nativeCatskills, a laminated, blue-gray sandstone, that when you have splitthem open with steel wedges and a big hammer, or blown them up withdynamite, instead of the gray fresh surface of the rock greeting you, itis often a surface of red mud, as if the surface had been enameled orelectrotyped with mud. It appears to date from the first muddy day ofcreation. I have such a one for my doorstone at Woodchuck Lodge. It isamusing to see the sweepers and scrubbers of doorstones fall upon itwith soap and hot water, and utterly fail to make any impression uponit. Nowhere else have I seen rocks casehardened with primal mud. Thefresh-water origin of the Catskill rocks no doubt in some way accountsfor it. 

VII

We are all interested students of the weather, but the naturaliststudies it for some insight into the laws which govern it. One season Imade my reputation as a weather prophet by predicting on the first dayof December a very severe winter. It was an easy guess. I saw in Detroita bird from the far north, a bird I had never before seen, the Bohemianwaxwing, or chatterer. It breeds above the Arctic Circle and is commonto both hemispheres. I said, When the Arctic birds come down, be surethere is a cold wave behind them. And so it proved. 

When the birds fail to give one a hint of the probable character of thecoming winter, what reliable signs remain? These remain: When Decemberis marked by sudden and violent extremes of heat and cold, the winterwill be broken; the cold will not hold. I have said elsewhere that thehum of the bee in December is the requiem of winter. But when the seasonis very evenly spaced, the cold slowly and steadily increasing throughNovember and December, no hurry, no violence, then be prepared for asnug winter. 

As to wet and dry summers, one can always be guided by the rainfall onthe Pacific coast; a shortage on the western coast means an excess onthe eastern. For four or five years past California has been short ofits rainfall; so much so that quite general alarm is felt over thegradual shrinkage of their stored-up supplies, the dams and reservoirs;and during the summer seasons the parts of New England and New York withwhich I am acquainted have had very wet seasons--floods in midsummer, and full springs and wells at all times. The droughts have beentemporary and local. 

We say, "As fickle as the weather, " but the meteorological laws arepretty well defined. All signs fail in a drought, and all signs fail ina wet season. At one time the south wind brings no rain, at another timethe north and northwest winds do bring rain. The complex of conditionsover a continental area of rivers and lakes and mountain-chains is toovast for us to decipher; it inheres in the nature of things. It is oneof the potencies and possibilities which matter possesses. We can takeno step beyond that. 

VIII

There seems to me to be false reasoning in the argument from analogywhich William James uses in his lectures on "Human Immortality. " Thebrain, he admits, is the organ of the mind, but may only sustain therelation to it, he says, which the wire sustains to the electric currentwhich it transmits, or which the pipe sustains to the water which itconveys. 

Now the source and origin of the electric current is outside the wirethat transmits it, and it could sustain no other than a transientrelation to any outside material through which it passed. But if weknow anything, we know that the human mind or spirit is a vital part ofthe human body; its source is in the brain and nervous system; hence, itand the organ through which it is manifested are essentially one. 

The analogy of the brain to the battery or dynamo in which the currentoriginates is the only logical or permissible one. 

IX

Maeterlinck wrote wisely when he said:

 The insect does not belong to our world. The other animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life, and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem wholly foreign to us. In spite of all we feel a sort of earthly brotherhood with them. . . . There is something, on the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. 

Certainly more cruel and monstrous than our own. Among the spiders, forinstance, the female eats the male and often devours her own young. Thescorpion does the same thing. I know of nothing like it among our landanimals outside the insect world. 

The insects certainly live in a wonderland of which we have littleconception. All our powers are tremendously exaggerated in these littlepeople. Their power makes them acquainted with the inner molecularconstitution of matter far more intimately than we can attain to by ourcoarse chemical analysis. Our world is agitated by vibrations, coarseand fine, of which our senses can take in only the slower ones. If theyexceed three thousand a second, they become too shrill for our ears. Itis thought that the world of sound with the insects begins where oursleaves off. The drums and tubes of insects' ears are very minute. Whatwould to us be a continuous sound is to them a series of separate blows. We begin to hear blows as continuous sounds when they amount to aboutthirty a second. The house-fly has about four thousand eye-lenses; thecabbage butterfly, and the dragon-fly, about seventeen thousand; andsome species of beetles have twenty-five thousand. We cannot begin tothink in what an agitated world the insect lives, thrilling andvibrating to a degree that would drive us insane. If we possessed thesame microscopic gifts, how would the aspect of the world be changed! Wemight see a puff of smoke as a flock of small blue butterflies, or hearthe hum of a mosquito as the blast of a trumpet. On the other hand, somuch that disturbs us must escape the insects, because their senses aretoo fine to take it in. Doubtless they do not hear the thunder or feelthe earthquake. 

The insects are much more sensitive to heat and cold than we are, andfor reasons. The number of waves in the ether that gives us thesensation of heat is three or four million millions a second. The numberof tremors required to produce red light is estimated at four hundredand seventy-four million millions a second, and for the production ofviolet light, six hundred and ninety-nine million millions a second. Nodoubt the insects react to all these different degrees of vibration. Those marvelous instruments called antennæ seem to put them in touchwith a world of which we are quite oblivious. 

X

To how many things our lives have been compared!--to a voyage, with itsstorms and adverse currents and safe haven at last; to a day with itsmorning, noon, and night; to the seasons with their spring, summer, autumn, and winter; to a game, a school, a battle. 

In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley compared life to a game ofchess. We must learn the names and the values and the moves of eachpiece, and all the rules of the game if we hope to play it successfully. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of theuniverse, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. But it may be questioned if the comparison is a happy one. Life is not agame in this sense, a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory overan opponent, except in isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chesswill not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a strugglewhere the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much morevague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Lifeis coöperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. Isuppose business is more often like a game than is life--your gain isoften the other man's loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit yourrivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal life there is little thatsuggests a game of any kind. 

We must all have money, or its equivalent. There are the threethings--money, goods, labor--and the greatest of these is labor. Laboris the sum of all values. The value of things is the labor it requiresto produce or to obtain them. Were gold plentiful and silver scarce, thelatter would be the more precious. The men at the plough and the hoe andin the mines of coal and iron stand first. These men win from naturewhat we all must have, and these things are none of them in the hands orunder the guardianship of some one who is trying to keep us fromobtaining them, or is aiming to take our aids and resources from us. 

The chess simile has only a rhetorical value. The London workingmen towhom Huxley spoke would look around them in vain to find in theirproblems of life anything akin to a game of chess, or for any fruitfulsuggestion in the idea. They were probably mechanics, tradesmen, artisans, teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew throughexperience the forces with which they had to deal. But how many personswho succeed in life have any such expert knowledge of the forces andconditions with which they have to deal, as two chess-players have ofthe pawns and knights and bishops and queens of the chessboard?

Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing, and there was vastlymore logical force in his figures than in those of most writers. 

Life may more truly be compared to a river that has its source in amountain or hillside spring, with its pure and sparking or foaming andnoisy youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger volume, and thenits placid and gently moving current to the sea. Blessed is the lifethat is self-purifying, like the moving waters; that lends itself tomany noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and becoming a destructiveforce. 

XI

I had a letter the other day from a man who wanted to know why themeadow, or field, mice gnawed or barked the apple-trees when there was adeep coverlid of snow upon the ground. Was it because they found itdifficult to get up through the deep, frozen snow to the surface to getseeds to eat? He did not seem to know that meadow mice are notseed-eaters, but that they live on grass and roots and keep well hiddenbeneath the ground during the day, when there is a deep fall of snowcoming up out of their dens and retreats and leading a free holiday lifebeneath the snow, free from the danger of cats, foxes, owls, and hawks. Life then becomes a sort of picnic. They build new nests on the surfaceof the ground and form new runways, and disport themselves apparently ina festive mood. The snow is their protection. They bark the trees andtake their time. When the snow is gone, their winter picnic is at anend, and they retreat to their dens in the ground and beneath flatstones, and lead once more the life of fear. 

XII

Sitting on my porch recently, wrapped in my blanket, recovering from aslight indisposition, I was in a mood to be interested in the everydayaspects of nature before me--in the white and purple lilacs, in themaple-leaves nearly full grown, in the pendent fringe of theyellowish-white bloom of the chestnut and oak, in the new shoots of thegrapevines, and so forth. All these things formed only a setting orbackground for the wild life near by. 

The birds are the little people that peep out at me, or pause and regardme curiously in this great temple of trees, --wrens, chippies, robins, bluebirds, catbirds, redstarts, and now and then rarer visitants. A fewdays earlier, for a moment, a mourning ground warbler suddenly appearedaround the corner, on the ground, at the foot of the steps, and glancedhastily up at me. When I arose and looked over the railing, it had gone. Then the speckled Canada warbler came in the lilac bushes and syringabranches and gave me several good views. The bay-breasted warbler wasreported in the evergreens up by the stone house, but he failed toreport to me here at "The Nest. " The female redstart, however, cameseveral times to the gravel walk below me, evidently looking formaterial to begin her nest. And the wren, the irrepressible house wren, was and is in evidence every few minutes, busy carrying nesting-materialinto the box on the corner of the veranda. How intense and emphatic sheis! And the male, how he throbs and palpitates with song! Yesterday aninterloper appeared. He or she climbed the post by the back way, as itwere, and hopped out upon the top of the box and paused, as if to seethat the coast was clear. He acted as if he felt himself an intruder. Quick as a flash there was a brown streak from the branch of a maplethirty feet away, and the owner of the box was after him. The culpritdid not stop to argue the case, but was off, hotly pursued. I must notforget the pair of wood thrushes that are building a nest in a maplefifty or more feet away. How I love to see them on the ground at myfeet, every motion and gesture like music to the eye! The head and neckof the male fairly glows, and there is something fine and manly abouthis speckled breast. 

A pair of catbirds have a nest in the barberry bushes at the south endof the house, and are in evidence at all hours. But when the nest iscompleted, and the laying of eggs begins, they keep out of the publiceye as much as possible. From the front of the stage they retreat behindthe curtain. 

One day as I sat here I heard the song of the olive-backed thrush downin the currant-bushes below me. Instantly I was transported to the deepwoods and the trout brooks of my native Catskills. I heard the murmuringwater and felt the woodsy coolness of those retreats--such magic hathassociative memories! A moment before a yellow-throated vireo sangbriefly in the maple, a harsh note; and the oriole with its insistentcall added to the disquieting sounds. I have no use for the oriole. Hehas not one musical note, and in grape time his bill is red, or purple, with the blood of our grapes. 

But the most of these little people are my benefactors, and add anotherray of sunshine to the May day. I shall not soon forget the spectacleof that rare little warbler peeping around the corner of the porch, like a little fairy, and then vanishing. 

The mere studying of the birds, seeking mere knowledge of them, is notenough. You must live with the birds, so to speak; have daily andseasonal associations with them before they come to mean much to you. Then, as they linger about your house or your camp, or as you see themin your walks, they are a part of your life, and help give tone andcolor to your day. 

III

THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS

To what widely different use birds put their power of flight! To thegreat mass of them it is simply a means of locomotion, of getting fromone point to another. A small minority put their wing-power to moreideal uses, as the lark when he claps his wings at heaven's gate, andthe ruffed grouse when he drums; even the woodcock has some other usefor his wings than to get from one point to another. Listen to hisflight song in the April twilight up against the sky. 

Our small hawks use their power of flight mainly to catch their prey, asdoes the swallow skimming the air all day on tireless wing, but some ofthe other hawks, such as our red-tailed hawk, climb their great spiralsapparently with other motives than those which relate to their dailyfare. The crow has little other use for his wings than to gad about likea busy politician from one neighborhood to another. In Florida I haveseen large flocks of the white ibis performing striking evolutions highup against the sky, evidently expressive of the gay and festive feelingbegotten by the mating instinct. 

The most beautiful flyer we ever see against our skies is the unsavorybuzzard. He is the winged embodiment of grace, ease, and leisure. Judging from appearances alone, he is the most disinterested of all thewinged creatures we see. He rides the airy billows as if only to enjoyhis mastery over them. He is as calm and unhurried as the orbs in theircourses. His great circles and spirals have a kind of astronomiccompleteness. That all this power of wing and grace of motion should begiven to an unclean bird, to a repulsive scavenger, is one of theanomalies of nature. He does not need to hurry or conceal his approach;what he is after cannot flee or hide; he has no enemies; nothing wantshim; and he is at peace with all the world. 

The great condor of South America, in rising from the ground, alwaysfaces the wind. It is often captured by tempting it to gorge itself in acomparatively narrow space. But if a strong enough wind were blowing atsuch times, it could quickly rise over the barrier. Darwin says hewatched a condor high in the air describing its huge circles for sixhours without once flapping its wings. He says that, if the bird wishedto descend, the wings were for a moment collapsed; and when againexpanded, with an altered inclination, the momentum gained by the rapiddescent seemed to urge the bird upwards with the even and steadymovement of a paper kite. In the case of any bird _soaring_, its motionmust be sufficiently rapid for the action of the inclined surface ofits body on the atmosphere to counterbalance its gravity. The force tokeep up the momentum of a body moving in a horizontal plane in the air(in which there is so little friction) cannot be great, and this forceis all that is wanted. The movement of the neck and body of the condor, we must suppose, is sufficient for this. However this may be, it istruly wonderful and beautiful to see so great a bird, hour after hour, without any apparent exertion, wheeling and gliding over mountain andriver. 

The airplane has a propelling power in its motor, and it shifts itswings to take advantage of the currents. The buzzard and condor do thesame thing. They are living airplanes, and their power is so evenly andsubtly distributed and applied, that the trick of it escapes the eye. But of course they avail themselves of the lifting power of theair-currents. 

All birds know how to use their wings to propel themselves through theair, but the mechanism of the act we may not be able to analyze. I donot know how a butterfly propels itself against a breeze with itsquill-less wings, but we know that it does do it. As its wings areneither convex nor concave, like a bird's, one would think that theupward and downward strokes would neutralize each other; but they donot. Strong winds often carry them out over large bodies of water; butsuch a master flyer as the monarch beats its way back to shore, and, indeed, the monarch habitually flies long distances over salt water whenmigrating along our seacoast in spring and fall. 

At the moment of writing these paragraphs, I saw a hen-hawk flap heavilyby, pursued by a kingbird. The air was phenomenally still, not a leafstirred, and the hawk was compelled to beat his wings vigorously. Nosoaring now, no mounting heavenward, as I have seen him mount till hispetty persecutor grew dizzy with the height and returned to earth. Butthe next day, with a fairly good breeze blowing, I watched two hawks formany minutes climbing their spiral stairway to the skies, till theybecame very small objects against the clouds, and not once did they flaptheir wings! Then one of them turned toward the mountain-top and sailedstraight into the face of the wind, till he was probably over his mateor young, when, with half-folded wings, he shot down into the tree-topslike an arrow. 

In regard to powers of flight, the birds of the air may be divided intothree grand classes: those which use their wings simply to transportthemselves from one place to another, --the same use we put our legsto, --those which climb the heavens to attain a wide lookout, either forthe pleasure of soaring, or to gain a vantage-point from which to scan awide territory in search of food or prey, and those which feed as theyfly. Most of our common birds are examples of the first class. Our hawksand buzzards are examples of the second class. Swallows, nighthawks, andsome sea-birds are examples of the third class. A few of our birds usetheir wings to gain an elevation from which to deliver their songs--asthe larks, and some of the finches; but the robins and the sparrows andthe warblers and the woodpeckers are always going somewhere. The hawksand the buzzards are, comparatively speaking, birds of leisure. 

Every bird and beast is a master in the use of its own tools andweapons. We who look on from the outside marvel at their skill. Here isthe carpenter bumble-bee hovering and darting about the verge-board ofmy porch-roof as I write this. It darts swiftly this way and that, andnow and then pauses in midair, surrounded by a blur of whirring wings, as often does the hummingbird. How it does it, I do not know. I cannotcount or distinguish the separate stroke of its wings. At the same time, the chimney swifts sweep by me like black arrows, on wings apparently asstiff as if made of tin or sheet-iron, now beating the air, now sailing. In some way they suggest winged gimlets. How thin and scimitar-liketheir wings are! They are certainly masters of their own craft. 

In general, birds in flight bring the wings as far below the body asthey do above it. Note the crow flapping his way through the air. He isa heavy flyer, but can face a pretty strong wind. His wings probablymove through an arc of about ninety degrees. The phœbe flies with apeculiar snappy, jerky flight; its relative the kingbird, with a mincingand hovering flight; it tiptoes through the air. The woodpeckers gallop, alternately closing and spreading their wings. The ordinary flight ofthe goldfinch is a very marked undulatory flight; a section of it, therise and the fall, would probably measure fifty feet. The bird goes halfthat distance or more with wings closed. This is the flight the maleindulges in within hearing distance of his brooding mate. During thelove season he occasionally gives way to an ecstatic flight. This is alevel flight, performed on round, open wings, which beat the airvertically. This flight of ecstasy during the song season is common tomany of our birds. I have seen even the song sparrow indulge in it, rising fifty feet or more and delivering its simple song with obviousexcitement. The idiotic-looking woodcock, inspired by the grand passion, rises upon whistling wings in the early spring twilight, and floats andcircles at an altitude of a hundred feet or more, and in rapidsmackering and chippering notes unburdens his soul. The song of ecstasywith our meadowlark is delivered in a level flight and is sharp andhurried, both flight and song differing radically from its everydayperformance. One thinks of the bobolink as singing almost habitually onthe wing. He is the most rollicking and song-drunk of all our singingbirds. His season is brief but hilarious. In his level flight he seemsto use only the tips of his wings, and we see them always below thelevel of his back. Our common birds that have no flight-song, so far asI have observed, are the bluebird, the robin, the phœbe, the socialsparrow, the tanager, the grosbeak, the pewee, the wood warblers, andmost of the ground warblers. 

Over thirty years ago a writer on flying-machines had this to say aboutthe flight of sea-gulls: "Sweeping around in circles, occasionallyelevating themselves by a few flaps of the wings, they glide down and upthe aerial inclines without apparently any effort whatever. But a closeobservation will show that at every turn the angle of inclination of thewings is changed to meet the new conditions. There is continual movementwith power--by the bird it is done instinctively, by our machine onlythrough mechanism obeying a mind not nearly so well instructed. "

The albatross will follow a ship at sea, sailing round and round, in abrisk breeze, on unbending wing, only now and then righting itself witha single flap of its great pinions. It literally rides upon the storm. 

IV

BIRD INTIMACIES

When, as sometimes happens, I feel an inclination to seek out new landsin my own country, or in other countries, to see what Nature is doingthere, and what guise she wears, something prompts me to pause, andafter a while to say to myself: "Look a little closer into the natureright at your own door; do a little intensive observation at home, andsee what that yields you. The enticement of the far-away is mostly inyour imagination; let your eyes and your imagination play once more onthe old familiar birds and objects. "

One season in my walks to the woods I was on the lookout for a naturalbracket among the tree-branches, to be used in supporting a book-shelf. I did not find it; but one day in a shad-blow tree, within a few feetfrom the corner of my own house, I found what I was searching for, perfect in every particular--the right angle and the supporting brace, or hypothenuse. It gave me a hint I have not forgotten. 

I find that one has only to overcome a little of his obtuseness andindifference and look a little more closely upon the play of wild lifeabout him to realize how much interesting natural history is beingenacted every day before his very eyes--in his own garden and dooryardand apple-orchard and vineyard. If one's mind were only alert andsensitive enough to take it all in! Whether one rides or walks or sitsunder the trees, or loiters about the fields or woods, the play of wildlife is going on about him, and, if he happens to be blessed with theseeing eye and the hearing ear, is available for his instruction andentertainment. On every farm in the land a volume of live naturalhistory goes to waste every year because there is no historian to notethe happenings. 

The drama of wild life goes on more or less behind screens--a screen ofleaves or of grass, or of vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alertand sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us see only a merefraction of it. If one saw one tenth of the significant happenings thattake place on his few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the courseof the season, or even of a single week, what a harvest he would have!The drama of wild life is played rapidly; the actors are on and off thestage before we fairly know it, and the play shifts to other stages. 

I wonder how many of the scores of persons passing along the roadbetween my place and the railway station one early May day became awarethat a rare bird incident was being enacted in the trees over theirheads. It was the annual _sängerfest_ of the goldfinches--one of theprettiest episodes in the lives of any of our birds, a real musicalreunion of the goldfinch tribe, apparently a whole township, manyhundreds of them, filling scores of the tree-tops along the road and inthe groves with a fine, sibilant chorus which the ear refers vaguely tothe surrounding tree-tops, but which the eye fails adequately to accountfor. It comes from everywhere, but from nowhere in particular. The birdssit singly here and there amid the branches, and it is difficult toidentify the singers. It is a minor strain, but multitudinous, and fillsall the air. The males are just donning their golden uniforms, as if tocelebrate the blooming of the dandelions, which, with the elm-trees, afford them their earliest food-supply. While they are singing they arebusy cutting out the green germs of the elm flakes, and going down tothe ground and tearing open the closed dandelion-heads that have shut upto ripen their seeds, preparatory to their second and ethereal floweringwhen they become spheres of fragile silver down. 

Whether this annual reunion of the goldfinches should be called adandelion festival, or a new-coat festival, or whether it is to bringthe sexes together preliminary to the mating-season, I am at a loss todecide. It usually lasts a week or more, and continues on wet days aswell as on fair. It all has a decidedly festive air, like the fête-daysof humans. I know of nothing like it among other birds. It is themanifestation of something different from the flocking instinct; it isthe social and holiday instinct, bringing the birds together for a briefseason, as if in celebration of some special event or purpose. I haveobserved it in my vicinity every spring for many years, usually in Aprilor early May, and it is the prettiest and most significant bird episode, involving a whole species, known to me. 

The goldfinch has many pretty ways. He is one of our most amiable birds. So far as my knowledge goes, he is not capable of one harsh note. Histones are all either joyous or plaintive. In his spring reunions theyare joyous. In the peculiar flight-song in which he indulges in themating season, beating the air vertically with his round, open wings, his tones are fairly ecstatic. His call to his mate when she isbrooding, and when he circles about her in that long, billowy flight, the crests of his airy waves being thirty or forty feet apart, calling, "Perchic-o-pee, perchic-o-pee, " as if he were saying, "For love of thee, for love of thee, " and she calling back, "Yes, dearie; yes, dearie"--histones at such times express contentment and reassurance. 

When any of his natural enemies appear--a hawk, a cat, a jay--his tonesare plaintive and appealing. "Pit-y, pit-y!" he cries in sorrow and notin anger. 

When with his mate he leads their brood about the August thistles, theyoung call in a similar tone. When in July the nesting has begun, thefemale talks the prettiest "baby talk" to her mate as he feeds her. Thenest-building rarely begins till thistledown can be had--so literallyare all the ways of this darling bird ways of softness and gentleness. The nest is a thick, soft, warm structure, securely fastened in the forkof a maple or an apple-tree. 

None of our familiar birds endear themselves to us more than does thebluebird. The first bluebird in the spring is as welcome as the blue skyitself. The season seems softened and tempered as soon as we hear hisnote and see his warm breast and azure wing. His gentle manners, hissoft, appealing voice, not less than his pleasing hues, seem born of thebright and genial skies. He is the spirit of the April days incarnatedin a bird. He has the quality of winsomeness, like the violet and thespeedwell among the flowers. Not strictly a songster, yet his every noteand call is from out the soul of harmony. The bluebird is evidently anoffshoot from the thrush family, and without the thrush's gift of song;still his voice affords us much of the same pleasure. 

How readily the bluebirds become our friends and neighbors when we offerthem suitable nesting-retreats! Bring them something from nature, something with the bark on--a section of a dry beech or maple limb inwhich the downy woodpecker has excavated his chamber and passed thewinter or reared his brood; fasten it in early spring upon the corner ofyour porch, or on the trunk of a near-by tree, and see what interestingneighbors you will soon have. One summer I brought home from one of mywalks to the woods a section, two or three feet long, of a large yellowbirch limb which contained such a cavity as I speak of, and I wired itto one of the posts of the rustic porch at Woodchuck Lodge. The nextseason a pair of bluebirds reared two broods in it. The incubation ofthe eggs for the second brood was well under way when I appeared uponthe scene in early July. My sudden presence so near their treasures, andmy lingering there with books and newspapers, disturbed the birds a gooddeal. The first afternoon the mother bird did not enter the cavity forhours. I shall always remember the pretty and earnest manner in whichthe male tried to reassure her and persuade her that the danger was notso imminent as it appeared to be, probably encouraging a confidence inhis mate which he did not himself share. The mother bird would alight atthe entrance to the chamber, but, with her eye fixed upon the man withthe newspaper, feared to enter. The male, perched upon the telegraphwire fifty feet away, would raise his wings and put all the love andassurance in his voice he was capable of, apparently trying to dispelher fears. He would warble and warble, and make those pretty winggestures over and over, saying so plainly: "It is all right, my dear, the man is harmless--absorbed there in his newspaper. Go in, go in, andkeep warm our precious eggs!" How long she hesitated! But as night grewnear she grew more and more anxious, and he more and more eloquent. Finally she alighted upon the edge of the overhanging roof and peereddown hesitatingly. Her mate applauded and encouraged till finally shemade the plunge and entered the hole, but instantly came out again; herheart failed her for a moment; but she soon returned and remainedinside. Then her mate flew away toward the orchard, uttering a cheerynote which doubtless she understood. 

The birds soon became used to my presence and their household mattersprogressed satisfactorily. Both birds took a hand in feeding the young, which grew rapidly. When they were nearly ready to leave the nest, acruel fate befell them: I slept upon the porch, and one night I wasawakened by the cry of young bluebirds, and the sound of feet like thoseof a squirrel on the roof over me. Then I heard the cry of a young birdproceed from the butternut-tree across the road opposite the house. Isaid to myself, "A squirrel or an owl is after my birds. " The cry comingso quickly from the butternut-tree made me suspect an owl, and that thebird whose cry I heard was in his talons. I was out of my cot and up tothe nest in a moment, but the tragedy was over; the birds were all gone, and the night was silent. In the morning I found that a piece of thebrittle birch limb had been torn away, enlarging the entrance to thecavity so that the murderous talons of the owl could reach in and seizethe young birds. I had been aroused in time to hear the marauder on theroof with one, and then hear its cry as he carried it to the tree. Inthe grass in front I found one of the young, unable to fly, butapparently unhurt. I put it back in the nest, but it would not stay. Thespell of the nest was broken, and the young bird took to the grassagain. The parent birds were on hand, much excited, and, when I tried toreturn the surviving bird to the nest, the male came at me fiercely, apparently charging the whole catastrophe to me. 

We had strong proof the previous season that an owl, probably thescreech owl, prowled about the house at night. A statuette of myself inclay which a sculptor was modeling was left out one night on the porch, and in the morning its head was unusually bowed. The prints of a bird'stalons upon the top told what had happened. In the bronze reproductionof that statuette the head has more of a droop than the artist at firstplanned to give it. 

The next season the bluebirds occupied the cavity in the birch limbagain, but before my arrival in July the owls had again cleaned themout. In so doing they had ripped the cavity open nearly to the bottom. For all that, early the following May bluebirds were occupying thecavity again. It held three eggs when I arrived. I looked over thesituation and resolved to try to head off the owl this time, even at therisk of driving the bluebirds away. I took a strip of tin several incheswide and covered the slit with it and wired it fast. Then I obtained abroad strip of dry birch-bark, wrapped it about the limb over the tin, and wired it fast, leaving the entrance to the nest in its originalform. I knew the owl could not slit the tin; the birch-bark would hideit and preserve in a measure the natural appearance of the branch. Whenthe bluebirds saw what had happened to their abode, they were a gooddeal distressed; they could no longer see their eggs through the slitwhich the owl had made, and they refused to enter the cavity. They hungabout all day, uttering despondent notes, approaching the nest at times, but hesitating even to alight upon the roof above it. Occasionally thefemale would fly away toward the distant woods or hills uttering thatplaintive, homesick note which seemed to mean farewell. The male wouldfollow her, calling in a more cheery and encouraging tone. Once thecouple were gone three or four hours, and I concluded they had reallydeserted the place. But just before sundown they were back again, andthe female alighted at the entrance to the nest and looked in. The malecalled to her cheerily; still she would not enter, but joined him on thetelephone wire, where the two seemed to hold a little discussion. Presently the mother bird flew to the nest again, then to the roof aboveit, then back to the nest, and entered it till only her tail showed, then flew back to the wire beside her mate. She was evidently making upher mind that the case was not hopeless. After a little moremaneuvering, and amid the happy, reassuring calls of her mate, sheentered the nest cavity and remained, and I was as well pleased as washer mate. 

No owls disturbed them this time, and the brood of young birds wasbrought off in due season. In July a second brood of four wassuccessfully reared and sent forth on their career. 

The oriole nests in many kinds of trees--oaks, maples, apple-trees, elms--but her favorite is the elm. She chooses the end of one of thelong drooping branches where a group of small swaying twigs affords hersuitable support. It is the most unlikely place imaginable for any but apendent nest, woven to half a dozen or more slender, vertical twigs, and swaying freely in the wind. Few nests are so secure, so hidden, andso completely sheltered from the rains by the drooping leaves above andaround it. It is rarely discoverable except from directly beneath it. Ithink a well-built oriole's nest would sustain a weight of eight or tenpounds before it would be torn from its moorings. They are also verypartial to the ends of branches that swing low over the highway. One MayI saw two female orioles building their nests twenty or twenty-five feetabove our State Road, where automobiles and other vehicles passed nearlyevery minute all the day. An oriole's nest in a remote field far fromhighways and dwellings is a rare occurrence. 

Birds of different species differ as widely in skill in nest-building asthey do in song. From the rude platform of dry twigs and other coarsematerial of the cuckoo, to the pendent, closely woven pouch of theoriole, the difference in the degree of skill displayed is analogous tothe difference between the simple lisp of the cedar-bird, or the littletin whistle of the "chippie, " and the golden notes of the wood thrush, or the hilarious song of the bobolink. 

Real castles in the air are the nests of the orioles; no other nests arebetter hidden or apparently more safe from the depredations of crows andsquirrels. To start the oriole's nest successfully is quite anengineering feat. The birds inspect the branches many times before theymake a decision. When they have decided on the site, the mother birdbrings her first string or vegetable fiber and attaches it to a twig bywinding it around and around many times, leaving one or both endshanging free. I have nests where these foundation strings are woundaround a twig a dozen times. In her blind windings and tuckings andloopings the bird occasionally ties a substantial knot, but it is neverthe result of a deliberate purpose as some observers contend, but purelya matter of chance. When she uses only wild vegetable fibers, shefastens it to the twig by a hopeless kind of tangle. It is about thecraziest kind of knitting imaginable. After the builder has fastenedmany lines to opposite twigs, their ends hanging free, she proceeds tospan the little gulf by weaving them together. She stands with her clawsclasped one to each side, and uses her beak industriously, looping upand fastening the loose ends. I have stood in the road under the nestlooking straight up till my head swam, trying to make out just how shedid it, but all I could see was the bird standing astride the chasm shewas trying to bridge, and busy with the hanging strings. Slowly the mazeof loose threads takes a sacklike form, the bottom of the nest thickens, till some morning you see the movement of the bird inside it; her beakcomes through the sides from within, like a needle or an awl, seizes aloose hair or thread, and jerks it back through the wall and tightensit. It is a regular stitching or quilting process. The course of anyparticular thread or fiber is as irregular and haphazard as if it werethe work of the wind or the waves. There is plan, but no consciousmethod of procedure. In fact, a bird's nest is a growth. It is notsomething builded as we build, in which judgment, design, forethoughtenter; it is the result of the blind groping of instinct which rarelyerrs, but which does not see the end from the beginning, as reason does. The oriole sometimes overhands the rim of her nest with strings andfibers to make it firm, and to afford a foundation for her to perchupon, but it is like the pathetic work which an untaught blind childmight do under similar conditions. The birds use fine, strong strings intheir nest-building at their peril. Many a tragedy results from it. Ihave an oriole's nest sent me from Michigan on the outside of which is abird's dried foot with a string ingeniously knotted around it. It wouldbe difficult to tie so complicated a knot. The tragedy is easy to read. Another nest sent me from the Mississippi Valley is largely made up offragments of fish-line with the fish-hooks on them. But there is no signthat the bird came to grief using this dangerous material. Where thelives of the wild creatures impinge upon our lives is always adanger-line to them. They are partakers of our bounty in many ways, butthey pay a tax to fate in others. 

The orioles in my part of the country always use the same material inthe body of their nests--a kind of soft, gray, flaxlike fiber which theyapparently get from some species of everlasting flower. Woven togetherand quilted through with strings and horse-hairs, it makes strong, warm, feltlike walls. In the nest sent me from Michigan the walls are made ofsomething that suggests brown human hair, except that it is too hard andbrittle for hair. 

Our orchard oriole also makes a pendent nest, but not so deep andpocketlike as that of the Baltimore oriole, and showing no suchelaborate use of strings and hairs. It is made entirely of some sort ofdried grass, very elaborately woven together. 

Bullock's oriole of California weaves its nest entirely of the long, strong threads which it draws out of the palm-leaves. The only one Ihave seen was suspended from the under side of one of those leaves. 

I think the prize nest of the woods, if we except the nest of thehummingbird, is that of the wood pewee. It is as smooth and compact andsymmetrical as if turned in a lathe out of some soft, feltlikesubstance. Of course, the phœbe's artistic masonry under the shelvingrocks, covered with moss and lined with feathers, or with the finest drygrass and bark fibers, sheltered from the storms and beyond the reachof four-footed prowlers, is almost ideal. It certainly is a happythought. 

The least flycatcher, the kingbird, the cedar-bird, the goldfinch, theindigo-bird, are all fine nest-builders, each with a style of its own. 

About the most insecure nest in our trees is that of the little socialsparrow, or "chippie. " When the sudden summer storms come, making thetree-tops writhe as if in agony, I think of this frail nest amid thetossing branches. Pass through the grove or orchard after the tempest isover, and you are pretty sure to find several wrecked nests upon theground. "Chippie" has never learned the art of nest-building in trees. She is a poor architect. She should have kept to the ground or to thelow bushes. The true tree nest-builders weave their nests fast to thebranches, but "Chippie" does not; she simply arranges her materialloosely between them, where the nest is supported, but not secured. Sheseems pathetically ignorant of the fact that there are such things aswind and storm. Hence her frail structure is more frequently dislodgedfrom the trees than that of any other bird. 

Recently, after a day of violent northwest wind, I found a wreckedrobin's nest and eggs upon the lawn under a maple--not a frequentspectacle. The robin's firm masonry is usually proof against wind andrain, but in this case the nest was composed almost entirely of drygrass; there was hardly a trace of mud in it, hence it was flexible andyielding, and had no grip of the branches. It was evidently the secondnest of the pair this season, and the second nest in summer of anyspecies of bird is frailer and more of a makeshift than the first nestin spring. Comparatively few of our birds attempt to bring off a secondbrood unless the first attempt has been defeated, but the robin is sureto bring off two, and may bring off three. But the robin is a hustler, probably the most enterprising of all our birds. I recall a mother robinthat, in late June, repaired a nest in a climbing rosebush which herfirst brood had vacated only a week before. A brood of wood thrusheswhich left their nest about the same time was still being fed by theirparents about the place. 

The song sparrow, the social sparrow, the phœbe, the bluebird, allbuild a second nest. The first brood of the bluebird will be lookedafter by the father in some near-by grove or orchard, while the motherstarts a new family in the old nest. If all goes well with them, thosetwo bluebird families will unite and keep together in a loose flock tillthey migrate in the fall. 

So many of our birds nest about our houses and lawns and gardens andalong our highways, that at first sight it seems as if they must bedrawn there by a sense of greater security for their eggs and young. Therobin has become almost a domestic institution. It is rarely that onefinds a robin's nest very far from a human habitation. One spring therewere four robins' nests on my house and outbuildings--in the vines, onwindow-sills, or other coigns of vantage. There were at the same time atleast fifteen robins' nests on my lot of sixteen acres, and I am quitecertain that I have not seen all there were. They were in sheds andapple-trees and spruces and cedars, in the ends of piles of grape-posts, in rosebushes, in the summer-house, and on the porch. We did not expectto get one of the early cherries, and might count ourselves lucky if wegot any of the later ones. 

A robin has built her nest in my summer-house. She abuses me so when Itry to tarry there, after incubation has begun, that I take no comfortand presently withdraw. Until her brood has flown, I am practically astranger in my open-air rest-house and study. 

When the fish crows come egging in the spruces and maples about thehouse, and I hear the screaming of the robins, I seize my gun and rushout to protect them, but am not always successful, as the mischief isoften done before I get within reach; I am not sure but that the robinsthink--if they think at all--that I am in league with the crows todespoil them. I was not in time to save the eggs of the wood thrush theother morning, when I heard the alarm calls of the birds, but I had thesatisfaction of seeing the black marauder go limping over the hill, dropping quills from his wings at nearly every stroke. I am sure he willnot come back. The fish crow is one of the most active enemies of oursmall birds. Of course, he only obeys his instincts in hunting out anddevouring their eggs and young, but I fancy I obey something higher thaninstinct when I protest with powder and shot. 

The birds do not mind the approach of the domestic animals, such as thecow, the horse, the sheep, the pig, and they are only a littlesuspicious of the dog, but the appearance of the cat fills them withsudden alarm. I think that birds that have never before seen a cat joinin the hue and cry. What alarms one alarms all within hearing. Theorioles are probably the most immune from the depredations of crows andjays and owls of all our birds, and yet they will join in the cry of"Thief, thief!" when a crow appears. (The alarm cry of birds will evenarrest the attention of four-footed beasts, and often bring thesportsman's stalking to naught. )

I fancy that Phœbe selects our sheds and bridges and porticoes forher nesting-sites because they are so much more numerous than theoverhanging rocks where her forbears built. For the same reason certainof the swallows and the swifts select our barns and chimneys. 

If the birds themselves are not afraid to draw near us, why should theirinstinct lead them to feel that their enemies will be afraid of us? Howdo they know that a jay or a crow or a red squirrel will be less timidthan they are? And why also, if they have such confidence in us, do theyraise such a hue and cry when we pass near their nests? The robin in mysummer-house knew, if she knew anything, that I had never raised afinger against her. On the contrary, my hoe in the garden had unearthedmany a worm and slug for her. Still she sees in me only a possibleenemy, and tolerate me with my book or my newspaper near her nest shewill not. Another robin has built her nest in a rosebush that has beentrained to form an arch over the walk that leads to the kitchen door andonly a few yards from it; but whenever we pass and repass she scurriesaway with loud, angry protests and keeps it up as long as we are insight, so that we do not feel at all complimented by her settling downso near us. If one's appearance is so alarming, even when he is going tohoe the garden, why did the intolerant bird set up her household gods sonear? If I keep away her enemies, why will she not be gracious enough toregard me as her friend? The robin that trusted her brood to thesheltering vines of the woodshed, and lined her nest with the hair ofour old gray horse--why should she scream, "Murder!" whenever any of usgo to the well a few feet away?

What is the real explanation of the fact that so many of our birds nestso near our dwellings and yet show such unfriendliness when we come nearthem? Their apparent confidence, on the one hand, contradicts theirsuspicion on the other. Is it because we have here the workings of a newinstinct which has not yet adjusted itself to the workings of the olderinstinct of solicitude for the safety of the nest and young? My owninterpretation is that birds are not drawn near us by any sense ofgreater security in our vicinity. It is evident from the start thatthere is an initial fear of us to be overcome. How, then, could thesense of greater safety in our presence arise? Fear and trust do notspring from the same root. How should the robins and thrushes know thattheir enemies--the jays, the crows, and the like--are more afraid ofhuman beings than they are themselves? Hunted animals pursued by wolvesor hounds will at times take refuge in the haunts of men, not becausethey expect human protection, but because they are desperate, andoblivious to everything save some means of escape. If the hunted deer orfox rushes into an open shed or a barn door, it is because it isdesperately hard-pressed, and sees and knows nothing but some object orsituation that it may place between itself and its deadly enemy. Thegreat fear obliterates all minor fears. 

The key to the behavior of the birds in this respect may be found in theDarwinian theory of natural selection. From the first settlement of thecountry a few of the common birds, attracted by a more suitable or moreabundant food-supply, or other conditions, must inevitably have nestednear human dwellings. These birds would thrive better and succeed inbringing off more young than those that nested in more exposed places. Hence, their progeny would soon be in the ascendancy. All animals seemto have associated memory. These birds would naturally return to thescenes and conditions of their youth, and start their nests there. Itwould not be confidence in men that would draw them; rather would thetruth be that the fear of man is inadequate to overcome or annul thishome attraction. 

The catbird does not come to our vines on the veranda to nest fromconsiderations of safety, but because her line of descent runs throughsuch places. The catbirds and robins and phœbe-birds that were rearedfar from human habitations doubtless return to such localities to reartheir young. The home sense in birds is strong. I have positive proof ina few instances of robins and song sparrows returning successive yearsto the same neighborhood. It is very certain, I think, that thephœbe-birds that daub our porches with their mud, and in July leavea trail of minute creeping and crawling pests, were not themselveshatched and reared in the pretty, moss-covered structure under theshelving rocks in the woods, or on the hillsides. 

How different from the manners of the robins are the manners of a pairof catbirds that have a nest in the honeysuckle against the side of thefirst-floor sleeping-porch! Nothing seems farther from the nature of thecatbird than the hue and cry which the robin at times sets up. Thecatbird is sly and dislikes publicity. An appealing feline _mew_ is hercharacteristic note. She never raises her voice like the town-crier, asthe robin does, perched in the mean time where all eyes may behold him. The catbird peers and utters her soft protest from her hiding-place inthe bushes. This particular pair of catbirds appeared in early May andbegan slyly to look over the situation in the vines and bushes about thehouse. All their proceedings were very stealthy; they were like two darkshadows gliding about, avoiding observation--no tree-tops or house-topsfor them, but coverts close to the ground. We hoped they would divinesafety in the shadow of the cottage, but tried to act as if oblivious oftheir goings and comings. We saw them now and then stealthily inspectingthe tangle of honeysuckle on the east side of the veranda, where a robinlast season reared a brood, and the low hedge of barberry-bushes on thesouth side of the cottage, where a song sparrow had her nest. If theycome, which will they take, we wondered. Several times in the earlymorning I heard the male singing vivaciously and confidently in thethick of the honeysuckle. I guessed that the honeysuckle was the choiceof the male, and that his song was a pæan in praise of it, addressed tohis mate. But it was nearly a week before his musical argument prevailedand the site was apparently agreed upon. 

When the nest-building actually began, the birds were so shy about itthat, watch as I might, I failed to catch them in the act. One morning Isaw the mother bird in the garden with nesting-material in her beak, butshe failed to come to the honeysuckle with it while I watched from anear-by covert. At the same time robins were flying here and there withloaded beaks, and wood thrushes were going through the air trailing longstrips of white paper behind them, but the catbird was an emblem ofsecrecy itself. She, too, brought fragments of white paper to her nest, but no one saw her do it. Like other nest-builders, she apparently putin her big strokes of work in the early morning before the sleepers onthe veranda were stirring. A few times my inquisitive eye, cautiouslypeering over the railing, started her from the vine, but I never saw herenter it with leaf, stick, or straw; yet slowly the nest grew and cameinto shape, and finally received its finishing touches. So cautiouslyhad the birds proceeded that, were they capable of concepts like us, Ishould fancy they flattered themselves that we had not the leastsuspicion of their little secret. The male ceased to sing near the houseafter the nest was begun. So much time elapsed after the finishing ofthe nest before the first egg appeared in it that some members of thehousehold feared the birds had deserted it, especially as they were notseen about the premises for several days. But the weather was wet andcool, and the eggs ripened slowly. Then one morning the birds were seenagain, and one blue-green egg was discovered in the nest. The nextmorning another egg was added, and a third egg on the third morning, anda fourth on the fourth morning. In due time incubation began, andthenceforth all went well with our dusky neighbors. 

It is an anxious moment for all birds when their young leave the nest. One noontime by the unusual mewing of a parent catbird I felt sure thatthe critical time had come. Sure enough, there sat one of the young on atwig a few inches above the nest, motionless and hushed. No lustyresponse to the agitated cry of the mother, as is usually the case withthe robin. "No publicity" is the watchword of the young catbirds as wellas of the old. An hour or two later another young one was perched on abranch, and before night, when no one was looking, they bothdisappeared, leaving two motionless birds in the nest. The next morningearly, without any signs of alarm or agitation on the part of the oldbirds, they took the important step. It could hardly have been much of aflight with any of them, as their wing-quills were only partiallydeveloped, and their tails were mere stubs. For several days afterwardno sign or sound of old or young was seen or heard. They were probablykeeping well concealed in the near-by trees or in the vines andcurrant-bushes in the vineyard. In about a week the whole familyappeared briefly in upper branches of the maples near the house. Theyoung were distinguishable from the old only by their shorter tails. Afew days later the parent birds were seen moving stealthily through thevines and bushes about the house, or perching on the near-by stakes thatsupported the wire netting. Are they coming back for a second brood? wasthe question in our minds. 

Soon we began to hear snatches of song from the male, then one morning aregular old-time burst of joy from him in the vine that held the oldnest. Then he sang in a syringa-bush near the window on the south sideof the cottage, and both birds were soon seen paying frequent visits tothe bush. We felt sure another brood was in the air. Whether or not thefirst brood were now shifting for themselves, we did not know; theynever again appeared upon the scene. Finally, on the morning of theFourth of July, the foundation of a new nest was started in thesyringa-bush three feet from the ground, and barely four feet from thewindow!

We had a view of the proceedings that the first site did not afford us. The old nest appeared to be in perfect condition, but there wasevidently no thought with the birds of using it again, as the robinssometimes do, and as bluebirds and cliff swallows always do. A new nest, built of material almost identical with that of the old, and in a moreexposed position, was decided upon. It progressed rapidly, and I wasdelighted to find that the male assisted in the building. Indeed, he wasfully as active as the female. Very often they were both in the nestwith material at the same moment. They seemed to agree perfectly. Atfirst I got the impression that the male was not quite as decided as thefemale, and hesitated more, once or twice bringing material that hefinally rejected. But he soon warmed up to the work and certainly didhis share. 

With most species of our birds the nest is entirely built by the female. With the robin, the wood thrush, the phœbe, the oriole, thehummingbird, the pewee, and many others, the male is only an interestedspectator of the proceeding. He usually attends his mate in her questfor material, but does not lend a hand, or a bill. I think the cockwren assists in nest-building. I know the male cedar-bird does, andprobably the male woodpeckers do also. The male rose-breasted grosbeakassists in incubation, and has been seen to sing upon the nest. It seemsfair to infer that he assists in the nest-building also, but I am notcertain that he does, and I have heard another observer state that in anest which he watched the female apparently did it all. 

My catbirds both worked overtime one afternoon at least, being on theirjob as late as seven o'clock. In three days the nest was done, all buttouching up the interior. During the construction I laid out pieces oftwine and bits of white paper on the bushes and wire netting, also someloose material from the outside of the old nest; all was quickly used. How much labor the birds would have saved themselves had they pulled theold nest to pieces and used the material a second time! I have known theoriole to start a nest, then change her mind, and then detach some ofher strings and fibers and carry them to the new site; and I once saw a"chebec" whose eggs had been destroyed pull the old nest to pieces andrebuild it in a tree a hundred feet away. 

The male catbird is slightly brighter and fresher-looking than his mate, but we could easily tell her by her often simulating the actions of ayoung bird when she came with material in her beak; she would alight ona near-by post and slightly spread and quiver her wings in a tender, beseeching kind of way. She would do this also when bringing food to herfirst brood. When one of the parent birds of any species simulates byvoice or manner the young birds, it is always the female; her heartwould naturally be more a-quiver with anticipation than that of themale. 

On the fifth day the nest was completed and received its first egg. There was considerable delay with the second egg, but it appeared on thesecond or third day, and the third egg the following day. Thenincubation began. In twenty days from the day the nest was begun, thebirds were hatched, and in eleven days more they had quietly left thenest. 

A friend of mine who has a summer home on one of the trout-streams ofthe Catskills discovered that the catbird was fond of butter, and shesoon had one of the birds coming every day to the dining-room window forits lump of fresh butter, and finally entering the dining-room, perchingon the back of the chair, and receiving its morsel of butter from a forkheld in the mistress's hand. I think the butter was unsalted. My friendwas convinced after three years that the same pair of birds returned toher each year, because each season the male came promptly for hisbutter. 

The furtive and stealthy manners of the catbird contrast strongly withthe frank, open manners of the thrushes. Its cousin the brown thrashergoes skulking about in much the same way, flirting from bush to bushlike a culprit escaping from justice. But he does love to sing from theApril tree-tops where all the world may see and hear, if said world doesnot come too near. In the South and West the thrasher also nests in thevicinity of houses, but in New York and New England we must look for himin remote, bushy fields. I do not know of any bad traits that go withthe thrasher's air of suspicion and secrecy, but I do know of one thatgoes with the catbird's--I have seen her perch on the rim of anotherbird's nest and deliberately devour the eggs. But only once. Whether ornot she frequently does this, I have no evidence. If she does, she isdoubtless so sly about it that she escapes observation. 

I welcomed the catbird, though she is not so attractive a neighbor asthe wood thrush. She has none of the wood thrush's dignity and grace. She skulks and slinks away like a culprit, while the wood thrush standsup before you or perches upon a limb, and turns his spotted waistcoattoward you in the most open and trusting manner. In fact, few birds havesuch good manners as the wood thrush, and few have so much the manner ofa Paul Pry and eavesdropper as the catbird. The flight of the woodthrush across the lawn is such a picture of grace and harmony, it ismusic to the eye. The catbird seems saying, "There, there! I told youso, pretty figure, pretty figure you make!" But the courteous thrush(just here I heard the excited calls of robins and the hoarse, angry cawof a crow, and rushed out hatless to see a fish crow fly away from themaple in front of the Study, pursued by a mob of screeching robins. Hetook refuge in the spruces above the house where the collected robinsabused him from surrounding branches. On my appearance he flew away, andthe robins dispersed)--but the courteous thrush, I say, invites thegood-breeding in you which he himself shows. The thrush never has theair of a culprit, while the catbird seldom has any other air. But Iwelcome them both. One shall stand for the harmony and repose of birdlife, and the other for its restlessness and curiosity. The songs andthe manners of birds correspond. The catbird, the brown thrasher, andthe mockingbird are all theatrical in their manners--full of gestures oftail and wings, and their songs all imply an audience, while the serenemelody of the thrushes is in keeping with the grace and poise of theirbehavior. 

V

A MIDSUMMER IDYL

As I sit here of a midsummer day, in front of the wide-open doors of abig hay-barn, busy with my pen, and look out upon broad meadows where myfarmer neighbor is busy with his haymaking, I idly contrast his harvestwith mine. I have to admit that he succeeds with his better than I dowith mine, though he can make hay only while the sun shines, while I canreap and cure my light fancies nearly as well in the shade as in thesun. Yet his crop is the surer and of more certain value to mankind. ButI have this advantage over him--I might make literature out of hishaymaking, or might reap his fields after him, and gather a harvest henever dreamed of. What does Emerson say?

 One harvest from the field Homeward bring the oxen strong; A second crop thine acres yield, Which I gather in a song. 

But the poet, like the farmer, can reap only where he has sown, and ifEmerson had not scattered his own heart in the fields his Muse would notreap much there. Song is not one of the instruments with which I gathermy harvest, but long ago, as a farm boy, in haymaking, and in drivingthe cows to and from the pasture, I planted myself there, and whatevercomes back to me now from that source is honestly my own. The secondcrop which I gather is not much more tangible than that which the poetgathers, but the farmer as little suspects its existence as he does thatof the poet. I can use what he would gladly reject. His daisies, hisbuttercups, his orange hawkweed, his yarrow, his meadow-rue, serve mypurpose better than they do his. They look better on the printed pagethan they do in the haymow. Yes, and his timothy and clover have theirliterary uses, and his new-mown hay may perfume a line in poetry. Whenone of our poets writes, "wild carrot blooms nod round his quiet bed, "he makes better use of this weed than the farmers can. 

Certainly a midsummer day in the country, with all its sights andsounds, its singing birds, its skimming swallows, its grazing orruminating cattle, its drifting cloud-shadows, its grassy perfumes fromthe meadows and the hillsides, and the farmer with his men and teamsbusy with the harvest, has material for the literary artist. A good hayday is a good day for the writer and the poet, because it has a certaincrispness and pureness; it is positive; it is rich in sunshine; there isa potency in the blue sky which you feel; the high barometer raises yourspirits; your thoughts ripen as the hay cures. You can sit in a circleof shade beneath a tree in the fields, or in front of the open hay-barndoors, as I do, and feel the fruition and satisfaction of nature allabout you. The brimming meadows seem fairly to purr as the breezesstroke them; the trees rustle their myriad leaves as if in gladness; themany-colored butterflies dance by; the steel blue of the swallows' backsglistens in the sun as they skim the fields; and the mellow boom of thepassing bumble-bee but enhances the sense of repose and contentment thatpervades the air. The hay cures; the oats and corn deepen their hue; thedelicious fragrance of the last wild strawberries is on the breeze; yourmental skies are lucid, and life has the midsummer fullness and charm. 

As I linger here I note the oft-repeated song of the scarlet tanager inthe maple woods that crown a hill above me, and in the loft overhead twobroods of swallows are chattering and lining up their light-coloredbreasts on the rims of their nests, or trying their newly fledged wingswhile clinging to its sides. The only ominous and unwelcome sound is thecall of the cuckoo, which I hear and have heard at nearly all hours formany days, and which surely bodes rain. The countryman who first namedthis bird the "rain crow" hit the mark. The cuckoo is a devourer ofworms and caterpillars, and why he should be interested in rain is hardto see. The tree-toad calls before and during a shower, mainly, I think, because he likes to have his back wet, but why a well-dressed bird likethe cuckoo should become a prophet of the rain is a mystery, unless therain and the shadows are congenial to the gloomy mood in which heusually seems to be. He is the least sprightly and cheery of our birds, and the part of doleful prophet in our bird drama suits him well. 

A high barometer is best for the haymakers and it is best for the humanspirits. When the smoke goes straight up, one's thoughts are more likelyto soar also, and revel in the higher air. The persons who do not liketo get up in the morning till the day has been well sunned and airedevidently thrive best on a high barometer. Such days do seem betterventilated, and our lungs take in fuller draughts of air. How curious itis that the air should seem heavy to us when it is light, and light whenit is heavy! On those sultry, muggy days when it is an effort to move, and the grasshopper is a burden, the air is light, and we are in thetrough of the vast atmospheric wave; while we are on its crest, and arebuoyed up both in mind and in body, on the crisp, bright days when theair seems to offer us no resistance. We know that the heavier saltsea-water buoys us up more than the fresh river or pond water, but we donot feel in the same way the lift of the high barometric wave. Even therough, tough-coated maple-trees in spring are quickly susceptible tothese atmospheric changes. The farmer knows that he needs sunshine andcrisp air to make maple-sugar as well as to make hay. Let the highblue-domed day with its dry northwest breezes change to a warmer, overcast, humid day from the south, and the flow of sap lessens at once. It would seem as if the trees had nerves on the outside of their drybark, they respond to the change so quickly. There is no sap withoutwarmth, and yet warmth, without any memory of the frost, stops the flow. 

The more the air presses upon us the lighter we feel, and the less itpresses upon us the more "logy" we feel. Climb to the top of a mountainten thousand feet high, and you breathe and move with an effort. The airis light, water boils at a low temperature, and our lungs and musclesseem inadequate to perform their usual functions. There is a kind ofpressure that exhilarates us, and an absence of pressure that depressesus. 

The pressure of congenial tasks, of worthy work, sets one up, while theidle, the unemployed, has a deficiency of hæmoglobin in his blood. TheLord pity the unemployed man, and pity the man so over-employed that thepressure upon him is like that upon one who works in a tunnel filledwith compressed air. 

Haying in this pastoral region is the first act in the drama of theharvest, and one likes to see it well staged, as it is to-day--the highblue dome, the rank, dark foliage of the trees, the daisies still whitein the sun, the buttercups gilding the pastures and hill-slopes, theclover shedding its perfume, the timothy shaking out its little cloudsof pollen as the sickle-bar strikes it, most of the song-birds stillvocal, and the tide of summer standing poised at its full. Very soon itwill begin to ebb, the stalks of the meadow grasses will become dry andharsh, the clover will fade, the girlish daisies will become coarse andmatronly, the birds will sing fitfully or cease altogether, the pastureswill turn brown, and the haymakers will find the hay half cured as itstands waiting for them in the meadows. 

What a wonderful thing is the grass, so common, so abundant, so various, a green summer snow that softens the outlines of the landscape, thatmakes a carpet for the foot, that brings a hush to the fields, and thatfurnishes food to so many and such various creatures! More than thegrazing animals live upon the grass. All our cereals--wheat, barley, rye, rice, oats, corn--belong to the great family of the grasses. 

Grass is the nap of the fields; it is the undergarment of the hills. Itgives us the meadow, a feature in the northern landscape so common thatwe cease to remark it, but which we miss at once when we enter atropical or semi-tropical country. In Cuba and Jamaica and Hawaii I sawno meadows and no pastures, no grazing cattle, none of the genial, mellow look which our landscape presents. Harshness, rawness, aridity, are the prevailing notes. 

From my barn-door outlook I behold meadows with their boundary line ofstone fences that are like lakes and reservoirs of timothy and clover. They are full to the brim, they ripple and rock in the breeze, the greeninundation seems about to overwhelm its boundaries, all the surfaceinequalities of the land are wiped out, the small rocks and stones arehidden, the woodchucks make their roads through it, immersed likedolphins in the sea. What a picture of the plenty and the flowingbeneficence of our temperate zone it all presents! Nature in her kinder, gentler moods, dreaming of the tranquil herds and the bursting barns. Surely the vast army of the grass hath its victories, for the most partnoiseless, peace-yielding victories that gladden the eye andtranquillize the heart. 

The meadow presents a pleasing picture before it is invaded by thehaymakers, and a varied and animated one after it is thus invaded; themowing-machine sending a shudder ahead of it through the grass, thehay-tedder kicking up the green locks like a giant, many-leggedgrasshopper, the horserake gathering the cured hay into windrows, thewhite-sleeved men with their forks pitching it into cocks, and, lastly, the huge, soft-cheeked loads of hay, towering above the teams that drawthem, brushing against the bar-ways and the lower branches of the treesalong their course, slowly winding their way toward the barn. Then thegreat mows of hay, or the shapely stacks in the fields, and the battleis won. Milk and cream are stored up in well-cured hay, and when thesnow of winter fills the meadows as grass fills them in summer, thetranquil cow can still rest and ruminate in contentment. 

As the swallows sweep out and in near my head they give out an angry"Sleet, sleet, " as if my presence had suddenly become offensive to them. I know what makes the change in their temper. The young are leavingtheir nests, and at such eventful times the parent birds are alwaysnervous and anxious. When any of our birds launch a family into theworld they would rather not have spectators, and you are pretty sure tobe abused if you intrude upon the scene. The swallow can put a good dealof sharp emphasis into that "Sleet, sleet, " though she is not armed tomake any of her threats good. Who knows that all will go well with themwhen they first make the plunge into space with their untried wings? Acareful parent should keep the coast clear. 

They have been testing their wings for several days, clinging to thesides of the nest and beating the wings rapidly. And now comes thecrucial moment of letting go and attempting actual flight. Several ofthem have already done it, and I see them resting on the dead limbs of aplum-tree across the road. But more are to follow, and parental anxietyis still rife. I shall be sorry when the spacious hayloft becomessilent. That affectionate "Wit, wit" and that contented and caressingsqueaking and chattering give me a sense of winged companionship. Theold barn is the abode of friendly and delicate spirits, and the sight ofthem and the sound of them surely bring a suggestion of poetry andromance to these familiar scenes. 

Is not the swallow one of the oldest and dearest of birds? Known to thepoets and sages and prophets of all peoples! So infantile, so helplessand awkward upon the earth, so graceful and masterful on the wing, thechild and darling of the summer air, reaping its invisible harvest inthe fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching no earthlyfood, drinking and bathing and mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelesslycoursing the long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in the shapeof a bird! Only in the free fields of the summer air could it have gotthat steel-blue of the wings and that warm tan of the breast. Of courseI refer to the barn swallow. The cliff swallow seems less a child of thesky and sun, probably because its sheen and glow are less, and its shapeand motions less arrowy. More varied in color, its hues yet lack theintensity, and its flight the swiftness, of those of its brother of thehaylofts. The tree swallows and the bank swallows are pleasing, but theyare much more local and restricted in their ranges than thebarn-frequenters. As a farm boy I did not know them at all, but the barnswallows the summer always brought. 

After all, there is but one swallow; the others are particular kindsthat we specify. How curious that men should ever have got the notionthat this airy, fairy creature, this playmate of the sunbeams, spendsthe winter hibernating in the mud of ponds and marshes, the bedfellow ofnewts and frogs and turtles! It is an Old-World legend, born of theblindness and superstition of earlier times. One knows that the rain ofthe rainbow may be gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but thefleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life. Yet one would assoon think of digging up a rainbow in the mud as a swallow. The swallowfollows the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial regions, whereit hibernates on the wing, buried in tropical sunshine. 

Well, this brilliant day is a good day for the swallows, a good day forthe haymakers, and a good day for him who sits before his open barn doorand weaves his facts and midsummer fancies into this slight literaryfabric. 

VI

NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE

The wild life around us is usually so unobtrusive and goes its own wayso quietly and furtively that we miss much of it unless we cultivate aninterest in it. A person must be interested in it, to paraphrase a lineof Wordsworth's, ere to him it will seem worthy of his interest. Onething is linked to another or gives a clue to another. There is no surerway to find birds' nests than to go berrying or fishing. In theblackberry or raspberry bushes you may find the bush sparrow's nest orthe indigobird's nest. Once while fishing a trout-stream I missed myfish, and my hook caught on a branch over my head. When I pulled thebranch down, there, deftly saddled upon it, was a hummingbird's nest. Iunwittingly caught more than I missed. On another occasion I stumbledupon the nest of the water accentor which I had never before found; onstill another, upon the nest of the winter wren, a marvel of mossysoftness and delicacy hidden under a mossy log. 

Along trout-streams with overhanging or shelving ledges the fishermanoften sees the nest of the phœbe-bird, which does not cease to pleasefor the hundredth time, because of its fitness and exquisite artistry. On the newly sawn timbers of your porch or woodshed it is far lesspleasing, because the bird's art, born of rocky ledges, only serves inthe new environment to make its nest conspicuous. 

Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper sparrow fly up and alighton the telephone wire with nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eyeupon her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy and weedy bank of theroadside in front of me and disappears. A few moments later I have hersecret--a nest in a little recess in the bank. That straw gave thefinishing touch. She kept her place on the nest until she had depositedher first egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this season. Some young vespers flitting about farther up the road are presumably herfirst brood. Each day thereafter for four consecutive days she added anegg. Incubation soon began and on the 10th of July the young were out, the little sprawling, skinny things looking, as a city girl said whenshe first beheld newly-hatched birds in a nest, as if they weremildewed. 

These ground-builders among the birds, taking their chances in the greatcommon of the open fields, at the mercy of all their enemies everyhour--the hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes, weasels, coons by night, and crows and hawks by day--what bird-lover does notexperience a little thrill when in his walk he comes upon one of theirnests? He has found a thing of art among the unkempt and the disorderly;he has found a thing of life and love amid the cold and the insensate. Yet all so artless and natural! Every shred and straw of it serves apurpose; it fairly warms and vivifies the little niche in which it isplaced. What a center of solicitude and forethought. 

Not many yards below the vesper's nest, on the other side of the road, is a junco's nest. You may know the junco's nest from that of any otherground-builder by its being more elaborate and more perfectly hidden. The nest is tucked far under the mossy and weedy bank, and only anest-hunter passing along the road, with "eye practiced like a blindman's touch" and with juncos in mind, would have seen it. A littlescreen of leaves of the hawkweed permits only the rim of one edge of thenest to be seen. Not till I stooped down and reached forth my hand didthe mother bird come fluttering out and go down the road with droopingwings and spread tail, the white quills of the latter fairly lighting upthe whole performance. 

A very shy and artful bird is the junco. I had had brief glimpses of themale many times about the place. The morning I found the nest I had seenone male spitefully pursuing another male along the top of the stonewall opposite, which fact, paralleled in a human case, would afford ahint for detectives to work on. The junco is evidently a verysuccessful bird. The swarms of them that one sees in the late fall andin the early winter going south is good evidence of this. They usuallyprecede the white-throats north in the spring, but a few linger andbreed in the high altitude of the Catskills. 

When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of my door makes herselfinto a sunshade to protect her nestlings. She pants with the heat, andher young pant too; they would probably perish were not the direct raysof the sun kept from them. Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in thehill pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk, might beconsidered in danger from a large herd of dairy cows, but it is wiselyplaced in view of such a contingency. It is at the foot of a stalk ofCanada thistle about a foot and a half high, and where, for a few squareyards, the grazing is very poor. I do not think that the chances are onein fifty that the hoof of a cow will find it. I do not suppose that theproblem presented itself to the bird as it does to me, but her instinctwas as sure a guide as my reason is to me--or a surer one. 

The vesper sparrow was thus happily named by a New England bird-lover, Wilson Flagg, an old-fashioned writer on our birds, fifty or more yearsago. I believe the bird was called the grass finch by our earlierwriters. It haunts the hilly pastures and roadsides in the Catskillregion. It is often called the road-runner, from its habit of runningalong the road ahead when one is driving or walking--a very differentbird, however, from the road-runner of the Western States. The vesper islarger than the song sparrow, of a lighter gray and russet, and does notfrequent our gardens and orchards as does the latter. In color itsuggests the European skylark; the two lateral white quills in its tailenhance this impression. One season a stray skylark, probably from LongIsland or some other place where larks had been liberated, appeared in abroad, low meadow near me, and not finding his own kind paid court to afemale vesper sparrow. He pursued her diligently and no doubt pesteredher dreadfully. She fled from him precipitately and seemed muchembarrassed by the attentions of the distinguished-looking foreigner. 

When the young of any species appear, the solicitude and watchfulness ofthe mother bird are greatly increased. Although my near neighbor thevesper sparrow in front of my door has had proof of my harmlesscharacter now for several weeks and, one would think, must know that herprecious secret is safe with me, yet, when she comes with food in herbeak while I am at my desk ten or eleven yards away, she maneuversaround for a minute or two, flying up to the telephone wire or a fewyards up or down the road, and finally approaches the nest with muchhesitation and suspicion, lest I see her in the act. When she comesagain and again and again, she is filled with the same apprehension. 

After a night of heavy but warm rain two of the half-fledged young werelying on the ground in front of the nest, dead. There were no murderousmarks upon them, and the secret of the tragedy I could not divine. 

What automatons these wild creatures are, apparently so wise on someoccasions and so absurd on others! This vesper sparrow in bringing foodto her young, going through the same tactics over and over, learns nomore than a machine would. But, of course, the bird does not think;hence the folly of her behavior to a being that does. The wisdom ofnature, which is so unerring under certain conditions, becomes to ussheer folly under changed conditions. 

When the mother bird's suspicion gets the better of her, she oftendevours the food she has in her beak, so fearful is she of betraying herprecious secret. But the next time she comes she may only maneuverbriefly before approaching the nest, and then again hesitate and parleywith her fears and make false moves and keep her eye on me, as if I hadonly just appeared upon the scene. 

One of the best things a bird-lover can have in front of his house orcabin is a small dead tree with numerous leafless branches. Many kindsof birds love to perch briefly where they can look around them. I wouldnot exchange the old dead plum-tree that stands across the road in frontof my lodge for the finest living plum-tree in the world. It bears aperpetual crop of birds. Of course the strictly sylvan birds, such asthe warblers, the vireos, the oven-bird, the veery and hermit thrushes, do not come, but many kinds of other birds pause there during the dayand seem to enjoy the unobstructed view. 

All the field and orchard and grove birds come. In early summer thebobolink perches there, then tiptoes, or tip-wings, away to the meadowsbelow, pouring out his ecstatic song. The rose-breasted grosbeak comesand shows his brilliant front. The purple finch, the goldfinch, theindigo bunting, the bluebird, the kingbird, the phœbe-bird, the greatcrested flycatcher, the robin, the oriole, the chickadee, the high-hole, the downy woodpecker, the vesper sparrow, the social sparrow, or chippy, pause there in the course of the day, and some of them several timesduring the day. Occasionally the scarlet tanager lights it up with hisvivid color. 

But more than all it is the favorite perch of a song sparrow whose matehas a nest not far off. Here he perches and goes through his repertoireof three or four different songs from dawn till nightfall, pausing onlylong enough now and then to visit his mate or to refresh himself with alittle food. He repeats his strain six times a minute, often preeninghis plumage in the intervals. He sings several hundred times a day andhas been doing so for many weeks. The house wren during thebreeding-season repeats his song thousands of times a day, while thered-eyed vireo sings continuously from morning till night for severalmonths. How a conscious effort like that would weary our human singersand their hearers! But the birds are quite unconscious, in our sense, ofwhat they are doing. 

When we pause to think of it, what a spectacle this singing sparrowpresents! A little wild bird sitting on a dead branch and lifting up itsvoice in song hour after hour, day after day, week after week. 

In terms of science we say it is a secondary sexual characteristic, butviewed in the light of the spirit of the whole, what is it except a songof praise and thanksgiving--joy in life, joy in the day, joy in the mateand brood, joy in the paternal and maternal instincts and solicitudes, avoice from the heart of nature that the world is good, thanksgiving forthe universal beneficence without which you and I and the little birdwould not be here? In foul weather as in fair, the bird sings. The rainand the cold do not silence him. 

There are few or no pessimists among the birds. One might think the callof the turtle-dove, which sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe, " a wail ofdespair; but it is not. It really means "love, love, love. " The plaintof the wood pewee, pensive and like a human sigh, is far frompessimistic, although in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest tobeing a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the catbird and the jay, with their peevish and complaining notes, might well be placed in thatcategory, were it not for their songs when the love passion makesoptimists even of them. The strain of the hermit thrush which floatsdown to me from the wooded heights above day after day at all hours, butmore as the shades of night are falling--what does this pure, serene, exalted strain mean but that, in Browning's familiar words, God's in his heaven-- All's right with the world!

The bird may sing for his mate and his brood alone, but what puts itinto his heart to do that? Certainly it is good to have a mate and abrood!

A new season brings new experiences with the same old familiar birds, ornew thoughts about them. This season I have had new impressions of ourcuckoos, which are oftener heard than seen. Of the two species, theblack-billed and the yellow-billed, the former prevails in the latitudeof New England, and the latter farther south. We cannot hail ourblack-billed as "blithe newcomer, " as Wordsworth does his cuckoo. "Doleful newcomer" would be a fitter title. There is nothing cheery oranimated in his note, and he is about as much a "wandering voice" as isthe European bird. He does not babble of sunshine and of flowers. He isa prophet of the rain, and the country people call him the rain crow. All his notes are harsh and verge on the weird. His nesting-instinctsseem to lead him, or rather her, to the thorn-bushes as inevitably asthe grass finch's lead her to the grass. 

The cuckoo seems such an unpractical and inefficient bird that it isinteresting to see it doing things. One of our young poets has a versein which he sings of

 The solemn priestly bumble-bee That marries rose to rose. 

He might apply the same or similar adjectives to the cuckoo. Solemn andpriestly, or at least monkish, it certainly is. It is a real recluse andsuggests the druidical. If it ever frolics or fights, or is gay andcheerful like our other birds, I have yet to witness it. 

During the last summer, day after day I saw one of the birds going by mydoor toward the clump of thorn-trees with a big green worm in its bill. One afternoon I followed it. I found the bird sitting on a branch verystill and straight, with the worm still in its beak. I sat down on thetentlike thicket and watched him. Presently he uttered that harsh, guttural note of alarm or displeasure. Then after a minute or two hebegan to shake and bruise the worm. I waited to see him disclose thenest, but he would not, and finally devoured the worm. Then he hopped orflitted about amid the branches above me, uttering his harsh note everyminute or two. 

After a half-hour or more I gave it up and parted the curtain of thornybranches which separated the thicket from the meadow and steppedoutside. I had moved along only a few paces when I discovered the neston an outer branch almost in the sunshine. The mother bird was coveringher half-grown young. As I put up my hand toward her, she slipped off, withdrew a few feet into the branches, and uttered her guttural calls. 

In the nest were four young, one of them nearly ready to leave it, whileanother barely had its eyes open; the eldest one looked frightened, while the youngest lifted up its head with open mouth for food. The mostmature one pointed its bill straight up and sat as still as ifpetrified. The whole impression one got from the nest and its contentswas of something inept and fortuitous. But the cares of a family wokethe parents up and they got down to real work in caring for theircharge. 

The young had a curious, unbirdlike aspect with threadlike yellowstripes, and looked as if they were wet or just out of the shell. 

That strain of parasitism in the blood of the cuckoo--how long in thehistory of its race since it mastered it and became its ownnest-builder? But a crude and barbarous nest-builder it certainly is. Its "procreant cradle" is built entirely of the twigs of the thorn-tree, with all their sharp needle-like spines upon them, some of the twigs afoot long, bristling with spines, certainly the most forbidding-lookingnest and nursery I ever beheld--a mere platform of twigs about fourinches across, carpeted with a little shredded brown fibrous material, looking as if made from the inner bark of some tree, perhaps this verythorn. 

In the total absence of the tent caterpillar or apple-tree worm, whichis their favorite food, cuckoos seem to succeed in finding a large greenworm here in the orchard. In the beech woods they can find a forest wormthat is riddling the leaves of the beeches. The robins are there inforce and I hope the cuckoos will join them in the destruction of theworms. It is interesting to see the cuckoo fly by several times a daywith a big green worm in its beak. Inefficient as it seems, here it isdoing things. It is like seeing a monk at the plough-handle. It is asolemn creature; its note is almost funereal. 

Our indigo bunting is as artful and secretive about its nesting-habitsas any of the sparrows. The male bird seems to know that his brilliantcolor makes him a shining mark, and he keeps far away from the nest, singing at all hours of the day in a circle around it, the radius ofwhich must be more than fifty yards. In one instance the nest was nearthe house, almost under the clothes-line, in a low blackberry-bush, partly masked by tall-growing daisies and timothy. I chanced to passnear it, when off went the little brown bird with her sharp, chidingmanners. She is a very emphatic creature. It is yea and nay with herevery time. 

The male seems like a bit of the tropics. He is not a very pleasingsinger, but an all-day one and an all-summer one. He is one of our rarerbirds. In a neighborhood where you see scores of sparrows andgoldfinches you will see only one pair of indigobirds. Their range offood is probably very limited. I have never chanced to see them takingfood of any kind. 

How crowded with life every square rod of the fields and woods is, if welook closely enough! Beneath my leafy canopy on the edge of the beechwoods where I now and then seek refuge from a hot wave, reclining on acushion of dry leaves or sitting with my back against a cool, smoothexposure of the outcropping place rock, I am in a mood to give myself upto a day of little things. And the little things soon come trooping orlooping along. 

I see a green measuring-worm taking the dimensions of the rim of mystraw hat which lies on the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it inan aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and rearing up on its hindlegs and feeling the vacant space around it as a blind man might huntfor a lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its travels looking fora place in which to go through that wonderful transformation of creepingworm into a winged creature. In its higher stage of being it is a littlesilvery moth, barely an inch across, and, like other moths, has a briefseason of life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some suitableplace and then dying or falling a victim to the wood pewee or some otherbird. After some minutes of groping and humping about on my hat and ondry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight. 

A little later a large black worm comes along. It is an inch and aquarter long, and is engaged in the same quest as its lesser brother ofthe green, transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say, many thousandtimes, and what a terrible-looking monster we should have--a travelingarch of contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher than yourhead, and measuring off the ground a rod or more at a time, or standingtwenty feet or more high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is apuny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead would quickly dispose. 

With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by and watch it golooping up the trunk. Evidently it doesn't know just where it wants togo, but it finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up that. Bychance it strikes one of the branches six feet from the ground and goeslooping up that. Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits oneof three small branches and climbs that a foot or more, and a dry twig, six or eight inches long, is seized and explored. At the end of it thecreature tarries a minute or more, reaching out in the empty space, thenturns back and hits a smaller twig on this twig about an inch long. Thisit explores over and over and sounds the depths that surround it, thenloops back again to the end of the main twig it has just explored, profiting nothing by experience; then retraces its steps and measuresoff another small branch, and is finally lost to sight amid the leaves. 

Has the course of life up through geologic time been in any way likethis? There has been the push of life, the effort to get somewhere, buthas there been no more guiding principle than in the case of this worm?The singular thing about the worm is its incessant reachings forth intosurrounding space, searching, searching, sounding, sounding, as if to besure that no chance to make a new connection is missed. 

Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging by its hind feet, lets itself down and simulates a small dry twig, in which disguise itwould deceive the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed the nightposing as a twig. 

Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon the stage were ahummingbird, a little red newt, and a wood frog. The hummer makes shortwork of everything: with a flash and a hum it is gone. This one seemedto be exploring the dry twigs for nesting-material, either spiders' websor bits of lichen. For a brief moment it perched on a twig a few yardsfrom me. My ardent wish could not hold it any longer. Truly a fairybird, appearing and vanishing like a thought, familiar with the heart ofall the flowers and taking no food grosser than their nectar, the wingedjewel of the poets, the surprise and delight of all beholders--it camelike a burnished meteor into my leafy alcove and was gone as quickly. 

All sylvan things have a charm and delicacy of their own, all except thewoodchuck; wherever he is, he is of the earth earthy. The wood frog isknown only to woodsmen and farm boys. He is a real sylvan frog, aspretty as a bird, the color of the dry leaves, slender and elegant inform and quick and furtive in movement. My feet disturbed one in the bedof dry leaves. Slowly I moved my hand toward him and stroked his backwith a twig. If you can tickle a frog's back in any way you put a spellupon him. He becomes quite hypnotized. He was instantly responsive to mypasses. He began to swell and foreshorten, and when I used my fingerinstead of the twig, he puffed up very rapidly, rose up more upon hisfeet, and bowed his head. As I continued the titillation he began togive forth broken, subdued croaks, and I wondered if he were going tobreak out in song. He did not, but he seemed loath to go his way. Howdifferent he looked from the dark-colored frogs which in large numbersmake a multitudinous croaking and clucking in the little wild pools inspring! He wakes up from his winter nap very early and is in the poolscelebrating his nuptials as soon as the ice is off them, and then in twoor three days he takes to the open woods and assumes the assimilativecoloring of the dry leaves. 

The little orange-colored salamander, a most delicate and highly coloredlittle creature, is as harmless as a baby, and about as slow andundecided in its movements. Its cold body seems to like the warmth ofyour hand. Yet in color it is as rich an orange as the petal of thecardinal flower is a rich scarlet. It seems more than an outside color;it is a glow, and renders the creature almost transparent, an effect asuniform as the radiance of a precious stone. Its little, innocent-looking, three-toed foot, or three and a half toed--howunreptilian it looks through my pocket glass! A baby's hand is not moreso. Its throbbing throat, its close-shut mouth, its jet-black eyes witha glint of gold above them--only a close view of these satisfies one. 

Here is another remarkable transformation among the small wild folk. Inthe spring he is a dark, slimy, rather forbidding lizard in the pools;now he is more beautiful than the jewel-weed in the woods. This is saidto be an immature form, which returns to the ponds and matures the nextseason; but whether it is the male or the female that assumes thisbright hue, or both, I do not know. The coat seems to be its midsummerholiday uniform which is laid aside when it goes back to the marshes tohibernate in the fall. 

Wild creatures so unafraid are sure to have means of protection that donot at once appear. In the case of the newt it is evidently an acrid orother disagreeable secretion, which would cause any animal to repentthat took it in its mouth. It is even less concerned at being caughtthan is the skunk, or porcupine, or stink-bug. 

In my retreat I was unwittingly intruding upon the domain of anothersylvan denizen, the chipmunk. One afternoon one suddenly came up fromthe open field below me with his pockets full of provender of some sort;just what sort I wondered, as there was no grain or seeds or any dryfood that it would be safe to store underground for the winter. 

Beholding me sitting there within two yards of his den was a greatsurprise to him. He eyed me a long time--squirrel time--making little, spasmodic movements on the flat stone above his den. At a motion of myarm he darted into his hole with an exultant chip. He was soon out withempty pockets, and he then proceeded to sound his little tocsin ofdistrust or alarm so that all the sylvan folk might hear. As I made nosign, he soon ceased and went about his affairs. 

All this time, behind and above me, concealed by a vase fern, reposedthat lovely creature of the twilight, the luna moth, just out of herchrysalis, drying and inflating her wings. I chanced to lift the fernscreen, and there was this marvel! Her body was as white and spotless asthe snow, and her wings, with their Nile-green hue, as fair and delicateas--well, as only those of a luna moth can be. It is as immaculate as anangel. With a twig I carefully lifted her to the trunk of a maplesapling, where she clung and where I soon left her for the night. 

While I was loitering there on the threshold of the woods, observing thesmall sylvan folk, about a hundred yards above me, near the highway, wasa bird's nest of a kind I had not seen for more than a score of years, the nest of the veery, or Wilson's thrush. Some friends were campingthere with their touring-car outfit in a fringe of the beech woods, andpassed and repassed hourly within a few yards of the nest, and, althoughthey each had sharp eyes and sharp ears, they had neither seen norheard the birds during the two days they had been there. 

While calling upon them I chanced to see the hurried movements of athrush in the low trees six or seven yards away. The bird had food inits beak, which caused me to keep my eye upon it. It quickly flew downto a small clump of ferns that crowned a small knoll in the open, aboutten feet from the border of the woods. As it did so, another thrush flewout of the ferns and disappeared in the woods. Their stealthy movementssent a little thrill through me, and I said, Here is a treasure. Iparted the ferny screen, and there on the top of the small knoll was thenest with two half-fledged young. 

A mowing-machine in a meadow in front of my door gave an unkind cut to asparrow that had a nest in the clover near the wall. The mower chancedto see the nest before the sickle-bar had swept over it. It containedfour young ones just out of the shell. At my suggestion the mowercarefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The parent birds werenot seen, but we naturally reasoned that they would come back and wouldalight upon the wall to make observations. 

But that afternoon and the next morning passed, and we saw no anxiousbird parents. The young lifted up their open mouths whenever I lookedinto the nest and seemed to be more contented than abandoned birdsusually are. The next night was unseasonably cold, and I expected tofind the nestlings dead in the morning; but they were not, and, strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather on a stone wall, theyseemed to be doing well. Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them, I said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the road opposite to themand watched. 

I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow came slyly up and droppedsome food into an open mouth and disappeared. 

Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in sauntering through thewoods, his hat just brushes a vireo's nest? This was my experience onemorning. The nest was like a natural growth, hanging there like a fairybasket in the fork of a beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery, brown and gray wood products, just high enough to escape prowling groundenemies and low enough to escape sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety wasin its artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the green-and-brownsolitude. The weaver had bent down one of the green leaves and made it apart of the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist. Then thedabs of white here and there, given by the fragments of spiders'cocoons--all helped to blend it with the flickering light and shade. 

I gently bent down the branch and four confident heads with open mouthsinstantly appeared above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile wasflitting about in the branches overhead, peering down upon me anduttering her anxious "quay quay, " equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Getaway!" This I soon did. 

Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is soon quickly over. Butthe red-eyed vireo sings on into September--not an ecstatic strain, buta quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at his work. 

VII

WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT

It was in May during the last term of his Presidency that Rooseveltasked me to go with him down to Pine Knot, Virginia, to help him namehis birds. I stayed with him at the White House the night before westarted. I remember that at dinner[1] there was an officer from theBritish army stationed in India, and the talk naturally turned on Indianaffairs. I did not take part in it because I knew nothing about India, but Roosevelt was so conversant with Indian affairs and Indian historythat you would think he had just been cramming on it, which I knew verywell he had not. But that British officer was put on his mettle to holdhis own. In fact, Roosevelt knew more about India and England's relationto it than the officer seemed to know. It was amazing to see thethoroughness of his knowledge about India. 

 [1] Mr. Burroughs's memory played him false here. The incident he speaks of was at a dinner in the White House, just before starting on the Yellowstone trip, in 1903. C. B. 

The next morning we started off for Virginia, taking an early train. 

Pine Knot is about one hundred miles from Washington. I think we leftthe train at Charlottesville, Virginia, and drove about ten miles toPine Knot; the house is a big barnlike structure on the edge of thewoods, a mile from the nearest farmhouse. 

Before we reached there we got out of the wagon and walked, as therewere a good many warblers in the trees--the spring migration was on. Itwas pretty warm; I took off my overcoat and the President insisted oncarrying it. We identified several warblers there, among them theblack-poll, the black-throated blue, and Wilson's black-cap. He knewthem in the trees overhead as quickly as I did. 

We reached Pine Knot late in the afternoon, but as he was eager for awalk we started off, he leading, as if walking for a wager. We wentthrough fields and woods and briers and marshy places for a mile ormore, when we stopped and mopped our brows and turned homeward withouthaving seen many birds. 

Mrs. Roosevelt took him to task, I think, when she saw the heatedcondition in which we returned, for not long afterwards he came to meand said: "Oom John, that was no way to go after birds; we were in toomuch of a hurry. " I replied, "No, Mr. President, that isn't the way Iusually go a-birding. " His thirst for the wild and the woods, and hisjoy at returning to these after his winter in the White House, hadevidently urged him on. He added, "We will try a different planto-morrow. "

So on the morrow we took a leisurely drive along the highways. Very soonwe heard a wren which was new to me. "That's Bewick's wren, " he said. Wegot out and watched it as it darted in and out of the fence and sang. 

I asked him if he knew whether the little gray gnatcatcher was to beseen there. I had not seen or heard it for thirty years. "Yes, " hereplied, "I saw it the last time I was here, over by a spring run. "

We walked over to some plum-trees where there had been a house at onetime. No sooner had we reached the spot than he cried, "There it isnow!" And sure enough, there it was in full song--a little bird theshape of a tiny catbird, with a very fine musical strain. 

As we were walking in a field we saw some birds that were new to me. Roosevelt also was puzzled to know what they were till we went amongthem and stirred them up, discovering that they were females of the bluegrosbeak, with some sparrows which we did not identify. 

In the course of that walk he showed me a place where he had seen whathe had thought at the time to be a flock of wild pigeons. He describedhow they flew, the swoop of their movements, and the tree where theyalighted. I was skeptical, for it had long been thought that wildpigeons were extinct, but that fact had not impressed itself upon hismind. He said if he had known there could be any doubt about it, hewould have observed them more closely. I was sorry that he had not, asit was one of the points on which I wanted indisputable evidence. Wetalked with the colored coachman about the birds, as he also had seenthem. His description agreed with Roosevelt's, and he had seen wildpigeons in his youth; still I had my doubts. Subsequently Rooseveltwrote me that he had come to the conclusion that they had been mistakenabout their being pigeons. 

One day while there, as we were walking through an old weedy field, Ichanced to spy, out of the corner of my eye, a nighthawk sitting on theground only three or four yards away. I called Roosevelt's attention toit and said, "Now, Mr. President, I think with care you can drop yourhat over that bird. " So he took off his sombrero and crept up on thebird, and was almost in a position to let his hat drop over it when thebird flew to a near tree, alighting lengthwise on the branch as thisbird always does. Roosevelt approached it again cautiously and almostsucceeded in putting his hand upon it; the bird flew just in time tosave itself from his hand. 

One Sunday after church he took me to a field where he had recently seenand heard Lincoln's sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the drygrass for an hour or more, waiting for the sparrow, but it did notappear. 

During my visit there we named over seventy-five species of birds andfowl, he knowing all of them but two, and I knowing all but two. Hetaught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler, and I taught him theswamp sparrow and one of the rarer warblers; I think it was the pinewarbler. If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he would have beenone ahead of me. 

I remember talking politics a little with him while we were waiting forthe birds, and, knowing that he was expecting Taft to be his successor, I expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill his shoes. 

"Oh, yes, he can, " he said confidently; "you don't know him as well as Ido. "

"Of course not, " I admitted; "but my feeling is that, though Taft is anable and amiable man, he is not a born leader. "

(I am glad to say that Mr. Taft's recent course in support of theproposed League of Nations has quite brought me around to Roosevelt'sestimate of him. )

Pine Knot is a secluded place in the woods. One evening as we sat in thelamplight, he reading Lord Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on theman-eating lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting near with herneedlework, suddenly Roosevelt's hand came down on the table with such abang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in aslightly nettled tone, "Why, my dear, what _is_ the matter?"

He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would almost have demolishedan African lion. 

It occurred to me later that evening how risky it was for the Presidentof the United States to be so unprotected--without a guard of anykind--in that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something of this tohim, suggesting that some one might "kidnap" him. 

"Oh, " he answered, slapping his hand on his hip pocket, "I go armed, andthey would have to be mighty quick to get the drop on me. "

Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and listen to the nightsounds in the Virginia woods, I went out around the cabin and almostimmediately heard some animal run heavily through the woods not far fromthe house. I thought perhaps it was a neighboring dog, but, on speakingof it to Mrs. Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men came everynight at nine o'clock and stood on guard till morning, spending the dayat a farmhouse in that vicinity. She did not let the President know ofthis because it would irritate him. 

The only flower we saw there which was new to me was the Indian pink. Roosevelt seemed to know the flowers as well as he did the birds. Pinkmoccasin-flowers and the bird's-foot violet were common in thatlocality. 

On our return trip, Roosevelt's secretary being on the train, Rooseveltthrew himself into the dictation of many letters, the wrens and thewarblers already sidetracked for the business of the Administration. 

I passed another night at the White House, and in the morning early wewent out on the White House grounds to look for birds, our quest seemingto attract the puzzled attention of the passers-by. 

"They often stare at me as though they thought me crazy, " he said, "whenthey see me gazing up into the trees. "

"Well, now they will think I am your keeper, " I said. 

"Yes, and I your nurse, " laughed Mrs. Roosevelt. 

When I left, Roosevelt gave me a list of the birds that we had seenwhile at Pine Knot and hoped that I would sometime write up the trip; infact, for years after, whenever we would meet, almost the first thing hewould say was, "Have you written up our Pine Knot trip yet, Oom John?"And his disappointment at my failure to do so was alwaysunmistakable. [2]

 [2] The following letter may be of interest in this connection. C. B. 

 DEAR OOM JOHN:

 Did you ever get the pamphlet on Concealing Coloration? If not, I will send you another. I do hope that you will include in your coming volume of sketches a little account of the time you visited us at Pine Knot, our little Virginia camp, while I was President. I am very proud of you, Oom John, and I want the fact that you were my guest when I was President, and that you and I looked at birds together, recorded there--and don't forget that I showed you the blue grosbeak and the Bewick's wren, and almost all the other birds I said I would!

 Ever yours, THEODORE ROOSEVELT

VIII

A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY

One August a few years ago (1918) I set out with some friends for a twoweeks' automobile trip into the land of Dixie--joy-riders with aluxurious outfit calculated to be proof against any form of discomfort. 

We were headed for the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. Iconfess that mountains and men that do not smoke suit me better. Still Ican stand both, and I started out with the hope that the greatAppalachian range held something new and interesting for me. Yet I knewit was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and withyounger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does notwarm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one wasyounger. More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latterhalf of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more inorder. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for newscenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw morestrongly. Yet I was fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies. 

Pennsylvania is an impressive State, so vast, so diversified, soforest-clad--the huge unbroken Alleghany ranges with their deep valleyscutting across it from north to south; the world of fine farms and ruralhomesteads in the eastern half, and the great mining and manufacturinginterests in the western, the source of noble rivers; and the storehouseof many of Nature's most useful gifts to man. 

The great Lincoln Highway, of course, follows the line of leastresistance, but it has some formidable obstacles to surmount, and itgoes at them very deliberately; and, in a powerful car, gives one asense of easy victory. But I smile as I remember persons with lightercars standing beside them at the foot of those long, winding ascents, nursing and encouraging them, as it were, and preparing them for theheavy task before them. An almost perfect road, worthy of its greatnamesake, but an Alleghany range which you cannot get around or throughgives the automobilist pause. 

As we were hurled along over the great highway the things I rememberwith the most satisfaction were the groups or processions of army truckswe met coming east. The doom of kaiserism was written large on thatLincoln Highway in that army of resolute, slow-moving army trucks. Dumb, khaki-colored fighters on wheels, staunch, powerful-looking, a host ofthem, rolling eastward toward the seat of war, some loaded withsoldiers, some with camp equipments, and all hinting of the enormousresources the fatuous Kaiser had let loose upon himself in this far-offland. On other highways the weapons and materials of war were convergingtoward the great seaports in the same way. The silent, grim, processions--how impressive they were!

Pittsburgh is a city that sits with its feet in or very near the lake ofbrimstone and fire, and its head in the sweet country air of thehill-tops. I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than I everdid in any other city in this country. One is fairly suffocated at timesdriving along the public highway on a bright, breezy August day. Itmight well be the devil's laboratory. Out of such blackening andblasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and ofdestructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of hell-fireseemed fit and natural, but much more comes out of them--much thatsuggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck of thelake bottoms. 

We live in an age of iron and have all we can do to keep the iron fromentering our souls. Our vast industries have their root in the geologichistory of the globe as in no other past age. We delve for our power, and it is all barbarous and unhandsome. When the coal and oil are allgone and we come to the surface and above the surface for the whitecoal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and the sunshine, how muchmore attractive life will be! Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We maynever hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can hitch them to themountain streams, and make the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then thesilver age will displace the iron age. 

The western end of Pennsylvania is one vast coal-mine. The farmer hasonly to dig into the side of the hill back of his house and take out hiswinter's fuel. I was surprised to see how smooth and gentle and grassythe hills looked. It is a cemetery of the old carboniferous gods, and itseems to have been prepared by gentle hands and watched over with kindlycare. Good crops of hay and grain were growing above their blackremains, and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way. The shufflingand the deformation of the earth's surface which attended the layingdown of the coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of thatwonderful husbandman, Father Time, has smoothed it all out. 

Our first camp was at Greensborough, thirty or more miles southeast ofPittsburgh, an ideal place--a large, open oak grove on a gentle eminencewell carpeted with grass, with wood and water in abundance. But thenight was chilly. Folding camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodilywarmth, and until you get the hang of them and equip yourself withplenty of blankets, Sleep enters your tent very reluctantly. Shetarried with me but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I gotup, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair beside it indulged in the"long, long thoughts" which belong to age much more than to youth. Youthwas soundly and audibly sleeping in the tents with no thoughts at all. 

The talk that first night around the camp-fire gave us an inside view ofmany things about which we were much concerned. The ship question wasthe acute question of the hour and we had with us for a few daysCommissioner Hurley, of the Shipping Board, who could give us first-handinformation, which he did to our great comfort. 

Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where for that night weslept indoors. 

On the following day one of the big cars had an accident--the fan broke, and the iron punctured the radiator. It looked as if we should bedelayed until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh. We madeour way slowly to Connellsville, where there was a good garage, but thebest workmen there shook their heads; they said a new radiator was theonly remedy. All four arms of the fan were broken off and there was noway to mend them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle. "Give me achance, " he said, and, pulling off his coat and rolling up his sleeves, he fell to work. In two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid ofdrills and copper wire the master mechanic had stitched the severed armsto their stubs, soldered up the hole in the radiator, and the disabledcar was again in running order. 

On August the 31st we made our camp on the banks of a large, clear creekin West Virginia called Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the roadfrom the creek seemed attractive, and I got the reluctant consent of thewidow who owned it to pitch our camp there, though her patch ofroasting-ears near by made her hesitate; she had probably hadexperiences with gypsy parties, and was not impressed in our favor evenwhen I gave her the names of two well-known men in our party. But Edisonwas not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, grassy margin ofthe creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring, eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated ourmess-tent being pitched astride a shallow gully, and our individualtents elbowing one another in the narrow spaces between the boulders. But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what the camper-out wants. Pure elements--air, water, earth--these settle the question; CampHorseshoe Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I got my firstview of the nonpareil, or painted bunting--a bird rarely seen north ofthe Potomac. 

An interesting object near our camp was an old, unused grist-mill, witha huge, decaying overshot oaken water-wheel. We all perched on thewheel and had our pictures taken. 

At our lunch that day, by the side of a spring, a twelve-year-old girlappeared in the road above us with a pail of apples for sale. We invitedher into our camp, an invitation she timidly accepted. We took all ofher apples. I can see her yet with her shining eyes as she crumpled thenew one-dollar bill which one of the party placed in her hand. She didnot look at it; the feel of it told the story to her. We quizzed herabout many things and got straight, clear-cut answers--a very firm, level-headed little maid. Her home was on the hill above us. We told herthe names of some of the members of the party, and after she hadreturned home we saw an aged man come out to the gate and look down uponus. An added interest was felt whenever we came in contact with any ofthe local population. Birds and flowers and trees and springs and millswere something, but human flowers and rills of human life were better. Ido not forget the other maiden, twelve or thirteen years old, to whom wegave a lift of a few miles on her way. She had been on a train fivetimes, and once had been forty miles from home. Her mother was dead andher father lived in Pennsylvania, and she was living with hergrandfather. When asked how far it was to Elkins she said, "Ever andever so many miles. "

The conspicuous roadside flowers for hundreds of miles, in fact, all theway from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, were the purple eupatorium, orJoe-Pye-weed, and the ironweed--stately, hardy growths, and verypleasing to look upon, the ironweed with its crimson purple, and theeupatorium with its massive head of soft, pinkish purple. 

August the 22d we reached Cheat River in West Virginia, a large, clearmountain trout-brook. It crossed our path many times that day. Everymountain we crossed showed us Cheat River on the other side of it. Itwas flowing by a very devious course northwest toward the Ohio. We wereworking south and east. 

We made our camp that night on the grounds of the Cheat Mountain Club, on the banks of the river--an ideal spot. The people at the bigclubhouse gave us a hospitable welcome and added much to our comfort. Ifound the forests and streams of this part of West Virginia much likethose of the Catskills, only on a larger scale, and the climate evencolder. That night the mercury dropped to thirty. On June the 24th theyhad a frost that killed all their garden truck. The paper outlines ofbig trout which covered the walls in the main room of the clubhouse toldthe story of the rare sport the club-members have there. Evidently CheatRiver deserves a better name. 

The mountains and valleys of the Virginias all present a markedcontrast to those of New York and Pennsylvania. They were not rubbeddown and scooped out by the great ice-sheet that played such a part inshaping our northern landscapes. The valleys are markedly V-shaped, while ours are markedly U-shaped. The valley sides are so steep thatthey are rarely cultivated; the farm land for the most part lies on thetops of the broad, rounded hills, though we passed through some broad, open river valleys that held miles upon miles of beautiful farms inwhich hay and oats were still being harvested. Everywhere were largefields of buckwheat, white with bloom, and, I presume, humming withbees. 

Here and there, by the rocks and the boulders strewn over the landscape, I saw evidences of large local glaciers that had hatched in thesemountains during the great Ice Age. 

We made camp at Bolar Springs on August the 23d--a famous spring, and abeautiful spot. We pitched our tents among the sugar maples, and some ofthe party availed themselves of the public bathhouse that spanned theoverflow of the great spring. The next night our camp was at Wolf Creek, not far from the Narrows--a beautiful spot, marred only by its proximityto the dusty highway. It was on the narrow, grassy margin of a broad, limpid creek in which the fish were jumping. Some grazing horsesdisturbed my sleep early in the morning, but on the whole I have onlypleasant memories of our camp at Wolf Creek. 

We were near a week in Virginia and West Virginia, crossing many timesthe border between the two States, now in one, then in the other, allthe time among the mountains, with a succession of glorious views frommountain-tops and along broad, fertile valleys. Now we were at WarmSprings, then at Hot Springs, then at White Sulphur, or at Sweet WaterSprings. Soft water and hard water, cold water and warm water, mineralwater and trout-streams, companion one another in these mountains. Thispart of the continent got much folded and ruptured and mixed up in thebuilding, and the elements are unevenly distributed. 

I think to most of us West Virginia had always been a rather hazyproposition, and we were glad to get a clear impression of it. Wecertainly became pretty intimate with the backbone of the continent--orwith its many backbones, as its skeleton seems to be a very multiplexaffair. The backbones of continents usually get broken in many places, but they serve their purpose just as well. In fact, our old Earth ismore like an articulate than a vertebrate. Its huge shell is in manysections. 

One of our camps we named Camp Lee, the name of the owner of the farm. One of the boys there, Robert E. Lee, made himself very useful inbringing wood and doing other errands. 

A privation, which I think Mr. Edison and I felt more than did theothers, was the scanty or delayed war news; the local papers, picked uphere and there, gave only brief summaries, and when in the larger townswe could get some of the great dailies, the news was a day or two old. When one has hung on the breath of the newspapers for four excitingyears, one is lost when cut off from them. 

Such a trip as we were taking was, of course, a kind of a lark, especially to the younger members of the party. Upon Alleghany Mountain, near Barton, West Virginia, a farmer was cradling oats on a side-hillbelow the road. Our procession stopped, and the irrepressible Ford andFirestone were soon taking turns at cradling oats, but with doubtfulsuccess. A photograph shows the farmer and Mr. Ford looking on withbroad smiles, watching Mr. Firestone with the fingers of the cradletangled in the oats and weeds, a smile on his face also, but decidedlyan equivocal smile--the trick was not so easy as it looked. EvidentlyMr. Ford had not forgotten his cradling days on the home farm inMichigan. 

Camp-life is a primitive affair, no matter how many conveniences youhave, and things of the mind keep pretty well in the background. Occasionally around the camp-fire we drew Edison out on chemicalproblems, and heard formula after formula come from his lips as if hewere reading them from a book. As a practical chemist he perhaps hasfew, if any, equals in this country. It was easy to draw out Mr. Ford onmechanical problems. There is always pleasure and profit in hearing amaster discuss his own art. 

A plunge into the South for a Northern man is in many ways a plunge intothe Past. As soon as you get into Virginia there is a change. Things andpeople in the South are more local and provincial than in the North. Forthe most part, in certain sections, at least, the county builds theroads (macadam), and not the State. Hence you pass from a fine stoneroad in one county on to a rough dirt road in the next. Toll-gatesappear. In one case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for thecars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills are seen along the way, driven by overshot wheels, and they are usually at work. A man or a boyon horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind him, going to orreturning from the mill, is a frequent sight; or a woman on horseback, on a sidesaddle, with a baby in her arms, attracts your attention. Thusmy grandmother went to mill in pioneer days in the Catskills. 

The absence of bridges over the small streams was to us a novel feature. One of the party called these fording places, "Irish bridges. " They aremade smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble. Another Southern feature, indicating how far behind our Northern and more scientific farming theSouth still is, are the groups of small haystacks in the meadows withpoles sticking out of their tops, letting the rain and the destructivebacteria into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features of theSouth much to be commended are the large families. In a farmhouse nearwhich we made camp one night there were thirteen children, the eldest ofwhom was at the front in France. The schools were in session in lateAugust, and the schoolrooms were well filled with pupils. 

No doubt there are many peculiar local customs of which the hurryingtourist gets no inkling. At a station in the mountains of North Carolinaa youngish, well-clad countryman, smoking his pipe, stood within a fewfeet of my friend and me and gazed at us with the simple, blankcuriosity of a child. There was not the slightest gleam of intelligentinterest, or self-consciousness in his face; it was the frank stare of afive-year-old boy. He belongs to a type one often sees in the mountaindistricts of the South--good human stuff, valiant as soldiers, andindustrious as farmers, but so unacquainted with the great outsideworld, their unsophistication is shocking to see. 

It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously equipped expeditiongoing forth to seek discomfort, for discomfort in several forms--dust, rough roads, heat, cold, irregular hours, accidents--is pretty sure tocome to those who go a-gypsying in the South. But discomfort, after all, is what the camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow weary of ourluxuries and conveniences. We react against our complex civilization, and long to get back for a time to first principles. We cheerfullyendure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality once more. 

Our two chief characters presented many contrasts: Mr. Ford is moreadaptive, more indifferent to places, than is Mr. Edison. His interestin the stream is in its potential water-power. He races up and down itsbanks to see its fall, and where power could be developed. He neverceases to lament so much power going to waste, and points out that ifthe streams were all harnessed, as they could easily be, farm laboreverywhere, indoors and out, could be greatly lessened. He dilates uponthe benefit that would accrue to every country neighborhood if thewater-power that is going to waste in its valley streams were set towork in some useful industry, furnishing employment to the farmers andothers in the winter seasons when the farms need comparatively littleattention. He is always thinking in terms of the greatest good to thegreatest number. He aims to place his inventions within reach of thegreat mass of the people. As with his touring-car, so with his tractorengine, he has had the same end in view. Nor does he forget thehousewife. He has plans afoot for bringing power into every householdthat will greatly lighten the burden of the women-folk. 

Partly owing to his more advanced age, but mainly, no doubt, to hismeditative and introspective cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less activethan is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday lunch, or to makecamp at the end of the day, Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, orcurl up, boy fashion, under a tree and take a nap, while Mr. Ford wouldinspect the stream or busy himself in getting wood for the fire. Mr. Ford is a runner and a high kicker, and frequently challenged some ofthe party to race with him. He is also a persistent walker, and fromevery camp, both morning and evening, he sallied forth for a briskhalf-hour walk. His cheerfulness and adaptability on all occasions, andhis optimism in regard to all the great questions, are remarkable. Hisgood-will and tolerance are boundless. Notwithstanding his practicalturn of mind, and his mastery of the mechanical arts and of businessmethods, he is through and through an idealist. As tender as a woman, heis much more tolerant. He looks like a poet, and conducts his life likea philosopher. No poet ever expressed himself through his work morecompletely than Mr. Ford has expressed himself through his car and histractor engine. They typify him; not imposing, nor complex, lessexpressive of power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability, anduniversal service, they typify the combination of powers and qualitieswhich make him a beneficent, a likable, and a unique personality. Thosewho meet him are invariably drawn to him. He is a national figure, andthe crowds that flock around the car in which he is riding, as we pausein the towns through which we pass, are not paying their homage merelyto a successful car-builder or business man, but to a beneficent humanforce, a great practical idealist whose good-will and spirit ofuniversal helpfulness they have all felt. He has not only broughtpleasure and profit into their lives, but has illustrated and writtenlarge upon the pages of current history a new ideal of the businessman--that of a man whose devotion to the public good has been a rulingpassion, and whose wealth has inevitably flowed from the depth of hishumanitarianism. He has taken the people into partnership with him, andhas eagerly shared with them the benefits that are the fruit of hisgreat enterprise--a liberator, an emancipator, through channels that areso often used to enslave or destroy. 

In one respect, essentially the same thing may be said of Mr. Edison:his first and leading thought has been, What can I do to make lifeeasier and more enjoyable to my fellow-men? He is a great chemist, atrenchant and original thinker on all the great questions of life, though he has delved but little into the world of art and literature--apractical scientist, plus a meditative philosopher of profound insight. And his humor is delicious. We delighted in his wise and witty sayings. A good camper-out, he turns vagabond very easily, can go with hairdisheveled and clothes unbrushed as long as the best of us, and canrough it week in and week out and wear that benevolent smile. He eats solittle that I think he was not tempted by the chicken-roosts orturkey-flocks along the way, nor by the cornfields and apple-orchards, as some of us were, but he is second to none in his love for the openand for wild nature. 

Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different type--the clean, clear-headed, conscientious business type; always on his job, alwaysready for whatever comes; in no sense an outdoor man; always at theservice of those around him; a man generous, kindly, appreciative, devoted to his family and his friends; sound in his ideas--amanufacturer who has faithfully and honestly served his countrymen. 

It is after he gets home that a meditative man really makes such a trip. All the unpleasant features are strained out or transformed. Inretrospect it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am aware that Iwas often irritable and ungracious, but my companions were tolerant, and gave little heed to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, atthis distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, I look uponthe whole trip with unmixed pleasure. 

IX

UNDER GENIAL SKIES

I. A SUN-BLESSED LAND

The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the East and West, differ from each other almost as much as day differs from night. On thecoast of southern California the dominant impression made upon one is ofa world made up of three elements--sun, sea, and sky. The Pacificstretches away to the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulatingfloor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly than they do uponthe Atlantic coast. It justifies its name. The passion and fury of theEastern seas I got no hint of, even in winter. Its rocks, all that I sawof them, are soft and friable. The languid waves rapidly wear them down. They are non-strenuous rocks, lifted up out of a non-strenuous sea. Themountains that tower four or five thousand feet along the coast are ofthe same character. They are young, and while they carry their headsvery high, they are soft and easily disintegrated compared with thegranite of our coast. 

As a rule, young mountains always wear the look of age, from their deeplines and jagged and angular character, while the really old mountainswear the look of youth from their comparative smoothness, theirunwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing lines. Time has taken theconceit all out of them. 

The annual rainfall in the Far West is only about one third of what itis on the eastern side of the continent. And the soil is curiouslyadapted to the climate. Trees flourish and crops are grown there underarid conditions that would kill every green thing on the Atlanticseaboard. The soil is clay tempered with a little sand, probably lessthan ten per cent of it by weight is sand. I washed the clay out of alarge lump of it and found the sand a curious heterogeneous mixture ofsmall and large, light and dark grains of all possible forms. The soildoes not bake as do our clay soils, and keeps moist when ours wouldalmost defy the plough. Under cultivation it works up into a goodtillable condition. Its capacity to retain moisture is remarkable, as ifit were made for a scant rainfall. As a crop-producing soil, it hasvirtues which I am at a loss to account for. Root vegetables grown herehave a sweetness, and above all, a tenderness, of which we know nothingin the East. Much sunshine in our climate makes root vegetables fibrousand tough. 

I more than half believe that the wonderful sweetness of the bird songshere, such as that of the meadowlark, is more or less a matter ofclimate; the quality of the sunshine seems to have affected their vocalcords. The clear, piercing, shaft-like note of our meadowlark contrastswith that of the Pacific variety as our hard, brilliant blue skiescontrast with the softer and tenderer skies of this sun-blessed land. 

II. LAWN BIRDS

To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house on the Pacific coast is tohave spread out before you at nearly all hours of the day a prettyspectacle of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes, titlarks, andplovers flutter across it as thick as autumn leaves--not so highlycolored, yet showing a pleasing variety of tints, while the blackphœbe flits about your porch and arbor vines. 

Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably ten to one of any othervariety of birds. Then the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, thetree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of which I am not sure arenext in number. 

Two species of birds from the Far North are usually represented by asolitary specimen of each, namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and theAmerican pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its usualtrim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker in the group. It walksabout like our oven-bird with the same pretty movement of the head and ateetering motion of the hind part of the body. 

While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman Expedition, I foundthe nest of the pipit far up on the side of a steep mountain. It wastucked in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of sea and mountainsuch as Alaska alone can afford. 

But the most conspicuous and interesting of all these lawn birds are thering-necked plovers, or killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or moreof those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the shore and of thespirit of the tender, glancing April days, running over your lawn but afew yards from you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs, thatcurious, mechanical jerking up-and-down movement of their bodies, theirshrill, disconsolate cries as they take flight, their beautiful andpowerful wings and tail, and their mastery of the air--all arrest yourattention or challenge your admiration. They bring the distant and thefurtive to your very door. All climes and lands wait upon their wings. They fly around the world. 

The plovers are the favored among birds. Beauty, speed, and immunityfrom danger from birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerialcreatures! Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice? Is that themotion of the waves in its body? Is that the restlessness of the surf inits behavior?

However high and far it may fly, it has to come back to earth as we alldo. It comes to our lawn to feed upon earthworms. The other birds areall busy picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors in the grass, but the plover is here for game that harbors in the turf. His methodsare like those of the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. Hescrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about over it, makingfrequent drives into it with his bill, but only now and then seizing theprey of which he is in search. When he does so, he shows the samejudgment which the robin does under like conditions. He pulls slowly andevenly, so as to make sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let goits hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are wise about theirfood-supplies. 

On the beach the wild life that I see is all on wings. There are thetranquil, effortless gliding herring gulls, snow-white beneath andpearl-gray above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful to lookupon--airplanes that put forth their powers so subtly and so silently asto elude both eye and ear. At low tide I see large groups of their whiteand gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered rocks. Freshwater is at a premium on this coast, and the thirsty gulls availthemselves of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town, whichdischarge on the beach. 

There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged birds, the brownpelicans, usually in a line of five or six, skimming low over the waves, shaping their course to the "hilly sea, " often gliding on set wings fora long distance, rising and falling to clear the water--coasting, at itwere, on a horizontal surface, and only at intervals beating the airfor more power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds with wings andforms that suggest none of the grace and beauty of the usual shorebirds. They do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to part thewater, but they do both very successfully. When the pelican dives forhis prey, he is for the moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comesdown like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts the water in superbstyle. When he recovers himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-lookingcreature as before. 

A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors--a birdthat is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing--isthe black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on theface of a sea-cliff a short distance above me. 

I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make abovethe foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions. In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrateto as great depths. One does not crave an intimate acquaintance withthem, but they are interesting as a part of the multitudinous life ofthe shore. 

III. SILKEN CHAMBERS

The trap-door spider has furnished me with one of the most interestingbits of natural history I have found on the coast. An obliging sojournernear me from one of the Eastern States had discovered a large plot ofuncultivated ground above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrowsof these curious animals. One afternoon he volunteered to conduct me tothe place. 

The ground was scantily covered with low bushy and weedy growths. Myguide warned me that the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed, found it so. It not only required an "eye as practiced as a blind man'stouch, " it required an eye practiced in this particular kind ofdetective work. My new friend conducted me down into the plot of groundand, stopping on the edge of it, said, "There is a nest within two feetof me. " I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I knew how, fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went over the soil inch by inch withmy eyes, but to no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and brownearth at my feet that suggested a trap-door, or any other device. Istooped low, but without avail. Then my guide stooped, and with a longneedle pried up a semicircular or almost circular bit of the gray soilnearly the size of a silver quarter of a dollar, which hinged on thestraight side of it, and behold--the entrance to the spider's castle! Iwas not prepared for anything so novel and artistic--a long silkenchamber, about three quarters of an inch in diameter, concealed by asilken trap-door, an inch in its greatest diameter. The under side ofthe door, a dull white, the color of old ivory, is slightly convex, andits top is a brownish gray to harmonize with its surroundings, andslightly concave. Its edges are beveled so that it fits into the flaringor beveled end of the chamber with the utmost nicety. No joiner couldhave done it better. A faint semicircular raised line of clay as fine asa hair gave the only clue. The whole effect, when the door was heldopen, was of a pleasing secret suddenly revealed. 

Then we walked about the place, and, knowing exactly what to look for, Igave my eyes another chance, but they were slow to profit by it. Myguide detected one after another, and when I failed, he would point themput to me. But presently I caught on, as they say, and began to findthem unaided. 

We often found the lord of the manor on duty as doorkeeper, and in nomood to see strangers. He held his door down by inserting his fangs intwo fine holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather, herself(as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree of resistancesurprising in an insect. If one persists with a needle, there is oftendanger of breaking the door. But when one has made a crack wide enoughto allow one to see the spider, she lets go her hold and rushes fartherdown in her burrow. 

Occasionally we found one about half the usual size, indicating a youngspider, but no other sizes. My guide said they only emerge from theirtunnel at night, and proved it by an ingenious mechanical device made ofstraws attached to the door. When the door was opened, the straws liftedup, but did not fall down when it was closed. Whenever he found thestraw still up in the morning he knew the door had been opened in thenight. 

As they are nocturnal in habits, they doubtless prey upon other insects, such as sow-bugs and crickets, which the night brings forth. Two brightspecks upon the top of the head appear to be eyes, but they are so smallthey probably only serve to enable them to tell night from day. I thinkthese spiders are mainly guided by a marvelously acute tactile sense. They probably feel the slightest vibration in the earth or air, unlessthey have a sixth sense of which we know nothing. 

All their work, the building and repairing of their nests, as well asall their hunting, is done by night. This habit, in connection withtheir extreme shyness, makes the task of getting at their life-historiesa difficult one. The inside of the burrow seems coated with a finer andharder substance than the soil in which they are dug. It is made on thespot, the spider mixing some secretion of her own with the clay, andworking it up into a finer product. 

The trap-door sooner or later wears out at the hinge, and is thendiscarded and a new door manufactured. We saw many nests with the olddoor lying near the entrance. The door is made of several layers of silkand clay, and is a substantial affair. 

The spider families all have the gift of genius. Of what ingeniousdevices and arts are they masters! How wide their range! They spin, theydelve, they jump, they fly. They are the original spinners. They haveprobably been on their job since carboniferous times, many millions ofyears before man took up the art. And they can spin a thread so finethat science makes the astonishing statement that it would take fourmillions of them to make a thread the caliber of one of the hairs of ourhead--a degree of delicacy to which man can never hope to attain. 

Trap-doors usually mean surprises and stratagems, secrets and betrayals, and this species of the arachnids is proficient in all these things. 

The adobe soil on the Pacific coast is as well fitted to the purposes ofthis spider as if it had been made for her special use. But, as in allsuch cases, the soil was not made for her, but she is adapted to it. Itis radically unlike any soil on the Atlantic coast--the soil for cañonsand the rectangular watercourses, and for the trap-door spider. It is atough, fine-grained homogeneous soil, and when dry does not crumble ordisintegrate; the cohesion of particles is such that sun-dried brick areeasily made from it. 

This spider is found in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Jamaica. Itbelongs to the family of _Mygalidae_. It resembles in appearance thetarantula of Europe, described by Fabre, and has many of the samehabits; but its habitation is a much more ingenious and artistic pieceof workmanship than that of its European relative. The tarantula has nodoor to her burrow, but instead she builds about the entrance a kind ofbreastwork an inch high and nearly two inches in diameter, and from thisfortress sallies out upon her prey. She sinks a deeper shaft than doesour spider, but excavates it in the same way with similar tools, herfangs, and lines it with silk from her own body. 

Our spider is an artist, evidently the master builder and architect ofher kind. Considering her soft and pussy-like appearance--no visibledrills for such rough work--one wonders how she excavates a burrow sixinches or more deep in this hard adobe soil of the Pacific coast, andhow she removes the dirt after she has loosened it. But she has beensurprised at her work; her tools are her two fangs, the same weaponswith which she seizes and dispatches her prey, and the rake or the_cheliceræ_. To use these delicate instruments in such coarse work, saysFabre, seems as "illogical as it would to dig a pit with a surgeon'sscalpel. " And she carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pelletat a time, and drops it here and there at some distance from her nest. Her dooryard is never littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig ahole the size of half an English walnut, and to remove the earth. 

One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests and left them turnedover, a few inches away. The next morning I found that the occupants ofthe nests, under cover of the darkness, had each started theconstruction of a new door, and had it about half finished. It seemed asif the soil on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put out asemicircular bit of its surface toward the opposite side of the orifice, each new door copying exactly the color of the ground that surroundedit, one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a light brick-red. Iread somewhere of an experimenter who found a nest on a mossy bit ofground protectively colored in this way. He removed the lid and made thesoil bare about. The spider made a new lid and covered it with moss likethe old one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it had in thefirst case. This is typical of the working of the insect mind. It seemsto know everything, and yet to know nothing, as we use the term "know. "

On the second morning, one of the doors had attained its normal size, but not yet its normal thickness and strength. It was much more artfullyconcealed than the old one had been. The builder had so completelycovered it with small dry twigs about the size of an ordinary pin, andhad so woven these into it, standing a few of them on end, that my eyewas baffled. I knew to an inch where to look for the door, and yet itseemed to have vanished. By feeling the ground over with a small stick Ifound a yielding place which proved to be the new unfinished door. Dayafter day the door grew heavier and stronger. The builder worked at iton the under side, adding new layers of silk. There is always a layer ofthe soil worked into the door to give it weight and strength. 

Spiders, like reptiles, can go months without food. The young, accordingto Fabre, go seven months without eating. They do not grow, but they arevery active; they expend energy without any apparent means of keeping upthe supply. How do they do it? They absorb it directly from the sun, Fabre thinks, which means that here is an animal between which and theorganic world the vegetable chlorophyl plays no part, but which can takeat first-hand, from the sun, the energy of life. If this is true, and itseems to be so, it is most extraordinary. 

In view of the sex of the extraordinary spider I have been considering, it is interesting to remember that one difference between the insectworld and the world of animal life to which we belong, which Maeterlinckhas forgotten to point out, is this:

In the vertebrate world, the male rules; the female plays a secondarypart. In the insect world the reverse is true. Here the female issupreme and often eats up the male after she has been fertilized by him. Motherhood is the primary fact, fatherhood the secondary. It is thefemale mosquito that torments the world. It is the female spider thatspins the web and traps the flies. Size, craft, and power go with thefemale. The female spider eats up the male after he has served herpurpose; her caresses mean death. The female scorpion devours the malein the same way. Among our wild bees it is the queen alone that survivesthe winter and carries on the race. The big noisy blow-flies on thewindow-pane are females. With the honey bees the males are big and loud, but are without any authority, and are almost as literally destroyed bythe female as is the male spider. The queen bee does not eat her mate, but she disembowels him. The work of the hive is done by the neuters. Inthe vertebrate world it is chiefly among birds of prey that the femaleis the larger and bolder; the care of the young devolves largely uponher. Yes, there is another exception: Among the fishes, the females are, as a rule, larger than the males; the immense number of eggs which theycarry brings this about. 

There are always exceptions to this dominance of the female in theinsect world. We cannot corner Nature and keep her cornered. She wouldnot be Nature if we could. With the fireflies, it is the male thatdominates; the female is a little soft, wingless worm on the ground, always in the larval state. 

In the plant world, also, the male as a rule is dominant. Behold theshowy catkins of the chestnuts, the butternuts, the hazelnuts, thewillows, and other trees. The stamens of most flowers are numerous andconspicuous. Our Indian corn carries its panicle of pollen high abovethe silken tresses which mother the future ear. 

One day I dug up a nest which was occupied by a spider with her brood ofyoung ones. I took up a large block of earth weighing ten pounds ormore, and sank it in a box of earth of its own kind. I kept it in thehouse under observation for a week, hoping that at some hour of day ornight the spider would come out. But she made no sign. My ingeniousfriend arranged the same mechanical contrivance over the door which hehad used successfully before. But the latch was never lifted. MadamSpider sulked or bemoaned her fate at the bottom of her den. At the endof a week I broke open the nest and found her alone. She had evidentlydevoured all her little ones. 

I kept two nests with a spider in each in the house for a week, and inneither case did the occupant ever leave its nest. 

Apparently the young spiders begin to dig nests of their own when theyare about half-grown. As to where they stay, or how they live up to thattime, I have no clue. The young we found in several nests were verysmall, not more than an eighth of an inch long. Of the size andappearance of the male spider, and where he keeps himself, I could getno clue. 

One morning I went with my guide down to the spider territory, and sawhim try to entice or force a spider out of her den. The morning previoushe had beguiled several of them to come up to the opening by thrusting astraw down the burrow and teasing them with it till in self-defense theyseized it with their fangs and hung on to it till he drew them to thesurface. But this morning the trick would not work. Not one spider wouldkeep her hold. But with a piece of wire bent at the end in the shape ofa hook, he finally lifted one out upon the ground. How bright and cleanand untouched she looked! Her limbs and a part of the thorax were asblack as jet and shone as if they had just been polished. No lady in herparlor could have been freer from any touch of soil or earth-stain thanwas she. On the ground, in the strong sunlight, she seemed to be lost. We turned her around and tried to induce her to enter the nest again;but over and over she ran across the open door without heeding it. Inthe novel situation in which she suddenly found herself, all her witsdeserted her, and not till I took her between my thumb and finger andthrust her abdomen into the hole, did she come to herself. The touch ofthat silk-lined tube caused the proper reaction, and she backed quicklyinto it and disappeared. 

Just what natural enemy the trap-door spider has I do not know. I neversaw a nest that had been broken into or in any way disturbed, exceptthose which we had disturbed in our observations. 

IV. THE DESERT NOTE

I often wonder what mood of Nature this world of cacti which we runagainst in the great Southwest expresses. Certainly something savage andmerciless. To stab and stab again suits her humor. How well she tempersher daggers and bayonets! How hard and smooth and sharp they are! Howthey contrast with the thick, succulent stalks and leaves which bearthem! It is a desert mood; heat and drought appear to be the excitingcauses. The scarcity of water seems to stimulate Nature to store upwater in vegetable tissues, just as it stimulates men to build greatdams and reservoirs. These giant cacti are reservoirs of water. But whyspines and prickles and cruel bayonets? They certainly cannot be forprotection or defense; the grass and other vegetation upon which thegrazing animals feed are not armed with spines. 

If the cacti were created that grazing animals in the desert might havesomething to feed upon, as our fathers' way of looking at things mightlead us to believe, why was that benevolent plan frustrated by the armorof needles and spines?

Nature reaches her hungry and thirsty creatures this broad, mittenedhand like a cruel joke. It smites like a serpent and stings like ascorpion. The strange, many-colored, fascinating desert! Beware! Agoniesare one of her garments. 

All we can say about it is that Nature has her prickly side whichdrought and heat aggravate. In the North our thistles and thorns andspines are a milder expression of this mood. The spines on theblackberry-bush tend against its propagation for the same reason. Amongour wild gooseberries, there are smooth and prickly varieties, and onesucceeds about as well as the other. Apple-and pear-trees in rough orbarren places that have a severe struggle for life, often develop sharp, thorny branches. It is a struggle of some kind which begets somethinglike ill-temper in vegetation--heat and drought in the desert, andbrowsing animals and poor soil in the temperate zones. The devil's clubin Alaska is one mass of spines; why, I know not. It must just beoriginal sin. Our raspberries have prickles on their stalks, but thelarge, purple-flowering variety is smooth-stemmed. 

Mr. John C. Van Dyke in his work on the desert expresses the belief thatthorns and spines are given to the desert plants for protection; andthat if no animal were there that would eat them, they would not havethese defenses. But I believe if there had never been a browsing animalin the desert the cacti would have had their thorns just the same. 

Nature certainly arms her animal forms against one another. We know thequills of the porcupine are for defense, and that the skunk carries aweapon that its enemies dread, but I do not believe that any plant formis armed against any creature whose proper food it might become. Cacticarry formidable weapons in the shape of spines and thorns, but thedesert conditions where they are found, heat and aridity, are no doubttheir primary cause. The conditions are fierce and the living forms arefierce. 

We cannot be dogmatic about Nature. From our point of view she oftenseems partial and inconsistent. But I would just as soon think thatNature made the adobe soil in the arid regions that the human dwellersthere might have material at hand with which to construct a shelter, asthat she gives spines and daggers to any of the vegetable forms tosecure their safety. One may confute Mr. Van Dyke out of his own mouth. He says:

 Remove the danger which threatened the extinction of a family, and immediately Nature removes the defensive armor. On the desert, for instance, the yucca has a thorn like a point of steel. Follow it from the desert to the high tropical table-lands of Mexico where there is plenty of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas to thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing. 

But are they not just as much exposed to browsing animals in the hightable-lands as in the desert, if not more so?

Mr. Van Dyke asserts that Nature is more solicitous about the speciesthan about the individual. She is no more solicitous about the one thanthe other. The same conditions apply to all. But the species arenumerous; a dozen units may be devoured while a thousand remain. Ageneral will sacrifice many soldiers to save his army, he will sacrificeone man to save ten, but Nature's ways are entirely different. Bothcontending armies are hers, and she is equally solicitous about both. She wants the cacti to survive, and she wants the desert animals tosurvive, and she favors both equally. All she asks of them is that theybreed and multiply endlessly. Notwithstanding, according to Van Dyke, Nature has taken such pains to protect her desert plants, he yetconfesses that, although it seems almost incredible, it is neverthelesstrue that "deer and desert cattle will eat the cholla--fruit, stem, andtrunk--though it bristle with spines that will draw blood from the humanhand at the slightest touch. "

This question of spines and thorns in vegetation is a baffling onebecause Nature's ways are so unlike our ways. Darwin failed utterly inhis theory of the origin of species, because he proceeded upon the ideathat Nature selects as man selects. You cannot put Nature into aformula. 

Behold how every branch and twig of our red thorn bristles with crueldaggers! But if they are designed to keep away bird or beast from eatingits fruit, see how that would defeat the tree's own ends! If no creatureate its little red apples and thus scattered its seeds, the fruit wouldrot on the ground beneath the branches, and the tribe of red thornswould not increase. And increase alone is Nature's end. 

It is safe to say, as a general statement, that the animal kingdom isfull of design. Every part and organ of our bodies has its purpose whichserves the well-being of the whole. I do not recall any character ofbird or beast, fish or insect, that does not show purpose, but in theplant world Nature seems to allow herself more freedom, or does not workon so economical a plan. What purpose do the spines on the prickly ashserve? or on the thistles? or on the blackberry, raspberry, gooseberrybushes? or the rose? Our purple-flowering raspberry has no prickles, andthrives as well as any. The spines on the blackberry and raspberry donot save them from browsing cattle, nor their fruit from the birds. Infact, as I have said, the service of the birds is needed to sow theirseeds. The devil's club of Alaska is untouchable, it is so encased in aspiny armor; but what purpose the armor serves is a mystery. We knowthat hard conditions of soil and climate will bring thorns on seedlingpear-trees and plum-trees, but we cannot know why. 

The yucca or Spanish bayonet and the century-plant, or American aloe(_Agave americana_), are thorny and spiny; they are also very woody andfibrous; yet nothing eats them or could eat them. They are no moreedible than cordwood or hemp ropes. This fact alone settles the defensequestion about spines. 

V. SEA-DOGS

There is a bit of live natural history out here in the sea in front ofme that is new and interesting. A bunch of about a dozen hair seals havetheir rendezvous in the unstable waves just beyond the breakers, andkeep together there week after week. To the naked eye they seem like agroup of children sitting there on a hidden bench of rock, undisturbedby the waves that sweep over them. Their heads and shoulders seem toshow above the water, and they appear to be having a happy time. 

Now and then one may be seen swimming about or lifted up in a wall ofgreen-blue transparent water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface inthe exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them children of the sea, until I hear their loud barking, and then I think of them as dogs orhounds of the sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night when ithas a half-muffled, smothered sound. 

They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals, and there seems somethingincongruous in their being at home there in the cold briny deep--badgersor marmots that burrow in the waves, wolves or coyotes that hunt theirprey in the sea. 

Their progenitors were once land animals, but Darwinism does not tell uswhat they were. The whale also was once a land animal, but the testimonyof the rocks throws no light upon its antecedents. The origin of any newspecies is shrouded in the obscurity of whole geological periods, andthe short span of human life, or of the whole human history, gives us noadequate vantage-ground from which to solve the problem. 

I can easily believe that these hair seals are close akin to the dog. They have five digits; they bolt their food like dogs; their sense ofsmell is said to be very acute, though how it could serve them in thesea does not appear. The young are born upon the land and enter thewater very reluctantly. 

This seal is easily tamed. It has the intelligence of the dog andattaches itself to its master as does the dog. Its sense of directionand locality is very acute. This group of seals in front of me, dayafter day, and week after week, returns to the same spot in theever-changing waters, without the variation of a single yard, so far asI can see. The locality is purely imaginary. It is a love tryst, and itseems as if some sixth sense must guide them to it. Locality is asunreal in the sea as in the sky, but these few square yards of shiftingwaters seem as real to these seals as if they were a granite ledge. Theykeep massed there on the water at that particular point, with theirflippers protruding above the surface, as if they were as free fromdanger as so many picnickers. Yet something attracts them to thisparticular place. I know of no other spot along the coast for a hundredmiles or more where the seals congregate as they do here. What is thesecret of it? Evidently it is a question of security from their enemies. At this point the waves break much farther out than usual, whichindicates a hidden reef or bench of rocks, and comparatively shallowwater. This would prevent their enemies, sharks and killer whales, fromstealing up beneath them and pulling them down. I do not hear theirbarking in the early part of the night, but long before morning theirhalf-muffled baying begins. Old fishermen tell me that they retire forthe night to the broad belts of kelp that lie a hundred yards or moreout to sea. Doubtless the beds of kelp also afford them some protectionfrom their enemies. The fishermen feel very bitter toward them onaccount of the fish they devour, and kill them whenever opportunityoffers. Often when I lie half asleep in the small hours of the morning, I seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their quarry on theunstable hills and mountains of the sea, and giving tongue at shortintervals, as did the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills in my youth. 

X

A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES

I. NATURE'S WIRELESS

The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes so much of, seems togive us the key to the psychic life of all the lower orders. What oneknows, all of that kind seem to know at the same instant. It seems as ifthey drew it in with the air they breathed. It is something likecommunity of mind, or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectualprocess, but an emotional process; not a thought, as with us, but animpulse. 

So far as we know there is nothing like a council or advisory board inthe hive. There are no decrees or orders. The swarm is a unit. Themembers act in concert without direction or rule. If anything happens tothe queen, if she is lost or killed, every bee in the hive seems to knowit at the same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly agitated. The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous: the bees function andcoöperate as do the organs in our own bodies, each playing its partwithout scheme or direction. 

This community of mind is seen in such an instance as that of themigrating lemmings from the Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of theselittle creatures are at times seized with an impulse to migrate or tocommit suicide, for it amounts to that. They leave their habitat inNorway and, without being deflected by any obstacle, march straighttoward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers that lie in their way. Whenthe coast is reached, they enter the water and continue on their course. Ship captains report sailing for hours through waters literally alivewith them. This suicidal act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind ofinsanity. It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know of in animallife. But the migration of all animals on a large scale shows the sameunity of purpose. The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The annualmigration of the caribou in the North is an illustration. In theflocking birds this unity of mind is especially noticeable. The vastarmies of passenger pigeons which we of an older generation saw in ouryouth moved like human armies under orders. They formed a unit. Theycame in countless hordes like an army of invasion, and they departed inthe same way. Their orders were written upon the air; their leaders wereas intangible as the shadows of their wings. The same is true of all ourflocking birds; a flock of snow buntings, or of starlings, or ofblackbirds, will act as one body, performing their evolutions in the airwith astonishing precision. 

In Florida, in the spring when the mating-instinct is strong, I haveseen a flock of white ibises waltzing about the sky, going throughvarious intricate movements, with the precision of dancers in a ballroomquadrille. No sign, no signal, no guidance whatever. Let a body of mentry it under the same conditions, and behold the confusion, and thetumbling over one another! At one moment the birds would wheel so as tobring their backs in shadow, and then would flash out the white of theirbreasts and under parts. It was like the opening and shutting of a gianthand, or the alternate rapid darkening and brightening of the sail of atacking ice-boat. This is the spirit of the flock. When a hawk pursues abird, the birds tack and turn as if linked together. When one robindashes off in hot pursuit of another, behold how their movements exactlycoincide! The hawk-hunted bird often escapes by reaching the cover of atree or a bush, but not by dodging its pursuer, as a rabbit or asquirrel will dodge a dog. Schools of fish act with the samemachine-like unity. 

In the South, I have seen a large area of water, acres in extent, uniformly agitated by a school of mullets apparently feeding upon someinfusoria on the surface, and then instantly, as if upon a given signal, the fish would dive and the rippling cease. It showed a unity of actionas of ten thousand spindles controlled by electricity. 

How quickly the emotion of fear is communicated among the wild animals!How wild and alarmed the deer become after the opening of the first dayof the shooting season. Those who have not seen or heard a hunter seemto feel the impending danger. 

The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the monarch) illustrate thesame law. In the fall they are all seized with this impulse to go Southand thousands of them march in one body. At night they roost in thetrees. I have seen photographs of them in which they appeared like a newkind of colored foliage covering the trees. In the return flight in thespring, the same massing again occurs. Recently the Imperial Valley inCalifornia was invaded by a vast army of worms moving from east to west. In countries that have been cursed with a plague of grasshopperswitnesses of the spectacle describe them as moving in the same way. Theystopped or delayed railway trains and automobiles, their crushed bodiesmaking the rails and highways as slippery as grease would have madethem. Ten million or ten billion behaving as one. 

This community of mind stands the lower orders in great stead. It makesup to them in a measure for the want of reason and judgment. In what wecall telepathy we get hints of the same thing among ourselves. Telepathyis probably a survival from our earlier animal state. 

II. MAETERLINCK ON THE BEE

Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee" resists theconclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are moreintelligent than honey bees:

 If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle down horizontally with its base to the window, you will find that the bees will persist till they die of exhaustion or hunger in their endeavors to discover an issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite side. 

The flies are more intelligent than the bees because their problems oflife are much more complicated; they are fraught with many more dangers;their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have very few naturalenemies. There are no bee-catchers in the sense that there are scores offlycatchers. I know of no bird that preys upon the worker bees. Thekingbird is sometimes called the "bee martin" because he occasionallysnaps up the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon the flies;the swallows sweep them up in the air, the swifts scoop them in, while, besides the so-called flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, thevireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more or less upon them. Try to catch a big blow-fly upon the window-pane and see how difficultthe trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all. Or try to"swat" the ordinary house-fly with your hand. See how he squares himselfand plants himself as your threatening hand approaches! He is ready fora trial of speed. He seems to know that your hand is slower than he is, and he is right in most cases. Now try a honey bee. The case isreversed. The bee has never been stalked; it shows no fear; and to crushit is as easy as to crush a beetle. 

The wit and cunning of all animals are developed by their struggle forexistence. The harder the struggle, the more their intelligence. Ourskunk and porcupine are very stupid because they do not have to takethought about their own safety; Nature has done that for them. 

To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that "the capacity for follyso great in itself argues intelligence, " which amounts to saying thatthe more fool you are, the more you know. 

Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion of the intelligence ofthe bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of otheranimals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of freeintelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of anovermastering instinct, as our new nature poet, McCarthy, says, She makes of labor an eternal lust. 

Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly. They work as well (orbetter) in the darkness as in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knowsand directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the individual bee. 

The bee does not know fear; she does not know love. She will defend theswarm with her life, but her fellows she heeds not. 

It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the same hive recognizeone another at all outside the hive. Every beehunter knows how the beesfrom the same tree will clip and strike at one another around his box, when they are first attracted to it. After they are seriously engaged incarrying away his honey, they pay no attention to one another or to beesfrom other swarms. That bees tell one another of the store of honey theyhave found is absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that. 

Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he once experimented uponduring an afternoon, the results showing that this bee had told the newsof her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood it in good stead!

Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive was an inspiration, and furnishes us with the key to all that happens in the hive. Thesecret of all its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon thissolution, he should have had the courage to stand by it. But he did not. He is continually forgetting it and applying to his problem theexplanations we apply in our dealings with one another. He talks of thepower of the bees to give "expression to their thoughts and feelings";of their "vocabulary, " phonetic and tactile; he says that the"extraordinary also has a name and place in their language"; that theyare able to "communicate to each other news of an event occurringoutside the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of the Hivesuperfluous. He quotes from a French apiarist who says that the explorerof the dawn, --the early bee, --like the early bird that catches the worm, returns to the hive with the news that "the lime-trees are bloomingto-day on the banks of the canal"; "the grass by the roadside is gaywith white clover"; "the sage and the lotus are about to open"; "themignonette and the lilies are overflowing with pollen. " Whereupon thebees must organize quickly and arrange to divide the work. They probablycall a council of the wise ones and after due discussion and formalitiesproceed to send out their working expeditions. "Five thousand of thesturdiest will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three thousandjuniors go and refresh the white clover. " "They make daily calculationsas to the means of obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharineliquid. "

When Maeterlinck speaks of "the hidden genius of the hive issuing itscommands, " or recognizes the existence among the bees of spiritualcommunications that go beyond a mere "yes" or "no, " he is true to his ownconception. 

The division of labor among hive bees is of course spontaneous, like alltheir other economies--not a matter of thought, but of instinct. 

Maeterlinck and other students of the honey bee make the mistake ofhumanizing the bee, thus making them communicate with one another as wecommunicate. Bees have a language, they say; they tell one another thisand that; if one finds honey or good pasturage, she tells her sisters, and so on. This is all wide of the mark. There is nothing analogous toverbal communication among the insects. The unity of the swarm, or theSpirit of the Hive, does it all. Bees communicate and coöperate with oneanother as the cells of the body communicate and coöperate in buildingup the various organs. The spirit of the body coördinates all thedifferent organs and tissues, making a unit of the body. 

If some outside creature, such as a mouse or a snail, penetrates intothe hive, and dies there, the bees encase it in wax, or bury it where itlies, so that it cannot contaminate the hive, and a foreign object inthe body, such as a bullet in the lungs, or in the muscles, becomesencysted in an analogous manner, and is thus rendered harmless. 

Kill a bee in or near the hive and the smell of its crushed body willinfuriate the other bees. But crush a bee in the fields or by thebee-hunter's box which is swarming with bees, and the units from thesame hive heed it not. 

Bees have no fear. They have no love or attachment for one another asanimals have. If one of their number is wounded or disabled, theyruthlessly expel it from the hive. In fact, they belong to another worldof beings that is absolutely oblivious of the world of which we form apart. They murder or expel the drones, after they have done their workof fertilizing the queen, in the most cruel and summary manner. Theirapparent attachment to the queen, and their loyalty to her, are notpersonal. They do not love her. It is the Spirit of the Hive, or thecult of the swarm solicitous about itself. There are no brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are only co-workers, working not for the present, but for the future. When we enter thekingdom of the bee, we must leave all our human standards behind. Theselittle people have no red blood, no organs of sense, as we have; theybreathe and hear through their legs, their antennæ. 

The drones do not know the queen as such in the hive. Their instinctslead them to search for her in the air during her nuptial flight, andthey know her only there. The drones have thirteen thousand eyes, whilethe workers have only six thousand. This double measure of the power ofvision is evidently to make sure that the males discover the queen inher course through the air. 

The guards that take their stand at the gate, the bees that become fansat the entrance to ventilate the hive, the nurses, the bees that bringthe bee-bread, the bees that pack it into the cells, the bees that goforth to find a home for the new swarm, the sweepers and cleaners of thehive, the workers that bring propolis to seal up the cracks andcrevices--all act in obedience to the voiceless Spirit of the Hive. 

After we have discounted Maeterlinck so far as the facts will bear usout in doing, it remains to be said that he is the philosopher of theinsect world. If Fabre is the Homer, as he himself has said, Maeterlinckis the Plato of that realm. How wisely he speaks of the insect world inhis latest volume, "Mountain Paths":

 The insect does not belong to our world. The other animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain earthly brotherhood with them. They often surprise and amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There is something, on the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. One would think that it was born of some comet that had lost its course and died demented in space. 

Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me of a well-known woodsmanand camp-fire man who recently extolled in print the intelligence ofhornets, saying that they have the ability to differentiate friends fromfoes. "They know us and we talk to them and they are made to feel aswelcome as any of our guests. " "When a stranger visits the camp, theyattract the attention of one they know _who recognizes their signal bythought or gesture and leaves immediately, returning only when thestranger has departed_. " (The italics are mine. ) He says the samehornets apparently come to them year after year, greeting them on theirarrival, and, should they be accompanied by strangers, they treat themwith the same deference as "when they visit us after we have been incamp some time. "

Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and well-mannered bees? Whatwould Maeterlinck say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent whenwe remember that hornets live but a single season, that none of themlives over the winter, save the queen, and that she never leaves thenest in summer after she has got her family of workers around her. 

III. ODD OR EVEN

One of our seven wise men once said to me, "Have you observed that inthe inorganic world things go by even numbers, and in the organic worldby odd?" I immediately went down to the edge of a bushy and swampymeadow below our camp and brought him a four-petaled flower of galium, and a plant-stalk with four leaves in a whorl. In another locality Imight have brought him dwarf cornel, or the houstonia, or wood-sorrel, or the evening-primrose. Yet even numbers are certainly more suggestiveof mechanics than of life, while odd numbers seem to go more with thefreedom and irregularity of growing things. 

One may make pretty positive assertions about non-living things. Crystals, so far as I know, are all even-sided, some are six and someeight-sided; snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but thenumber six rules them. In the world of living things we cannot be sosure of ourselves. Life introduces something indeterminate andincommensurable. It makes use of both odd and even, though undoubtedlyodd numbers generally prevail. Leaves that are in lobes usually havethree or five lobes. But the stems of the mints are four-square, and thecells of the honey bee are six-sided. We have five fingers and fivetoes, though only four limbs. Locomotion is mechanical and even numbersserve better than odd. Hence the six-legged insects. In the inorganicworld things attain a stable equilibrium, but in the living world theequilibrium is never stable. Things are not stereotyped, hence thedanger of dogmatizing about living things. Growing Nature will not bedriven into a corner. 

Well may Emerson ask--

 Why Nature loves the number five, And why the star form she repeats?

The number five rules in all the largest floral families, as in thecrowfoot family, the rose family (which embraces all our fruit trees), the geranium family, the flax family, the campanula family, theconvolvulus family, the nightshade family. Then there is a large numberof flowers the parts of which go in threes, one of the best known ofwhich is the trillium. In animal life the starfish is the only form Irecall based on the number five. 

IV. WHY AND HOW

One may always expect in living nature variations and modifications. Itis useless to ask why. Nature is silent when interrogated in this way. Ask her how, and you get some results. If we ask, for instance, why thesting of the honey bee is barbed, and those of the hornet and wasp andbumble-bee, and of other wild bees, are smooth like a needle, so thatthey can sting and sting again, and live to sting another day, while thehoney bee stings once at the cost of its life; or why only one speciesof fish can fly; or why one kind of eel has a powerful electricbattery; or why the porcupine has an armor of quills while his brotherrodent the woodchuck has only fur and hair, and so on--we make noaddition to our knowledge. 

But if we ask, for instance, how so timid and defenseless an animal asthe rabbit manages to survive and multiply, we extend our knowledge ofnatural history. The rabbit prospers by reason of its wakefulness--bynever closing its eyes--and by its speed; also by making its home whereit can command all approaches, and so flee in any direction. Or if weask how our ruffed grouse survives and prospers in a climate where itscousin the quail perishes, we learn that it eats the buds of certaintrees, while the quail is a ground-feeder and is often cut off by a deepfall of snow. 

If we ask why the chipmunk hibernates, we get no answer; but if we askhow he does it, we find out that he stores up food in his den, hencemust take a lunch between his naps. The woodchuck hibernates, also, buthe stores up fuel in the shape of fat in his own body. The porcupine isabove ground and active all winter. He survives by gnawing the bark ofcertain trees, probably the hemlock. We have two species of native micethat look much alike, the white-footed mouse and the jumping, orkangaroo, mouse. The white-foot is active the season through, over andunder the snow; the jumper hibernates all winter, and apparentlyaccomplishes the feat by the power he has of barely keeping the spark oflife burning. His fires are banked, so to speak; his temperature is verylow, and he breathes only at long intervals. 

If, then, we ask with Emerson, "_why_ Nature loves the number five, " and"_why_ the star form she repeats, " we shall be put to it for an answer. We can only say that with living things odd numbers are more likely toprevail, and with non-living, even numbers. 

Some seeds have wings and some have not. To ask why, is a blindquestion, but if we ask _how_ the wingless seeds get sown, we may add toour knowledge. 

In our own practical lives, in which experimentation plays such a part, we are often compelled to ask why this result and not that, why thisthing behaves this way and that thing that way. We are looking forreasons or causes. The farmer asks why his planting in this field was afailure, while it was a success in the next field, and so on. Ananalysis of his soil or of his fertilizer and culture will give him theanswer. 

V. AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM

That Darwin was a great natural philosopher and a good and wise manadmits of no question, but to us, at this distance, it seems strangeenough that he should have thought that he had hit upon the key to theorigin of species in the slow and insensible changes which he fanciedspecies underwent during the course of the geologic ages, and shouldthus have used the phrase as the title of his book. Had he called hiswork the "Variability of Species, " or the "Modification of Species, " itwould not have been such a misnomer. Sudden mutations give us newvarieties, but not new species. In fact, of the origin of species weknow absolutely nothing, no more than we do about the origin of lifeitself. 

Of the development of species we know some of the factors that play apart, as the influence of environment, the struggle for existence, andthe competitions of life. But do we not have to assume an inherenttendency to development, an original impulse as the key to evolution?Accidental conditions and circumstances modify, but do not originatespecies. The fortuitous plays a part in retarding or hastening aspecies, and in its extinction, but not in its origin. The record of therocks reveals to us the relation of species, and their succession ingeologic time, but gives no hint of their origin. 

Agassiz believed that every species of animal and plant was the resultof a direct and separate act of the Creator. But the naturalist sees thecreative energy immanent in matter. Does not one have to believe insomething like this to account for the world as we see it? And toaccount for us also?--a universal mind or intelligence

 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. 

Agassiz was too direct and literal; he referred to the Infinite Mysteryin terms of our own wills and acts. When we think of a Creator and thething created as two, we are in trouble at once. They are one, as fireand light are one, as soul and body are one. Darwin said he could notlook upon the world as the result of chance, and yet his theory of theorigin of species ushers us into a chance world. But when he said, speaking of the infinite variety of living forms about us, that they"have all been produced by laws acting around us, " he spoke as a greatphilosopher. These laws are not fortuitous, or the result of the blindgrouping of irrational forces. 

VI. A LIVE WORLD

It was "the divine Kepler, " as Professor Shaler calls him, who lookedupon the earth as animated in the fashion of an animal. "To him thisworld is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted alive. "But his critics looked upon this fancy of Kepler's as proof of adisordered mind. 

Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) onthe tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a livingorganism than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs andpalpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organismsdo. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, asKepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is heldin the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vastsidereal tree, that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon is nodoubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to fancy its surface yieldingto our tread as does that of the earth. Then we know that the absence ofair and water on it is proof that it cannot be endowed with what we calllife. George Darwin tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp andbend the surface very much as we might bend or dent the epidermis of acolossal pachyderm. He and his brother devised an instrument by whichthe slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move over it, could bemeasured. The instrument was so delicate that it revealed the differenceof effect produced by the same pressure at seven feet and at six feetfrom the instrument! More than that, the instrument revealed thethrobbing and agitations which the ground is undergoing at all times. They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms, as the Italians callthem, are occurring constantly. 

Another instrument has been invented called the microphone, whichtranslates this earth's movements into sound--its tremors andagitations become audible. This microphone, when placed in a cave twentyfeet below the surface, and carefully protected by means of a carpetfrom any accidental disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed whatis called "natural telluric phenomena; such as roarings, explosions, occurring isolated or in volleys, and metallic or bell-like sounds. ""The noises sometimes become intolerably loud, " especially on oneoccasion in the middle of the night, half an hour before a sensibleearthquake. 

Our apparently impassive and slumbering old planet evidently has dreamswe know little of. 

From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in America" I get an impressionwhich again deepens my feeling of something half human about our luckyplanet, at least something progressive and unequal, like life itself. Shaler finds that organic development in the Northern Hemisphere is moreadvanced, by a whole geologic period, than in the Southern, with Europeat the head and Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life ofAustralia is much like that of Europe in the Jurassic period, while bothAsia and Africa possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and lions, which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times. Hence the NorthernHemisphere is more like the head of the beast, and the Southern morelike the viscera. The Northern races easily dominate the Southern. Theflowering of civilization is in the North. It is very certain that manoriginated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect thatthe achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rivalthe achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth. 

VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR

That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes of the World War seemsto me quite obvious. Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist hasmore to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His biological doctrine ofthe struggle for existence, natural selection, and the survival of thefittest, fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first. These theoriesfell in well with their militarism and their natural cruelty andgreediness. Their philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann fairlymade a god of natural selection, as did other German thinkers. And whenthey were ready for war, the Germans at once applied the law of thejungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution, the triumph of thestrong, the supremacy of the fit, became the foundation of theirpolitical and national ideals. They looked for no higher proof of thedivinity of this law, as applied to races and nations, than the factthat the organic world had reached its present stage of developmentthrough the operation of this law. Darwin had given currency to theseideas. He had denied that there was any inherent tendency todevelopment, affirming that we lived in a world of chance, and thatpower comes only to him who exerts power--half truths, all of them. 

The Germans as a people have never been born again into the light of ourhigher civilization. They are morally blind and politically treacherous. Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and theDarwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind, in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In hisplodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, hismind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, hissimplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings borefruit of a political and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind. The Teutons incorporated the law of the jungle in their ethical code. Had not they the same right to expansion and to the usurpation of theterritory and to the treasures of their neighbors that every weed in thefields and even the vermin of the soil and the air have? If they had thesanction of natural law, that was enough; they were quite oblivious tothe fact that with man's moral nature had come in a new biological lawwhich Darwin was not called upon to reckon with, but which hastremendous authority and survival value--the law of right, justice, mercy, honor, love. 

We do not look for the Golden Rule among swine and cattle, or amongwolves and sharks; we look for it among men; we look for honor, forheroism, for self-sacrifice, among men. None of these things areinvolved in the Darwinian hypothesis. There is no such thing as right orwrong in the orders below man. These are purely human distinctions. Itis not wrong for the wolf to eat the lamb, or the lamb to eat the grass, but an aggressive war is wrong to the depths of the farthest star. Germany's assault upon the peace and prosperity of the world was a crimeagainst the very heavens. 

Darwin occupied himself only with the natural evolution of organicforms, and not with the evolution of human communities. He treated manas an animal, and fitted him into the zoölogical scheme. He removed himfrom the realm of the miraculous into the plane of the natural. For allpurposes of biological discussion, man is an animal, but that is notsaying he is only an animal, and still under the law of animalevolution. The European man is supposed to have passed the stage ofsavagery, in which the only rule of right is the rule of might. To havemade Darwinism an excuse for a war of aggression is to have debased asound natural philosophy to a selfish and ignoble end. 

Germany lifted the law to the human realm and staked her all upon it, and failed. The moral sense of the world--the sense of justice, of fairplay--was against her, and inevitably she went down. Her leaders weremorally blind. When the rest of the world talked of moral standards, theGerman leaders said, "We think you are fools. " But these standardsbrought England into the war--the sacredness of treaties. They broughtthe United States in. We saw a common enemy in Germany, an enemy ofmankind. We sent millions of men to France for an ideal--for justice andfair play. To see our standards of right and justice ignored andtrampled upon in this way was intolerable. The thought of the worldbeing swayed by Prussianism was unbearable. I said to myself from thefirst, "The Allies have got to win; there is no alternative. " And whatastonishes me is that certain prominent Englishmen, such as Lord Morley, and others, did not see it. Would they have sat still and watchedGermany destroy France and plant herself upon the Channel and make readyto destroy England? The very framework of our moral civilization wouldhave been destroyed. Darwin little dreamed to what his natural selectiontheory was to lead. 

VIII. THE ROBIN

Of all our birds the robin has life in the fullest measure, or beststands the Darwinian test of the fittest to survive. His versatility, adaptiveness, and fecundity are remarkable. While not an omnivorousfeeder, he yet has a very wide range among fruits and insects. Fromcherries to currants and strawberries he ranges freely, while he is theonly thrush that makes angle-worms one of his dietetic staples and looksupon a fat grub as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the mostdiverse of all. Now he is a tree-builder in the fork of a trunk or on ahorizontal branch, then a builder in vines or rosebushes around yourporch, then on some coign of vantage about your house or barn, or underthe shed, or under a bridge, or in the stone wall, or on the groundabove a hedge. I have known him to go into a well and build there on aprojecting stone. He even nests beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is saidhe never sings sweeter than when singing during those long Arctic days. 

He brings off his first brood in May, and the second in June, and if adry season does not seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one inSeptember. He is a hustler in every sense of the word--a typicalAmerican in his enterprise and versatility. His voice is the first Ihear in the morning, and the last at night. Little wonder that there aretwenty robins to one bluebird, or wood thrush, or catbird. The songsparrow is probably our next most successful bird, but she is farbehind the robin. We could never have a plague of song sparrows orbluebirds, but since the robins are now protected in the South as wellas in the North, we are exposed to the danger of a plague of robins. Since they may no longer have robin pot-pies in Mississippi, the time isnear at hand when we may no longer have cherry-pies in New York or NewEngland. Yet who does not cherish a deep love for the robin? He is aplebeian bird, but he adds a touch to life in the country that one wouldnot like to miss. 

The robin is neither a walker nor a hopper; he is doomed always to be arunner. Go slow he cannot; his engine is always "in high"--it starts "inhigh" and stops "in high. "

IX. THE WEASEL

In wild life the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to thestrong. For instance, the weasel catches the rabbit and the redsquirrel, both of which are much more fleet of foot than is he. The redsquirrel can fairly fly through the tops of the trees, where the weaselwould be entirely out of its element, and the rabbit can easily leavehim behind, and yet the weasel captures and sucks the blood of both. Recently, when the ground was covered with our first snow, some men atwork in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the slope below them. Their dog rushed down and found a weasel holding a rabbit, which itreleased on the approach of the dog and took to the cover of a near-bystone wall. The whole story was written there on the snow. Thebloodsucker had pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for manyyards and then had pulled it down. 

Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods when they came upon aweasel chasing a red squirrel around the trunk of a big oak; round andround they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The men stood andlooked on. It soon became apparent that the weasel was going to get thesquirrel, so they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker. Why thesquirrel did not take to the tree-tops, where the weasel probably wouldnot have followed him, and thus make his escape--who knows? One of myneighbors, however, says he has seen where a weasel went up a tree andtook a gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the snow, thendragged it to cover and left it dead. The weasel seems to inspire suchterror in its victim that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an easyprey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes, that gliding snakelike form, that fearless, fatelike pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spellupon the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel once pursued ahen to my very feet and seized it and would not let it go until I put myfoot upon it and gripped it by the back of the neck with my hand. Itsmethods are a kind of _Schrecklichkeit_ in the animal world. It is theincarnation of the devil among our lesser animals. 

X. MISINTERPRETING NATURE

We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start with the assumption thather methods are at all like our methods. We pick out our favorites amongplants and animals, those that best suit our purposes. If we want woolfrom the sheep, we select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If wewant mutton, we act accordingly. If we want cows for quantity of milk, irrespective of quality, we select with that end in view; if we wantbutter-fat, we breed for that end, and so on. With our fruits and grainsand vegetables we follow the same course. We go straight to our objectwith as little waste and delay as possible. 

Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of those qualities in herfruits and grains which best enable them to survive. In like manner shesubordinates her wool and fur and milk to the same general purpose. Herone end is to increase and multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there willbe no great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there will be no prizefleeces. The wild fowl do not lay eggs for market. 

Those powers and qualities are dominant in the wild creatures that arenecessary for the survival of the species--strength, speed, sharpness ofeye and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival value. 

Our hawks could not survive without wing-power or great speed, but thecrow survives without this power, because he is an omnivorous feeder andcan thrive where the hawk would starve, and also because no bird of preywants him, and, more than that, because he is dependent upon nothingthat requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious for reasonsthat are not obvious. The fox in this country requires both speed andcunning, but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent andunafraid that he walked up to it and killed it with his geologist'shammer. Has it no enemies in that country?

Nature's course is always a roundabout one. Our petty economies are noconcern of hers. Man wants specific results at once. Nature works slowlyto general results. Her army is drilled only in battle. Her tools growsharper in the using. The strength of her species is the strength of theobstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin when we assume thatNature selects as man selects. Nature selects solely upon the principleof power of survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility. Hewants some particular good--a race-horse, a draft-horse--better qualityor greater quantity of this or that. Nature aims to fill the world withher progeny. Only power to win in the competition of life counts withher. As I have so often said, she plays one hand against the other. Thestakes are hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one to her. Shepits one species of plant or animal against another--heads I win, tailsyou lose. Some plants spread both by seed and runners, this doublestheir chances; they are kept in check because certain localities areunfavorable to them. I know a section of the country where a species ofmint has completely usurped the pastures. It makes good bee pasturage, but poor cattle pasturage. Quack grass will run out other grass becauseit travels under ground in the root as well as above ground in the seed. 

XI. NATURAL SCULPTURE

We may say that all the forms in the non-living world come by chance, orby the action of the undirected irrational physical forces, mechanicalor mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of forces shaping theearth's surface, but the same forces are doing two kinds of work, pilingup and pulling down--aggregating and accumulating, and separating anddisintegrating. 

It is to me an interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms ininorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process, but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, anobelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the rocks, the architectural andmonumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Cañon and in theGarden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion. Water and otheraerial forces are the builders and sculptors, and the nature andstructure of the material determine the form. It is as if these strikingforms were inherent in the rocks, waiting for the erosive forces toliberate them. The stratified rocks out of which they are carved werenot laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon layer, like theleaves of a book; neither has the crumpling and deformation of theearth's crust piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic andsuggestive. Yet behold what the invisible workmen have carved out ofthem in the Grand Cañon! It looks as though titanic architects andsculptors had been busy here for ages. But only little grains of sandand a vast multitude of little drops of water, active through geologicages, were the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle. If theriver could have builded something equally grand and beautiful with thematerial it took out of this chasm! But it could not--poetry at one endof the series and dull prose at the other. The deposition took the formof broad, featureless, uninteresting plains--material for a new seriesof stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand Cañons may becarved. Thus the gods of erosion are the artists, while the builders ofthe mountains are only ordinary workmen. 

XI

RUMINATIONS

I. MAN A PART OF NATURE

This bit of nature which I call myself, and which I habitually think ofas entirely apart from the nature by which I am surrounded, going itsown way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of the natureexternal to it, is yet as strictly a part of the total energy we callnature as is each wave in the ocean, no matter how high it raises itscrest, a part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but a littleway in separating us from the totality of things. Outside of the verylimited sphere of what we call our spontaneous activities, we too arethings and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know not of. 

It is only in action, or in the act of living, that we view ourselves asdistinct from nature. When we think, we see that we are a part of theworld in which we live, as much so as the trees and the other animalsare a part. Intellect unites what life separates. Our whole civilizationis the separating of one thing from another and classifying andorganizing them. We work ourselves away from rude Nature while we areabsolutely dependent upon her for health and strength. We cease to besavages while we strive to retain the savage health and virility. Weimprove Nature while we make war upon her. We improve her for our ownpurposes. All the forces we use--wind, water, gravity, electricity--arestill those of rude Nature. Is it not by gravity that the water rises tothe top stories of our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplanesoars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns hurl a ton of iron twentymiles they pit the greater weight against the lesser. The lighterprojectile goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete hurls thehammer because he greatly outweighs it. 

II. MARCUS AURELIUS ON DEATH

Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing else than a dissolution ofthe elements of which every human being is composed. " May we say it islike a redistribution of the type after the page is printed? The type isunchanged, only the order of arrangement is broken up. In the death ofthe body the component elements--water, lime, iron, phosphorus, magnesia, and so on--remain the same, but their organization is changed. Is that all? Is this a true analogy? The meaning of the printed page, the idea embodied, is the main matter. Can this idea be said to existindependent of the type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and thennot permanently. Then it is only an arrangement of molecules of matterin the brain, which is certainly only temporary. On the printed page itis a certain combination of white and black that moves the cells of thebrain through the eye to create the idea. So the conception in our mindsof our neighbor or friend--his character, his personality--exists afterhe is dead, but when our own brain ceases to function, where is it then?

We rather resent being summed up in this way in terms of physics, oreven of psychology. Can you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from itsashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology describe all men in thesame terms; our component parts are all the same; but character, personality, mentality--do not these escape your analysis? and are theynot also real?

III. THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE

Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the minister and interpreterof Nature. But man has been very slow to see that he is a part of thatsame Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter. Hisinterpretation is not complete until he has learned to interpret himselfalso. This he has done all unconsciously through his art, hisliterature, his religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one phaseof him, music another, poetry another, sculpture another, his civicorders another, his creeds and beliefs and superstitions another, sothat at this day and age of the world he has been pretty wellinterpreted. But the final interpretation is as far off as ever, becausethe condition of man is not static, but dynamic. He is forever born anewinto the world and experiences new wonder, new joy, new loves, newenthusiasms. Nature is infinite, and the soul of man is infinite, andthe action and reaction between the two which gives us our culture andour civilization can never cease. When man thinks he is interpretingNature, he is really interpreting himself--reading his own heart andmind through the forms and movements that surround him. In his art andhis literature he bodies forth his own ideals; in his religion he givesthe measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations toward theperfect good; in his science he illustrates his capacity for logicalorder and for weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the nightprowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck or the ground mole, thereis no biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cowsand the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; theyare the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Natureinterprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, herterror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in herpresence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for theemotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to himhis susceptibility to beauty. 

It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing inthe block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fallinto such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in theflute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue inthe form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor, and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the potof printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn, the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is noresurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it. We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of thelaws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand ofbrick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder. 

The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soulthrough the medium of the marble--the picture is not in the painter'scolor tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it isin the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat andthe corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws ofphysics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up theperfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms thatapply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpretthe stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars inthe heavens is accidental--the chair, the dipper, the harp, thehuntsman, are our fabrications. Does Shelley interpret the skylark, orWordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman themockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet'smind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax. 

All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of anunfailing sequence of events we frame laws--the law of gravity, ofchemical affinity, of magnetism, of electricity--and refer to them as ifthey had an objective reality, when they are only concepts in our ownminds. Nature has no statute books and no legislators, though wehabitually think of her processes under these symbols. Human laws can beannulled, but Nature's laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, thoughtheology revokes or suspends them in its own behalf. It was Joshua'smind that stopped while he conquered his enemies, and not the sun. 

The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers; fire and flood, famineand pestilence, are deaf to our appeals. One of the cardinal doctrinesof Emerson was that all true prayers are self-answered--the spirit whichthe act of prayer begets in the suppliant is the answer. A heartfeltprayer for faith or courage or humility is already answered in theattitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know that the officialprayers in the churches for victory to the armies in the field are of noavail--and how absurd to expect them to be--but who shall say that theprayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may not steady his hand andclinch his courage? But the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or forthe stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is as vain as toreach one's hands for the moon. 

IV. ORIGINAL SOURCES

The writers who go directly to life and Nature for their material are, in every age, few compared with the great number that go to thelibraries and lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation tothe primary sources of inspiration. They cannot go directly to thefountain-head, but depend upon those who can and do. They are like thoseforms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that have no chlorophyll, and hencecannot get their food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid in theair; they must draw it from the remains of plants that did get it atfirst-hand from Nature. Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of thevegetable world; it makes the solar power available for life. It is indirect and original relation to the sun. It also makes animal lifepossible. The plant can go to inorganic nature and through itschlorophyll can draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the plant, or to the animal that went to the plant, for our sustenance. 

The secondary men go to books and creeds and institutions for theirreligion, but the original men, having the divine chlorophyll, go toNature herself. The stars in their courses teach them. The earthinspires them. 

V. THE COSMIC HARMONY

The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not like that which manproduces or aims to produce in his work--the order and harmony that willgive him the best and the quickest results; but it is an astronomicorder and harmony which flows inevitably from the circular movements andcircular forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and evolution arethe two feet upon which creation goes. All natural forms strive for thespherical. The waves on the beach curve and roll and make the pebblesround. From the drops of rain and dew to the mighty celestial orbs onelaw prevails. Nature works to no special ends; she works to all ends;and her harmony results from her universality. The comets are apparentlycelestial outlaws, but they all have their periodic movements, and maketheir rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of space, whichundoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies and failures of order, asthey undoubtedly are. What else can we call them? When a new starsuddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one blazes up, and from astar of the tenth magnitude becomes one of the first, and then slowlygrows dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe, an astronomicaccident on a cosmic scale. Had such things occurred frequently enough, would not the whole solar system have been finally wrecked, or could iteven have begun? For the disharmonies in Nature we must look to theworld of the living things, but even here the defeats and failures arethe exception--else there would be no living world. Organic evolutionreaches its goal despite the delays and suffering and its deviouscourse. The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last, though itscourse double and redouble upon itself scores of times, and it travelsten miles to advance one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetablelife, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a thunderbolt that shatters aliving tree, are all disharmonies of Nature. In fact, one may say thatdisease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and all forms of what wecall evil are disharmonies, because their tendency is to defeat theorderly development of life. 

The disharmonies in Nature in both the living and the non-living worldstend to correct themselves. When Nature cannot make both ends meet, shediminishes her girth. If there is not food enough for her creatures, she lessens the number of mouths to be fed. A surplus of food, on theother hand, tends to multiply the mouths. 

Man often introduces an element of disorder into Nature. His work indeforesting the land brings on floods and the opposite conditions ofdrought. He destroys the natural checks and compensations. 

VI. COSMIC RHYTHMS

The swells that beat upon the shores of the ocean are not merely theresult of a local agitation of the waters. The pulse of the earth is inthem. The pulse of the sun and the moon is in them. They are more cosmicthan terrestrial. The earth wears her seas like a loose garment whichthe sun and moon constantly pluck at and shift from side to side. Onlythe ocean feels the tidal impulse, the heavenly influences. The greatinland bodies of water are unresponsive to them--they are too small forthe meshes of the solar and lunar net. Is it not equally true that onlygreat souls are moved by the great fundamental questions of life? What apuzzle the tides must have been to early man! What proof they afford ofthe cosmic forces that play upon us at all times and hold us in theirnet! Without the proof they afford, we should not know how we are tiedto the solar system. The lazy, reluctant waters--how they follow the sunand moon, "with fluid step, " as Whitman says, "round the world"! Theland feels the pull also and would follow if it could. But the mobileclouds go their way, and the aerial ocean makes no sign. The pull of thesun and the moon is upon you and me also, but we are all unconscious ofit. We are bodies too slight to affect the beam of the huge scale. 

VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE

It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn, in his "Origin andEvolution of Life, " makes no account of the micro-organisms orunicellular lives that are older than the continents, older than theCambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged even to our times. Isaw in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado where they were laid downhorizontally on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the hand of amason building the foundation of a superstructure. All the vast seriesof limestone rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute livingbodies. Other strata of rocks are made up of the skeletons of diatoms. Some of our polishing powders are made from these rocks. Formed of puresilex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons of organisms of manyexquisite forms, _Foraminiferæ_. The Pyramids are said to be built ofrocks formed by these organisms. "No single group of the animalkingdom, " says Mr. W. B. Carpenter, "has contributed, or is at presentcontributing, so largely as has the _Foraminiferæ_ to the formation ofthe earth's crust. " In the face of these facts, how unsatisfactory seemProfessor Osborn's statements that life probably originated on thecontinents, either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils, in the freshwaters of continental pools, or in the slightly saline waters of the"bordering primordial seas. " This last suggestion comes nearer the mark. There is no variation during geologic time of these primordial livingorganisms. All conceivable changes of environment have passed over them, but they change not. Bacteria struggle together, one form devouringanother form. Unicellular life long precedes multicellular. Biologistsusually begin with the latter; the former are fixed; with the latterbegins development or evolution, and the peopling of the world withmyriads of animal forms. 

VIII. SPENDTHRIFT NATURE

Emerson says, "Nature is a spendthrift, but takes the shortest way toher ends. " She is like ourselves, she is ourselves writtenlarge--written in animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish ofthat of which she has the most. She is lavish of her leaves, but less soof her flowers, still less of her fruit, and less yet of her germinalparts. The production of seed is a costly process to the plant. Manytrees yield fruit only every other year. 

I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what she has the most. Behold the clouds of pollen from the blooming pines and from the grassesin the meadow. She is less parsimonious with her winged seeds, such asof the maple and the elm, than with her heavy nuts--butternuts, hickory-nuts, acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend upon theagency of the birds and squirrels to scatter them. She offers them thewage of the sweet kernel, and knows that they will scatter more thanthey eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds of her berries sheoffers the delectable pulp: "Do this chore for me, and you will find theservice its own reward. " All the wild fruits of the fields and woodshold seeds that must be distributed by animal agency. Even the fieryarum or Indian turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red berries, and thus scatter the undigested seeds. The mice and the squirrelsdoubtless give them a wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seedshave the sting taken out of them. You cannot poison a hen withstrychnine. 

We ourselves are covetous of those things of which we have but few, extravagant with those of which we have an abundance. When the Westernfarmer burns corn in place of coal, be assured he sees his own accountin it. We husband our white pine, and are free with our hemlock; we arestingy with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech and chestnut. 

XII

NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD

As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover new acts inNature's drama. They are, however, the old acts, played again and again, which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed have I been in therise and fall of the curtain, and in the entrances and exits of the morefamiliar players. I count myself fortunate if, during each season, Idetect a few new acts on the vast stage; and as long as I live I expectto cogitate and speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest inthe whole performance. 

I. SUNRISE

The most impressive moment of the day here in the Catskills is therising of the sun. From my cot on the porch I see the first flash of hiscoming. Before that I see his rays glint here and there through theforest trees which give a mane to the mountain crest. The dawn comesvery gently. I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually becomeconscious of a faint luminousness in the eastern sky. This slowlyincreases and changes to a deep saffron, and then in eight or tenminutes that fades into a light bluish tinge--the gold turns to silver. After some minutes the sky, just at the point where the sun is toappear, begins to glow again, as if the silver were getting warm; aminute or two more and the brow of the great god is above the horizonline. His mere brow, as I try to fix my eye upon it, fairly smites meblind. The brow is magnified by the eye into the whole face. Onerealizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old earth turns on itsaxis. You witness the miracle of the transition of the dawn into day. The day is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the word "boil"to describe this moment?--"Day boils at last. " Gilder, I think, speaksof it as a scimitar flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate, Iwatch for it each morning as if I were seeing it for the first time. Itis the critical moment of the day. You actually see the earth turning. Later in the day one does not note in the same way the sun climbing theheavens. The setting sun does not impress one, because it is usuallyenveloped in vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his restveiled and subdued. He is new in the morning and old at his going down. His gilding of the clouds at sunset is a token of a fair day on themorrow; his touching them with fire in the morning is a token of wind orstorm. So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. Theyare local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is asif it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, andyet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon thismote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that itcould hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate Godto ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private andparticular way, though we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence. 

II. NATURE'S METHODS

Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon hisinventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. Thefirst airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flieshundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressedsteadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms;her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models. There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the caseof man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them withthose of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term. She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internaland not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods islike trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines. 

The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of thesecondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production ofthe vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from theoriginal Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from oneanother? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in onecase as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, oneoverlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, andno union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begatrock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but theorigin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is thatof the animal species. 

The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa isanalogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminatedsandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into theother. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need ofhigh feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals musthave felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and, while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do notapproach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but itis a low feeder, mainly from the ground. 

We can only account for man and other higher forms of life surviving inthe highway of the physical forces on the ground that the wheels andtramping hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit them. They learnedinstinctively to avoid these destructive forces. Animal life wasdeveloped amid these dangers. The physical forces go their way asindifferent to life as is your automobile to the worms and beetles inthe road. Pain and suffering are nothing to the Eternal; the only thingthat concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter how many fall orare crushed by the way; to It men are as cheap as fleas; and they haveslaughtered one another in Europe of late without help or hindrance fromthe Eternal, as do the tribes of hostile ants. The wars of the microbesand the wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme of things. The survivors owe their power of survival to the forces that soughttheir destruction; they are strong by what they have overcome; theygraduated in that school. Hence it is that we can say that evil is forus as much as it is against us. Pain and suffering are guardian angels;they teach us what to shun. 

How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is! How impossible, forinstance, to reduce her use of horns to a single rule. In the deer andelk tribe the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics. Theyare dropped as the season wanes; but the antelopes do not drop theirhorns, and in Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with ourcommon sheep the horns are sexual manifestations; yet the old ram doesnot shed his horns. Nature will not be consistent. 

Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with four horns, two on the noseand two on the crown, and they were real, permanent, bony growths. 

What a powerful right fore limb Nature has given to the shovel-footedmole, while the chipmunk, who also burrows in the ground, has no specialtool to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is compelled to usehis soft, tender little nose as a pusher. When the soil which his feethave loosened has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he shoves itback with his nose. 

Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial. The Canada thistle sowsits seeds upon the wind like the common native thistle; then in additionit sends a big root underground parallel with its surface, and justbeyond the reach of the plough, which sends up shoots every six or seveninches, so that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on itsconquests like a powerful besieging army, both below ground and above. 

A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a rather peremptory manner, demanding an answer by return mail as to why robins are evenlydistributed over the country instead of collected in large numbers inone locality; and if they breed in the South; and he insists that myanswer be explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is naturallaw. " I wonder that he did not put a special-delivery stamp on hisletter. He is probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering. 

There seems to be an inherent tendency in nearly all living things toscatter, to seek new fields. They are obeying the first command--toincrease and multiply. Then it is also a question of food, which islimited in every locality. Robins do not breed in flocks, but in pairs. Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is a vacuumto the different species of birds that breed there. The seed-eaters, thefruit-eaters, the insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like therobin--in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers, the warblers--mayand do all live together in harmony in the same narrow area. 

The struggle of which we have heard so much since Darwin's time ismainly a natural sifting and distributing process, such as that going onall about us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried by the windsdo not thrive unless they chance to fall on suitable ground. All may be"fit" to survive and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What so frailas a spider's web, and yet how the spiders thrive! Nature gives the weakmany advantages. 

There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species with another--thefleet with the slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed andsharp-eared with the dull of eye and ear, the keen of scent with theblunt of scent--which we call natural competition; but the slow, thestupid, the dull-eyed, dull-eared, and dull-scented find their place andthrive for all that. They are dull and slow because they do not need tobe otherwise; the conditions of their lives do not require speed andsharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills, the skunk its pungentsecretion. All parts of nature dovetail together. The deer and theantelope kind have speed and sharp senses because their enemies havespeed and sharp senses. The small birds are keen-eyed and watchfulbecause the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel dominates the graysquirrel, which is above him in size and strength, and the chipmunkbelow him, but he does not exterminate either. The chipmunk burrows inthe ground where the red cannot follow him, and he lays up a store ofnuts and seeds which the red does not. The weasel easily dominates therat, but the rat prospers in spite of cats and traps and weasels. 

The sifting of species is done largely by environment, the wet, thecold, the heat--the fittest, or those best adapted to their environment, survive. For some obscure reason they have a fuller measure of life thanthose who fall by the way. 

III. HEADS AND TAILS

I have heard a story of a young artist who, after painting a picture ofa horse facing a storm, was not satisfied with it, and, feeling thatsomething was wrong, asked Landseer to look at it. Instantly the greatartist said to him, "Turn the horse around. "

The cow turns her head to the storm, the horse turns his tail. Why thisdifference? Because each adopts the plan best suited to its needs andits anatomy. How much better suited is the broad, square head of thecow, with its heavy coating of hair and its ridge of bone that supportsits horns, to face the storm than is the smooth, more nervous andsensitive head of the horse! What a contrast between their noses andtheir mode of grazing! The cow has no upper front teeth; she reaps thegrass with the scythe of her tongue, while the horse bites it off andloves to bite the turf with it. The lip of the horse is mobile andsensitive. Then the bovine animals fight with their heads, and theequine with their heels. The horse is a hard and high kicker, the cow afeeble one in comparison. The horse will kick with both hind feet, thecow with only one. In fact, there is not much "kick" in her kind. Thetail of the cow is of less protection to her than is that of the horseto him. Her great need of it is to fight flies, and, if attacked in therear, it furnishes a good hold for her enemies. Then her bony stern, with its ridges and depressions and thin flanks, is less fit in anyencounter with storm or with beast than is her head. On the other hand, the round, smooth, solid buttocks of the horse, with their huge massesof muscles, his smooth flanks, and his tail--an apron of long, straight, strong hair--are well designed to resist storm and cold. What animal isit in Job whose neck is clothed with thunder? With the horse, it is thehips that are so clothed. His tremendous drive is in his hips. 

IV. AN UNSAVORY SUBJECT

If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I suppose the breathof the obscene fungus by any other name would smell as rank. Thedefensive weapon of our black-and-white wood pussy would probably not beless offensive if we called him by that name alone, instead of thecommon one by which he is universally known. 

While in southern California last winter I heard of one that took up hisabode in the basement of a house that stood on the side of a hill in theedge of the country. It was in a sort of lumber-room where all sorts ofodds and ends had accumulated. On some shelves was a box ofmiscellaneous articles, such as lids to tin cans, bed castors, oldtoothbrushes, bits of broken crockery, pieces of wire, chips of wood, and the dried foot and leg of a hen. One morning, on opening the door ofthe basement, the mistress of the house was surprised to see the wholecollection of trash laid out in a line across the floor. The articleswere placed with some degree of regularity covering a space aboutfifteen inches wide and ten feet in length. There were sixty-onearticles in the row. 

Having such an unsavory creature in the basement of one's house israther ticklish business; not so perilous as a stick of dynamite, yetfraught with unpleasant possibilities. They cleared away the exhibit andleft the door open, hoping their uninvited guest would take hisdeparture. But he did not. A few nights later he began anothercollection, finding a lot of new material--among other things a box withold atomizer bulbs, four of which bulbs he arranged here and there, inthe row--a motley array. 

What is his object? I confess I do not know. No one has seen him do it, as he works at night, but there is little doubt that it is his work. [3]The Western skunk is a small creature, not much bigger than a graysquirrel. He can hide behind a dustpan. 

 [3] Later investigations point to this having been the work of a wood rat instead of a skunk. --C. B. 

I wish some one would tell me why this night prowler so often seems tospray the midnight air with his essence which leaves no trace by day. Henever taints his own fur with it. In the wilds our Eastern species isas free from odor as a squirrel or a woodchuck. Kill or disturb one byday or night in his haunts, and he leaves an odor on the ground thatlasts for months. While at a friend's house in the Catskills last Augusta wood pussy came up behind the kitchen and dug in the garbage-heap. Wesaw him from the window in the early evening, and we smelled him. Forsome reason he betrayed his presence. Late that night I was awakened bya wave of his pungent odor; it fairly made my nose smart, yet in themorning no odor could be detected anywhere about the place. Of coursethe smell is much more pronounced in the damp night air than by day, yetthis does not seem an adequate explanation. Does he signal at night tohis fellows by his odor? He has no voice, so far as I know. I have neverheard him make a vocal sound. When caught in a trap, or besieged by dogsin a stone wall, he manifests his displeasure by stamping his feet. Heis the one American who does not hurry through life. I have no proofthat he ever moves faster than a walk, or that by any sign, he everexperiences the feeling of fear, so common to nearly all our smalleranimals. His track upon the snow is that of a creature at peace with allthe world. 

V. CHANCE IN ANIMAL LIFE

Chance plays a much larger part in the lives of some animals than ofothers. The frog and the toad lay hundreds of eggs, the fishes spawnthousands, but most birds lay only five or six eggs. 

A spendthrift with one hand, Nature is often a miser with the other. Shelets loose an army of worms upon the forests, and then sends anichneumon-fly to check them. She wastes no perfume or color upon theflowers which depend upon the wind to scatter their pollen. Cross-fertilization is dear to her, and she invents many ingenious waysto bring it about, as in certain orchids. She will rob the bones of thefowl of their lime to perfect the shell of the egg. She wastes no wit orcunning on the porcupine or on the skunk, because she has alreadyendowed each of them with a perfect means of defense. 

Two things Nature is not chary of--fear and pain. She heaps the measurehere because fear puts her creatures on the safe side; it saves themfrom many real dangers. What dangers have lurked for man and for mostwild things in the dark! How silly seems the fear of the horse! afluttering piece of paper may throw him in a panic. Pain, too, safeguards us; it shields us against real dangers. The pains ofchildbirth are probably no check upon offspring, because the ecstasy ofprocreation, especially on the part of the male, overcomes all otherconsiderations. 

VI. MOSQUITOES AND FLEAS

Mosquitoes for the North and mainly fleas and ticks for the South--thisseems to be Nature's decree, at least in this country. The mosquitoes ofthe Far North pounce upon one suddenly and ferociously, while our Jerseymosquitoes hesitate and parley and make exasperating feints and passes. On the tundra of Alaska, if I stopped for a moment a swarm of theseinsects rose out of the grass as if they had been waiting for me all theyears (as they had) and were so hungry that they could not stand uponthe order of their proceeding, but came headlong. 

In Jamaica the dogs were persecuted almost to death by the fleas. Theywere the most sorry, forlorn, and emaciated dogs I ever saw. Life wasevidently a burden to them. I remember that Lewis and Clark, in theirjourney across the continent, were greatly pestered by fleas. I havefound that our woodchucks, when they "hole up" in the fall, are full offleas. 

VII. THE CHANGE OF CLIMATE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

I have just been reading, for the third time, Dana's "Two Years Beforethe Mast, " my sojourn near San Diego for a few months, where so many ofthe scenes and events he describes took place, having given me a renewedinterest in the book. 

It is very evident that the climate of southern California has greatlychanged since Dana was here in the trading ships Pilgrim and Alert, in1832 and 1833. The change has been from wet to dry. At that time hisship collected, and others engaged in the same trade collected, hundredsof thousands of hides and great quantities of tallow, all from cattlegrown by the missions between San Diego and Santa Barbara. This factimplies good pasturage. The cattle grazed on the hills and plains thatare now, during a large part of the year, as dry as a bone. At presentcattle left to their own devices on this coast would soon starve todeath. 

Dana describes violent storms of wind and rain, mainly from thesoutheast, which the ship, anchored a few miles off the coast, orcruising up and down, experienced at all times of year--one or morestorms each week, often lasting for days. One December he describes itas raining every hour for the whole month. The dread of the southeasterswas ever present with the sailors. One of these, lasting three days, which came out of a cloudless sky, blew the sails to tatters. Nowadays asoutheast storm of half a day is, according to my experience, anuncommon occurrence. To-day scarcely a drop of rain falls here fromApril till November, yet Dana describes many heavy rains in August. Atpresent, in some of the interior valleys, where they grow alfalfa bymeans of irrigation, I see herds of well-kept dairy cows. In the seasonof rains the grass springs up and for a time cattle do well, but duringthe long dry season there is no pasturage save dry pasturage. 

Although winter is supposed to be the rainy season here, I have beenhere during three seasons and have so far seen only light rains. To-day(December 16th) the earth is like powder as deep down as you care todig. Yesterday I saw a man dragging in grain, and a great cloud of duststreamed out behind him. Ten or more years ago there was a very heavyrainfall in this locality that inundated large sections of the countryand destroyed much property, the dry San Diego River getting out ofbounds and carrying away bridges and floating houses on its banks. Butit has been as dry as a highway ever since. It is clear that when thebig rains do come they are more sporadic and uncertain than formerly. 

VIII. ALL-SEEING NATURE

Sitting by a flat rock one summer morning, on my home acres in theCatskills, I noticed that the wild strawberry-vines sent out theirrunners over the rock, the surface of which is on a level with the turf, just as over the ground. Of course they could not take root, but theywent through all the motions of taking root; the little clusters ofleaves developed at intervals, the rootlets showed their points or stoodat "attention, " and the runners pushed out two or three feet over thebarren surface and then seemed to hesitate like a traveler in the desertwhose strength begins to fail. The first knot, or, one might say, thefirst encampment, was about one foot from the last one upon the turf, the next one about eight inches farther in; then the distance dropped tosix inches, then to four. I think the runner finally gave it up andstopped reaching out. Each group of leaves apparently draws its mainsustenance from the one next behind it, and when this one fails to reachthe soil it loses heart and can give little succor to the next in front. The result is that the stools become smaller and smaller, and thedistances between them less and less, down the whole line. 

Nature's methods are seen in the little as well as in the big, and theselittle purple runners of the vine pushing out in all directions show theall-round-the-circle efforts of Nature as clearly as do the revolvingorbs in sidereal space. Her living impulses go out in all directions. She scatters her seeds upon the barren as well as upon fertile spots. She sends rains and dews upon the sea as well as upon the land. Sheknows not our parsimony nor our prudence. We say she is blind, butwithout eyes she is all-seeing; only her creatures who live toparticular ends, and are limited to particular spheres, have need ofeyes. Nature has all time and all space and all ends. Delays and failureshe knows not. If the runners of her strawberries do not reach theirgoal, the trouble corrects itself; they finally stop searching for it inthat direction, and the impulse of the plant goes out stronger andfuller on other sides. 

If the rains were especially designed to replenish our springs andsupply our growing crops, the clouds might reasonably be expected tolimit their benefactions, as do our sprinkling carts; but the rains areolder than are we and our crops, and it is we who must adjust ourselvesto them, not they to us. 

The All-Seeing, then, has no need of our specialized vision. Does theblood need eyes to find its way to the heart and lungs? Does the windneed eyes to find the fertile spots upon which to drop its winged seeds?It drops them upon all spots, and each kind in due time finds its properhabitat, the highly specialized, such as those of the marsh plants, hitting their marks as surely as do others. 

Our two eyes serve us well because our footsteps are numbered and mustgo in a particular direction, but the goal of all-seeing Nature iseverywhere, and she arrives before she starts. She has no plan and nomethod, and she is not governed. 

These conceptions express too little, not too much. Nature's movementsare circular; her definite ends are enclosed in universal ends. Therains fall because the vapors rise. The rain is no more an end than isthe rising vapor. Each is a part of the great circuit of beneficent andmalevolent forces upon which our life (and all life) depends, upon whichthe making of the soil of the earth and the shaping of the landscapedepend; all vegetable and animal life, all the bloom and perfume of theworld, all the glory of cloud and sky, all the hazards of flood andstorm, all the terror of torrents and inundations, are in this circuitof the waters from the sea to the sky, and back again through the riversto the sea. In our geologic time there is, in this circuit of thewaters, more that favors life than hinders it, else, as I so often say, we should not be here. The enormous destruction of human life, of alllife, which has taken place and will continue to take place, in thisbeneficent circuit, is only an incident in the history of the globe; thephysical forces are neither for nor against it; they are neutral; lifeto be here at all has to run these risks; has to run the gantlet ofthese forces, and to get many a lash and gash in the running. Againstthe suffering and death incident thereto there is no insurance save inthe wit of man himself. All this wit has been developed and sharpened bymuch waste and suffering. We learn to deal with difficulties through thediscipline of the difficulties themselves. If man were finally to learnto control the rains and the floods, it would be through the experiencewhich they themselves bring him. The demons that destroy him are on hisside when he strikes with the strength which they give him. Gravity, which so often crushes and overthrows him, is yet the source of all hismight. The fire that consumes his towns and cities is yet the same firethat warms him and drives his engines across the continent. 

There is no god that pities us or weeps over our sufferings, save thegod in our own breasts. We have life on heroic terms. Nature does notbaby us nor withhold from us the bitter cup. We take our chances withall other forms of life. Our special good fortune is that we are capableof a higher development, capable of profiting to a greater extent byexperience, than are the lower forms of life. And here is the mysterythat has no solution: we came out of the burning nebulæ just as ourhorse and dog, but why we are men and they are still horse and dog weowe to some Power, or, shall I say, to the chance working of a multitudeof powers, that are beyond our ken. That some Being willed it, designedit, no; yet it was in some way provided for in the constitution of theworld. 

THE END

INDEX

 Agassiz, Louis, 168, 169. 

 Air, light and heavy, 72, 73. 

 Albatross, 38. 

 Animal life, abundance, 11, 12. 

 Antlers, 201. 

 Ants, 11. 

 Army trucks, 110, 111. 

 Arum, 196. 

 Automobile trip, 109-26. 

 Bacon, Francis, 186. 

 Barton, W. Va. , 119. 

 Bee, honey, spirit of the hive, 152, 158-62; intelligence, 156, 157; communication, 159, 160; their world, 161; sting, 165. 

 Bee, leaf-cutter, 14, 15. 

 Beech, autumn color, 3. 

 Birds, living with, 31; flight, 32-38; and cats, 56; nesting near houses, 54-59; home sense, 59; nests of most species built by the females, 64, 65; and dead trees, 84, 85; song, 86; at Pine Knot, Va. , 102-05; of southern California, 129-32; community of mind in flocks, 153, 154. 

 Birds' nests, finding, 79-81. 

 Bluebird, endearing qualities, 43; nesting, 43, 44, 54; experience with a pair, 44-48. 

 Bobolink, song flight, 38, 85. 

 Bolar Springs, 117. 

 Brain, as organ of the mind, 22, 23. 

 Buffon, Georges Louis Le Clerc, 157. 

 Bumble-bee, carpenter, 36. 

 Bunting, indigo, nesting, 90, 91. 

 Bunting, painted, 114. 

 Butterflies, flight, 34; flocking, 155. 

 Butterfly, monarch, 34, 35, 155. 

 Buzzard, turkey, 32-34. 

 Cacti, 143-48. 

 California, southern, observations in, 127-51; coast, 127; mountains, 127, 128; climate and soil, 128; bird-song, 128, 129; birds, 129-32; change of climate in, 210-12. 

 Cambium layer, 5, 6. 

 Carpenter, W. B. , quoted, 194. 

 Catbird, 30; stealthiness, 60, 67, 68; experience with a pair, 60-66; fondness for butter, 66; theatrical, 68; notes, 87. 

 Caterpillars, 91-94. 

 Causes, 165-67. 

 Cedar-bird, 65. 

 Chance, in animal life, 208, 209. 

 Cheat River, W. Va. , 116. 

 Chipmunks, two in a den, 11; storing currants, 17; carrying provender, 96, 97. 

 Chippie. _See_ Sparrow, chipping. 

 Chlorophyll, 190, 191. 

 Chrysalis, 12. 

 Condor, 33, 34. 

 Connellsville, Pa. , 113. 

 Cormorant, 132. 

 Cosmos, the, order and harmony of, 191-93. 

 Cow, 205. 

 Crow, flight, 37; needs no great wing-power, 180. 

 Crow, fish, 55, 56, 68. 

 Cuckoo, 71, 72, 87; solemnity, 88; nesting, 88, 89; young, 89; nest, 90; food, 90. 

 Cuckoo, black-billed, notes, 87, 88; nesting-habits, 88. 

 Cuckoo, yellow-billed, 87. 

 Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. , at San Diego, 210, 211. 

 Darwin, Charles, quoted, 5, 17, 18, 33; his eager study of natural history, 17, 18; observations during the voyage of the Beagle, 18, 19; failure of his theory, 147, 167-69; his mind, 173; treated man as an animal, 174. 

 Darwin, George Howard, on the tides, 169, 170. 

 Darwinism, a cause of the World War, 172-75. 

 Death, an analogy of, 185, 186. 

 Desert, vegetation of the, 143-48. 

 Dove, mourning, _or_ turtle-dove, 86. 

 Earth, the, quiverings of the surface, 169-71; the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 171, 172. 

 Edison, Thomas A. , 114, 119; contrasted with Mr. Ford, 122-25. 

 Elm, autumn color, 3. 

 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 69, 165, 186. 

 Erosion, as sculpture, 181-83. 

 Fabre, Jean Henri, 162; quoted, 139. 

 Far-away, the, 39. 

 Fear in animals, 58, 59, 154, 155, 209. 

 Fireflies, 19. 

 Firestone, H. S. , 119, 125. 

 Fish, schools of, 154. 

 Fleas, 210. 

 Flies, intelligence, 156, 157. 

 Foraminiferæ, 194. 

 Ford, Henry, 113, 114, 119, 120; contrasted with Mr. Edison, 122-24. 

 Foxes, 180. 

 Frog, wood, 94, 95. 

 Germans, Darwinism, and the World War, 172-75. 

 Giraffe, 200. 

 Girls, two West Virginia, 115. 

 Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, 103. 

 God, man appropriating, 199. 

 Goldfinch, flight, 37, 42; chorus singing, 40-42; notes, 42; notes of young, 43; nesting, 43. 

 Grand Cañon, 182, 194. 

 Grass, the wonder of, 74, 75. 

 Grasshoppers, 155. 

 Great Smoky Mts. , 109. 

 Greensborough, Pa. , 112. 

 Grosbeak, rose-breasted, nesting, 65. 

 Grouse, ruffed, 166. 

 Gull, herring, 131. 

 Gulls, flight, 38. 

 Hawk, red-tailed, 32. 

 Hawks, flight, 35. 

 Haymaking, 69-76. 

 Hen-hawk, flight, 35. 

 Hornets, 163. 

 Horns, 201, 202. 

 Horse, 205, 206. 

 Horseshoe Run, W. Va. , 114. 

 Hummingbird, ruby-throated, 64; bathing in dew, 13; nest, 79; a fairy bird, 94. 

 Hurley, Edward N. , 113. 

 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 27; quoted, 8, 25. 

 Ibis, white, 32, 153, 154. 

 Insects, their world, 23-25, 162; senses, 24; reaction to heat, cold, and vibrations, 25; antennæ, 25; the ruling sex among, 140, 141. 

 Interpretation, 186-90. 

 Ironweed, 116. 

 James, William, 22. 

 Jay, blue, notes, 87. 

 Joe-Pye-weed, 116. 

 Junco, young, 19, 20; nesting, 81; abundance, 82. 

 Kepler, Johann, 169. 

 Killdeer, 130, 131. 

 Kingbird, flight, 37; and bees, 156. 

 Leaves, autumn, 1-3. 

 Lemmings, 152, 153. 

 Life, origin of, 194, 195. 

 Life, human, analogies, 25-27. 

 Lightning-bugs. _See_ Fireflies. 

 Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 5. 

 Lubbock, Sir John, quoted, 156. 

 McCarthy, Denis Aloysius, quoted, 157. 

 Maeterlinck, Maurice, quoted, 23, 162; on the bee, 156-63. 

 Man, and Darwinism, 174; a part of nature, 184-86; interpretation of nature and of himself, 186-90; mystery of his evolution, 216. 

 Maple, sugar, susceptibility to atmospheric changes, 72, 73. 

 Maples, autumn color, 3. 

 Marcus Aurelius, quoted, 185. 

 Meadowlark, song flight, 37. 

 Measuring-worm, 91, 92. 

 Mice, wild, 16; barking trees, 27, 28. 

 Microphone, 170, 171. 

 Microseisms, 170. 

 Mind, community of, 152-55. 

 Mockingbird, 68. 

 Moose, 200. 

 Mosquitoes, 210. 

 Moth, luna, 97. 

 Mouse, jumping, 166, 167. 

 Mouse, white-footed, 166. 

 Mullets, 154. 

 Natural history about home, 39, 40. 

 Nature, her methods unlike ours, 179-81, 199; interpreting, 186-90; lavishness and parsimony, 195, 196, 209; puzzling and contradictory, 201, 202; all-seeing, 212-14; her movements circular, 214-16. 

 Nighthawk, 104. 

 Nonpareil, _or_ painted bunting, 114. 

 North Carolina, a countryman of, 121. 

 Northern Hemisphere, 171, 172. 

 Oak, autumn color, 3. 

 Odd and even numbers, 163-65. 

 Oriole, Baltimore, 30, 56; nest, 48-52, 64. 

 Oriole, Bullock's, nest, 52. 

 Oriole, orchard, nest, 52. 

 Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on the origin of life, 194, 195. 

 Ostrich, 200. 

 Owl, screech, 45-47. 

 Pacific Ocean, 127. 

 Pain, 209. 

 Pear-trees, autumn color, 1. 

 Pelican, California brown, 131, 132. 

 Pennsylvania, motor trip through, 109-13. 

 Pewee, wood, nest, 52, 64; its plaint, 87. 

 Phœbe, flight, 37; nest, 52-54, 56, 59, 60, 64, 79, 80. 

 Pigeon, wild, 103, 104. 

 Pine Knot, Va. , visit to, 101-08. 

 Pipit, American, 129; nest, 129, 130. 

 Pittsburgh, 111. 

 Plover, killdeer, 130, 131. 

 Porcupine, 166. 

 Rabbit, its protection, 166; caught by a weasel, 177, 178. 

 Rainbow tints, in dew, etc. , 13, 14. 

 Rat, wood, 207 _note_. 

 Reasons, 165-67. 

 Redstart, 29. 

 Road-mending, 11. 

 Robin, young, 19; nest, 53-55, 64, 176; fear of man, 57, 58; fittest to survive, 175, 176; versatility, 176; a hustler, 176; danger of a plague of robins, 177; a runner, 177. 

 Rocks, origin of the secondary, 200. 

 Roosevelt, Theodore, visit to Pine Knot, Va. , with, 101-08; knowledge of India, 101; opinion of Taft, 105; killing a mosquito, 105, 106; protection of the President, 106; bird-gazing, 107; letter from, 107, 108. 

 Salamander, orange-colored, 95, 96. 

 San Diego, Cal. , 210-12. 

 Sandstone, in the Catskills, 20. 

 Sap, 6-8. 

 Sapsucker, yellow-bellied, 6. 

 Scorpion, 23. 

 Seals, hair, in California, 148-51. 

 Sex, the ruling, 140, 141. 

 Shaler, Nathaniel S. , quoted, 169; on the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 171, 172. 

 Shrew, 16. 

 Skunk, 206-08. 

 Snakes, 11. 

 Sources, original, 190, 191. 

 South, characteristics of the, 120, 121. 

 Southern Hemisphere, 171, 172. 

 Sparrow, story of a nest, 98, 99. 

 Sparrow, chipping _or_ social, nest, 53, 54. 

 Sparrow, song, song flight, 37; nesting, 54; singing, 85, 86. 

 Sparrow, vesper, nesting, 80-84; its names, 82; appearance and habits, 82, 83; courted by a skylark, 83. 

 Species, origin of, an insoluble problem, 167-69, 199. 

 Spider, trap-door, 132-43. 

 Spiders, 12, 23; genius of, 136. 

 Spider-webs, rainbows in, 13, 14. 

 Squirrel, gray, caught by a weasel, 178. 

 Squirrel, red, chased by a weasel, 178. 

 Strawberry-vines, wild, 212-14. 

 Struggle, 203, 204. 

 Sunrise, 197, 198. 

 Survival of the fit, 201, 203. 

 Swallow, bank, 78. 

 Swallow, barn, 71; parental anxiety, 76, 77; notes, 76, 77; pleasing qualities, 77, 78. 

 Swallow, cliff, 77. 

 Swallow, tree, 78. 

 Swallows, feeding, 15, 16; hibernation, 78. 

 Swift, chimney, 36. 

 Sycamore, autumn color, 3. 

 Taft, William Howard, 105. 

 Telepathy, 155. 

 Thistle, Canada, 202. 

 Thorns, the use of, 143-48. 

 Thrasher, brown, 67, 68. 

 Thrush, Alaska hermit, 129. 

 Thrush, hermit, song, 87. 

 Thrush, olive-backed, 30. 

 Thrush, Wilson's. _See_ Veery. 

 Thrush, wood, 30, 64; manners, 67, 68. 

 Tides, the, 169, 170, 193, 194. 

 Titlark. _See_ Pipit. 

 Trees, leaves, 1-3; mechanism of growth, 4-8; roots and rootlets, 4-6; what man has in common with, 9, 10. 

 Tree-toad, 71. 

 Turnip, Indian, 196. 

 Turtle-dove. _See_ Dove, mourning. 

 Uniontown, Pa. , 113. 

 Universe. _See_ Cosmos. 

 Van Dyke, John C. , on desert plants, 145, 146. 

 Veery, nesting, 97, 98. 

 Vireo, nest, young, and mother, 99, 100. 

 Vireo, red-eyed, 86, 100. 

 Vireo, yellow-throated, 30. 

 Vital principle, 8, 9. 

 Warbler, Audubon's, 129. 

 Warbler, Canada, 29. 

 Warbler, mourning, 29, 31. 

 Wasp, a solitary, 12, 13. 

 Water-thrush, _or_ water accentor, 79. 

 Waxwing, Bohemian, 21. 

 Weasel, catching rabbits and squirrels, 177, 178; an inspirer of terror, 178, 179. 

 Weather, prophesying the, 20-22. 

 West Virginia, motor trip through, 114-19. 

 Whitman, Walt, quoted, 9, 193. 

 Wolf Creek, 117. 

 Woodcock, flight song, 32, 37. 

 Woodpecker, yellow-bellied, 6. 

 Woodpeckers, flight, 37. 

 World War, Darwinism a cause of the, 172-75. 

 Wren, Bewick's, 103. 

 Wren, house, 86; and nesting-box, 29. 

 Wren, winter, nest, 79. 

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