UW-NHLr 
 
 B 3 1D7 
 
 THE SPRING OF 
 THE YEAR 
 
 DALLAS LORE SHARP 
 
GIFT OF 
 L. A. Williams 
 
SPRING OF THE YEAR - SHADBUSH (CHAPTER I) 
 
THE 
 
 SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 BY ; ; J 
 
 DALLAS LORE SHARP 
 
 4UTHOR OF " THE LAY OF THE LAND," " THE FACE OF THE 
 FIELDS," " THE FALL OF THE YEAR," " WINTER," ETC. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY 
 
 ROBERT BRUCE HORSFALL 
 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 TOe EitoermUe press Cambritip 
 
-^fi 
 
 ^ I -o*r 
 
 C , OP . YK A G J fIT 1904,^1905; AND 1906, BY THE CHAPPLE PUBLISHING CO., LTD, 
 
 m-RiGjrr/ icjp^^V THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS BOOK COMPANY 
 
 COPYRIGHT, IQOS, I9II, AND 1912, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP 
 COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A 
 
TO MY SISTER 
 JENNIE 
 
 THE BEST OF COMPANIONS 
 
 IN THE WOODS AND FIELDS 
 
 THROUGH WHICH WE 
 
 WENT TO SCHOOL 
 
 700775 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION ... ... . . . . . . ix 
 
 I. SPRING ! SPRING ! SPRING ! 1 
 
 II. THE SPRING RUNNING 7 
 
 III. AN OLD APPLE TREE . 13 
 
 IV. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING . . 26 
 V. IF YOU HAD WINGS . . . . . 1 . . . .33 
 
 VI. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO Do THIS SPRING ... 41 
 VII. THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN ...... 48 
 
 VIII. Is IT A LIFE OF FEAR? .60 
 
 IX. THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 76 
 
 X. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING . . 86 
 
 XI. TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 94 
 
 XII. AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE , . 115 
 
 XIII. WOODS MEDICINE . . . . . . . . 127 
 
 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS . ...... 137 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 SPRING OF THE YEAR SHADBUSH Frontispiece 
 
 HYLAS PEEPING " SPRING!" 1 
 
 "THE EARLIEST BLOODROOT " . 4 
 
 THE TURKEY-HEN "HALF A MILE FROM HOME" ... 8 
 
 CATFISH FAMILY . . . . . .12 
 
 SCREECH OWL " OUT OVER THE MEADOW HE SAILS" . . 17 
 TREE-TOAD " COMES FORTH TO THE EDGE OF HIS HOLE" 23 
 SKUNK-CABBAGE AND BUMBLEBEE 
 
 A SUNFISH OVER ITS NEST .29 
 
 CRESTED FLYCATCHER WITH SNAKE-SKIN 31 
 
 " ONE OF MY LITTLE BAND OF CROWS " - ^' 33 
 
 YOUNG PAINTED TURTLE, FROGS' EGGS, SNAILS, AND WHIRLI- 
 GIG BEETLES 45 
 
 "ONE LIVE TOAD UNDER YOUR DOORSTEP" . . . . .46 
 
 PH(EBE AND HER YOUNG . .55 
 
 PIKE AND MINNOWS 62 
 
 Fox BARKING "UPON THE BARE KNOLL NEAR THE HOUSE" 66 
 PINE MARTEN AND CHIPMUNK 71 
 
viii ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 "UPON ONE OF THESE THE BUZZARD SAT HUMPED 5 ' ... 79 
 
 YOUNG TURKEY BUZZARD 83 
 
 BROWN THRASHER " OUR FINEST, MOST GIFTED SONGSTER" 87 
 PAINTED TURTLE " BEGAN TO BURY HERSELF "... 103 
 CHIPMUNK EATING JUNE-BUGS 117 
 
 "TWO TUMBLE-BUGS TRYING TO ROLL THEIR BALL UP HILL" 127 
 "THE BOX TURTLES SCUFF CARELESSLY ALONG" . . 130 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 IT has been my aim in the thirty-nine chapters 
 of the three books in this series to carry my 
 readers through the weeks of all the school 
 year, not however as with a calendar, for that would 
 be more or less wooden and artificial ; but by read- 
 ings, rather, that catch in a large way the spirit of 
 the particular season, that give something definite and 
 specific in the way of suggestions for tramps afield 
 with things to look for and hear and do. Naturally 
 many of the birds and animals and flowers mentioned, 
 as well as woods and aspects of sky and field, are 
 those of my own local environment of my New 
 England surrounding and so must differ in some 
 details from those surrounding you in your far South- 
 ern home or you on your distant Pacific coast, or 
 you in your rich and varied valley of the Mississippi, 
 or you on your wide and generous prairie. But the 
 similarities and correspondences, the things and 
 conditions we have in common, are more than our 
 differences. Our sun, moon, sky, earth our land 
 are the same, our love for this beautiful world is 
 the same, as is that touch of nature which we all feel 
 and which makes us all kin. Wherever, then, in these 
 books of the seasons, the things treated differ from 
 
x INTRODUCTION 
 
 the things around you, read about those things for 
 information, and in your journeys afield fill in the 
 gaps with whatever it is that completes your land- 
 scape, or rounds out your cycle of the seasons, or 
 links up your endless chain of life. 
 
 While I have tried to be accurate throughout these 
 books, still it has not been my object chiefly to write 
 a natural history volumes of outdoor facts; but 
 to quicken the imaginations behind the sharp eyes, 
 behind the keen ears and the eager souls of the mul- 
 titude of children who go to school, as I used to go 
 
 & ~ o 
 
 to school, through an open, stirring, beckoning world 
 of living things that I longed to range and under- 
 stand. 
 
 The best thing that I can do as writer, that you 
 can do as teacher, if I may quote from the last para- 
 graph the keynote of these volumes is to " go 
 into the fields and woods, go deep and far and fre- 
 quently, with eyes and ears and all your souls alert," 
 
 MULLEIN HILL, May, 1912 
 
THE SPEING OF THE YEAE 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 " SPRING ! SPRING^! 
 
 - l 
 
 W~"HO is your spring messenger ? Is it bird 
 or flower or beast that brings your spring? 
 What sight or sound or smell spells 
 S-P-R-I-N-G to you, in big, joyous letters ? 
 
 Perhaps it is the frogs. Certainly I could not have 
 a real spring without the frogs. They have peeped 
 u Spring! " to me ev- 
 ery time I have had a 
 spring. Perhaps it is 
 the arbutus, or the 
 hepatica, or the pus- 
 sy - willow, or the 
 bluebird, or the yel- 
 low spice-bush, or, if 
 you chance to live in New England, perhaps it is 
 the wood pussy that brings your spring ! 
 
 Beast, bird, or flower, whatever it is, there comes a 
 day and a messenger and spring ! You know that 
 spring is here. It may snow again before night : no 
 matter; your messenger has brought you the news, 
 brought you the very spring itself, and after all 
 
2 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 your waiting through the winter months are you 
 going to be discouraged by a flurry of snow ? 
 
 " All white and still lie stream and hill 
 
 The winter dread and drear! 
 
 ., t u<l -.' t "V^he from the skies a bluebird flies, 
 
 '!," V - 4 V^-nd ^- spring is here! " 
 
 To.be sure, it is:bere, if the bluebird is your herald. 
 
 But how much faith in the weather you must have, 
 and how you must long for the spring before the 
 first bluebird brings it to you ! Some sunny March 
 day he drops down out of the blue sky, saying softly, 
 sweetly, " Florida, florida ! " as if calling the flowers ; 
 and then he is gone ! gone for days at a time, 
 while it snows and blows and rains, freezes and 
 thaws, thaws, thaws, until the March mud looks 
 fitter for clams than for flowers. 
 
 So it is with the other first signs. If you want 
 springtime ahead of time, then you must have it in 
 your heart, out of reach of the weather, just as you 
 must grow cucumbers in a hothouse if you want 
 them ahead of time. But there comes a day when 
 cucumbers will grow out of doors ; and there comes 
 a day when the bluebird and the song sparrow and 
 all the other heralds stay, when spring has come 
 whether you have a heart or not. 
 
 What day is that in your out-of-doors, and what 
 sign have you to mark it ? Mr. John Burroughs says 
 his sign is the wake-robin, or trillium. When I was 
 a school-boy it used to be for me the arbutus ; but 
 
SPRING! SPRING! SPRING! 3 
 
 nowadays it is the shadbush : I have no sure settled 
 spring until I see the shadbush beginning to open 
 misty white in the edge of the woods. Then I can 
 trust the weather ; I can open my beehives ; I can 
 plough and plant my garden ; I can start into the 
 woods for a day with the birds and flowers; for 
 when the shadbush opens, the great gate to the 
 woods and fields swings open wide open to let 
 everybody in. 
 
 But perhaps you do not know what the shadbush 
 is? That does not matter. You can easily enough 
 find that out. Some call it June-berry; others call it 
 service-berry; and the botany calls it A-me-lan' chi-er 
 ca-na-deri 'sis ! But that does not matter either. For 
 this is not a botany lesson. It is an account of how 
 springtime comes to me, and when and what are its 
 signs. And I would have you read it to think how 
 springtime comes to you, and when and what are 
 its signs. So, if the dandelion, and not the shadbush, 
 is your sign, then you must read " dandelion " here 
 every time I write " shadbush." 
 
 There is an old saying, "He that would bring 
 home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth 
 of the Indies out " ; which is to say, those who 
 bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out 
 some kind of wealth in exchange. So you who would 
 enjoy or understand what my shadbush means to me 
 must have a shadbush of your own, or a dandelion, 
 or something that is a sign to you that spring is here. 
 
4 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 Then, you see, my chapter in the book will become 
 your own. 
 
 There are so many persons who do not know one 
 bird from another, one tree from another, one flower 
 from another ; who would not know one season from 
 another did they not see the spring hats in the mil- 
 liner's window or feel the need of a 
 change of coat. I hope you are not 
 one of them. I hope you are 
 on the watch, instead, for the 
 first phcebe or the earliest 
 bloodroot, or are listening to 
 catch the shrill, brave peep- 
 ing of the little tree-frogs, 
 the hylas. 
 
 As for me, I am on the watch 
 for the shadbush. Oh, yes, spring 
 comes before the shadbush opens, but 
 it is likely not to stay. The wild geese 
 trumpet spring in the gray March skies 
 as they pass ; a February rain, after a 
 long cold season of snow, spatters your face with 
 spring ; the swelling buds on the maples, the fuzzy 
 kittens on the pussy-willows, the opening marsh- 
 marigolds in the meadows, the frogs, the bluebirds 
 all of these, while they stay, are the spring. But 
 they are not sure to stay over night, here in New 
 England. You may wake up and find it snowing 
 until the shadbush opens. After that, hang up your 
 
SPRING! SPRING! SPRING! 5 
 
 sled and skates, put away your overcoat and mittens ; 
 for spring is here, and the honey-bees will buzz every 
 bright day until the October asters are in bloom. 
 
 I said if you want springtime ahead of time you 
 must have it in your heart. Of course you must. 
 If your heart is warm and your eye is keen, you can 
 go forth in the dead of winter and gather buds, seeds, 
 cocoons, and living things enough to make a little 
 spring. For the fires of summer are never wholly 
 out. They are only banked in the winter, smoulder- 
 ing always under the snow, and quick to brighten 
 and burst into blaze. There comes a warm day in 
 January, and across your thawing path crawls a 
 woolly-bear caterpillar ; a mourning-cloak butter- 
 fly flits through the woods, and the j uncos sing. 
 That night a howling snowstorm sweeps out of the 
 north ; the coals are covered again. So they kindle 
 and darken, until they leap from the ashes of winter 
 a pure, thin blaze in the shadbush, to burn higher 
 and hotter across the summer, to flicker and die 
 away a line of yellow embers in the weird 
 witch-hazel of the autumn. 
 
 At the sign of the shadbush the doors of my 
 springtime swing wide open. My birds are back, my 
 turtles are out, my long sleeping woodchucks are 
 wide awake. There is not a stretch of woodland or 
 meadow now that shows a trace of winter. Over the 
 pasture the bluets are beginning to drift, as if the 
 haze on the distant hills, floating down in the night, 
 
6 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 had been caught in the dew-wet grass. They wash 
 the field to its borders in their delicate azure hue. 
 At the sign of the shadbush the doors of my mem- 
 ory, too, swing wide open, and I am a boy again in 
 the meadows of my old home. The shadbush is in 
 blossom, and the fish are running the sturgeon 
 up the Delaware ; the shad up Cohansey Creek ; 
 and through the Lower Sluice, these soft, stirring 
 nights, the catfish are slipping. Is there any real 
 boy now in Lupton's Meadows to watch them come ? 
 Oh yes, doubtless ; and doubtless there ever shall be. 
 But I would go down for this one night, down in the 
 May moonlight, and listen, as I used to listen years 
 ago, for the quiet splash splash sf)lash, as the swarm- 
 ing catfish pass through the shallows of the main 
 ditch, up toward the dam at the pond. 
 
 At the sign of the shadbush how swiftly the tides 
 of life begin to rise ! How mysteriously their cur- 
 rents run ! the fish swimming in from the sea, 
 the birds flying up from the South, the flowers open- 
 ing fresh from the soil, the insects coming out from 
 their sleep : life moving everywhere across the 
 heavens, over the earth, along the deep, dim aisles of 
 the sea! 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE SPRING RUNNING 
 
 THIS title is Kipling's ; the observations that 
 follow are mine ; but the real spring run- 
 ning is yours and mine and Kipling's and 
 Mowgli the wolf-child's, whose running Kipling has 
 told us about. Indeed, every child of the earth has 
 felt it, has had the running every living thing of 
 the land and the sea. 
 
 Everything feels it ; everything is restless, every- 
 thing is moving. The renter changes houses; the 
 city dweller goes " down to the shore " or up to the 
 mountains to open his summer cottage; the farmer 
 starts to break up the land for planting; the school- 
 children begin to squirm in their seats and long to 
 fly out of the windows ; and " Where are you going 
 this summer? " is on every one's lips. 
 
 They have all caught the spring running, the 
 only infection I know that you can catch from April 
 skies. The very sun has caught it, too, and is length- 
 ening out his course, as if he hated to stop and go 
 to bed at night. And the birds, that are supposed 
 to go to bed most promptly, they sleep, says the 
 good old poet Chaucer, with open eye, these April 
 nights, so bad is their case of spring running, 
 
 " So priketh hem Nature in hir corages." l 
 1 So nature pricks (stirs) them in their hearts. 
 
8 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 Their long journey northward over sea and land has 
 not cured them yet of their unrest. Only one thing 
 will do it (and I suppose we all should be glad), one 
 sovereign remedy, and that is family cares. But 
 they are yet a long way off. 
 
 Meantime watch your turkey-hen, how she saunters 
 down the field alone, how pensive she looks, how 
 lost for something to do and somewhere to go. She 
 is sick with this disease of spring. Follow her, keep- 
 ing out of sight 
 yourself, an dlo, 
 a nest, hidden 
 under 
 
 a pile of brush in a corner of the pasture fence, half 
 a mile from home ! 
 
 The turkey-hen has wandered off half a mile to 
 build her nest ; but many wild birds have come on 
 their small wings all the way from the forests of the 
 Amazon and have gone on to Hudson Bay and the 
 Fur Countries, just to build their nests and rear 
 their young. A wonderful case of the spring run- 
 ning, you would say ; and still more wonderful is the 
 annual journey of the golden plover from Patagonia 
 to Alaska and back, eight thousand miles each way. 
 Yet there is another case that seems to me more 
 mysterious, and quite as wonderful, as the sea seems 
 more mysterious than the land. 
 
THE SPRING RUNNING 9 
 
 It is the spring running of the fish. For when the 
 great tidal waves of bird-life begin to roll north- 
 ward with the sun, a corresponding movement begins 
 among the denizens of the sea. The cold-blooded 
 fish feel the stirring; the spring running seizes them, 
 and in they come through the pathless wastes of the 
 ocean, waves of them, shoals of them, sturgeon, 
 shad, herring, like the waves and flocks of wild 
 geese, warblers, and swallows overhead, into the 
 brackish water of the bays and rivers and on (the 
 herring) into the fresh water of the ponds. 
 
 To watch the herring come up Weymouth Back 
 River into Herring Run here near my home, as I do 
 every April, is to watch one of the most interesting, 
 most mysterious movements of all nature. It was 
 about a century ago that men of Weymouth brought 
 herring in barrels of water by ox-teams from Taun- 
 ton River and liberated them in the pond at the 
 head of Weymouth Back River. These fish laid their 
 eggs in the grassy margins of the pond that spring 
 and went out down the river to the sea. Later on, 
 the young fry, when large enough to care for them- 
 selves, found their way down the river and out to sea. 
 
 And where did they go then ? and what did they 
 do? Who can tell? for who can read the dark book 
 of the sea? Yet this one thing we know they did, 
 for still they are doing it after all these hundred 
 years, they came back up the river, when they 
 were full-grown, up the river, up the run, up into 
 
10 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 the pond, to lay their eggs in the waters where they 
 were hatched, in the waters that to them were home. 
 
 Something very much like this all the other fish 
 are doing, as are the birds also. The spell of 
 home is over land and sea, and has been laid upon 
 them all. The bird companies of the fall went 
 south at the inexorable command of Hunger ; but 
 a greater than Hunger is in command of the forces 
 of spring. Now our vast bird army of North Amer- 
 ica, five billion strong, is moving northward at the 
 call of Home. And the hosts of the sea, whose 
 shining billions we cannot number, they, too, are 
 coming up, some of them far up through the shal- 
 low streams to the wood-walled ponds for a drink of 
 the sweet waters of Home. 
 
 As a boy I used to go down to the meadows at 
 night to hear the catfish coming, as now I go down 
 to the village by day to see the herring coming. The 
 catfish would swim in from the Cohansey, through 
 the sluices in the bank, then up by way of the meadow 
 ditches to the dam over which fall the waters of Lup- 
 ton's Pond. 
 
 It was a seven- or eight-foot dam, and of course 
 the fish could not climb it. Down under the splash- 
 ing water they would crowd by hundreds, their 
 moving bodies close-packed, pushing forward, all 
 trying to break through the wooden wall that blocked 
 their way. Slow, stupid things they looked ; but was 
 not each big cat head pointed forward? each slow, 
 
THE SPRING RUNNING 11 
 
 cold brain trying to follow and keep up with each 
 swift, warm heart? For the homeward-bound heart 
 knows no barrier; it never stops for a dam. 
 
 The herring, too, on their way up the run are 
 stopped by a dam; but the town, in granting to cer- 
 tain men the sole rights to catch the fish, stipulated 
 that a number of the live herring, as many .as several 
 barrels full, should be helped over the dam each 
 spring that they might go on up to the pond to de- 
 posit their eggs. If this were not done annually, the 
 fish would soon cease to come, and the Weymouth 
 herring would be no more. 
 
 There was no such lift for the catfish under Lup- 
 ton's dam. I often tossed them over into the pond, 
 and so helped to continue the line; but perhaps there 
 was no need, for spring after spring they returned. 
 They were the young fish, I suppose, new each year, 
 from parent fish that remain inside the pond the year 
 round. 
 
 I cannot say now I never asked myself before 
 whether it is Mother or Father Catfish who stays with 
 the swarm (it is literally a swarm) of kitten catfish. 
 It may be father, as in the case of Father Stickleback 
 and Father Toadfish, who cares for the children. If 
 it is I take off my hat to him. I have four of 
 my own ; and I think if I had eighteen or twenty 
 more I should have both hands full. But Father Cat- 
 fish ! Did you ever see his brood ? 
 
 I should say that there might easily be five hun- 
 
12 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 dred young ones in the family, though I never have 
 counted them. But you might. If you want to try 
 it, take your small scoop-net of coarse cheesecloth, 
 or mosquito-netting, and go. down to the pond this 
 spring. Close along the margin you will see holes 
 in the shallow water running up under the over- 
 hanging grass and roots. The holes were made prob- 
 ably by the muskrats. It is in here that the old 
 catfish is guarding the brood. 
 
 As soon as you learn to know the holes, you can 
 cover the entrance with your net, and then by 
 
 jumping or stamp- 
 ing hard on the 
 ground above the 
 
 hole, you will drive out the old fish with a flop, the 
 family following in a fine, black cloud. The old fish 
 will swim away, then come slowly back to the scat- 
 tered swarm, to the little black things that look like 
 small tadpoles, who soon cluster about the parent 
 once more and wiggle away into the deep, dark 
 water of the pond the strangest family group 
 that I know in all the spring world. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 AN OLD APPLE TREE 
 
 BEYOND the meadow, perhaps half a mile 
 from my window, stands an old apple tree, 
 the last of an ancient line that once marked 
 the boundary between the " upper " and the "lower" 
 pastures. It is a bent, broken, hoary old tree, grizzled 
 with suckers from feet to crown. No one has pruned 
 it for half a century ; no one ever gathers its gnarly 
 apples no one but the cattle who love to lie in its 
 shadow and munch its fruit. 
 
 The cows know the tree. One of their winding 
 
 o 
 
 paths runs under its low-hung branches ; and as I 
 frequently travel the cow-paths, I also find my way 
 thither. Yet I do not go for apples, nor just be- 
 cause the cow-path takes me. That old apple tree is 
 hollow, hollow all over, trunk and branches, as hol- 
 low as a lodging-house ; and I have never known it 
 when it was not " putting up " some wayfaring vis- 
 itor or some permanent lodger. So I go over, when- 
 ever 1 have a chance, to call upon my friends or pay 
 my respects to the distinguished guests. 
 
 This old tree is on the neighboring farm. It does 
 not belong to me, and I am glad ; for if it did, then 
 I should have to trim it, and scrape it, and plaster 
 
14 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 up its holes, and put a burlap petticoat on it, all be- 
 cause of the gruesome gypsy moths that infest my 
 trees. Oh, yes, that would make it bear better ap- 
 ples, but what then would become of its birds and 
 beasts? Everybody ought to have one apple tree 
 that bears birds and beasts and Baldwin apples, 
 too, of course, if the three sorts of fruit can be 
 made to grow on the same tree. But only the birds 
 and beasts grow well on the untrimmed, unscraped, 
 unplastered, unpetticoated old tree yonder between 
 the pastures. His heart is wide open to every small 
 traveler passing by. 
 
 Whenever I look over toward the old tree, I think 
 of the old vine-covered, weather-beaten house in 
 which my grandfather lived, where many a traveler 
 put up over night to get a plate of grandmother's 
 buckwheat cakes, I think, and a taste of her keen 
 wit. The old house sat in under a grove of pin oak 
 and pine, "Underwood" we called it, a shel- 
 tered, sheltering spot ; with a peddler's stall in the 
 barn, a peddler's place at the table, a peddler's bed 
 in the herby garret, a boundless, fathomless feather- 
 bed, of a piece with the house and the hospitality. 
 There were larger houses and newer, in the neigh- 
 borhood ; but no other house in all the region, not 
 even the tavern, two miles farther down the pike, 
 was half so central, or so homelike, or so full of 
 sweet and juicy gossip. The old apple tree yonder 
 between the woods and the meadow is as central, as 
 
AN OLD APPLE TREE 15 
 
 hospitable, and, if animals talk with one another, 
 just as full of neighborhood news as was grand- 
 father's roof-tree. 
 
 Of course you would never suspect it, passing by. 
 But then, no lover of wild things passes by never 
 without first stopping, and especially before an old 
 tree all full of holes. Whenever you see a hole in a 
 tree, in a sand-bank, in a hillside, under a rail-pile 
 anywhere out of doors, stop ! 
 
 Stop here beside this decrepit apple tree. No, you 
 will find no sign swinging from the front, no door- 
 plate, no letter-box bearing the name of the family 
 residing here. The birds and beasts do not adver- 
 tise their houses so. They would hide their houses, 
 they would have you pass by ; for most persons are 
 rude in the woods and fields, breaking into the 
 homes of the wood-folk as they never would dream 
 of doing in the case of their human neighbors. 
 
 There is no need of being rude anywhere, no 
 need of being an unwelcome visitor even to the shy- 
 est and most timid of the little people of the fields. 
 Come over with me they know me in the old apple 
 tree. It is nearly sundown. The evening is near, 
 with night at its heels, for it is an early March day. 
 
 We shall not wait long. The doors will open that 
 we may enter enter into a home of the fields, and, 
 a little way at least, into a life of the fields, for, as 
 I have said, this old tree has a small dweller of some 
 sort the year round. 
 
16 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 On this March day we shall be admitted by my 
 owls. They take possession late in winter and oc- 
 cupy the tree, with some curious fellow tenants, un- 
 til early summer. I can count upon these small 
 screech owls by February, the forlorn month, the 
 seasonless, hopeless, lifeless month of the year, but 
 for its owls, its thaws, its lengthening days, its 
 cackling pullets, its possible bluebirds, and its being 
 the year's end! At least the ancients called Feb- 
 ruary, not December, the year's end, maintaining, 
 with some sense, that the making of the world was 
 begun in March, that is, with the spring. The owls 
 do not, like the swallows, bring the spring, but they 
 nevertheless help winter with most seemly haste into 
 an early grave. 
 
 If, as the dusk comes down, I cannot go over to 
 the tree, I will go to my window and watch. I can- 
 not see him, the grim-beaked baron with his hooked 
 talons, his ghostly wings, his night-seeing eyes, but 
 I know that he has come to his window in the apple- 
 tree turret yonder against the darkening sky, and 
 that he watches with me. I cannot see him swoop 
 downward over the ditches, nor see him quarter the 
 meadow, beating, dangling, dropping between the 
 flattened tussocks; nor can I hear him, as, back on 
 the silent shadows, he slants upward again to his 
 tower. Mine are human eyes, human ears. Even 
 the quick-eared meadow mouse did not hear until 
 the long talons closed and it was too late. 
 
SCREECH OWL - " OUT OVER THE MEADOW HE SAILS " 
 
18 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 But there have been times when, like some belated 
 traveler, I have been forced to cross this wild night- 
 land of his ; and I have felt him pass so near at 
 times that he has stirred my hair, by the wind dare I 
 say ? of his mysterious wings. At other times I have 
 heard him. Often on the edge of night I have lis- 
 tened to his quavering, querulous cry from the elm- 
 tops below me by the meadow. But oftener I have 
 watched at the casement here in my castle wall. 
 
 Away yonder on the borders of night, dim and 
 gloomy, looms his ancient keep. I wait. Soon on the 
 deepened dusk spread his soft wings, out over the 
 meadow he sails, up over my wooded height, over 
 my moat, to my turret tall, as silent and unseen as 
 the soul of a shadow, except he drift across the face 
 of the full round moon, or with his weird cry cause 
 the dreaming quiet to stir in its sleep and moan. 
 
 Now let us go over again to the old tree, this time 
 in May. It will be curious enough, as the soft dusk 
 comes on, to see the round face of the owl in one 
 hole and, out of another hole in the broken limb 
 above, the flat, weazened face of a little tree-toad. 
 
 Both creatures love the dusk; both have come 
 forth to their open doors to watch the darkening; 
 both will make off under the cover of the night 
 one for mice and frogs over the meadow, the other 
 for slugs and insects over the crooked, tangled limbs 
 o the apple tree. 
 
 It is strange enough to see them together, but it 
 
AN OLD APPLE TREE 19 
 
 is stranger still to think of them together; for it is 
 just such prey as this little toad that the owl has 
 gone over the meadow to catch. 
 
 Why does he not take the supper ready here on 
 the shelf? There may be reasons that we, who do 
 not eat tree-toad, know nothing of ; but I am inclined 
 to believe that the owl has never seen his fellow 
 lodger in the doorway above, though he must often 
 have heard him trilling gently and lonesomely in the 
 gloaming, when his skin cries for rain! 
 
 Small wonder if they have never met ! for this 
 gray, squat, disk-toed little monster in the hole, or 
 flattened on the bark of the tree like a patch of li- 
 chen, may well be one of the things that are hidden 
 from even the sharp-eyed owl. It is always a source of 
 fresh amazement, the way that this largest of the 
 hylas, on the moss-marked rind of an old tree, can 
 utterly blot himself out before your staring eyes. 
 
 The common toads and all the frogs have enemies 
 enough, and it would seem from the comparative 
 scarcity of the tree-toads that they must have en- 
 emies, too ; but I do not know who they are. This 
 scarcity of the tree-toads is something of a puzzle, 
 and all the more to me, that, to my certain knowl- 
 edge, this toad has lived in the old Baldwin tree, 
 now, for five years. Perhaps he has been several 
 toads, you say, not one; for who can tell one tree- 
 toad from another ? Nobody ; and for that reason 1 
 made, some time ago, a simple experiment, in order 
 
20 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 to see how long a tree-toad might live, unprotected, 
 in his own natural environment. 
 
 Upon moving into this house, about nine years 
 ago, we found a tree-toad living in the big hickory 
 by the porch. For the next three springs he reap- 
 peared, and all summer long we would find him, now 
 on the tree, now on the porch, often on the railing 
 and backed tight up against a post. Was he one or 
 many ? we asked. Then we marked him ; and for the 
 next four years we knew that he was himself alone. 
 How many more years he might have lived in the 
 hickory for us all to pet, I should like to know ; but 
 last summer, to our great sorrow, the gypsy moth 
 killers, poking in the hole, hit our little friend and 
 left him dead. 
 
 It was very wonderful to me, the instinct for 
 home the love for home, I should like to call it 
 that this humble little creature showed. Now, a toad 
 is an amphibian to the zoologist ; an ugly gnome 
 with a jeweled eye, to the poet; but to the naturalist, 
 the lover of life for its own sake, who lives next 
 door to his toad, who feeds him a fly or a fat grub 
 now and then, who tickles him to sleep with a rose 
 leaf, who waits as thirstily as the hilltop for him 
 to call the summer rain, who knows his going to 
 sleep for the winter, his waking up for the spring 
 to such a one, I say, a tree-toad means more 
 than the jeweled eye and the strange amphibious 
 habits. 
 
AN OLD APPLE TREE 21 
 
 This small tree-toad had a home, had it in a tree, 
 too, in a hickory tree, this toad that dwelt by 
 my house. 
 
 " East, west, 
 Hame s best," 
 
 croaked our tree-toad in a tremulous, plaintive song 
 that wakened memories in the vague twilight of more 
 old, unhappy, far-off things than any other voice I 
 ever knew. 
 
 These two tree-toads could not have been induced 
 to trade houses, the hickory for the apple, because a 
 house to a toad means home, and a home is never in 
 the market. There are many more houses in the land 
 than homes. Most of us are only real-estate dealers. 
 Many of us have never had a home ; and none of 
 us has ever had, perhaps, more than one, or could 
 have that home of our childhood. 
 
 This toad seemed to feel it all. Here in the hickory 
 for four years (more nearly seven, I am sure) he 
 lived, single and alone. He would go down to the 
 meadow when the toads gathered there to lay their 
 eggs; but back he would come, without mate or 
 companion, to his tree. Stronger than love of kind, 
 than love of mate, constant and dominant in his slow 
 cold heart was his instinct for home. 
 
 If I go down to the orchard and bring up from 
 an apple tree some other toad to dwell in the hole 
 of the hickory, I shall fail. He might remain for the 
 day, but not throughout the night, for with the 
 
22 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 gathering twilight there steals upon him an irresist- 
 ible longing ; and guided by it, as bee and pigeon 
 and dog and man are guided, he makes his sure way 
 back to his orchard home. 
 
 Would my toad of the Baldwin tree go back be- 
 yond the orchard, over the road, over the wide 
 meadow, over to the old tree, half a mile away, if I 
 brought him from there ? We shall see. During the 
 coming summer I shall mark him in some manner, 
 and bringing him here to the hickory, I shall then 
 watch the old apple tree yonder to see if he re- 
 turns. It will be a hard, perilous journey. But his 
 longing will not let him rest; and, guided by his 
 mysterious sense of direction, for that one place, 
 he will arrive, I am sure, or he will die on the 
 
 ^ay- 
 Suppose he never gets back ? Only one toad less ? 
 A great deal more than that. There in the old Bald- 
 win he has made his home for I don't know 7 how 
 long, hunting over its world of branches in the sum- 
 mer, sleeping down in its deep holes during the 
 winter down under the chips and punk and cast- 
 ings, beneath the nest of the owls, it may be ; for 
 my toad in the hickory always buried himself so, 
 down in the debris at the bottom of the hole, where, 
 in a kind of cold storage, he preserved himself until 
 thawed out by the spring. 
 
 I never pass the old apple in the summer but that 
 I stop to pay my respects to the toad ; nor in the 
 
AN OLD APPLE TREE 23 
 
 winter that I do not pause and think of him asleep 
 in there. He is no longer mere toad. He has passed 
 into the Guardian Spirit of the tree, warring in the 
 green leaf against worm and grub and slug, and in 
 the dry leaf hiding himself, a heart of life, within 
 the thin ribs, as if to save the old shell of a tree to 
 another summer. 
 
 Often in the dusk, especially the summer dusk, I 
 have gone over to sit at his feet and learn some of 
 the things that my school-teachers and college pro- 
 fessors did not teach me. 
 
 Seating myself comfortably at the foot of the tree, 
 I wait. The toad comes forth to the edge 
 of his hole above me, settles himself 
 comfortably, and waits. And the / 
 lesson begins. The quiet of the 
 summer evening steals out 
 with the wood-shadows and 
 softly covers the fields. We 
 do not stir. An hour passes. 
 We do not stir. Not to stir 
 is the lesson one of the primary lessons in this 
 course with the toad. 
 
 The dusk thickens. The grasshoppers begin to 
 strum; the owl slips out and drifts away; a whip- 
 poor-will drops on the bare knoll near me, clucks and 
 shouts and shouts again, his rapid repetition a thou- 
 sand times repeated by the voices that call to one 
 another down the long empty aisles of the swamp; 
 
24 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 a big moth whirs about my head and is gone ; a bat 
 flits squeaking past; a firefly blazes, is blotted out 
 by the darkness, blazes again, and so passes, his tiny 
 lantern flashing into a night that seems the darker 
 for his quick, unsteady glow. 
 
 We do not stir. It is a hard lesson. By all my 
 other teachers I had been taught every manner of 
 stirring, and this strange exercise of being still takes 
 me where my body is weakest, and puts me almost 
 out of breath. 
 
 What ! out of breath by keeping still ? Yes, be- 
 cause I had been hurrying hither and thither, do- 
 ing this and that doing them so fast for so many 
 years that I no longer understood how to sit down 
 and keep still and do nothing inside of me as well 
 as outside. Of course you know how to keep still, 
 for you are children. And so perhaps you do not need 
 to take lessons of teacher Toad. But I do, for I am 
 grown up, and a man, with a world of things to 
 do, a great many of which I do not need to do at 
 all if only I would let the toad teach me all he 
 knows. 
 
 So, when I am tired, I will go over to the toad. I 
 will sit at his feet, where time is nothing, and the 
 worry of work even less. He has all time and no 
 task. He sits out the hour silent, thinking I 
 know not what, nor need to know. So we will sit in 
 silence, the toad and I, watching Altair burn along 
 the shore of the horizon, and overhead Arcturus, and 
 
AN OLD APPLE TREE 25 
 
 the rival fireflies flickering through the leaves of the 
 apple tree. And as we watch, I shall have time to 
 rest and to think. Perhaps I shall have a thought, a 
 thought all my own, a rare thing for any one to 
 have, and worth many an hour of waiting. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING 
 
 OUT of the multitude of sights, which twelve 
 sights this spring shall I urge you to see? 
 Why the twelve, of course, that I always look 
 for most eagerly. And the first of these, I think, is 
 the bluebird. 
 
 " Have you seen a bluebird yet ? " some friend 
 will ask me, as March comes on. Or it will be, "I 
 have seen my first bluebird ! "as if seeing a first blue- 
 bird were something very wonderful and important. 
 And so it is ; for the sight of the first March blue- 
 bird is the last sight of winter and the first sight of 
 spring. The brown of the fertile earth is on its 
 breast, the blue of the summer sky is on its back, 
 and in its voice is the clearest, sweetest of all invi- 
 tations to come out of doors. 
 
 Where has he spent the winter ? Look it up. What 
 has brought him back so early ? Guess at it. What 
 does he say as he calls to you? Listen. What has 
 John Burroughs written about him ? Look it up 
 and read. 
 
THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING 
 
 27 
 
 II 
 
 You must see the skunk-cabbage abloom in the 
 swamp. You need not pick it and carry it home for 
 the table just see it. But be sure you see it. Get 
 down and open the big purple-streaked spathe, as it 
 spears the cold mud, and 
 look at the "spadix" cov- 
 ered with its tiny but per- 
 fect flowers. Now wait a 
 minute. The woods are 
 still bare ; ice may still be 
 found on the northern 
 slopes, while 
 here before 
 you, like a 
 wedge split- 
 ting the fro- 
 zen soil, like a 
 spear cleaving 
 through the 
 earth from the 
 other, the sum- 
 mer, side of 
 the world, is 
 this broad blade of life letting up almost the first 
 cluster of the new spring's flowers. Wait a moment 
 longer and you may hear your first bumblebee, as 
 he comes humming at the door of the cabbage for 
 a taste of new honey and pollen. 
 
28 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 III 
 
 Among the other early signs of spring, you should 
 see a flock of red-winged blackbirds ! And what 
 a sight they are upon a snow-covered field ! For often 
 after their return it will snow again, when the bril- 
 liant, shining birds in black with their red epaulets 
 make one of the most striking sights of the season. 
 
 IV 
 
 Another bird event that you should witness is the 
 arrival of the migrating warblers. You will be out 
 one of these early May days when there will be a 
 stirring of small birds in the bushes at your side, 
 in the tall trees over your head everywhere! It is 
 the warblers. You are in the tide of the tiny migrants 
 yellow warblers, pine warblers, myrtle warblers, 
 black-throated green warblers some of them on 
 their way from South America to Labrador. You 
 must be in the woods and see them as they come. 
 
 V 
 
 You should see the "spice-bush" (wild allspice or 
 fever-bush or Benjamin-bush) in bloom in the damp 
 March woods. And, besides that, you should see with 
 your own eyes under some deep, dark forest trees the 
 blue hepatica and on some bushy hillside the pink 
 arbutus. (For fear I forget to tell you in the chapter 
 of things to do, let me now say that you should take 
 a day this spring and go " may-flowering.") 
 
THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING 
 
 VI 
 
 29 
 
 There are four nests that you should see this 
 spring: a hummingbird's nest, saddled upon the 
 horizontal limb of some fruit or forest tree, and 
 looking more like a wart on the limb than a nest ; 
 secondly, the nest, eggs rather, of a turtle buried in 
 the soft sand along the margin of a pond or out 
 in some cultivated field; thirdly, the nest of a sun- 
 fish (pumpkin-seed) in the shallow water close up 
 
 along the sandy shore of the pond; and fourthly, 
 the nest of the red squirrel, made of fine stripped 
 cedar bark, away up in the top of some tall pine 
 tree ! I mean by this that there are many other in- 
 teresting nest-builders besides the birds. Of all the 
 difficult nests to find, the hummingbird's is the most 
 difficult. When you find one, please write to me 
 about it. 
 
 VII 
 
 You should see a "spring peeper," the tiny Pick- 
 ering's frog if you can. The marsh and the mead- 
 ows will be vocal with them, but one of the hardest 
 
30 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 things that you will try to do this spring will be 
 to see the shrill little piper, as he plays his bagpipe 
 in the rushes at your very feet. But hunt until you 
 do see him. It will sharpen your eyes and steady 
 your patience for finding other things. 
 
 VIII 
 
 You should see the sun come up on a May morn- 
 ing. The dawn is always a wonderful sight, but 
 never at other times attended with quite the glory, 
 with quite the music, with quite the sweet fragrance, 
 with quite the wonder of a morning in May. Don't 
 fail to see it. Don't fail to rise with it. You will 
 feel as if you had wings something better even 
 than wings. 
 
 IX 
 
 You should see a farmer ploughing in a large field 
 the long straight furrows of brown earth ; the 
 blackbirds following behind after worms ; the rip of 
 the ploughshare ; the roll of the soil from the smooth 
 mould-board the wealth of it all. For in just such 
 fields is the wealth of the world, and the health of 
 it, too. Don't miss the sight of the ploughing. 
 
 x 
 
 Go again to the field, three weeks later, and see 
 it all green with sprouting corn, or oats, or one of a 
 score of crops. Then but in " The Fall of the 
 Year " I ask you to go once more and see that field 
 
THINGS TO SEE THIS SPRING 
 
 31 
 
 all covered with shocks of ripened corn, shocks that 
 are pitched up and down its long rows of corn-butts 
 like a vast village of Indian tepees, each tepee full 
 
 of golden corn. 
 
 XI 
 
 You should see, hanging from a hole in some old 
 apple tree, a long thin snake-skin ! It is the latch- 
 string of the great crested fly- 
 catcher. Now why does this bird 
 always use a snake-skin in his 
 nest? and why does he usually 
 leave it hanging loose outside 
 the hole ? Questions, these, for 
 you to think about. And if you 
 will look sharp, you will see in 
 even the commonest things ques- 
 tions enough to keep you think- 
 ing as long as you live. 
 
 XII 
 
 You should see a dandelion. 
 A dandelion ? Yes, a dandelion, 
 "fringing the dusty road with harmless gold." But 
 that almost requires four eyes two to see the dan- 
 delion and two more to see the gold the two eyes 
 in your head, and the two in your imagination. Do 
 you really know how to see anything ? Most persons 
 have eyes, but only a few really see. This is because 
 they cannot look hard and steadily at anything. The 
 
32 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 first great help to real seeing is to go into the woods 
 knowing what you hope to see seeing it in your 
 eye, as we say, before you see it in the out-of-doors. 
 No one would ever see a tree-toad on a mossy tree or 
 a whip-poor-will among the fallen leaves who did not 
 have tree-toads and whip-poor-wills in mind. Then, 
 secondly, look at the thing hard until you see in it 
 something peculiar, something different from any- 
 thing like it that you ever saw before. Don't dream 
 in the woods; don't expect the flowers to tell you 
 their names or the wild things to come up and ask 
 you to wait while they perform for you 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 IF YOU HAD WINGS 
 
 IF you had wings, why of course you would 
 wear feathers instead of clothes, and you 
 might be a crow ! And then of course you 
 would steal corn, and run the risk of getting three 
 of your big wing feathers shot away. 
 
 All winter long, and occasionally during this 
 spring, I have seen one of ray little band of crows 
 
 flying about with a big 
 hole in his wing, at 
 least three of his large 
 wing feathers gone, shot 
 away probably last sum- 
 
 mer, which causes him to fly with a list or limp, 
 like an automobile with a flattened tire, or a ship 
 with a shifted ballast. 
 
 Now for nearly a year that crow has been hobbling 
 about on one whole and one half wing, trusting to 
 
34 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 luck to escape his enemies, until he can get three 
 new feathers to take the places of those that are 
 missing. " Well, why does n't he get them ? " you 
 ask. If you were that crow, how would you get them ? 
 Can a crow, by taking thought, add three new feath- 
 ers to his wing? 
 
 Certainly not. That crow must wait until wing- 
 feather season comes again, just as an apple tree 
 must wait until apple-growing season comes to hang 
 its boughs with luscious fruit. The crow has nothing 
 to do with it. His wing feathers are supplied by Na- 
 ture once a year (after the nesting-time), and if a 
 crow loses any of them, even if right after the 
 new feathers had been supplied, that crow will have 
 to wait until the season for wing feathers comes 
 around once more if indeed he can wait and does 
 not fall a prey to hawk or owl or the heavy odds of 
 winter. 
 
 But Nature is not going to be hurried on that ac< 
 count, nor caused to change one jot or tittle from 
 her wise and methodical course. The Bible says 
 that the hairs of our heads are numbered, So are 
 the feathers on a crow's body. Nature knows just 
 how many there are altogether ; how many there 
 are of each sort primaries, secondaries, tertials, 
 greater coverts, middle coverts, lesser coverts, and 
 scapulars in the wing; just how each sort is 
 arranged; just when each sort is to be moulted and 
 renewed. If Master Crow does not take care of his 
 
IF YOU HAD WINGS 35 
 
 clothes, then he will have to go without until the 
 time fora new suit comes; for Mother Nature won't 
 patch them up as your mother patches up yours. 
 
 But now this is what I want you to notice and 
 think about : that just as an apple falls according 
 to a great law of Nature, so a bird's feathers fall ac- 
 cording to a law of Nature. The moon is appointed 
 for seasons ; the sun knoweth his going down ; and 
 so light and insignificant a thing as a bird's feather 
 not only is appointed to grow in a certain place at a 
 certain time, but also knoweth its falling off. 
 
 Nothing could look more haphazard, certainly, 
 than the way a hen's feathers seem to drop off at 
 moulting time. The most forlorn, undone, abject 
 creature about the farm is the half-moulted hen. 
 There is one in the chicken-yard now, so nearly 
 naked that she really is ashamed of herself, and so 
 miserably helpless that she squats in a corner all 
 night, unable to reach the low poles of the roost. It 
 is a critical experience with the hen, this moulting 
 of her feathers ; and were it not for the protection 
 of the yard it would be a fatal experience, so easily 
 could she be captured. Nature seems to have no 
 hand in the business at all ; if she has, then what a 
 mess she is making of it! 
 
 But pick up the hen, study the falling of the 
 feathers carefully, and lo! here is law and order, 
 every feather as important to Nature as a star, every 
 quill as a planet, and the old white hen as mightily 
 
36 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 looked after by Nature as the round sphere of the 
 universe ! 
 
 Once a year, usually after the nesting-season, it 
 seems a physical necessity for most birds to renew 
 their plumage. 
 
 We get a new suit (some of us) because our old 
 one wears out. That is the most apparent cause for 
 the new annual suit of the birds. Yet with them, 
 as with some of us, the feathers go out of fashion, 
 and then the change of feathers is a mere matter 
 of style, it seems. 
 
 For severe and methodical as Mother Nature 
 must be (and what mother or teacher or ruler, who 
 has great things to do and a multitude of little things 
 to attend to, must not be severe and methodical?) 
 severe, I say, as Mother Nature must be in look- 
 ing after her children's clothes, she has for all that 
 a real motherly heart, it seems. 
 
 For see how she looks after their wedding gar- 
 ments giving to most of the birds a new suit, gay 
 and gorgeous, especially to the bridegrooms, as if 
 fine feathers did make a fine bird ! Or does she do 
 all of this to meet the fancy of the bride, as the 
 scientists tell us? Whether so or not, it is a fact 
 that among the birds it is the bridegroom who is 
 adorned for his wife, and sometimes the fine feathers 
 come by a special moult an extra suit for him ! 
 
 Take Bobolink, for instance. He has two complete 
 moults a year, two new suits, one of them his wedding 
 
IF YOU HAD WINGS 37 
 
 suit. Now, as I write, I hear him singing over the 
 meadow a jet-black, white, and cream-buff lover, 
 most strikingly adorned. His wife, down in the grass, 
 looks as little like him as a sparrow looks like a black- 
 bird. But after the breeding-season he will moult 
 again, changing color so completely that he and his 
 wife and children will all look alike, all like spar- 
 rows, and will even lose their names, flying south 
 now under the name of "reedbirds." 
 
 Bobolink passes the winter in Brazil ; and in the 
 spring, just before the long northward journey be- 
 gins, he lays aside his fall traveling clothes and 
 puts on his gay wedding garments and starts north 
 for his bride. But you would hardly know he was 
 so dressed, to look at him ; for, strangely enough, 
 he is not black and white, but still colored like a 
 sparrow, as he was in the fall. Apparently he is. 
 Look at him more closely, however, and you will 
 find that the brownish-yellow color is all caused by 
 a veil of fine fringes hanging from the edges of the 
 feathers. The bridegroom wearing the wedding veil? 
 Yes ! Underneath is the black and white and cream- 
 buff suit. He starts northward ; and, by the time 
 he reaches Massachusetts, the fringe veil is worn off 
 and the black and white bobolink appears. Speci- 
 mens taken after their arrival here still show traces 
 of the brownish-yellow veil. 
 
 Many birds do not have this early spring moult 
 at all ; and with most of those that do, the great 
 
38 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 wing feathers are not then renewed as are bobolink's, 
 but only at the annual moult after the nesting is 
 done. The great feathers of the wings are, as you 
 know, the most important feathers a bird has; and 
 the shedding of them is so serious a matter that 
 Nature has come to make the change according to 
 the habits and needs of the birds. With most birds 
 the body feathers begin to go first, then the wing 
 feathers, and last those of the tail. But the shedding 
 of the wing feathers is a very slow and carefully 
 regulated process. 
 
 In the wild geese and other water birds the wing 
 feathers drop out with the feathers of the body, and 
 go so nearly together that the birds really cannot 
 fly. On land you could catch the birds with your 
 hands. But they keep near or on the water and thus 
 escape, though times have been when it was neces- 
 sary to protect them at this season by special laws ; 
 for bands of men would go into their nesting- 
 marshes and kill them with clubs by hundreds ! 
 
 The shedding of the feathers brings many risks 
 to the birds ; but Nature leaves none of her children 
 atterly helpless. The geese at this time cannot fly 
 because their feathers are gone ; but they can swim, 
 and so getaway from most of their natural enemieSo 
 On the other hand, the hawks that hunt by wing, and 
 must have wings always in good feather, or else perish, 
 lose their feathers so slowly that they never feel their 
 loss. It takes a hawk nearly a year to get a complete 
 
IF YOU HAD WINGS 39 
 
 change of wing feathers, one or two dropping out 
 from each wing at a time, at long intervals apart. 
 
 Then here is the gosling, that goes six weeks in 
 down, before it gets its first feathers, which it sheds 
 within a few weeks, in the fall. Whereas the young 
 quail is born with quills so far grown that it is able 
 to fly almost as soon as it is hatched. These are real 
 mature feathers ; but the bird is young and soon 
 outgrows these first flight feathers, so they are 
 quickly lost and new ones come. This goes on till 
 fall, several moults occurring the first summer to 
 meet the increasing weight of the little quail's grow- 
 ing body. 
 
 I said that Nature was severe and methodical, and 
 so she is, where she needs to be, so severe that you 
 are glad, perhaps, that you are not a crow. But Na- 
 ture, like every wise mother, is severe only where 
 she needs to be. A crow's wing feathers are vastly 
 important to him. Let him then take care of them, 
 for they are the best feathers made and are put in 
 to stay a year. But a crow's tail feathers are not so 
 vastly important to him ; he could get on, if, like the 
 rabbit in the old song, he had no tail at all. 
 
 In most birds the tail is a kind of balance or steer- 
 ing-gear, and not of equal importance with the wings. 
 Nature, consequently, seems to have attached less 
 importance to the feathers of the tail. They are not 
 so firmly set, nor are they of the same quality or kind ; 
 for, unlike the wing feathers, if a tail feather is lost 
 
40 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 through accident, it is made good, no matter when. 
 How do you explain that? Do you think I believe 
 that old story of the birds roosting with their tails 
 out, so that, because of generations of lost tails, 
 those feathers now grow expecting to be plucked 
 by some enemy, and therefore have only a temporary 
 hold? 
 
 The normal, natural way, of course, is to replace 
 a lost feather with a new one as soon as possible. 
 But, in order to give extra strength to the wing 
 feathers, Nature has found it necessary to check 
 their frequent change ; and so complete is the check 
 that the annual moult is required to replace a single 
 one. The Japanese have discovered the secret of this 
 check, and are able by it to keep certain feathers 
 in the tails of their cocks growing until they reach 
 the enormous length of ten to twelve feet. 
 
 My crow, it seems, lost his three feathers last sum- 
 mer just after his annual moult ; the three broken 
 shafts he carries still in his wing, and must continue 
 to carry, as the stars must continue their courses, 
 until those three feathers have rounded out their 
 cycle to the annual moult. The universe of stars and 
 feathers is a universe of law, of order, and of reason. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO DO THIS SPRING 
 
 I DO not know where to begin there are so 
 many interesting things to do this spring ! But, 
 while we ought to be interested in all of the 
 out-of-doors, it is very necessary to select some one 
 field, say, the birds or flowers, for special study. 
 That would help us to decide what to do this spring. 
 
 I 
 
 If there is still room under your window, or on 
 the clothes-pole in your yard, or in a neighboring 
 tree, nail up another bird-house. (Get "Methods of 
 Attracting Birds " by Gilbert H. Trafton.) If the 
 bird-house is on a pole or post, invert a large tin pan 
 over the end of the post and nail the house fast 
 upon it. This will keep cats and squirrels from dis- 
 turbing the birds. If the bird-house is in a tree, saw 
 off a limb, if you can without hurting the tree, and 
 do the same there. Cats are our birds' worst enemies. 
 
 II 
 
 Cats ! Begin in your own home and neighborhood 
 a campaign against the cats, to reduce their number 
 and to educate their owners to the need of keeping 
 them well fed and shut up in the house from early 
 
42 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 evening until after the early morning ; for these are 
 the cats' natural hunting hours, when they do the 
 greatest harm to the birds. 
 
 This does not mean any cruelty to the cat no 
 stoning, no persecution. The cat is not at fault. It is 
 the keepers of the cats who need to be educated. Out 
 of every hundred nests in my neighborhood the cats 
 of two farmhouses destroy ninety-five! The state 
 must come to the rescue of the birds by some new 
 rigid law reducing the number of cats. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Speaking of birds, let me urge you to begin your 
 watching and study early with the first robins 
 and bluebirds and to select some near-by park or 
 wood-lot or meadow to which you can go frequently. 
 There is a good deal in getting intimately acquainted 
 with a locality, so that you know its trees individ- 
 ually, its rocks, walls, fences, the very qualities of its 
 soil. Therefore you want a small area, close at hand. 
 Most observers make the mistake of roaming first 
 here, then there, spending their time and observa- 
 tion in finding their way around, instead of upon 
 the birds to be seen. You must get used to your 
 paths and trees before you can see the birds that flit 
 about them. 
 
 IV 
 
 In this haunt that you select for your observation, 
 you must study not only the birds but the trees, and 
 
THINGS TO DO THIS SPRING 43 
 
 the other forms of life, and the shape of the ground 
 (the u lay " of the land) as well, so as to know all 
 that you see. In a letter just received from a teacher, 
 who is also a college graduate, occurs this strange 
 description : " My window faces a hill on which 
 straggle brown houses among the deep green of 
 elms or oaks or maples, I don't know which." Per- 
 haps the hill is far away ; but I suspect that the 
 writer, knowing my love for the out-of-doors, wanted 
 to give me a vivid picture, but, not knowing one tree 
 from another, put them all in so I could make my 
 own choice ! 
 
 Learn your common trees, common flowers, com- 
 mon bushes, common animals, along with the birds. 
 
 Plant a garden, if only a pot of portulacas, and 
 care for it, and watch it grow ! Learn to dig in the 
 soil and to love it. It is amazing how much and how 
 many things you can grow in a box on the window- 
 sill, or in a corner of the dooryard. There are plants 
 for the sun and plants for the shade, plants for the 
 wall, plants for the very cellar of your house. Get 
 you a bit of earth and plant it, no matter how busy 
 you are with other things this spring. 
 
 VI 
 
 There are four excursions that you should make 
 this spring : one to a small pond in the woods ; one 
 
44 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 to a deep, wild swamp; one to a wide salt marsh or 
 fresh-water meadow; and one to the seashore 
 to a wild rocky or sandy shore uninhabited by 
 man. 
 
 There are particular birds and animals as well as 
 plants and flowers that dwell only in these haunts; 
 besides, you will get a sight of four distinct kinds of 
 landscape, four deep impressions of the face of 
 nature that are altogether as good to have as the 
 sight of four flowers or birds. 
 
 VII 
 
 Make a calendar of your spring (read " Nature's 
 Diary" by Francis H. Allen) when and where you 
 find your first bluebird, robin, oriole, etc. ; when and 
 where you find your first hepatica, arbutus, saxi- 
 frage, etc.; and, as the season goes on, when and 
 where the doings of the various wild things take 
 place. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Boy or girl, you should go fishing down to the 
 pond or the river where you go to watch the birds. 
 Suppose you do not catch any fish. That doesn't 
 matter; for you have gone out to the pond with a 
 pole in your hands (a pole is a real thing) ; you have 
 gone with the hope (hope is a real thing) of catch- 
 ing fish (fish are real things); and even if you 
 catch no fish, you will be sure, as you wait for the 
 
THINGS TO DO THIS SPRING 
 
 45 
 
 fish to bite, to hear a belted kingfisher, or see a 
 painted turtle, or catch the breath of the sweet 
 leaf-buds and clustered catkins opening around the 
 wooded pond. It is a very good thing for the young 
 naturalist to learn to sit still. A fish-pole is a great 
 help in learning that necessary lesson. 
 
 IX 
 
 One of the most interesting things you can do for 
 special study is to collect some frogs' eggs from the 
 pond and watch them grow into tadpoles 
 and on into frogs. There are jj glass vessels 
 
 made particularly 
 -y~ for such study (an 
 ordinary glass jar will 
 do). If you can afford a 
 ^a // small glass aquarium, get one 
 and with a few green water- 
 plants put in a few minnows, a 
 snail or two, a young turtle, water-beetles, and 
 frogs' eggs, and watch them grow. 
 
46 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 X 
 
 You should get up by half past three o'clock (at 
 the earliest streak of dawn) and go out into the new 
 morning with the birds ! You will hardly recognize 
 the world as that in which your humdrum days 
 (there are no such days, really) are spent! All is 
 fresh, all is new, and the bird-chorus! "Is it possi- 
 ble," you will exclaim, " that this can be the earth?" 
 
 Early morning and toward sunset are the best 
 times of the day for bird-study. But if there was 
 not a bird, there would be the sunrise and the sunset 
 the wonder of the waking, the peace of the clos- 
 ing, day. 
 
 XI 
 
 I am not going to tell you that you should make 
 a collection of beetles or butterflies (you should not 
 
 make a collection of birds or birds' eggs) or of 
 pressed flowers or of minerals or of arrow-heads or 
 of anything. Because, while such a collection is 
 of great interest and of real value in teaching you 
 names and things, still there are better ways of study- 
 ing living nature. For instance, I had rather have 
 
THINGS TO DO THIS SPRING 47 
 
 you tame a hop-toad, feed him, watch him evening 
 after evening all summer, than make any sort of 
 dead or dried or pressed collection of anything. Live 
 things are better than those things dead. Better 
 know one live toad under your doorstep than bottle 
 up in alcohol all the reptiles of your state. 
 
 XII 
 
 Finally you should remember that kindliness and 
 patience and close watching are the keys to the out- 
 of-doors; that only sympathy and gentleness and 
 quiet are welcome in the fields and woods. What, 
 then, ought I to say that you should do finally? 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 
 
 YOU have taken a handful of my wooded 
 acres/' says Nature to me, " and if you have 
 not improved them, you at least have 
 changed them greatly. But they are mine still. Be 
 friendly now, go softly, and you shall have them all 
 and I shall have them all, too. We will share them 
 together." 
 
 And we do. Every part of the fourteen acres is 
 mine, yielding some kind of food or fuel or shelter. 
 And every foot, yes, every foot, is Nature's ; as entirely 
 hers as when the thick primeval forest stood here, 
 The apple trees are hers as much as mine, and she 
 has ten different bird families that I know of, living 
 in them this spring. A pair of crows and a pair of 
 red-tailed hawks are nesting in the wood-lot; there 
 are at least three families of chipmunks in as many 
 of my stone-piles ; a fine old tree-toad sleeps on the 
 porch under the climbing rose; a hornet's nest hangs 
 in a corner of the eaves; a small colony of swifts 
 thunder in the chimney ; swallows twitter in the hay- 
 loft ; a chipmunk and a half-tame gray squirrel feed 
 in the barn ; and to bring an end to this bare be- 
 ginning under the roof of the pig-pen dwell a 
 pair of phoebes. 
 
THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 49 
 
 To make a bird-house of a pig-pen, to divide it 
 between the pig and the bird this is as far as Na- 
 ture can go, and this is certainly enough to redeem 
 the whole farm. For she has not sent an outcast or 
 a scavenger to dwell in the pen, but a bird of char- 
 acter, however much he may lack in song or color. 
 Phoebe does not make up well in a picture; neither 
 does he perform well as a singer; there is little to 
 him, in fact, but personality personality of a kind 
 and (may I say?) quantity, sufficient to make the 
 pig-pen a decent and respectable neighborhood. 
 
 Phoebe is altogether more than his surroundings. 
 Every time I go to feed the pig, he lights upon a 
 post near by and says to me, " It 's what you are ! 
 Not what you do, but how you do it ! " with a 
 launch into the air, a whirl, an unerring snap at 
 a cabbage butterfly, and an easy drop to the post 
 again, by way of illustration. u Not where you live, 
 but how you live there; not the feathers you wear, 
 but how you wear them it is what you are that 
 counts!" 
 
 There is a difference between being a " character" 
 and having one. My phcebe "lives over the pig," 
 but I cannot feel familiar with a bird of his air and 
 carriage, who faces the world so squarely, who settles 
 upon a stake as if he owned it, who lives a prince 
 in my pig-pen. 
 
 Look at him ! How alert, able, free ! Notice the 
 limber drop of his tail, the ready energy it suggests. 
 
50 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 By that one sign you would know the bird had force, 
 He is afraid of nothing, not even the cold; and he 
 migrates only because he is a fly-catcher, and is 
 thus compelled to. The earliest spring day, however, 
 that you find the flies buzzing in the sun, look for 
 phcebe. He is back, coming alone and long before 
 it is safe. He was one of the first of my birds to 
 return this spring. 
 
 And it was a fearful spring, this of which I am tell- 
 ing you. How Phcebe managed to exist those miser- 
 able March days is a mystery. He came directly to 
 the pen as he had come the year before, and his 
 presence in that bleakest of Marches gave the 
 weather its only touch of spring. 
 
 The same force and promptness are manifest in 
 the domestic affairs of the bird. One of the first to 
 arrive this spring, he was the first to build and bring 
 off a brood or, perhaps, she was. And the size of 
 the brood of the broods, for there was a second, 
 and a third ! 
 
 Phcebe appeared without his mate, and for nearly 
 three weeks he hunted in the vicinity of the pen, 
 calling the day long, and, toward the end of the 
 second week, occasionally soaring into the air, flut- 
 tering, and pouring forth a small, ecstatic song that 
 seemed fairly forced from him. 
 
 These aerial bursts meant just one thing: she was 
 coming, was coming soon! Was she coming or was 
 he getting ready to go for her? Here he had been 
 
THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 51 
 
 for nearly three weeks, his house-lot chosen, his mind 
 at rest, his heart beating faster with every sunrise. 
 It was as plain as day that he knew was certain 
 just how and just when something lovely was going 
 to happen. I wished I knew. I was half in love with 
 her myself; and I, too, watched for her. 
 
 On the evening of April 14th, he was alone as usual. 
 The next morning a pair of phoebes flitted in and 
 out of the windows of the pen. Here she was. Will 
 some one tell me all about it ? Had she just come 
 along and fallen instantly in love with him and his fine 
 pig-pen? It is pretty evident that he nested here 
 last year. Was she, then, his old mate? Did they 
 keep together all through the autumn and winter? 
 If so, then why not together all the way back from 
 Florida to Massachusetts? 
 
 Here is a pretty story. But who will tell it to 
 me? 
 
 For several days after she came, the weather con- 
 tinued raw and wet, so that nest-building was greatly 
 delayed. The scar of an old, last year's nest still 
 showed on a stringer, and I wondered if they had 
 decided on this or some other site for the new nest. 
 They had not made up their minds, for when they 
 did start it was to make three beginnings in as many 
 places. 
 
 Then I offered a suggestion. Out of a bit of stick, 
 branching at right angles, I made a little bracket 
 and tacked it up on one of the stringers. It ap- 
 
52 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 pealed to them at once, and from that moment the 
 building went steadily on. 
 
 Saddled upon this bracket, and well mortared to 
 the stringer, the nest, when finished, was as safe 
 as a castle. And how perfect a thing it was ! Few 
 nests, indeed, combine the solidity, the softness, and 
 the exquisite inside curve of Phcebe's. 
 
 In placing the bracket, I had carelessly nailed it 
 under one of the cracks in the loose board roof. The 
 nest was receiving its first linings when there came 
 a long, hard rain that beat through the crack and 
 soaked the little cradle. This was serious, for a great 
 deal of mud had been worked into the thick founda- 
 tion, and here, in the constant shade, the dampness 
 would be long in drying out. 
 
 The builders saw the mistake, too, and with their 
 great good sense immediately began to remedy it. 
 They built the bottom up thicker, carried the walls 
 over on a slant that brought the outermost point 
 within the line of the crack, then raised them until 
 the cup was as round-rimmed and hollow as the 
 mould of Mrs. Phcebe's breast could make it. 
 
 The outside of the nest, its base, is broad and 
 rough and shapeless enough ; but nothing could be 
 softer and lovelier than the inside, the cradle, and 
 nothing drier, for the slanting walls of the nest shed 
 every drop from the leafy crack above. 
 
 Wet weather followed the heavy rain until long 
 after the nest was finished. The whole structure was 
 
THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 53 
 
 as damp and cold as a newly plastered house. It felt 
 wet to my touch. Yet I noticed that the birds were 
 already brooding. Every night and often during the 
 day I would see one of them in the nest so deep 
 in, that only a head or a tail showed over the round 
 rim. 
 
 After several days I looked to see the eggs, but 
 to my surprise found the nest empty. It had been 
 robbed, I thought, yet by what creature I could not 
 imagine. Then down cuddled one of the birds again 
 and I understood. Instead of wet and cold, the 
 nest to-day was warm to my hand, and dry almost 
 to the bottom. It had changed color, too, all the 
 upper part having turned a soft silver-gray. She 
 (I am sure it was she) had not been brooding her 
 eggs at all ; she had been brooding her mother's 
 thought of them ; and for them had been nestling 
 here these days and nights, drying and warming 
 their damp cradle with the fire of her life and love. 
 
 In due time the eggs came, five of them, white, 
 spotless, and shapely. While the little phcebe hen 
 was hatching them, I gave my attention further to 
 the cock. 
 
 Our intimate friendship revealed a most pleas- 
 ing nature in phcebe. Perhaps such close and con- 
 tinued association would show like qualities in every 
 bird, even in the kingbird ; but I fear only a woman, 
 like Mrs. Olive Thome Miller, could find them in him. 
 Not much can be said of this flycatcher family, ex- 
 
54 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 cept that it is useful a kind of virtue that gets its 
 chief reward in heaven. I am acquainted with only 
 four of the other nine Eastern members, crested 
 flycatcher, kingbird, wood pewee, and chebec, and 
 each of these has some redeeming attribute besides 
 the habit of catching flies. 
 
 They are all good nest-builders, good parents, and 
 brave, independent birds ; but aside from phrebe and 
 pewee the latter in his small way the sweetest 
 voice of the oak woods the whole family is an odd 
 lot, cross-grained, cross-looking, and about as musical 
 as a family of ducks. A duck seems to know that 
 he cannot sing. A flycatcher knows nothing of his 
 shortcomings. He believes he can sing, and in time 
 he will prove it. If desire and effort count for any- 
 thing, he certainly must prove it in time. How long 
 the family has already been training, no one knows. 
 Everybody knows, however, the success each fly- 
 catcher of them has thus far attained. It would 
 make a good minstrel show, doubtless, if the family 
 would appear together. In chorus, surely, they would 
 be far from a tuneful choir. Yet individually, in 
 the wide universal chorus of the out-of-doors, how 
 much we should miss the kingbird's metallic twitter 
 and the chebec's insistent call ! 
 
 There was little excitement for phoabe during this 
 period of incubation. He hunted in the neighborhood 
 and occasionally called to his mate, contented enough 
 perhaps, but certainly sometimes appearing tired. 
 
PHCEBE AND HER YOUNG 
 
56 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 One rainy day he sat in the pig-pen window looking 
 out at the gray, wet world. He was humped and 
 silent and meditative, his whole attitude speaking 
 the extreme length of his day, the monotony of the 
 drip, drip, drip from the eaves, and the sitting, the 
 ceaseless sitting, of his brooding wife. He might 
 have hastened the time by catching a few flies for 
 her or by taking her place on the nest ; but I never 
 saw him do it. 
 
 Things were livelier when the eggs hatched, for 
 it required a good many flies a day to keep the five 
 young ones growing. And how they grew! Like 
 bread sponge in a pan, they began to rise, pushing 
 the mother up so that she was forced to stand over 
 them ; then pushing her out until she could cling 
 only to the side of the nest at night; then pushing 
 her off altogether. By this time they were hanging 
 to the outside themselves, covering the nest from 
 sight almost, until finally they spilled off upon their 
 wings. 
 
 Out of the nest upon the air ! Out of the pen and 
 into a sweet, wide world of green and blue and of 
 golden light ! I saw one of the broods take this first 
 flight, and it was thrilling. 
 
 The nest was placed back from the window and 
 below it, so that in leaving the nest the young would 
 have to drop, then turn and fly up to get out. Below 
 was the pig. 
 
 As they grew, I began to fear that they might try 
 
THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 57 
 
 their wings before this feat could be accomplished, 
 and so fall to the pig below. But Nature, in this case, 
 was careful of her pearls. Day after day they clung 
 to the nest, even after they might have flown ; and 
 when they did go, it was with a sure and long flight 
 that carried them out and away to the tops of the 
 neighboring trees. 
 
 They left the nest one at a time and were met in 
 the air by their mother, who, darting to them, calling 
 loudly, and, whirling about them, helped them as 
 high and as far away as they could go. 
 
 I wish the simple record of these family affairs 
 could be closed without one tragic entry. But that 
 can rarely be of any family. Seven days after the 
 first brood were awing, I found the new eggs in the 
 nest. Soon after that the male bird disappeared. 
 The second brood had now been out a week, and in 
 all that time no sight or sound was had of the father. 
 
 What happened? Was he killed? Caught by a 
 cat or a hawk ? It is possible ; and this is an easy and 
 kindly way to think of him. It is not impossible that 
 he may have remained as leader and protector to the 
 first brood ; or (perish the thought !) might he have 
 grown weary at sight of the second lot of five 
 eggs, of the long days and the neglect that they 
 meant for him, and out of jealousy and fickleness 
 wickedly deserted? 
 
 I hope it was death, a stainless, even ignominious 
 death by one of my neighbor's many cats. 
 
58 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 Death or desertion, it involved a second tragedy. 
 Five such young ones at this time were too many 
 for the mother. She fought nohly ; no mother could 
 have done more. All five were brought within a few 
 days of flight; then, one day, I saw a little wing 
 hanging listlessly over the side of the nest. I went 
 closer. One had died. It had starved to death. There 
 were none of the parasites in the nest that often kill 
 whole broods. It was a plain case of sacrifice, 
 by the mother, perhaps ; by the other young, maybe 
 one for the other four. 
 
 But she did well. Nine such young birds to her 
 credit since April. Who shall measure her actual use 
 to the world ? How does she compare in value with 
 the pig ? Weeks later I saw several of her brood 
 along the meadow fence hawking for flies. They 
 were not far from my cabbage-patch. 
 
 I hope a pair of them will return to me next 
 spring and that they will come early. Any bird that 
 deigns to dwell under roof of mine commands my 
 friendship. But no other bird takes Phoebe's place 
 in my affections ; there is so much in him to like, 
 and he speaks for so much of the friendship of 
 nature. 
 
 " Humble and inoffensive bird " he has been 
 called by one of our leading ornithologies because 
 he comes to my pig-pen ! Inoffensive ! this bird 
 with the cabbage butterfly in his beak ! The faint 
 and damning praise ! And humble ? There is not 
 
THE PALACE IN THE PIG-PEN 59 
 
 a humble feather on his body. Humble to those who 
 see the pen and not the bird. But to me why, the 
 bird has made a palace of my pig-pen ! 
 
 The very pig seems less a pig because of this ex- 
 quisite association ; and the lowly work of feeding 
 the creature has been turned for me by Phoebe into 
 a poetic course in bird study. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR ? 
 
 THERE was a swish of wings, a flash of gray, 
 a cry of pain ; a squawking, cowering, scat- 
 tering flock of hens ; a weakly fluttering pul- 
 let; and yonder, swinging upward into the sky, a 
 marsh hawk, buoyant and gleaming silvery in the 
 sun. Over the trees he beat, circled once, and disap- 
 peared. 
 
 The hens were still flapping for safety in a 
 dozen directions, but the gray harrier had gone. A 
 bolt of lightning could hardly have dropped so unan- 
 nounced, could hardly have vanished so completely, 
 could scarcely have killed so quickly. I ran to the 
 pullet, but found her dead. The harrier's stroke, de- 
 livered with fearful velocity, had laid head and neck 
 open as with a keen knife. Yet a little slower and 
 he would have missed, for the pullet warded off the 
 other claw with her wing. The gripping talons 
 slipped off the long quills, and the hawk swept on 
 without his quarry. He dared not come back for it 
 at my feet ; so, with a single turn above the woods 
 he was gone. 
 
 The scurrying hens stopped to look about them. 
 
IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 61 
 
 There was nothing in the sky to see. They stood 
 still and silent a moment. The rooster chucked. 
 Then one by one they turned back into the open 
 pasture. A huddled group under the hen-yard fence 
 broke up and came out with the others. Death had 
 flashed among them, but had missed them. Fear had 
 come, but it had gone. Within two minutes from 
 the fall of the stroke, every hen in the flock was in- 
 tent at her scratching, or as intently chasing the 
 gray grasshoppers over the pasture. 
 
 Yet, as the flock scratched, the high-stepping cock 
 would frequently cast up his eye toward the tree- 
 tops ; would sound his alarum at the flight of a robin ; 
 and if a crow came over, he would shout and dodge 
 and start to run. But instantly the shadow would 
 pass, and instantly Chanticleer 
 
 " He looketh as it were a grym leoun, 
 And on hise toos he rometh up and doun; 
 
 Thus roial as a prince is in an halle." 
 
 He wasn't afraid. Cautious, alert, watchful he was r 
 but not afraid. No shadow of dread lay dark and 
 ominous across the sunshine of his pasture. Shadows 
 came like a flash ; and like a flash they vanished 
 away. 
 
 We cannot go far into the fields without sighting 
 the hawk and the snake, whose other names are 
 Death. In one form or another Death moves every- 
 where, down every wood-path and pasture-lane^ 
 
62 
 
 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 through the black waters of the mill-pond, out under 
 the open of the April sky, night and day, and every 
 day^ the four seasons through. 
 
 I have seen the still surface of a pond break sud- 
 denly with a swirl, and flash a hundred flecks of 
 silver into the light, as the minnows leap from the 
 
 jaws of the terrible pike. Then a loud rattle, a streak 
 of blue, a splash at the centre of the swirl, and I 
 see the pike twisting and bending in the beak of 
 the terrible kingfisher. The killer is killed. But at the 
 mouth of the nest-hole in the steep sand-bank, sway- 
 ing from a root in the edge of the turf above, hangs 
 the terrible black snake, the third killer ; and the 
 belted kingfisher, dropping the pike, darts off with 
 a startled cry. 
 
 I have been afield at times when one tragedy has 
 followed another in such rapid and continuous suc- 
 cession as to put a whole shining, singing, blossom- 
 ing springtime under a pall. Everything has seemed 
 to cower, skulk, and hide, to run as if pursued. 
 There was no peace, no stirring of small life, n6t 
 even in the quiet of the deep pines ; for here a hawk 
 would be nesting, or a snake would be sleeping, or 
 
IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 63 
 
 I would hear the passing of a fox, see perhaps his 
 keen, hungry face an instant as he halted, winding 
 me. 
 
 There is struggle, and pain, and death in the 
 woods, and there is fear also, but the fear does not 
 last long ; it does not haunt and follow and terrify; 
 it has no being, no shape, no lair. The shadow of 
 the swiftest scudding cloud is not so fleeting as this 
 Fear-shadow in the woods. The lowest of the animals 
 seem capable of feeling fear ; yet the very highest 
 of them seem incapable of dreading it. For them 
 Fear is not of the imagination, but of the sight, and 
 of the passing moment. 
 
 " The present only toucheth thee ! " 
 
 It does more, it throngs him our little fellow 
 mortal of the stubble-field. Into the present is lived 
 the whole of his life he remembers none of it ; he 
 anticipates none of it. And the whole of this life is 
 action ; and the whole of this action is joy. The mo- 
 ments of fear in an animal's life are few and vanish- 
 ing. Action and joy are constant, the joint laws of 
 all animal life, of all nature of the shining stars 
 that sing together, of the little mice that squeak to- 
 gether, of the bitter northeast storms that roar across 
 the wintry fields. 
 
 I have had more than one hunter grip me excitedly, 
 and with almost a command bid me hear the music 
 of the baying pack. There are hollow halls in the 
 
64 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 swamps that lie to the east and north and west of 
 me, that catch up the cry of the foxhounds, that 
 blend it, mellow it, round it, and roll it, rising and 
 falling over the meadows in great globes of sound, 
 as pure and sweet as the pearly notes of the veery 
 rolling round their silver basin in the summer dusk. 
 What music it is when the pack breaks into the 
 open on the warm trail ! A chorus then of tongues 
 singing the ecstasy of pursuit ! My blood leaps ; the 
 natural primitive wild thing of muscle and nerve and 
 instinct within me slips its leash, and on past with 
 the pack I drive, the scent of the trail single and 
 sweet in my nostrils, a very fire in my blood, motion, 
 motion, motion in my bounding muscles, and in my 
 being a mighty music, spheric and immortal ! 
 
 " The fair music that all creatures made 
 To their great Lord, whose love their motions swayed . . ." 
 
 But what about the fox, loping wearily on ahead ? 
 What part has he in the chorus? No part, perhaps, 
 unless we grimly call him its conductor. But the 
 point is the chomis that it never ceases, the hounds 
 at this moment, not the fox, in the leading role. 
 
 "But the chorus ceases for me," you say. "My 
 heart is with the poor fox." So is mine, and mine is 
 with the dogs too. No, don't say " Poor little fox ! " 
 For many a night I have bayed with the pack, and 
 as often of tener, I think I have loped and dodged 
 and doubled with the fox, pitting limb against limb, 
 lung against lung, wit against wit, and always escap- 
 
IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 65 
 
 ing. More than once, in the warm moonlight, I, the 
 fox, have led them on and on, spurring their lagging 
 muscles with a sight of my brush, on and on, through 
 the moonlit night, through the day, on into the moon 
 again, and on until only the stir of my own foot- 
 steps has followed me. Then, doubling once more, 
 creeping back a little upon my track, I have looked 
 at my pursuers, silent and stiff upon the trail, and, 
 ere the echo of their cry has died away, I have 
 caught up the chorus and carried it single-throated 
 through the wheeling, singing spheres. 
 
 There is more of fact than of fancy to this. That 
 a fox ever purposely led a dog to run to death would 
 be hard to prove ; but that the dogs run themselves 
 to death in a single extended chase after a single fox 
 is a common occurrence here in the woods about the 
 farm. Occasionally the fox may be overtaken by the 
 hounds ; seldom, however, except in the case of a 
 very young one or of one unacquainted with the 
 lay of the land, a stranger that may have been 
 driven into the rough country here. 
 
 I have been both fox and hound ; I have run the 
 race too often not to know that both enjoy it at 
 times, fox as much as hound. Some weeks ago the 
 dogs carried a young fox around and around the 
 farm, hunting him here, there, everywhere, as if in 
 a game of hide-and-seek. An old fox would have led 
 the dogs on a long coursing run across the range. 
 But the young fox, after the dogs were caught and 
 
66 
 
 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 taken off the trail, soon sauntered up through the 
 mowing-field behind the barn, came out upon the 
 bare knoll near the house, and sat there in the moon- 
 light yapping down at Rex and Dewey, the house- 
 dogs in the two farms below. Rex is a Scotch collie, 
 Dewey a dreadful mix of dog-dregs. He had been 
 tail-ender in the pack for a while during the after- 
 noon. Both dogs an- 
 swered back at the 
 young fox. But he 
 could not egg them 
 on. Rex was too 
 fat, Dewey had 
 had enough ; 
 
 not so the 
 
 young fox. - ^ : - 'Pf 
 
 It had been fun. 
 
 He wanted more 
 
 "Comeon ? Dewey!" 
 
 he cried. " Come on, Rex, play tag again ! You 're 
 
 still < it.'" 
 
 I was at work with my chickens one spring day 
 when the fox broke from cover in the tall woods, 
 struck the old wagon-road along the ridge, and came 
 at a gallop down behind the hen-coops, with five 
 hounds not a minute behind. They passed with a 
 crash and were gone up over the ridge and down 
 
IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 67 
 
 into the east swamp. Soon I noticed that the pack 
 had broken, deploying in every direction, beating 
 the ground over and over. Reynard had given them 
 the slip on the ridge-side, evidently, for there were 
 no cries from below in the swamp. 
 
 Leaving my work at noon, I went down to restake 
 my cow in the meadow. I had just drawn her chain- 
 pin when down the road through the orchard behind 
 me came the fox, hopping high up and down, his 
 neck stretched, his eye peeled for poultry. Spying a 
 white hen of my neighbor's, he made for her, clear 
 to the barnyard wall. Then, hopping higher for a 
 better view, he sighted another hen in the front yard, 
 skipped in gayly through the fence, seized her, and 
 loped across the road and away up the birch-grown 
 hills beyond. 
 
 The dogs had been at his very heels ten minutes 
 before. He had fooled them. And no doubt he had 
 done it again and again. They were even now yelp- 
 ing at the end of the baffling trail behind the ridge. 
 Let them yelp. It is a kind and convenient habit of 
 dogs, this yelping, one can tell so exactly where they 
 are. Meantime one can take a turn for one's self at 
 the chase, get a bite of chicken, a drink of water, 
 a wink or two of rest, and when the yelping gets 
 warm again, one is quite ready to pick up one's 
 heels and lead the pack another merry dance. The 
 fox is quite a jolly fellow. 
 
 This is the way the races out of doors are all run 
 
68 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 off. Now and then they may end tragically. A fox, 
 cannot reckon on the hunter with a gun. He is rac- 
 ing against the pack of hounds. But, mortal finish 
 or no, the spirit of the chase is neither rage nor ter- 
 ror, but the excitement of a matched game, the 
 ecstasy of pursuit for the hound, the passion of es- 
 cape for the fox, without fury or fear except for 
 the instant at the start and at the finish when it 
 is a finish. 
 
 This is the spirit of the chase of the race, more 
 truly; for it is always a race, where the stake is not 
 life and death, but rather the joy of winning. The 
 hound cares as little for his own life as for the life 
 of the fox he is hunting. It is the race, instead, that 
 he loves ; it is the moments of crowded, complete, su- 
 preme existence for him " glory " we call it when 
 men run it off together. Death, and the fear of death, 
 the animals can neither understand nor feel. Only 
 enemies exist in the world out of doors, only hounds, 
 foxes, hawks they, and their scents, their sounds 
 and shadows ; and not fear, but readiness only. The 
 level of wild life, of the soul of all nature, is a great 
 serenity. It is seldom lowered, but often raised to a 
 higher level, intenser, faster, more exultant. 
 
 The serrate pines on my horizon are not the 
 pickets of a great pen. My fields and swamps and 
 ponds are not one wide battle-field, as if the only 
 work of my wild neighbors were bloody war, and 
 the whole of their existence a reign of terror. This 
 
IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 69 
 
 is a universe of law and order and marvelous bal- 
 ance ; conditions these of life, of normal, peaceful, 
 joyous life. Life and not death is the law ; joy and 
 not fear is the spirit, is the frame of all that breathes, 
 of very matter itself. 
 
 "And ever at the loom of Birth 
 
 The Mighty Mother weaves and sings; 
 She weaves fresh robes for mangled earth; 
 She sings fresh hopes for desperate things." 
 
 But suppose the fox were a defenseless rabbit, 
 what of fear and terror then ? 
 
 Ask any one who has shot in the rabbity fields of 
 southern New Jersey. The rabbit seldom runs in 
 blind terror. He is soft-eyed, and timid, and as gentle 
 as a pigeon, but he is not defenseless. A nobler set 
 of legs was never bestowed by nature than the little 
 cottontail's. They are as wings compared with the 
 bent, bow legs that bear up the ordinary rabbit- 
 hound. With winged legs, protecting color, a clear 
 map of the country in his head, its stumps, rail- 
 piles, cat-brier tangles, and narrow rabbit-roads, 
 with all this as a handicap, Bunny may well run his 
 usual cool and winning race. The balance is just as 
 even, the chances quite as good, and the contest 
 every bit as interesting to him as to Reynard. 
 
 I have seen a rabbit squat close in his form and 
 let a hound pass yelping within a few feet of him, 
 but waiting on his toes as ready as a hair-trigger 
 should he be discovered. 
 
70 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 I have seen him leap for his life as the dog sighted 
 him, and, bounding like a ball across the stubble, 
 disappear in the woods, the hound within two jumps 
 of his flashing tail. I have waited at the end of the 
 wood-road for the runners to come back, down the 
 home-stretch, for the finish. On they go through 
 the woods, for a quarter, or perhaps a half a mile, 
 the baying of the hound faint and intermittent 
 in the distance, then quite lost. No, there it is again, 
 louder now. They have turned the course. 
 
 I wait. 
 
 The quiet life of the woods is undisturbed ; for 
 the voice of the hound is only an echo, not unlike 
 the far-off tolling of a slow-swinging bell. The 
 leaves stir as a wood mouse scurries from his stump ; 
 an acorn rattles down ; then in the winding wood- 
 road I hear the pit-pat, pit-pat, of soft furry feet, 
 and there at the bend is the rabbit. He stops, rises 
 high up on his haunches, and listens. He drops again 
 upon all fours, scratches himself behind the ear, 
 reaches over the cart-rut for a nip of sassafras, hops 
 a little nearer, and throws his big ears forward in 
 quick alarm, for he sees me, and, as if something 
 had exploded under him, he kicks into the air and 
 is off, leaving a pretty tangle for the dog to un- 
 ravel, later on, by this mighty jump to the side. 
 
 My children and a woodchopper were witnesses re- 
 cently of an exciting, and, for this section of Mas- 
 sachusetts, a novel race, which, but for them, must 
 
IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 
 
 71 
 
 certainly have ended fatally. The boys were coming 
 through the wood-lot where the man was chopping, 
 when down the hillside toward them rushed a little 
 chipmunk, his teeth a-chatter with terror ; for close 
 behind him, with the easy, wavy motion 
 of a shadow, glided a dark-brown ani- 
 mal, which the man took on the instant 
 for a mink, but which must have been 
 a large weasel or a pine marten. When 
 almost at the feet of the boys, and 
 about to be seized by the marten, the 
 squeaking chipmunk ran up a tree. 
 Up glided the marten, up for twenty 
 feet, when the chipmunk jumped. It 
 was a fearfully close call. 
 
 The marten did not dare to jump, 
 but turned and started down, when the 
 man intercepted him 
 with a stick. 
 Around and 
 around the 
 tree he 
 
 dodged, growling and snarling and avoid- 
 
 ing the stick, not a bit abashed, fpF stubbornly 
 holding his own, until forced to seek refuge among 
 the branches. Meanwhile, the terrified chipmunk 
 had recovered his nerve and sat quietly watching 
 the sudden turn of affairs from a near-by stump. 
 I frequently climb into the cupola of the barn 
 
72 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 during 1 the winter, and bring down a dazed junco 
 that would beat his life out up there against the 
 window-panes. He will lie on his back in my open 
 hand, either feigning death or really powerless with 
 fear. His eyes will close, his whole tiny body throb 
 convulsively with his throbbing heart. Taking him 
 to the door, I will turn him over and give him a 
 gentle toss. Instantly his wings flash ; they take him 
 zigzag for a yard or two, then bear him swiftly round 
 the corner of the house and drop him in the midst 
 of his fellows, where they are feeding upon the lawn. 
 He will shape himself up a little and fall to picking 
 with the others. 
 
 From a state of collapse the laws of his being 
 bring the bird into normal behavior as quickly and 
 completely as the collapsed rubber ball is rounded 
 by the laws of its being. The memory of the fright 
 seems to be an impression exactly like the dent in 
 the rubber ball as if it had never been. 
 
 Memories, of course, the animals surely have; but 
 little or no power to use them. The dog will some- 
 times seem to cherish a grudge ; so will the elephant. 
 Some one injures or wrongs him, and the huge 
 beast harbors the memory, broods it, and awaits his 
 opportunity for revenge. Yet the records of these 
 cases usually show that the creature had been living 
 with the object of his hatred his keeper, perhaps 
 and that the memory goes no farther back than 
 the present moment, than the sight of the hated one. 
 
IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR ? 73 
 
 At my railroad station I frequently see a yoke of 
 great sleepy, bald-faced oxen, that look as much 
 alike as two blackbirds. Their driver knows them 
 apart ; but as they stand there, bound to one an- 
 other by the heavy bar across their foreheads, it 
 would puzzle anybody else to tell Buck from Berry. 
 But not if he approach them wearing an overcoat. 
 At sight of me in an overcoat the off ox will snort 
 and back and thrash about in terror, twisting the 
 head of his yoke-fellow, nearly breaking his neck, 
 and trampling him miserably. But the nigh ox is 
 used to it. He chews and blinks away placidly, keeps 
 his feet the best he can, and does n't try to under- 
 stand at all why greatcoats should so frighten his 
 cud-chewing brother. I will drop off my coat and go 
 up immediately to smooth the muzzles of both oxen, 
 now blinking sleepily while the lumber is being 
 loaded on. 
 
 Years ago, the driver told me, the off ox was 
 badly frightened by a big woolly coat, the sight or 
 smell of which probably suggested to the creature 
 some natural enemy, a panther, perhaps, or a bear. 
 The memory remained, but beyond recall except in 
 the presence of its first cause, the greatcoat. 
 
 To us there are such things as terror and death, 
 but not to the lower animals except momentarily. 
 We are clutched by terror even as the junco was 
 clutched in my goblin hand. When the mighty fin- 
 gers open, we zigzag, dazed, from the danger ; but 
 
74 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 fall to planning before the tremors of the fright 
 have ceased. Upon the crumbled, smoking heap of 
 San Francisco a second splendid city has arisen and 
 shall ever rise. Terror can kill the living, but it can- 
 not hinder them from forgetting, or prevent them 
 from hoping, or, for more than an instant, stop 
 them from doing. Such is the law of life the law 
 of heaven, of my pastures, of the little junco, of my- 
 self. Life, Law, and Matter are all of one piece. 
 The horse in my stable, the robin, the toad, the 
 beetle, the vine in my garden, the garden itself, 
 and I together with them all, come out of the same 
 divine dust ; we all breathe the same divine breath ; 
 we have our beings under the same divine laws; only 
 they do not know that the law, the breath, and the 
 dust are divine. If, with all that I know of fear, I 
 can so readily forget it, and can so constantly feel 
 the hope and the joy of life within me, how soon for 
 them, my lowly fellow mortals, must vanish all sight 
 of fear, all memory of pain ! And how abiding with 
 them, how compelling, the necessity to live ! And 
 in their unquestioning obedience, what joy ! 
 
 The face of the fields is as changeful as the face 
 of a child. Every passing wind, every shifting cloud, 
 every calling bird, every baying hound, every shape, 
 shadow, fragrance, sound, and tremor, are reflected 
 there. But if time and experience and pain come, they 
 pass utterly away ; for the face of the fields does not 
 grow old or wise or seamed with pain. It is always the 
 
IS IT A LIFE OF FEAR? 75 
 
 face of a child, asleep in winter, awake in spring and 
 summer, a face of life and health always, as much 
 in the falling leaf as in the opening bud, as much 
 under the covers of the snow as in the greensward 
 of the spring, as much in the wild, fierce joy of fox 
 and hound as they course the turning, tangling paths 
 of the woodlands in their fateful race as in the song 
 of brook and bird on a joyous April morning. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 
 
 NO, I do not believe that any one of you ever 
 went into a swamp to find a turkey buzzard's 
 nest. Still, if you had been born on the 
 edge of a great swamp, as I was, and if the great- 
 winged buzzards had been soaring, soaring up in 
 your sky, as all through my boyhood they were 
 soaring up in mine, then why should you not have 
 gone some time into the swamp to see where they 
 make their nests these strange cloud-winged crea- 
 tures ? 
 
 Boys are boys, and girls are girls, the world over; 
 and I am pretty sure that little Jack Horner and 
 myself were not the only two boys in all the world 
 to do great and wonderful deeds. Any boy with a 
 love for birds and a longing for the deep woods, 
 living close to the edge of the Bear Swamp, would 
 have searched out that buzzard's nest. 
 
 Although I was born within the shadows of the 
 Bear Swamp, close enough to smell the magnolias 
 along its margin, and lived my first ten years only a 
 little farther off, yet it was not until after twice 
 ten years of absence that I stood again within sight 
 
THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 77 
 
 of it, ready for the first time to cross its dark bor- 
 ders and find the buzzard's nest. 
 
 Now here at last I found myself, looking down 
 over the largest, least trod, deepest-tangled swamp 
 in southern New Jersey wide, gloomy, silent, and 
 to me, for I still thought of it as I used to when 
 a child, to me, a mysterious realm of black streams, 
 hollow trees, animal trails, and haunting shapes, 
 presided over by this great bird, the turkey buzzard. 
 
 For he was never mere bird to me, but some kind 
 of spirit. He stood to me for what was far off, mys- 
 terious, secret, and unapproachable in the deep, dark 
 swamp ; and, in the sky, so wide were his wings, so 
 majestic the sweep of his flight, he had always 
 stirred me, caused me to hold my breath and wish 
 myself to fly. 
 
 No other bird did I so much miss from my New 
 England skies when I came here to live. Only the 
 other day, standing in the heart of Boston, I glanced 
 up and saw, sailing at a far height against the bil- 
 lowy clouds, an aeroplane ; and what should I think 
 of but the flight of the vulture, so like the steady 
 wings of the great bird seemed the steady wings of 
 this great monoplane far off against the sky. 
 
 And so you begin to understand why I had come 
 back after so many years to the swamp, and why I 
 wanted to see the nest of this strange bird that had 
 been flying, flying forever in my imagination and 
 in my sky. But my good uncle, whom I was visit- 
 
78 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 ing, when I mentioned iny quest, merely exclaimed, 
 "What in th moderation!" 
 
 You will find a good many uncles and other folk 
 who won't understand a good many things that you 
 want to do. Never mind. If you want to see a buz- 
 zard's nest, let all your relations exclaim while you 
 go quietly off alone and see it. 
 
 I wanted to find a buzzard's nest the nest of 
 the Bear Swamp buzzard ; and here at last I stood ; 
 and yonder on the clouds, a mere mote in the dis- 
 tance, floated the bird. It was coming toward me 
 over the wide reach of the swamp. 
 
 Silent, inscrutable, and alien lay the swamp, and 
 untouched by human hands. Over it spread a quiet 
 and reserve as real as twilight. Like a mask it was 
 worn, and was slipped on, I know, at my approach. 
 I could feel the silent spirit of the place drawing 
 back away from me. But I should have at least 
 a guide to lead me through the shadow land, for out 
 of the lower living green towered a line of limb- 
 less stubs, like a line of telegraph-poles, their bleached 
 bones gleaming white, or showing dark and gaunt 
 against the horizon, and marking for me a path far 
 out across the swamp. Besides, here came the buzzard 
 winding slowly down the clouds. Soon its spiral 
 changed to a long pendulum-swing, till just above 
 the skeleton trees the great bird wheeled and, brac- 
 ing itself with its flapping wings, dropped heavily 
 upon one of the headless tree-trunks. 
 
THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 79 
 
 It had come leisurely, yet I could 
 see that it had come with a direct- 
 ness and purpose that was unmistak- 
 able and also meaningful. It had 
 discovered me in the distance, and, 
 while still invisible to my eyes, 
 had started down to perch 
 upon that giant stub in order 
 to watch me. It was suspicious, 
 and had come to watch me, 
 because somewhere beneath its 
 perch, I felt sure, lay a hollow 
 log, the creature's den, hold- 
 ing its two eggs or its young. 
 A buzzard has something 
 like a soul. 
 
 Marking the direction 
 of the stub, and its 
 probable distance, I 
 waded into the deep un- 
 derbrush, the buzzard 
 perched against the sky 
 for my guide, and, for 
 my quest, the stump or 
 hollow log that held the 
 creature's nest. 
 
 The rank ferns and 
 ropy vines swallowed 
 me up, and shut out at 
 
80 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 times even the sight of the sky and the buzzard. It 
 was not until half an hour's struggle that, climbing 
 a pine-crested swell in the low bottom, I sighted the 
 bird again. It had not moved. 
 
 I was now in the real swamp, the old uncut forest. 
 It wa a land of tree giants : huge tulip poplar and 
 swamp white oak, so old that they had become soli- 
 tary? their comrades having fallen one by one ; while 
 some of them, unable to loose their grip upon the soil, 
 which had widened and tightened through centuries, 
 were still standing, though long since dead. It was 
 upon one of these that the buzzard sat humped. 
 
 Directly in my path stood an ancient swamp white 
 oak, the greatest tree, I think, that I have ever seen. 
 It was not the highest, nor the largest round, per- 
 haps, but in years and looks the greatest. Hoary, 
 hollow, and broken-limbed, his huge bole seemed 
 encircled with the centuries. 
 
 " For it had bene an aimcient tree, 
 Sacred with many a mysteree." 
 
 Above him to twice his height loomed a tulip pop- 
 lar, clean-boled for thirty feet and in the top all 
 green and gold with blossoms. It was a resplendent 
 thing beside the oak, yet how unmistakably the 
 gnarled old monarch wore the crown ! His girth more 
 than balanced the poplar's greater height; and, as 
 for blossoms, he had his tiny-flowered catkins ; but 
 nature knows the beauty of strength and inward 
 majesty, and has pinned no boutonniere upon the oak, 
 
THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 81 
 
 My buzzard now was hardly more than half a mile 
 away, and plainly seen through the rifts in the lofty 
 timbered roof above me. As I was nearing the top 
 of a large fallen pine that lay in my course, I was 
 startled by the burrh ! burrh ! burrh ! of three par- 
 tridges taking wing just beyond, near the foot of 
 the tree. Their exploding flight seemed all the more 
 like a real explosion when three little clouds of dust- 
 smoke rose out of the low, wet bottom of the swamp 
 and drifted up against the green. 
 
 Then I saw an interesting sight. The pine, in its 
 fall, had snatched with its wide-reaching, multitudi- 
 nous roots at the shallow bottom and torn out a giant 
 fistful of earth, leaving a hole about two feet deep and 
 more than a dozen feet wide. The sand thus lifted 
 into the air had gradually washed down into a mound 
 on each side of the butt, where it lay high and dry 
 above the level of the wet swamp. This the swamp 
 birds had turned into a great dust-bath. It was in 
 constant use, evidently. Not a spear of grass had 
 sprouted in it, and all over it were pits and craters 
 of various sizes, showing that not only the partridges 
 but also the quail and such small things as the 
 warblers bathed here, though I can't recall ever 
 having seen a warbler bathe in the dust. A dry bath 
 in the swamp was something of a luxury, evidently. 
 I wonder if the buzzards used it? 
 
 I went forward cautiously now, and expectantly, 
 for I was close enough to see the white beak and 
 
 o 
 
82 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 red wattled neck of my buzzard guide. The buzzard 
 saw me, too, and began to twist its head and to 
 twitch its wing-tips nervously. Then the long, black 
 wings began to open, as you would open a two-foot 
 rule, and, with a heavy lurch that left the dead stub 
 rocking, the bird dropped and was soon soaring 
 high up in the blue. 
 
 This was the locality of the nest; now where 
 should I find it? Evidently I was to have no further 
 help from the old bird. The underbrush was so thick 
 that I could hardly see farther than my nose. A 
 half -rotten tree-trunk lay near, the top end resting 
 across the backs of several saplings that it had borne 
 down in its fall. I crept up on this for a look around, 
 and almost tumbled off at finding myself staring 
 directly into the dark, cavernous hollow of an im- 
 mense log lying on a slight rise of ground a few 
 feet ahead of me. 
 
 It was a yawning hole, which at a glance I knew 
 belonged to the buzzard. The log, a mere shell of a 
 mighty white oak, had been girdled and felled with 
 an axe, by coon-hunters probably, and still lay with 
 one side resting upon the rim of the stump. As I 
 stood looking, something white stirred vaguely in 
 the hole and disappeared. 
 
 Leaping from my perch, I scrambled forward to 
 the mouth of the hollow log and was greeted with 
 hisses from far back in the dark. Then came a thump- 
 ing of bare feet, more hisses, and a sound of snap* 
 ping beaks. I had found my buzzard's nest! 
 
YOUNG TURKEY BUZZARD 
 
84 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 Hardly that, either, for there was not a feather, 
 stick, or chip as evidence of a nest. The eggs had 
 been laid upon the sloping cavern floor, and in the 
 course of their incubation must have rolled clear 
 down to the opposite end, where the opening was so 
 narrow that the buzzard could not have brooded them 
 until she had rolled them back. The wonder is that 
 they had ever hatched. 
 
 But they had, and what they hatched was another 
 wonder. Nature never intended a young buzzard 
 for any eye but his mother's, and she hates the sight 
 of him. Elsewhere I have told of a buzzard that 
 devoured her eggs at the approach of an enemy, so 
 delicately balanced are her unnamable appetites and 
 her maternal affections! 
 
 The two strange nestlings in the log must have 
 been three weeks old, I should say, the larger weigh- 
 ing about four pounds. They were covered, as young 
 owls are, with deep snow-white down, out of which 
 protruded their black scaly, snaky legs. They stood 
 braced on these long black legs, their receding 
 heads drawn back, shoulders thrust forward, and 
 bodies humped between the featherless wings like 
 challenging- tom-cats. 
 
 O O 
 
 In order to examine them, I crawled into the den 
 not a difficult act, for the opening measured four 
 feet and a half across at the mouth. The air was 
 musty inside, yet surprisingly free from odor. The 
 floor was absolutely clean, but on the top and sides 
 
THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP 85 
 
 of the cavity was a thick coating of live mosquitoes, 
 most of them gorged, hanging like a red-beaded 
 tapestry over the walls. 
 
 I had taken pains that the flying buzzard should 
 not see me enter, for I hoped she would descend to 
 look after her young. But she would take no chances 
 with herself. I sat near the mouth of the hollow, 
 where I could catch the fresh breeze that pulled 
 across the end, and where I had a view of a far-away 
 bit of sky. Suddenly, across this field of blue, there 
 swept a meteor of black the buzzard! and evidently 
 in that instant of passage, at a distance certainly of 
 half a mile, she spied me in the log. 
 
 I waited more than an hour longer, and when I 
 tumbled out with a dozen kinds of cramps, the un- 
 worried mother was soaring serenely far up in the 
 clear, cool sky. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING 
 
 THE frogs ! You can have no spring until you 
 hear the frogs. The first shrill notes, heard 
 before the ice is fairly out of the marshes, 
 will be the waking call of the hylas, the tiny tree- 
 frogs that later on in the summer you will find in the 
 woods. Then, as the spring advances and this sil- 
 very sleigh-bell jingle tinkles faster, other voices 
 will join in the soft croak of the spotted leopard 
 frogs, the still softer melancholy quaver of the com- 
 mon toad, and away down at the end of the scale the 
 deep, solemn bass of the great bullfrog saying, " Go 
 round ! Better go round ! " 
 
 II 
 
 You must hear, besides the first spring notes of the 
 bluebird and the robin, four bird songs this spring. 
 First (1) the song of the wood thrush or the hermit 
 thrush, whichever one lives in your neighborhood. 
 No words can describe the purity, the peacefulness, 
 the spiritual quality of the wood thrush's simple 
 " Come to me." It is the voice of the 
 tender twilight, the voice of the tran- 
 
THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING 87 
 
 quil forest, speaking to you. After the thrush (2) 
 the brown thrasher, our finest, most gifted songster, 
 
 as great a singer, I think (and I have often heard 
 them both), as the Southern mockingbird. Then (3) 
 the operatic catbird. She sits lower down among 
 the bushes than the brown thrasher, as if she knew 
 that, compared with him, she must take a back seat; 
 but for variety of notes and length of song, she has 
 few rivals. I say she, when really I ought to say he, 
 for it is the males of most birds that sing, but the cat- 
 bird seems so long and slender, so dainty and femi- 
 nine, that I think of this singer as of some exquisite 
 operatic singer in a woman's role. Then (4) the 
 bobolink ; for his song is just like Bryant's bubbling 
 poem, only better ! Go to the meadows in. June and 
 
88 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 listen as he comes lilting and singing over your 
 head. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There are some birds that cannot sing: the belted 
 kingfisher, for instance ; he can only rattle. You 
 must hear him rattle. You can do as well yourself if 
 you will shake a " pair of bones " or heave an anchor 
 and let the chain run fast through the hawse-hole. 
 You then must hear the downy woodpecker doing 
 his rattling rat-ta-tat-tat-tat-tat (across the page and 
 back again), as fast as rat-ta-tat can tat. How he 
 makes the old dead limb or fence-post rattle as he 
 drums upon it with his chisel bill. He can be heard 
 half a mile around. 
 
 Then high-hole, the flicker (or golden-winged 
 woodpecker), you must hear him yell, Up-up-up-up-up 
 up-up-up-up-up-up , a ringing, rolling, rapid kind 
 of yodel that echoes over the spring fields. 
 
 IV 
 
 You must hear the nighthawk and the whip-poor- 
 will. Both birds are to be heard at twilight, and the 
 whip-poor-will far into the night. At the very break 
 of dawn is also a good time to listen to them. 
 
 At dusk you will see (I have seen him from the 
 city roofs in Boston) a bird about the size of a pigeon 
 mounting up into the sky by short flights, crying 
 peent, until far over your head the creature will sud- 
 denly turn and on half-closed wings dive headlong 
 
THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING 89 
 
 toward the earth, when, just before hitting the 
 ground, upward he swoops, at the same instant 
 making a weird booming sound, a kind of hollow 
 
 O O ' 
 
 groan with his wings, as the wind rushes through 
 their large feathers. This diver through the dim 
 ocean of air is the nighthawk. Let one of the 
 birds dive close to your head on a lonely dusky 
 road, and your hair will try to jump out from under 
 your hat. 
 
 The whip-poor-will's cry you all know. When you 
 hear one this spring, go out into the twilight and 
 watch for him. See him spring into the air, like a 
 strange shadow, for flies; count his whip-poor-wills 
 (he may call it more than a hundred times in as many 
 seconds !). But hear a circle of the birds, if possible, 
 calling through the darkness of a wood all around 
 
 you ! 
 
 V 
 
 There is one strange bird song that is half song and 
 half dance that perhaps most of you may never be able 
 to hear and see ; but as it is worth going miles to hear, 
 and nights of watching to witness, I am going to set 
 it here as one of your outdoor tasks or feats: you 
 must hear the mating song of the woodcock. I have 
 described the song and the dance in " Roof and 
 Meadow," in the chapter called " One Flew East 
 and One Flew West." Mr. Bradford Torrey has an 
 account of it in his "Clerk of the Woods," in the 
 chapter named " Woodcock Vespers." To hear the 
 
90 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 song is a rare experience for the habitual watcher 
 in the woods, but one that you might have the first 
 April evening that you are abroad. 
 
 Go down to your nearest meadow a meadow 
 near a swampy piece of woods is best and here, 
 along the bank of the meadow stream, wait in the 
 chilly twilight for the speank, speank, or the peent, 
 peent, from the grass the signal that the song is 
 about to begin. 
 
 VI 
 
 One of the dreadful positively dreadful 
 sounds of the late spring that I hear day in and day 
 out is the gobbling, strangling, ghastly cries of 
 young crows feeding. You will surely think some- 
 thing is being murdered. The crying of a hungry 
 baby is musical in comparison. But it is a good 
 sound to hear, for it reminds one of the babes in the 
 woods that a new generation of birds is being 
 brought through from babyhood to gladden the 
 world. It is a tender sound ! The year is still 
 
 young. 
 
 VII 
 
 You should hear the hum of the honey-bees on a 
 fresh May day in an apple tree that is just coming 
 into perfect bloom. The enchanting loveliness of 
 the pink and white world of blossoms is enough to 
 make one forget to listen to the hum-hum-hum- 
 
THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING 91 
 
 humming-ing-ing-ing-ing of the excited bees. But 
 hear their myriad wings, fanning the perfume into 
 the air and filling the sunshine with the music of 
 work. The whir, the hum of labor of a busy fac- 
 tory, of a great steamship dock is always music 
 to those who know the blessedness of work ; but it 
 takes that knowledge, and a 'good deal of imagination 
 besides, to hear the music in it. Not so with the bees. 
 The season, the day, the colors, and perfumes they 
 are the song ; the wings are only the million-stringed 
 seolian upon which the song is played. 
 
 VIII 
 
 You should hear the grass grow. What ! I re- 
 peat, you should hear the grass grow. I have a friend, 
 a sound and sensible man, but a lover of the out-of- 
 doors, who says he can hear it grow. But perhaps it 
 is the soft stir of the working earthworms that he 
 hears. Try it. Go out alone one of these April 
 nights ; select a green pasture with a slope to the 
 south, at least a mile from any house, or railroad ; lay 
 your ear flat upon the grass, listen without a move 
 for ten minutes. You hear something or do you 
 feel it ? Is it the reaching up of the grass ? is it the 
 stir of the earthworms? is it the pulse of the throb- 
 bing universe? or is it your own throbbing pulse? 
 It is all of these, I think ; call it the heart of the 
 grass beating in every tiny living blade, if you wish 
 to. You should listen to hear the grass grow. 
 
92 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 IX 
 
 The fires have gone out on the open hearth. 
 Listen early in the morning and toward evening for 
 the rumbling, the small, muffled thunder, of the 
 chimney swallows, as they come down from the open 
 sky on their wonderful wings. Don't be frightened. 
 It is n't Santa Glaus this time of year ; nor is it the 
 Old Nick ! The smothered thunder is caused by the 
 rapid beating of the swallows' wings on the air in 
 the narrow chimney-flue, as the birds settle down 
 from the top of the chimney and hover over their 
 nests. Stick your head into the fireplace and look 
 up ! Don't smoke the precious lodgers out, no matter 
 how much racket they make. 
 
 Hurry out while the last drops of your first May 
 thunder-shower are still falling and listen to the 
 robins singing from the tops of the trees. Their 
 liquid songs are as fresh as the shower, as if the rain- 
 drops in falling were running down from the trees 
 in song as indeed they are in the overflowing 
 trout-brook. Go out and listen, and write a better 
 poem than this one that I wrote the other afternoon 
 when listening to the birds in our first spring 
 shower : 
 
 The warm rain drops aslant the sun 
 
 And in the rain the robins sing; 
 Across the creek in twos and troops, 
 
 The hawking swifts and swallows wing. 
 
THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING 93 
 
 The air is sweet with apple bloom, 
 
 And sweet the laid dust down the lane, 
 
 The meadow's marge of calamus, 
 And sweet the robins in the rain. 
 
 O greening time of bloom and song! 
 
 O fragrant days of tender pain! 
 The wet, the warm, the sweet young days 
 
 With robins singing in the rain. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 
 
 I TOOK down, recently, from the shelves of a 
 great public library, the four volumes of Ag- 
 assiz's " Contributions to the Natural History 
 of the United States." I doubt if anybody but the 
 charwoman, with her duster, had touched those vol- 
 umes for twenty-five years. They are a monumental 
 work, the fruit of vast and heroic labors, with colored 
 plates on stone, showing the turtles of the United 
 States, and their life-history. The work was published 
 more than half a century ago, but it looked old 
 beyond its years massive, heavy, weathered, as if 
 dug from the rocks ; and I soon turned with a sigh 
 from the weary learning of its plates and diagrams 
 to look at the preface. 
 
 Then, reading down through the catalogue of 
 human names and of thanks for help received, I 
 came to a sentence beginning: 
 
 " In New England I have myself collected largely ; 
 but I have also. received valuable contributions from 
 the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burlington ; . . . 
 from Mr. D. Henry Thoreau of Concord; . . . and 
 from Mr. J. W. P. Jenks of MiddleboroV And then 
 it hastens on with the thanks in order to get to the 
 
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 95 
 
 turtles, as if turtles were the one and only thing of 
 real importance in all the world. 
 
 Turtles are important interesting; so is the late 
 Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burlington. Indeed any 
 reverend gentleman who would catch turtles for 
 Agassiz must have been interesting. If Agassiz had 
 only put a chapter into his turtle book about him! 
 and as for the Mr. Jenks of Middleboro' (at the end 
 of the quotation) I know that he was interesting; for 
 years later, he was an old college professor of mine. 
 He told me some of the particulars of his turtle contri- 
 butions, particulars which Agassiz should have found 
 a place for in his big book. The preface says merely 
 that this gentleman sent turtles to Cambridge by the 
 thousands brief and scanty recognition. For that 
 is not the only thing this gentleman did. On one 
 occasion he sent, not turtles, but turtle eggs to Cam- 
 bridge broiight them, I should say ; and all there 
 is to show for it, so far as I could discover, is a 
 small drawing of a bit of one of the eggs ! 
 
 Of course, Agassiz wanted to make that drawing, 
 and had to have afresh turtle egg to draw it from. 
 He had to have it, and he got it. A great man, when 
 he wants a certain turtle egg, at a certain time, al- 
 ways gets it, for he gets some one else to get it for 
 him. I am glad he got it. But what makes me sad 
 and impatient is that he did not think it worth while 
 to tell us about the getting of it. 
 
 It would seem, naturally, that there could be noth- 
 
96 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 ing unusual or interesting about the getting of tur- 
 tle eggs when you want them. Nothing at all, if you 
 should chance to want the eggs as you chance to 
 find them. So with anything else. But if you want 
 turtle eggs when you want them, and are bound to 
 have them, then you must get Mr. Jenks, or some- 
 body else to get them for you. 
 
 Agassiz wanted those turtle eggs when he wanted 
 them not a minute over three hours from the min- 
 ute they were laid. Yet even that does not seem ex- 
 acting, hardly more difficult than the getting of hens' 
 eggs only three hours old. Just so, provided the pro- 
 fessor could have had his private turtle-coop in 
 Harvard College Yard ; and provided he could have 
 made his turtles lay. But turtles will not respond, 
 like hens, to meat-scraps and the warm mash. The 
 professor's problem was not to get from a mud 
 turtle's nest in the back yard to his work-table in 
 the laboratory; but to get from the laboratory in 
 Cambridge to some pond when the turtles were lay- 
 ing, and back to the laboratory within the limited 
 time. And this might have called for nice and dis- 
 criminating work as it did. 
 
 Agassiz had been engaged for a long time upon 
 his "Contributions." He had brought the great work 
 nearly to a finish. It was, indeed, finished but for 
 one small yet very important bit of observation : he 
 had carried the turtle egg through every stage of 
 its development with the single exception of one 
 
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 97 
 
 the very earliest. That beginning stage had brought 
 the " Contributions" to a halt. To get eggs that were 
 fresh enough to show the incubation at this period 
 had been impossible. 
 
 There were several ways that Agassiz might have 
 proceeded : he might have got a leave of absence 
 for the spring term, taken his laboratory to some 
 pond inhabited by turtles, and there camped until 
 he should catch the reptile digging out her nest. 
 But there were difficulties in all of that as those 
 who are college professors and naturalists know. 
 As this was quite out of the question, he did the 
 easiest thing asked Mr. Jenks of Middleboro to 
 get him the eggs. Mr. Jenks got them. Agassiz knew 
 all about his getting of them ; and I say the strange 
 and irritating thing is, that Agassiz did not think 
 it worth while to tell us about it, at least in the 
 preface to his monumental work. 
 
 It was many years later that Mr. Jenks, then a 
 gray-haired college professor, told me how he got 
 those eggs to Agassiz. 
 
 " I was principal of an academy, during my younger 
 years," he began, " and was busy one day with my 
 classes, when a large man suddenly filled the door- 
 way of the room, smiled to the four corners of the 
 room, and called out with a big, quick voice that he 
 was Professor Agassiz. 
 
 " Of course he was. I knew it, even before he had 
 had time to shout it to me across the room. 
 
98 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 " Would I get him some turtle eggs ? he called. 
 Yes, I would. And would I get them to Cambridge 
 within three hours from the time they were laid? Yes, 
 I would. And I did. And it was worth the doing. 
 But I did it only once. 
 
 " When I promised Agassiz those eggs, I knew 
 where I was going to get them. I had got turtle eggs 
 there before at a particular patch of sandy shore 
 along a pond, a few miles distant from the acad- 
 emy. 
 
 " Three hours was the limit. From the railroad 
 station to Boston was thirty-five miles ; from the 
 pond to the station was perhaps three or four miles; 
 from Boston to Cambridge we called about three 
 miles. Forty miles in round numbers ! We figured 
 it all out before he returned, and got the trip down 
 to two hours, record time : driving from the 
 pond to the station ; from the station by express train 
 to Boston ; from Boston by cab to Cambridge. This 
 left an easy hour for accidents and delays. 
 
 " Cab and car and carriage we reckoned into our 
 time-table ; but what we did n't figure on was the 
 turtle." And he paused abruptly. 
 
 " Young man," he went on, his shaggy brows 
 and spectacles hardly hiding the twinkle in the eyes 
 that were bent severely upon me, " young man, 
 when you go after turtle eggs, take into account the 
 turtle. No ! No ! that 's bad advice. Youth never 
 reckons on the turtle and youth seldom ought to. 
 
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 99 
 
 Only old age does that ; and old age would never 
 have got those turtle eggs to Agassiz. 
 
 "It was in the early spring that Agassiz came to 
 the academy, long before there was any likelihood 
 of the turtles' laying. But I was eager for the quest, 
 and so fearful of failure that I started out to watch 
 at the pond, fully two weeks ahead of the time that 
 the turtles might be expected to lay. I remember 
 the date clearly : it was May 14th. 
 
 "A little before dawn along near three o'clock 
 I would drive over to the pond, hitch my horse 
 near by, settle myself quietly among some thick 
 cedars close to the sandy shore, and there I would 
 wait, my kettle of sand ready, my eye covering the 
 whole sleeping pond. Here among the cedars I would 
 eat my breakfast, and then get back in good season 
 to open the academy for the morning session. 
 
 " And so the watch began. 
 
 "I soon came to know individually the dozen or 
 more turtles that kept to my side of the pond. 
 Shortly after the cold mist would lift and melt away, 
 they would stick up their heads through the quiet 
 water ; and as the sun slanted down over the ragged 
 rim of tree-tops, the slow things would float into the 
 warm lighted spots, or crawl out and doze comfort- 
 ably on the hummocks and snags. 
 
 " What fragrant mornings those were ! How fresh 
 and new and unbreathed ! The pond odors, the 
 woods odors, the odors of the ploughed fields of 
 
100 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 water-lily, and wild grape, and the dew-laid soil ! 1 
 can taste them yet, and hear them yet the still, 
 large sounds of the waking day the pickerel break- 
 ing the quiet with his swirl; the kingfisher drop- 
 ping anchor ; the stir of feet and wings among the 
 trees. And then the thought of the great book be- 
 ing held up for me ! Those were rare mornings ! 
 
 " Bat there began to be a good many of them, for 
 the turtles showed no desire to lay. They sprawled 
 in the sun, and never one came out upon the sand 
 as if she intended to help on the great professor's 
 book. The story of her eggs was of small concern 
 to her; her contribution to the Natural History of 
 the United States could wait. 
 
 " And it did wait. I began my watch on the 14th 
 of May ; June 1st found me still among the cedars, 
 still waiting, as I had waited every morning, Sun- 
 days and rainy days alike. June 1st was a perfect 
 morning, but every turtle slid out upon her log, as if 
 egg-laying might be a matter strictly of next year. 
 
 " I began to grow uneasy, not impatient yet, 
 for a naturalist learns his lesson of patience early, 
 and for all his years ; but I began to fear lest, by 
 some subtile sense, my presence might somehow be 
 known to the creatures ; that they might have gone 
 to some other place to lay, while I was away at the 
 schoolroom. 
 
 " I watched on to the end of the first week, on to 
 the end of the second week in June, seeing the mists 
 
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 101 
 
 rise and vanish every morning, and along with them 
 vanish, more and more, the poetry of my early morn- 
 ing vigil. Poetry and rheumatism cannot long dwell 
 together in the same clump of cedars, and I had 
 begun to feel the rheumatism. A month of morning 
 mists wrapping me around had at last soaked through 
 to my bones. But Agassiz was waiting, and the 
 world was waiting, for those turtl^iegjg^ an<f*J 
 would wait. It was all I could ,do, .for tljerje is, no, 
 use bringing a china nest-egg td*a Jtu*rle$&lm'i"ii)V 
 open to any such delicate suggestion. 
 
 " Then came a mid-June Sunday morning, with 
 dawn breaking a little after three : a warm, wide- 
 
 O ' 
 
 awake dawn, with the level mist lifted from the level 
 surface of the pond a full hour higher than I had 
 seen it any morning before. 
 
 " This was the day. I knew it. I have heard per- 
 sons say that they can hear the grass grow ; that 
 they know by some extra sense when danger is nigh. 
 For a month I had been watching, had been brood- 
 ing over this pond, and now I knew. I felt a stirring 
 of the pulse of things that the cold-hearted turtles 
 could no more escape than could the clods and I. 
 
 " Leaving my horse unhitched, as if he, too, un- 
 derstood, I slipped eagerly into my covert for a look 
 at the pond. As I did so, a large pickerel ploughed 
 a furrow out through the spatter-docks, and in his 
 wake rose the head of a large painted turtle. Swing- 
 ing slowly round, the creature headed straight for 
 
102 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 the shore, and, without a pause, scrambled out on 
 the sand. 
 
 " She was nothing unusual for a turtle, but her 
 manner was unusual and the gait at which she 
 moved ; for there was method in it and fixed pur- 
 pose. On she came, shuffling over the sand toward 
 the higher open fields, with a hurried, determined 
 sfee-saw thut was- taking her somewhere in particular, 
 and that was bound to get her there on time. 
 ': ?] held my breath. Had she been a dinosaurian 
 making Mesozoic footprints, I could not have been 
 more fearful. For footprints in the Mesozoic mud, 
 or in the sands of time, were as nothing to me when 
 compared with fresh turtle eggs in the sands of this 
 pond. 
 
 "But over the strip of sand, without a stop, she 
 paddled, and up a narrow cow-path into the high 
 grass along a fence. Then up the narrow cow-path, 
 on all fours, just like another turtle, I paddled, and 
 into the high wet grass along the fence. 
 
 " I kept well within sound of her, for she moved 
 recklessly, leaving a wide trail of flattened grass be- 
 hind. I wanted to stand up, and I don't believe 
 I could have turned her back with a rail, but I 
 was afraid if she saw me that she might return in- 
 definitely to the pond ; so on I went, flat to the 
 ground, squeezing through the lower rails of the 
 fence, as if the field beyond were a melon-patch. It 
 was nothing of the kind, only a wild, uncomfortable 
 
"TAIL FIRST, BEGAN TO BURY HERSELF" 
 
104 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 pasture, full of dewberry vines, and very discourag- 
 ing. They were excessively wet vines and briery. I 
 pulled my coat-sleeves as far over my fists as I could 
 get them, and with the tin pail of sand swinging 
 from between my teeth to avoid noise, I stumped 
 fiercely, but silently, on after the turtle. 
 
 " She was laying her course, I thought, straight 
 down the length of this dreadful pasture, when, not 
 far from the fence, she suddenly hove to, warped 
 herself short about, and came back, barely clearing 
 me. I warped about, too, and in her wake bore 
 down across the corner of the pasture, across the 
 powdery public road, and on to a fence along a field 
 of young corn. 
 
 " I was somewhat wet by this time, but not so 
 wet as I had been before wallowing through the 
 deep, dry dust of the road. Hurrying up behind a 
 large tree by the fence, I peered down the corn-rows 
 and saw the turtle stop, and begin to paw about in 
 the loose, soft soil. She was going to lay! 
 
 " I held on to the tree and watched, as she tried 
 this place, and that place, and the other place. 
 But the place, evidently, was hard to find. What 
 could a female turtle do with a whole field of possi- 
 ble nests to choose from ? Then at last she found it, 
 and, whirling about, she backed quickly at it and, 
 tail first, began to bury herself before my staring 
 eyes. 
 
 " Those were not the supreme moments of my life; 
 
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 105 
 
 perhaps those moments came later that day ; but those 
 certainly were among the slowest, most dreadfully 
 mixed of moments that I ever experienced. They 
 were hours long. There she was, her shell just show- 
 ing, like some old hulk in the sand alongshore. And 
 how long would she stay there ? and how should I 
 know if she had laid an egg? 
 
 " I could still wait. And so I waited, when, over 
 the freshly awakened fields, floated four mellow 
 strokes from the distant town clock. 
 
 " Four o'clock ! Why there was no train until 
 seven ! No train for three hours ! The eggs would 
 spoil ! Then with a rush it came over me that this 
 was Sunday morning, and there was no regular seven 
 o'clock train, none till after nine. 
 
 " I think I should have fainted had not the turtle 
 just then begun crawling off. I was weak and dizzy; 
 but there, there in the sand, were the eggs ! and 
 Agassiz ! and the great book ! Why, I cleared the 
 fence and the forty miles that lay between me 
 and Cambridge at a single jump ! He should have 
 them, trains or no. Those eggs should go to Agas- 
 siz by seven o'clock, if I had to gallop every mile 
 of the way. Forty miles ! Any horse could cover it 
 in three hours, if he had to ; and, upsetting the 
 astonished turtle, I scooped out her long white eggs. 
 
 " On a bed of sand in the bottom of the pail I 
 laid them, with what care my trembling fingers al- 
 lowed ; filled in between them with more sand ; so 
 
106 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 with layer after layer to the rim ; and covering all 
 smoothly with more sand, I ran back for my horse. 
 
 " That horse knew, as well as I, that the turtles 
 had laid, and that he was to get those eggs to Agas- 
 siz. He turned out of that field into the road on two 
 wheels, a thing he had not done for twenty years, 
 doubling me up before the dashboard, the pail of 
 eggs miraculously lodged between my knees. 
 
 " I let him out. If only he could keep this pace 
 all the way to Cambridge! or even half way there, 
 I would have time to finish the trip on foot. I 
 shouted him on, holding to the dasher with one hand, 
 holding the pail of eggs with the other, not daring 
 to get off my knees, though the bang on them, as 
 we pounded down the wood-road, was terrific. But 
 nothing must happen to the eggs ; they must not 
 be jarred, or even turned over in the sand before 
 they came to Agassiz. 
 
 " In order to get out on the pike it was necessary 
 to drive back away from Boston toward the town. 
 We had nearly covered the distance, and were round- 
 ing a turn from the woods into the open fields, when, 
 ahead of me, at the station it seemed, I heard the 
 quick, sharp whistle of a locomotive. 
 
 " What did it mean ? Then followed the puff, 
 puff, puff, of a starting train. But what train? 
 Which way going ? And jumping to my feet for a 
 longer view, I pulled into a side road that paralleled 
 the track, and headed hard for the station. 
 
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 107 
 
 " We reeled along. The station was still out of 
 sight, but from behind the bushes that shut it from 
 view, rose the smoke of a moving engine. It was 
 perhaps a mile away, but we were approaching, head 
 on, and, topping a little hill, I swept down upon a 
 freight train, the black smoke pouring from the 
 stack, as the mighty creature pulled itself together 
 for its swift run down the rails. 
 
 66 My horse was on the gallop, following the 
 track, and going straight toward the coming train. 
 The sight of it almost maddened me the bare 
 thought of it, on the road to Boston ! On I went; 
 on it came, a half a quarter of a mile between us, 
 when suddenly my road shot out along an unfenced 
 field with only a level stretch of sod between me 
 and the engine. 
 
 " With a pull that lifted the horse from his feet, 
 I swung him into the field and sent him straight as 
 an arrow for the track. That train should carry me 
 and my eggs to Boston ! 
 
 " The engineer pulled the whistle. He saw me 
 stand up in the rig, saw my hat blow off, saw me 
 wave my arms, saw the tin pail swing in my teeth, 
 and he jerked out a succession of sharp Halts ! But 
 it was he who should halt, not I ; and on we went, 
 the horse with a flounder landing the carriage on 
 top of the track. 
 
 " The train was already grinding to a stop ; but 
 before it was near a standstill, I had backed off the 
 
108 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 track, jumped out, and, running down the rails with 
 the astonished engineers gaping at me, had swung 
 aboard the cab. 
 
 " They offered no resistance ; they had n't had 
 time. Nor did they have the disposition, for I looked 
 strange, not to say dangerous. Hatless, dew-soaked, 
 smeared with yellow mud, and holding, as if it were 
 a baby or a bomb, a little tin pail of sand ! 
 
 " ' Crazy,' the fireman muttered, looking to the 
 engineer for his cue. 
 
 " I had been crazy, perhaps, but I was not crazy 
 now. 
 
 " ' Throw her wide open/ I commanded. ' Wide 
 open ! These are fresh turtle eggs for Professor 
 Agassiz of Cambridge. He must have them before 
 breakfast.' 
 
 " Then they knew I was crazy, and, evidently 
 thinking it best to humor me, threw the throttle 
 wide open, and away we went. 
 
 " I kissed my hand to the horse, grazing uncon- 
 cernedly in the open field, and gave a smile to my 
 crew. That was all I could give them, and hold my- 
 self and the eggs together. But the smile was enough. 
 And they smiled through their smut at me, though 
 one of them held fast to his shovel, while the other 
 kept his hand upon a big ugly wrench. Neither of 
 them spoke to me, but above the roar of the sway- 
 ing engine I caught enough of their broken talk to 
 understand that they were driving under a full head 
 
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 109 
 
 of steam, with the intention of handing me over 
 to the Boston police, as perhaps the safest way of 
 disposing of me. 
 
 " I was only afraid that they would try it at the 
 next station. But that station whizzed past without 
 a bit of slack, and the next, and the next ; when it 
 came over me that this was the through freight, 
 which should have passed in the night, and was 
 making up lost time. 
 
 " Only the fear of the shovel and the wrench kept 
 me from shaking 'hands with both men at this dis- 
 covery. But I beamed at them ; and they at me. I 
 was enjoying it. The unwonted jar beneath my feet 
 was wrinkling my diaphragm with spasms of delight. 
 And the fireman beamed at the engineer, with a look 
 that said, ' See the lunatic grin ; he likes it ! ' 
 
 " He did like it. How the iron wheels sang to me 
 as they took the rails ! How the rushing wind in my 
 ears sang to me ! From my stand on the fireman's 
 side of the cab I could catch a glimpse of the track 
 just ahead of the engine, where the ties seemed to 
 leap into the throat of the mile-devouring monster. 
 The joy of it 1 of seeing space swallowed by the 
 mile ! 
 
 " I shifted the eggs from hand to hand and thought 
 of my horse, of Agassiz, of the great book, of my 
 great luck, luck, luck, until the multitudi- 
 nous tongues of the thundering train were all chim- 
 ing Muck! luck! luck!' They knew! they under- 
 
110 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 stood! This beast of fire and tireless wheels was 
 doing its best to get the eggs to Agassiz ! 
 
 " We swung out past the Blue Hills, and yonder 
 flashed the morning sun from the towering dome of 
 the State House. I might have leaped from the cab 
 and run the rest of the way on foot, had I not 
 caught the eye of the engineer watching me nar- 
 rowly. I was not in Boston yet, nor in Cambridge 
 either. I was an escaped lunatic, who had held up a 
 train, and forced it to carry me from Middleboro to 
 Boston. 
 
 " Perhaps I had overdone the lunacy business. 
 Suppose these two men should take it into their 
 heads to turn me over to the police, whether I 
 would or no ? I could never explain the case in time 
 to get the eggs to Agassiz. I looked at my watch. 
 There were still a few minutes left in which I might 
 explain to these men, who, all at once, had become 
 my captors. But how explain? Nothing could avail 
 against my actions, my appearance, and my little 
 pail of sand. 
 
 "I had not thought of my appearance before. 
 Here I was, face and clothes caked with yellow mud, 
 my hair wild and matted, my hat gone, and in my full- 
 grown hands a tiny tin pail of sand, as if I had been 
 digging all night with a tiny tin shovel on the shore ! 
 And thus to appear in the decent streets of Boston 
 of a Sunday morning ! 
 
 " I began to feel like a lunatic. The situation 
 
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 111 
 
 was serious, or might be, and rather desperately 
 funny at its best. I must in some way have shown 
 my new fears, for both men watched me more sharply. 
 
 " Suddenly, as we were nearing the outer freight- 
 yard, the train slowed down and came to a stop. I 
 was ready to jump, but still I had no chance. They 
 had nothing to do, apparently, but to guard me. I 
 looked at my watch again. What time we had made! 
 It was only six o'clock, a whole hour left in 
 which to get to Cambridge! 
 
 " But I didn't like this delay. Five minutes 
 ten went by. 
 
 " ' Gentlemen/ I began, but was cut short by an 
 express train coining past. We were moving again, 
 on into a siding on to the main track on with 
 a bump and a crash and a succession of crashes, 
 running the length of the train on, on at a turtle's 
 pace, but on, when the fireman, quickly jumping 
 for the bell-rope, left the way to the step free, and 
 
 " I never touched the step, but landed in the soft 
 sand at the side of the track, and made a line for 
 the freight-yard fence. 
 
 "There was no hue or cry. I glanced over my 
 shoulder to see if they were after me. Evidently 
 their hands were full, or they did n't know I had 
 gone. 
 
 " But I had gone ; and was ready to drop over 
 the high board-fence, when it occurred to me that I 
 might drop into a policeman's arms. Hanging my 
 
112 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 pail in a splint on top of a post, I peered cautiously 
 over a very wise thing to do before you jump a 
 high board-fence. There, crossing the open square 
 toward the station, was a big, burly fellow with a 
 club looking for me ! 
 
 " I flattened for a moment, when some one in the 
 freight-yard yelled at me. I preferred the policeman, 
 and, grabbing my pail, I slid softly over to the street. 
 The policeman moved on past the corner of the sta- 
 tion out of sight. The square was free, and yonder 
 stood a cab. 
 
 ''Time was flying now. Here was the last lap. 
 The cabman saw me coming, and squared away. I 
 waved a dollar-bill at him, but he only stared the 
 more. A dollar can cover a good deal, but I was too 
 much for one dollar. I pulled out another, thrust 
 them both at him, and dodged into the cab, calling, 
 6 Cambridge!' 
 
 " He would have taken me straight to the police- 
 station, had I not said, ' Harvard College. Professor 
 Agassiz's house ! I've got eggs for Agassiz,' push- 
 ing another dollar up at him through the hole. 
 
 " It was nearly half past six. 
 
 " ( Let him go ! ' I ordered. e Here 's another dol- 
 lar if you make Agassiz's house in twenty minutes. 
 Let him out ; never mind the police! ' 
 
 "He evidently knew the police, or there were 
 none around at that time on a Sunday morning. We 
 went down the sleeping streets, as I had gone down the 
 
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 113 
 
 wood-roads from the pond two hours before, but 
 with the rattle and crash now of a fire brigade. 
 Whirling a corner into Cambridge Street, we took 
 the bridge at a gallop, the driver shouting out some- 
 thing in Hibernian to a pair of waving arms and a 
 belt and brass buttons. 
 
 " Across the bridge with a rattle and jolt that put 
 the eggs in jeopardy, and on over the cobble-stones, 
 we went. Hall: standing, to lessen the jar, I held the 
 pail in one hand and held myself in the other, not 
 daring to let go even to look at my watch. 
 
 " But I was afraid to look at the watch. I was 
 afraid to see how near to seven o'clock it might be. 
 The sweat was dropping down my nose, so close was 
 I running to the limit of my time. 
 
 " Suddenly there was a lurch, and I dived forward, 
 ramming my head into the front of the cab, coming 
 up with a rebound that landed me across the small 
 of my back on the seat, and sent half of my pail of 
 eggs helter-skelter over the floor. 
 
 " We had stopped. Here was Agassiz's house; 
 and without taking time to pick up the eggs that 
 were scattered, I jumped out with my pail and 
 pounded at the door. 
 
 " No one was astir in the house. But I would stir 
 some one. And I did. Right in the midst of the 
 racket the door opened. It was the maid. 
 
 " * Agassiz,' I gasped, ' I want Professor Agassiz, 
 quick ! ' And I pushed by her into the hall. 
 
114 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 " ' Go 'way, sir. I '11 call the police. Professor 
 Agassiz is in bed. Go 'way, sir ! ' 
 
 " ( Call him Agassiz instantly, or I '11 call him 
 myself.' 
 
 " But I did n't ; for just then a door overhead was 
 flung open, a great white-robed figure appeared on 
 the dim landing above, and a quick loud voice called 
 excitedly, 
 
 "' Let him in ! Let him in. I know him. He has 
 my turtle eggs ! ' 
 
 " And the apparition, slipperless, and clad in any- 
 thing but an academic gown, came sailing down the 
 stairs. 
 
 "The maid fled. The great man, his arms ex- 
 tended, laid hold of me with both hands, and drag- 
 ging me and my precious pail into his study, with a 
 swift, clean stroke laid open one of the eggs, as the 
 watch in my trembling hands ticked its way to seven 
 as if nothing unusual were happening to the his- 
 tory of the world." 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE 
 
 THERE were chipmunks everywhere. The stone 
 walls squeaked with them. At every turn, 
 from early spring to early autumn, a chip- 
 munk was scurrying away from me. Chipmunks 
 were common. They did no particular harm, no par- 
 ticular good ; they did nothing in particular, being 
 only chipmunks and common, or so I thought, until 
 one morning (it was June-bug time) when I stopped 
 and watched a chipmunk that sat atop the stone wall 
 down in the orchard. He was eating, and the shells 
 of his meal lay in a little pile upon the big flat stone 
 which served as his table. 
 
 They were acorn-shells, I thought; yet June 
 seemed rather late in the season for acorns, and, 
 looking closer, I discovered that the pile was entirely 
 composed of June-bug shells wings and hollow 
 bodies of the pestiferous beetles ! 
 
 Well, well! I had never seen this before, never 
 even heard of it. Chipmunk, a useful member of 
 society ! actually eating bugs in this bug-ridden world 
 of mine! This was interesting and important. Why, 
 I had really never known Chipmunk, after all ! 
 
 So I had n't. He had always been too common t 
 
116 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 Flying squirrels were more worth while, because 
 there were none on the farm. Now, however, I deter- 
 mined to cultivate the acquaintance of Chipmunk, 
 for there might be other discoveries awaiting me. 
 And there were. 
 
 A narrow strip of grass separated the orchard and 
 my garden-patch. It was on my way to the garden 
 that I most often stopped to watch this chipmunk, 
 or rather the pair of them, in the orchard wall. June 
 advanced, the beetles disappeared, and the two chip- 
 munks in the wall were now seven, the young ones 
 almost as large as their parents, and both young and 
 old on the best of terms with me. 
 
 For the first time in four years there were pros- 
 pects of good strawberries. Most of my small patch 
 was given over to a new variety, one that I had 
 originated; and I was waiting with an eagerness 
 which was almost anxiety for the earliest berries. 
 
 I had put a little stick beside each of the three 
 big berries that were reddening first (though I could 
 have walked from the house blindfolded and picked 
 them). I might have had the biggest of the three on 
 June 7th, but for the sake of the flavor I thought 
 it best to wait another day. On the 8th I went 
 down to get it. The big berry was gone, and so was 
 one of the others, while only half of the third was 
 left on the vine! 
 
 Gardening has its disappointments, its seasons of 
 despair and wrath, too. Had a toad showed him- 
 
CHIPMUNK EATING JUNE-BUGS 
 
118 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 self at that moment, he might have fared badly, for 
 more than likely, I thought, it was he who had stolen 
 my berries. On the garden wall sat a friendly chip- 
 munk eying me sympathetically. 
 
 A few days later several fine berries were ripe, and 
 I was again on my way to the garden when I passed 
 the chipmunks in the orchard. A shining red spot 
 among the vine-covered stones of their wall brought 
 me to a stop. For an instant I thought that it was my 
 rose-breasted grosbeak, and that I was about to get a 
 clew to its nest. Then up to the slab where he ate the 
 June-bugs scrambled the chipmunk, and the rose-red 
 spot on- the breast of the supposed grosbeak dissolved 
 into a big scarlet-red strawberry. And by its long 
 wedge shape I knew it was one of my new variety. 
 
 I hurried across to the patch and found every 
 berry gone, while a line of bloody fragments led me 
 back to the orchard wall, where a half-dozen fresh 
 calyx crowns completed my second discovery. 
 
 No, it did not complete it. It took a little watch- 
 ing to find out that the whole family all seven ! 
 were after those berries. They were picking them 
 half ripe, even, and actually storing them away, can- 
 ning them, down in the cavernous depths of the 
 stone-pile! 
 
 Alarmed? Yes, and I was wrathful, too. The taste 
 for strawberries is innate, original; you can't be 
 human without it. But joy in chipmunks is a culti- 
 vated liking. What chance in such a circumstance 
 
AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE 119 
 
 has the nature-lover with the human man? What 
 shadow of doubt as to his choice between the chip- 
 munks and the strawberries ? 
 
 I had no gun and no time to go over to my neigh- 
 bor's to borrow his. So I stationed myself near by 
 with a fistful of stones, and waited for the thieves 
 to show themselves. I came so near to hitting one of 
 them with a stone that the sweat started all over me. 
 After that there was no danger. I had lost my nerve. 
 The little scamps knew that war had been declared, 
 and they hid and dodged and sighted me so far off 
 that even with a gun I should have been all summer 
 killing the seven of them. 
 
 Meantime, a good rain and the warm June days 
 were turning the berries red by the quart. They had 
 more than caught up to the chipmunks. I dropped 
 my stones and picked. The chipmunks picked, too ; 
 so did the toads and the robins. Everybody picked. 
 It was free for all. We picked them and ate them, 
 jammed them, and canned them. I almost carried 
 some over to my neighbor, but took peas instead. 
 
 The strawberry season closed on the Fourth of 
 July ; and our taste was not dimmed, nor our natural 
 love for strawberries abated ; but all four of the 
 small boys had hives from over-indulgence, so boun- 
 tifully did Nature provide, so many did the seven 
 chipmunks leave us ! 
 
 Peace between me and the chipmunks had been 
 signed before the strawberry season closed, and the 
 
120 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 pact still holds. Other things have occurred since to 
 threaten it, however. Among them, an article in a 
 recent number of an out-of-door magazine, of wide 
 circulation. Herein the chipmunk family was most 
 roundly rated, in fact condemned to annihilation be- 
 cause of its wicked taste for birds' eggs and for the 
 young birds. Numerous photographs accompanied 
 the article, showing the red squirrel with eggs in 
 his mouth, but no such proof (even the red squirrel 
 photographs, I strongly believe, were done from a 
 stuffed squirrel) of Chipmunk's guilt, though he was 
 counted equally bad and, doubtless, will suffer with 
 Chickaree at the hands of those who have taken the 
 article seriously. 
 
 I believe that would be a great mistake. Indeed, 
 I believe the article a deliberate falsehood, concocted 
 in order to sell the made-up photographs. Chipmunk 
 is not an egg-sucker, else I should have found it out. 
 But of course that does not mean that no one else 
 has found it out. It does mean, however, that if 
 Chipmunk robs at all he does it so seldom as to call 
 for no alarm or retribution. 
 
 There is scarcely a day in the nesting-season when 
 I fail to see half a dozen chipmunks about the walls, 
 yet I have never noticed one even suspiciously near 
 a bird's nest. In an apple tree, scarcely six jump? 
 from the home of the family in the orchard wall, a 
 brood of tree swallows came to wing this spring ; 
 while robins, chippies, and red-eyed vireos not to 
 
AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE 121 
 
 mention a cowbird, which I wish they had devoured 
 have also hatched and flown away from nests that 
 these squirrels might easily have rifled. 
 
 It is not often that one comes upon even the red 
 squirrel in the very act of robbing a nest. But the 
 black snake, the glittering fiend! and the dear 
 house cats ! If I run across a dozen black snakes in 
 the early summer, it is safe to say that six of them 
 are discovered to me by the cries of the birds that 
 they are robbing. So is it with the cats. No creature 
 larger than a June-bug, however, is often distressed 
 by a chipmunk. In a recent letter to me Mr. Bur- 
 roughs says : 
 
 "No, I never knew the chipmunk to suck or de- 
 stroy eggs of any kind, and I have never heard of 
 any well-authenticated instance of his doing so. 
 The red squirrel is the sinner in this respect, and 
 probably the gray squirrel also." 
 
 It will be difficult to find a true bill against him. 
 Were the evidence all in, I believe that instead of a 
 culprit we should find Chipmunk a useful citizen. 
 Does not that pile of June-bug bodies on the flat 
 stone leave me still in debt to him ? He may err 
 occasionally, and may, on occasion, make a nuisance 
 of himself but so do my four small boys, bless 
 them ! And, well, who doesn't? When a family 
 of chipmunks, which you have fed all summer on 
 the veranda, take up their winter quarters inside the 
 closed cabin, and chew up your quilts, hammocks, 
 
122 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 table-cloths, and whatever else there is of chewable 
 properties, then they are anathema. 
 
 The havoc certain chipmunks in the mountains 
 once made among our possessions was dreadful. But 
 instead of exterminating them root and branch, a big 
 box was prepared the next summer and lined with 
 tin, in which the linen was successfully wintered. 
 
 But how real was the loss, after all ? Here was a 
 rough log cabin on the side of Thorn Mountain. 
 What sort of table-cloth ought to be found in such a 
 cabin, if not one that has been artistically chewed 
 by chipmunks? Is it for fine linen that we take to 
 the woods in summer? The chipmunks are well 
 worth a table-cloth now and then well worth, be- 
 sides these, all the strawberries and all the oats they 
 can steal from my small patch. 
 
 Only it is n't stealing. Since I ceased throwing 
 stones and began to watch the chipmunks carefully, 
 I do not find that their manner is in the least the man- 
 ner of thieves. They do not act as if they were taking 
 what they have no right to. For who has told Chip- 
 munk to earn his oats in the sweat of his brow ? No 
 one. Instead, he seems to understand that he is one 
 of the innumerable factors ordained to make me 
 sweat a good and wholesome experience for me so 
 long as I get the necessary oats. 
 
 And I get them, in spite of the chipmunks, though 
 I don't like to guess at the quantity of oats they have 
 carried off anywhere, I should say, from a peck to a 
 
AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE 123 
 
 bushel, which they have stored as they tried to store 
 the berries, somewhere in the big recesses of the 
 stone wall. 
 
 All this, however, is beside the point. It is n't a 
 case of oats and berries against June-bugs. You 
 don't haggle with Nature after that fashion. The 
 farm is not a market-place where you get exactly 
 what you pay for. You must spend on the farm all 
 you have of time and strength and brains ; but you 
 must not expect in return merely your money's worth. 
 Infinitely more than that, and oftentimes less. Farm- 
 ing is like virtue, its own reward. It pays the man 
 who loves it, no matter how short the crop of oats and 
 corn. 
 
 So it is with Chipmunk. Perhaps his books don't 
 balance a few June-bugs short on the credit side. 
 What then? It is n't mere bugs and berries, as I 
 have just suggested, but stone-piles. What is the 
 difference in value to me between a stone-pile with 
 a chipmunk in it and one without. Just the difference, 
 relatively speaking, between the house with my four 
 boys in it, and the house without. 
 
 Chipmunk, with his sleek, round form, his rich 
 color and his stripes, is the daintiest, most beautiful 
 of all our squirrels. He is one of the friendliest of 
 my tenants, too, friendlier even than the friendliest of 
 my birds Chickadee. The two are very much alike 
 in spirit; but however tame and confiding Chickadee 
 may become, he is still a bird and belongs to a different 
 
124 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 and, despite his wings, lower order of beings. Chick 
 adee is often curious about me ; he can be coaxed to 
 eat from my hand. Chipmunk is more than curious; 
 he is interested ; and it is not crumbs that he wants, 
 but friendship. He can be coaxed to eat from my lips, 
 sleep in my pocket, and even come to be stroked. 
 
 I have sometimes seen Chickadee in winter when 
 he seemed to come to me out of very need for living 
 companionship. But in the flood-tide of summer life 
 Chipmunk will watch me from his stone-pile and tag 
 me along with every show of friendship. 
 
 The family in the orchard wall have grown very 
 familiar. They flatter me. One or another of them, 
 sitting upon the high flat slab, sees me coming. He 
 sits on the very edge of the crack, to be truthful; 
 and if I take a single step aside toward him, he flips, 
 and all there is left of him is a little angry squeak 
 from the depths of the stones. If, however, I pass 
 properly along, do not stop or make any sudden mo- 
 tion, he sees me past, then usually follows me, espe- 
 cially if I get well off and pause. 
 
 During a shower one day I halted under a large 
 hickory just beyond his den. He came running after 
 me, so interested that he forgot to look to his foot- 
 ing, and just opposite me slipped and bumped his 
 nose hard against a stone so hard that he sat up 
 immediately and vigorously rubbed it. Another time 
 he followed me across to the garden and on until he 
 came to the barbed-wire fence along the meadow. 
 
AN ACCOUNT WITH NATURE 125 
 
 Here he climbed a post and continued after me by way 
 of the middle strand of the wire, wriggling, twisting, 
 even grabbing the barbs, in his efforts to maintain 
 his balance. He got midway between the posts, when 
 the sagging strand tripped him and he fell with a 
 splash into a shallow pool below. No, he did not 
 drown, but his curiosity did get a ducking. 
 
 Did the family in the orchard wall stay together 
 as a family for the first summer ? I should like to 
 know. As late as August they all seemed to be 
 in the wall ; for in August I cut my oats, and during 
 this harvest we all worked together. 
 
 I mowed the oats as soon as they began to yellow, 
 cocking them to cure for hay. It was necessary to 
 let them " make " for six or seven days, and all this 
 time the chipmunks raced back and forth between 
 the cocks and the stone wall. They might have 
 hidden their gleanings in a dozen crannies nearer at 
 hand; but evidently they had a particular store- 
 house, near the home nest, where the family could 
 get at their provisions in bad weather without com- 
 ing forth. 
 
 Had I removed the stones and dug out the nest, 
 I should have found a tunnel leading into the ground 
 for a few feet and opening into a chamber filled with 
 a bulky grass nest a bed capable of holding half 
 a dozen chipmunks and, adjoining this, by a short 
 passageway, the storehouse of the oats. 
 
 How many trips they made between this crib and 
 
126 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 the oat-patch, how many kernels they carried in 
 their pouches at a trip, and how big a pile they had 
 when all the grains were in, these are more of the 
 things I should like to know. 
 
 When the first frosts come, the family if they 
 are still a family seek the nest in the ground 
 beneath the stone wall. But they do not go to sleep 
 immediately. Their outer entrances have not yet 
 been closed. There is still plenty of fresh air and, 
 of course, plenty of food acorns, chestnuts, hick- 
 ory-nuts, and oats. They doze quietly for a time and 
 then they eat, pushing the empty shells and hulls 
 into some side passage prepared beforehand to receive 
 the debris. 
 
 But soon the frost is creeping down through the 
 stones and earth overhead, the rains are filling the 
 outer doorways and shutting off the supply of fresh 
 air; and one day, though not sound sleepers, the 
 family cuddle down and forget to wake entirely until 
 the frost has begun to creep back toward the sur- 
 face, and in through the softened soil is felt the 
 thrill of the waking spring. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 WOODS MEDICINE 
 
 THE real watcher in the woods usually goes 
 off by himself. He hates to have anybody 
 along; for Anybody wants to be moving all 
 the time, and Anybody wants to be talking all the 
 time, and Anybody wants to be finding a circus, or 
 a zoo, or a natural history museum in the middle of 
 the woods, else Anybody wishes he had stayed at 
 home or gone to the ball-game. 
 
 Now I always say to 
 r Mr. Anybody when 
 he asks me to 
 take him into 
 the woods, " Yes, 
 come along, if you 
 can stand stock-still 
 for an hour, without 
 budging ; if you can 
 keep stock-still for 
 
128 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 an hour, without talking ; if you can get as excited 
 watching two tumble-bugs trying to roll their ball 
 up hill, as you do watching nine baseball men try- 
 ing to bat their ball about a field." 
 
 The doctor pulled a small blankbook out of his vest 
 pocket, scribbled something in Latin and Chinese (at 
 least it looked like Chinese), and then at the bottom 
 wrote in English, "Take one teaspoonful every 
 hour " ; and, tearing off the leaf, handed it to the 
 patient. It was a prescription for some sort of med- 
 icine. 
 
 Now I am going to give you a prescription, for 
 some woods medicine, a magic dose that will cure 
 you of blindness and deafness and clumsy-footed- 
 ness, that will cause you to see things and hear 
 things and think things in the woods that you have 
 never thought or heard or seen in the woods before. 
 Here is the prescription : 
 
 WOOD CHUCK, M. D., 
 
 MULLEIN HILL. 
 Office Hours : 
 5.30 A.M. until Breakfast. 
 
 R 
 
 No moving for one hour . . . 
 No talking for one hour . . . 
 No dreaming or thumb-twiddling the while . , . 
 
 Sig: The dose to be taken from the top of a stump with 
 a bit of sassafras bark or a nip of Indian turnip 
 every time you go into the woods. 
 
 WOOD CHUCK. 
 
WOODS MEDICINE 129 
 
 I know that this compound will cure if you begin 
 taking it early enough along, I should say, from 
 the Fifth to the Eighth Grades. It is a very diffi- 
 cult dose to take at any age, but it is almost impos- 
 sible for grown-ups to swallow it ; for they have so 
 many things to do, or think they have, that they 
 can't sit still a whole hour anywhere a terrible 
 waste of time! And then they have been talking for 
 so many years that to stop for a whole hour might 
 kill them, who knows ! And they have been work- 
 ing nervously with their hands so long that their 
 thumbs will twiddle, and to sleep they will go the 
 minute they sit down, in spite of themselves. It is 
 no use to give this medicine to grown-ups. They 
 are what Dr. Wood Chuck calls " chronics " hope- 
 less burners who will never sit down upon a stump, 
 who, when the Golden Chariot comes for them, will 
 stand up and drive all the way to heaven. 
 
 However, I am not giving this medicine to grown- 
 ups, but to you. Of course you will make a bad face 
 over it, too ; for, young or old, it is hard to sit still 
 and even harder to keep still I mean not to talk. 
 I have closely watched four small boys these sev- 
 eral years now, and I never knew one of them to 
 sit still for a whole hour at home not once in 
 his whole life! And as for his tongue! he might 
 tuck that into his cheek, hold it down between his 
 teeth, crowd it back behind his fist no matter. 
 The tongue is an unruly member. But let these four 
 
130 
 
 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 boys get into the woods, and every small pale-face 
 of them turns Indian instinctively, tip-toeing up and 
 down the ridges with lips as close-sealed as if some 
 finger of the forest were laid upon them. So it must 
 be with you when you enter the fields and woods. 
 The wood-born people are all light-footed and cau- 
 tious in their stir- 
 ring. Only the 
 box turtles scuff 
 carelessly along; 
 and that is be- 
 cause they can 
 shut themselves 
 up head, paws, 
 tail inside their 
 
 lidded shells, 
 and defy their 
 enemies. 
 
 The skunk, 
 however, is 
 sometimes care- 
 less in his go- 
 ing ; for he 
 knows that he will neither be crowded nor jostled 
 along the street, so he naturally behaves as if all 
 the woods were his. Yet, how often do you come 
 upon a skunk ? Seldom because, he is quite as 
 unwilling to meet you as you are to meet him ; but 
 as one of your little feet makes as much noise in 
 
WOODS MEDICINE 131 
 
 the leaves as all four of his, he hears you coming 
 and turns quietly down some alley or in at some bur- 
 row and allows you to pass on. 
 
 Louder than your step in the woods is the sound 
 of your voice. Perhaps there is no other noise so 
 far-reaching, so alarming, so silencing in the woods 
 as the human voice. When your tongue begins, all 
 the other tongues cease. Songs stop as by the snap 
 of a violin string; chatterings cease ; whisperings 
 end mute are the woods and empty as a tomb, 
 except the wind be moving aloft in the trees. 
 
 Three things all the animals can do supremely 
 well : they can hear well ; they can see motion well ; 
 they can wait well. 
 
 If you would know how well an animal can wait, 
 scare Dr. Wood Chuck into his office, then sit down 
 outside and wait for him to come out. It would be a 
 rare and interesting thing for you to do. No one has 
 ever done it yet, I believe ! Establish a world's record 
 for keeping still ! But you should scare him in at the 
 beginning of your summer vacation so as to be sure 
 you have all the waiting-time the state allows : for you 
 may have to leave the hole in September and go back 
 to school. 
 
 When the doctor wrote the prescription for this 
 medicine, " No moving for an hour," he was giving 
 you a very small, a homeopathic dose of patience, as 
 you can see; for an hour at a time, every wood- 
 watcher knows, will often be only a waste of time, 
 
132 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 unless followed immediately by another hour of 
 the same. 
 
 On the road to the village one day, I passed a 
 fox-hunter sitting atop an old stump. It was about 
 seven o'clock in the morning, 
 
 " Hello, Will ! " I called, " been out all night?" 
 
 "No, got here 'bout an hour ago," he replied. 
 
 I drove on and, returning near noon, found Will 
 still atop the stump. 
 
 "Had a shot yet?" I called. 
 
 " No, the dogs brought him down 'tother side the 
 brook, and carried him over to the Shanty field." 
 
 About four o'clock that afternoon I was hurry- 
 ing down to the station, and there was Will atop 
 that same stump. 
 
 "Got him yet?" I called. 
 
 "No, dogs are fetching him over the Quarries now" 
 and I was out of hearing. 
 
 It was growing dark when I returned; but there 
 was Will Hall atop the stump. I drew up in the road. 
 
 "Grown fast to that stump, Will?" I called. 
 " Want me to try to pull you off?" 
 
 " No, not yet," he replied, jacking himself pain- 
 fully to his feet. "Chillin' up some, ain't it?" he 
 added shaking himself. " Might 's well go home, I 
 guess" when from the direction of Young's Mead- 
 ows came the eager voice of his dogs; and, waving 
 me on, he got quickly back atop the stump, his 
 gun ready across his knees. 
 
WOODS MEDICINE 138 
 
 I was nearly home when, through the muffle of 
 the darkening woods, I heard the quick bang ! bang ! 
 of Will's gun. 
 
 Yes, he got him, a fine red fox. And speaking to 
 me about it one day, he said, 
 
 " There 's a lot more to sittin' still than most folks 
 thinks. The trouble is, most folks in the woods can't 
 stand the monopoly of it." 
 
 Will's English needs touching up in spots ; but 
 he can show the professors a great many things 
 about the ways of the woods. 
 
 And now what does the doctor mean by " No 
 dreaming or thumb-twiddling" in the woods? Just 
 this : that not only must you be silent and motionless 
 for hours at a time, but you must also be alert 
 watchful, keen, ready to take a hint, to question, 
 guess, and interpret. The fields and woods are not 
 full of life, but full only of the sounds, shadows, and 
 signs of life. 
 
 You are atop of your stump, when over the ridge 
 you hear a slow, quiet rustle in the dead leaves a 
 skunk ; then a slow, loud rustle a turtle ; then a 
 quick, loud one-two-tliree rustle a chewink; 
 then a tiny, rapid rustle a mouse ; then a long, 
 rasping rustle a snake ; then a measured, gallop- 
 ing rustle a squirrel; then a light-heavy, hop-thump 
 rustle a rabbit; then and not once have you 
 seen the rustlers in the leaves beyond the ridge; and 
 not once have you stirred from your stump. 
 
134 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR, 
 
 Perhaps this understanding of the leaf-sounds 
 might be called " interpretation " ; but before you 
 can interpret them, you must hear them; and no 
 dozing, dreaming, fuddling sitter upon a stump has 
 ears to hear. 
 
 As you sit there, you notice a blue jay perched 
 silent and unafraid directly over you not an ordi- 
 nary, common way for a blue jay to act. "Why?" 
 you ask. Why, a nest, of course, somewhere near ! 
 Or, suddenly round and round the trunk of a large 
 oak tree whirls a hummingbird. "Queer," you say. 
 Then up she goes and throwing your eye ahead 
 of her through the tree-tops you chance to intercept 
 her bee-line flight a hint ! She is probably gather- 
 ing lichens for a nest which she is building some- 
 where near, in the direction of her flight. A whirl! 
 a flash ! as quick as light! You have a wonderful 
 story ! 
 
 Now do not get the impression that all one needs 
 to do in order to become acquainted with the life of 
 the woods is to sit on a stump a long time, say noth- 
 ing, and listen hard. All that is necessary rather, 
 the ability to do it is necessary ; but in the woods or 
 out it is also necessary to exercise common sense. 
 Guess, for instance, when guessing is all that you 
 can do. You will learn more, however, and learn it 
 faster, generally, by following it up, than by sitting 
 on a stump and guessing about it. 
 
 At twilight, in the late spring and early summer, 
 
WOODS MEDICINE 135 
 
 we frequently hear a gentle, tremulous call from the 
 woods or from below in the orchard. " What is it? " 
 I had been asked a hundred times, and as many times 
 had guessed that it might be the hen partridge cluck- 
 ing to her brood ; or else I had replied that it made 
 me think of the mate-call of a coon, or that I half 
 inclined to believe it the cry of the woodchucks, or 
 that possibly it might be made by the owls. In fact, 
 I did n't know the peculiar call, and year after year I 
 kept guessing at it. 
 
 We were seated one evening on the porch listening 
 to the whip-poor-wills, when some one said, " There 's 
 your woodchuck singing again." Sure enough, there 
 sounded the tremulous woodchuck-partridge-owl-coon 
 cry. I slipped down through the birches determined 
 at last to know that cry and stop guessing about it, 
 if I had to follow it all night. 
 
 The moon was high and full, the footing almost 
 noiseless, and everything so quiet that I quickly 
 located the clucking sounds as coming from the 
 orchard. I came out of the birches into the wood- 
 road, and was crossing the open field to the orchard, 
 when something dropped with a swish and a vicious 
 clacking close upon my head. I jumped from under 
 my hat, almost, and saw the screech owl swoop 
 softly up into the nearest apple tree. Instantly she 
 turned toward me and uttered the gentle purring 
 cluck that I had been guessing at so hard for at least 
 three years. And even while I looked at her, I saw 
 
136 THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 
 
 in the tree beyond, silhouetted against the moonlit 
 sky, two round bunches, young owls evidently, 
 which were the explanation of the calls. These two, 
 and another young one, were found in the orchard 
 the following day. 
 
 I rejoined the guessers on the porch and gave 
 them the satisfying fact, but only after two or three 
 years of guessing about it. I had laughed once at 
 some of my friends over on the other road who had 
 bolted their front door and had gone out of the 
 door at the side of the house for precisely twenty- 
 one years because the key in the front-door lock 
 wouldn't work. They were intending to have it 
 fixed, but the children being little kept them busy ; 
 then the children grew up, and of course kept them 
 busier ; got married at last and left home all but 
 one daughter. Still the locksmith was not called to 
 fix that front door. One day this unmarried daugh- 
 ter, in a fit of impatience, got at that door herself, 
 and found that the key had been inserted just 
 twenty-one years before upside down ! 
 
 There I had sat on the porch on a stump, let 
 us say, and guessed about it. Truly, my key to this 
 mystery had been left long in the lock, upside down, 
 while I had been going in and out by the side door. 
 
 No, you must go into the fields and woods, go deep 
 and far and frequently, with eyes and ears and all 
 your souls alert ! 
 
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 Put the question to your scholars individually : Who is your mes- 
 senger of spring ? Make the reading of this book not an end in itself, 
 but only a means toward getting the pupils out of doors. Never let 
 the reading stop with the end of the chapter, any more than you 
 would let your garden stop with the buying of the seeds. And how 
 eager and restless a healthy child is for the fields and woods with 
 the coming of spring ! Do not let your opportunity slip. Go with 
 them after reading this chapter (re-reading if you can the first chap- 
 ter in " The Fall of the Year" ) out to some meadow stream where 
 they can see the fallen stalks and brown matted growths of the 
 autumn through which the new spring shoots are pushing, green 
 with vigor and promise. The seal of winter has been broken ; the 
 pledge of autumn has been kept ; the life of a new summer has 
 started up from the grave of the summer past. Here by the stream 
 under your feet is the whole cycle of the seasons the dead stalks, 
 the empty seed-vessels, the starting life. 
 
 Let the children watch for the returning birds and report to you ; 
 have them bring in the opening flowers, giving them credit (on the 
 blackboard) for each new flower found; go with them (so that they 
 will not bring the eggs to you) to see the new nests discovered, teach- 
 ing them by every possible means the folly and cruelty of robbing 
 birds' nests, of taking life ; while at the same time you show them 
 the beauty of life, its sacredness, and manifold interests. 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 PAGE 1 
 
 Have you ever seen a " spring peeper " peeping ? You will 
 hear, these spring nights, many distinct notes in the marshes, 
 
138 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 
 
 and when you have seen all of the lowly musicians you will be a 
 fairly accomplished naturalist. Let the discovery of " Who 's Who 
 among the Frogs " this spring be one of your first outdoor studies. 
 The picture shows you Pickering's hyla, blowing his bagpipe. 
 Arbutus: trailing arbutus (Epigcea repens), sometimes called 
 ground-laurel, and mayflower, fishflower (in New Jersey). 
 hepatwa: liver-leaf (Hepatica triloba). 
 
 Spice-bush : wild allspice, fever-bush, Benjamin-bush (Benzoin 
 cestivale}. 
 
 Wood-pussy the skunk, who comes out of his winter den very 
 early in spring, and whose scent is one of the characteristic odors 
 of a New England spring. 
 
 PAGE 2 
 
 Ail white and still : The whole poem will be found on the last page 
 of " Winter," the second book in this series. 
 
 tnllium: the wake-robin. Read Mr. Burroughs's book "Wake- 
 Robin," the first of his outdoor books. 
 
 PAGE 4 
 
 phoebe . See the chapter called " The Palace in the Pig-Pen." 
 bloodroot : Sanguinaria canadensis, See the picture on this page. 
 So named because of the red-orange juice in the root-stalks, used 
 by the Indians as a stain. 
 
 marsh-marigolds : The more common but incorrect name is " cow- 
 slip." The marsh-marigold is Caltha palustris and belongs with 
 the buttercup and wind-flower to the Crowfoot Family. The 
 cowslip, a species of primrose, is a European plant and belongs 
 to the Primrose Family. 
 
 PAGE 5 
 
 woolly-bear : caterpillar of the Isabella tiger moth, the common 
 
 caterpillar, brown in the middle with black ends, whose hairs 
 
 look as if they had been clipped, so even are they. 
 
 mourning-cloak: See picture, page 77 of "Winter," the second 
 
 book of this series. The antiopa butterfly. 
 
 j uncos : the common slate-colored "snowbirds." 
 
 witch-hazel: See picture, page 28 of "The Fall of the Year"; 
 
 read description of it on pages 31-33 of the same volume. 
 
 bluets : or " innocence " (Houstonia ccerulea). 
 
 PAGE 6 
 
 the Delaware ? the Delaware River, up which they come in order 
 
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 139 
 
 to lay their eggs. As they come up they are caught in nets and 
 
 their eggs or " roe " salted and made into caviar. 
 
 Cohansey Creek : a small river in New Jersey. 
 
 Lupton's Meadows ; local name of meadows along Cohansey Creek. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 Read Kipling's story in " The Second Jungle Book " called " The 
 Spring Running." Both Jungle Books ought to be in your school 
 library. Spring is felt on the ocean as well as over the land; life is all 
 of one piece; the thrill we feel at the touch of spring is felt after his 
 manner and degree by bird and beast and by the fish of the sea. Go 
 back to the last paragraph of chapter I for the thought. Here I have 
 expanded that thought of the tides of life rising. See the picture of 
 the herring on their deep sea run on page 345 of the author's 
 " Wild Life Near Home." Let the chapter suggest to the pupils 
 the mysterious powers of the minds of the lower animals. 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 PAGE 7 
 
 Mowgli: Do you know Mowgli of "The Jungle Book"? 
 
 Chaucer: the "Father of English Poetry." This is one of the 
 
 opening lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. 
 PAGE 8 
 
 migrating birds : See " The Great Tidal Waves of Bird Life " by 
 
 D. Lange, in the " Atlantic Monthly " for August, 1909. 
 PAGE 9 
 
 The cold-blooded : said of those animals lower than the mammals 
 
 and birds, that have not four-chambered hearts and the complete 
 
 double blood-circulation. 
 
 Weymouth Back River: of Weymouth, Massachusetts. 
 PAGE 10 
 
 catfish : or horn-pout or bull-pout, see picture, page 12. 
 PAGE 11 
 
 stickleback : The little male stickleback builds a nest, drives the 
 
 female into it to lay her eggs, then takes charge of the eggs until 
 
 the fry hatch out and go off for themselves, 
 
140 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 You will try to get three suggestions out of this chapter for your 
 pupils : First, that an old tree with holes may prove to be the most 
 fruitful and interesting tree in the neighborhood, that is to say, 
 nothing out of doors is so far fallen to pieces, dead, and worthless 
 as to be passed by in our nature study. (Read to them " Second 
 Crops " in the author's " A Watcher in the Woods.") Secondly : the 
 humble tree-toad is well worth the most careful watching, for no one 
 yet has told us all of his life-story. Thirdly: one of the benefits of 
 this simple, sincere love of the out-of-doors will come to us as rest, 
 both in mind and body, as contentment, too, and clearer understanding 
 of what things are worth while. 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 PAGE 14 
 
 burlap petticoat : a strip of burlap about six inches wide tied with 
 
 a string and folded over about the trunks of the trees under 
 
 which the night-feeding gypsy moth caterpillars hide by day. 
 
 The burlaps are lifted and the worms killed. 
 
 a peddler's stall : In the days of the author's boyhood peddlers 
 
 sold almost everything that the country people could want. 
 PAGE 16 
 
 grim-beaked baron : the little owl of the tree. 
 
 keep: an older name for castle ; sometimes for the dungeon. 
 PAGE 20 
 
 for him to call the summer rain : alluding to his evening and his 
 
 cloudy-day call as a sign of coming rain. 
 PAGE 22 
 
 castings : the disgorged lumps of hair and bones of the small 
 
 animals eaten by the owls. 
 PAGE 24 
 
 Altair and Arcturus : prominent stars in the northern hemisphere 
 
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 141 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 See the suggestions for the corresponding chapter in " The Fall 
 of the Year," the first volume in this series. Lest you may not have 
 that book at hand, let me repeat here the gist of what I said there : 
 that you make this chapter the purpose of one or more field excur- 
 sions with the class in order to see with your own eyes the charac- 
 teristic sights of spring as recorded here ; secondly, that you use this, 
 and chapters vi and x, as school tests of the pupils' knowledge and 
 observation of his own fields and woods ; and thirdly, let the items 
 mentioned here be used as possible subjects for the pupils' further 
 study as themes for compositions, or independent investigations out 
 of school hours. The finest fruit the teacher oan show is a school full 
 of children personally interested in things. And what better things 
 than live things out of doors ? 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 I might have used a star, or the sun, or the sea to teach the lesson 
 involved here, instead of the crow and his three broken feathers. 
 But these three feathers will do for your pupils as the falling apple 
 did for Sir Isaac Newton. The point of the chapter is: that the 
 feathers like the stars must round out their courses ; that this uni- 
 verse is a universe of law, of order, and of reason, even to the wing 
 feathers of a crow. Try to show your pupils the beauty and wonder 
 of order and law (not easy to do) as well as the beauty and wonder 
 of shapes and colors and sounds, etc. 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 PAGE 34 
 
 primaries, secondaries, tertials : Turn to your dictionary under 
 " Bird " (or at the front of some good bird book) and study out 
 just which feathers of the wing these named here are. 
 
142 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 
 
 PAGE 35 
 
 half-moulted hen : Pick her up and notice the regular and system- 
 atic arrangement of the young feathers. Or take a plucked hen 
 and draw roughly the pin-feather scheme as you find it on her 
 body. 
 PAGE 37 
 
 reed-birds : The bobolink is also called " rice-bird >? from its habit 
 of feeding in the rice-fields of the South on its fall migration. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 
 Do not stop doing or seeing or hearing when you have done, seen, 
 and heard the few things suggested in this chapter and in chapters 
 iv and x ; for these are only suggestions, and merely intended to 
 give you a start, as if your friend had said to you upon your visiting 
 a new city, "Now, don't fail to see the Common and the old State 
 House, etc. ; and don't fail to go down to T Wharf, etc.," knowing 
 that all the time you would be doing and seeing and hearing a thou- 
 sand interesting things. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 I called this chapter when I first wrote it "The Friendship of 
 Nature " a much used title, but entirely suggestive of the thought 
 aad the lesson in the story here. This was first written about six 
 years ago, and to-day, May 12, 1912, that pair of phcebes, or another 
 pair, have their nest out under the pig-pen roof as they have had every 
 year since I have known the pen. Repeat and expand the thought as 
 I have put it into the mouth of Nature in the first paragraph " We 
 will share them [the acres] together." Instill into your pupils' minds 
 the large meaning of obedience to Nature's laws and love for her and 
 all her own. Show them also how ready Nature is (and all the birds 
 and animals and flowers) to be friendly; and how even a city door- 
 yard may hold enough live wild things for a small zoo. This chapter 
 
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 143 
 
 might well be made use of by the city teacher to stir her pupils to 
 see what interesting live things their city or neighborhood has, al- 
 though the woods and open fields are miles away. 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 
 PAGE 48 
 
 a hornet's nest : the white-faced hornet, that builds the great cone- 
 shaped paper nests. 
 
 swifts thunder in the chimney: See chapter vn (and notes) in 
 " Winter." For the " thunder " see section ix in chapter X of 
 this book. 
 
 PAGE 49 
 
 cabbage 'butterfly ; a pest ; a small whitish butterfly with a few 
 small black spots. Its grubs eat cabbage. 
 
 PAGE 54 
 
 the crested flycatcher : is the largest of the family; builds in holes ; 
 distinguished by its use of cast-off snake-skins in its nests. 
 kingbird : Everybody knows him, for it is usually he who chases 
 the marauding crows; he builds, out in the apple tree if he can, 
 a big, bulky nest with strings a-flying from it : also called "bee- 
 martin," a most useful bird. 
 
 wood pewee : builds on the limbs of forest trees a most beautiful 
 nest, much like a hummingbird's, only larger. Pewee's soft, pen- 
 sive call of " pe-e-e-wee " in the deep, quiet, dark-shrouded sum- 
 mer woods is one of the sweetest of bird notes. 
 chebec: a little smaller than a sparrow ; builds a beautiful nest in 
 orchard trees and says " chebec, chebec, chebec." 
 
 PAGE 58 
 
 One had died : After phoebe brings off her first brood sprinkle a 
 little tobacco-dust or lice-powder, such as you use in the hen- 
 yard, into the nest to kill the vermin. Otherwise the second and 
 third broods may be eaten alive by lice or mites. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 In " Winter " I put a chapter called " The Missing Tooth," showing 
 the dark and bitter side of the life of the wild things; here I have 
 
144 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 
 
 taken that thought as most people think of it (see Burroughs's essay, 
 "A Life of Fear" in "Riverby ") and in the light of typical exam- 
 ples tried to show that wild life is not fear, but peace and joy. The 
 kernel of the chapter is found in the words: "The level of wild 
 life, the soul of all nature, is a great serenity." Let the pupils watch 
 and report instances of fear (easy to see) and in the same animals 
 instances of peace and joy. 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 PAGE 60 
 
 gray harrier : so named because of his habit of flying low and 
 " harrying," that is, hunting, catching small prey on or near the 
 ground. " Harry " comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for army, 
 
 PAGE 61 
 
 " He looketk as it were a grym leoun : from Chaucer's description 
 of the Cock in the story of the Cock and the Fox. 
 
 PAGE 62 
 
 terrible pike: closely related to the pickerel. 
 
 kingfisher: builds in holes in sand-banks near water. Its peculiar 
 
 rattle sounds like the small boys' "clapper." 
 
 PAGE 63 
 
 " The present only toucheth thee!" Burns's poem "To a Mouse." 
 
 PAGE 64 
 
 " The fair music that all creatures made" : from Milton's poem "To 
 a Solemn Music," " solemn " meaning " orchestral " music. 
 
 PAGE 65 
 
 then doubling once more: This is all figurative language. I am 
 thinking of myself as the fox. The dogs have run themselves to 
 death on my trail, and I am turning back, "doubling," to have a 
 look at them and to rejoice over their defeat. 
 
 PAGE 71 
 
 pine marten . The marten is so rare in this neighborhood that I 
 am inclined to think the creature was the large weasel. 
 
 PAGE 73 
 
 the heavy bar across their foreheads : a very unusual way of yoking 
 oxen in the United States. The only team I ever saw here so yoked, 
 
 PAGE 74 
 
 San Francisco: alluding to the earthquake and fire which nearly 
 wiped out the city in 190G. 
 
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 145 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 
 The picture of the young buzzard is as true as a photograph; the 
 humped-up drawing of the old bird looks precisely as she did atop 
 her dead tree, watching iny approach. This vulture rarely soars into 
 New England skies ; down South, especially along the coast, the 
 smaller black vulture (Catharista urubu) is found very tame and in 
 great abundance ; while in the far Southwest lives the great condor. 
 PAGE 80 
 
 tulip poplar : tulip-tree (Liriodendron tulipifera). 
 "For it had bene an auncient tree " ; from Edmund Spenser's " Shep- 
 herd's Calendar." 
 PAGE 85 
 
 a dozen kinds of cramps : Perhaps you will say I didn't find much 
 in finding the buzzard's nest, and got mostly cramps ! Yes, but I 
 also got the buzzard's nest a thing that I had wanted to see for 
 many years. It was worth seeing, however, for its own sake. 
 Even a buzzard is interesting. See the account of him in " Wild 
 Life Near Home," the chapter called " A Buzzard's Banquet." 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 The point of the story is the enthusiasm of the naturalists for their 
 work work that to the uncaring and unknowing seemed not even 
 worth while. But all who do great things do them with all their 
 might. No one can stop to count the cost whose soul is bent on great 
 things. 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 
 PAGE 94 
 
 Burlington: in Vermont. 
 
 Concord and Middleboro* : in Massachusetts. 
 
 Zadoc Thompson : a Vermont naturalist. 
 
 D. Henry Thoreau : better known as Henry D. Thoreau ; author 
 
 of " Walden," etc. 
 
146 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 
 
 /. W. P. Jenks: for many years head of Pierce Academy, 
 Middleboro, and later Professor of Agricultural Zoology in Brown 
 University. 
 
 PAGE 96 
 
 Contributions: used in place of the whole name: Go yourself into 
 the public library and read this and look at the four large volumes. 
 
 PAGE 101 
 
 spatter-docks: yellow pond-lily (Nuphar advena). 
 
 PAGE 102 
 
 dinosaurian : one of the fossil reptile monsters of the Mesozoic, 
 or " middle," period of the earth's history, before the age of man. 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 In this story I have tried to settle the difficult question of debit 
 and credit between me and the out-of-doors. Shall we exterminate 
 the red squirrels, the hawks, owls, etc., is a question that is not so 
 easily answered as one might think. The fact is we do not want to 
 exterminate any of our native forms of life we need them all, 
 and owe them more, each of them, for the good they do us, than they 
 owe us for the little harm they may do us. Read this over with the 
 children with its moral and economic lesson in view. Send to the 
 National Association of Audubon Societies, New York City, for their 
 free leaflets upon this matter. The Pennsylvania Department of Agri- 
 culture, Harrisburg, Pa., has a bulletin upon this same subject which 
 will be sent free upon application. 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 PAGE 115 
 
 June-bug : the very common brown beetle whose big white grubs 
 you dig up under the sod and in composts. 
 
 PAGE 118 
 
 rose-breasted grosbeak : one of the most beautiful of our birds, 
 and a lovely singer. 
 
 PAGE 120 
 
 Chickaree : the common name of the red squirrel. The red squir- 
 rel does not need to be destroyed. 
 
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 147 
 
 tree swallows: They build in holes in orchard trees, etc.; to be dis- 
 tinguished on the wing from the barn swallows by their white 
 bellies and plain, only slightly forked tails. 
 chippies : the little chipping sparrow, or hair-bird. 
 red-eyed vireos : the most common of the vireos ; see picture of its 
 nest on page 40 of " Winter." 
 
 PAGE 121 
 
 cowbird: the miserable brown-headed blackbird that lays its egg or 
 eggs in smaller birds' nests and leaves its young to be fed by the 
 unsuspecting foster-mother. As the young cowbird is larger than 
 the rightful young, it gets all the food and causes them to starve. 
 
 PAGE 122 
 
 Thorn Mountain : one of the smaller of the White Mountains .; 
 it overlooks the village of Jackson, N. H. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 TO THE TEACHER 
 
 If you have read through " The Fall of the Year " and "Winter " 
 and to this chapter in " The Spring of the Year," you will know 
 that the upshot of these thrice thirteen readings has been to take 
 you and your children into the woods ; you will know that the last 
 paragraph of this last chapter is the aim and purpose and key of all 
 three books. You must go into the woods, you must lead your chil- 
 dren to go, deep and far and frequently. The Three R's first but 
 after them, before dancing, or cooking, or sewing, or manual train- 
 ing, or anything, send your children out into the open, where they 
 belong. The school can give them nothing better than the Three R's, 
 and can only fail in trying to give them more, except it give them 
 the freedom of the fields. Help Nature, the old nurse, to take your 
 children on her knee. 
 
 FOR THE PUPIL 
 PAGE 128 
 
 Here is the prescription: Think you can swallow it ? Go out and try 
 PAGE 129 
 
 Golden Chariot : In what Bible story does the Golden Chariot 
 
 descend ? and whom does it carry away ? 
 
 pale-face : an Indian name for the white man. 
 
148 NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 
 
 PAGE 130 
 
 box turtles : They are sometimes found as far north as the woods 
 of Cape Cod, Massachusetts ; but are very abundant farther south. 
 PAGE 133 
 
 Chewink : towhee, or ground-robin; to be distinguished by his loud 
 call of " chewink " and his vigorous scratching among the leaves 
 
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