initial commit of ebook 3163HEADmain

1 files changed, 5362 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/3163.txt b/3163.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cb1d726
--- /dev/null
+++ b/3163.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5362 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers, by
+John Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers
+
+Author: John Burroughs
+
+Commentator: Mary E. Burt
+
+Posting Date: January 17, 2009 [EBook #3163]
+Release Date: April, 2002
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIRDS AND BEES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Patricia C. Franks, Lisa Carter, Danette Dulny,
+Charles Duvall, Cheri Ripley, and Cheryl Sullivan
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BIRDS AND BEES
+
+SHARP EYES
+
+AND OTHER PAPERS
+
+
+By John Burroughs
+
+
+With An Introduction
+
+By Mary E. Burt
+
+
+And A Biographical Sketch
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Biographical Sketch
+
+Introduction By Mary E. Burt
+
+Birds
+
+  Bird Enemies
+
+  The Tragedies of the Nests
+
+Bees
+
+  An Idyl of the Honey-Bee
+
+  The Pastoral Bees
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.
+
+
+Nature chose the spring of the year for the time of John Burroughs's
+birth. A little before the day when the wake-robin shows itself, that
+the observer might be on hand for the sight, he was born in Roxbury,
+Delaware County, New York, on the western borders of the Catskill
+Mountains; the precise date was April 3, 1837. Until 1863 he remained
+in the country about his native place, working on his father's farm,
+getting his schooling in the district school and neighboring academies,
+and taking his turn also as teacher. As he himself has hinted, the
+originality, freshness, and wholesomeness of his writings are probably
+due in great measure to the unliterary surroundings of his early life,
+which allowed his mind to form itself on unconventional lines, and to
+the later companionships with unlettered men, which kept him in touch
+with the sturdy simplicities of life.
+
+From the very beginnings of his taste for literature, the essay was his
+favorite form. Dr. Johnson was the prophet of his youth, but he soon
+transferred his allegiance to Emerson, who for many years remained his
+"master enchanter." To cure himself of too close an imitation of
+the Concord seer, which showed itself in his first magazine article,
+Expression, he took to writing his sketches of nature, and about this
+time he fell in with the writings of Thoreau, which doubtless confirmed
+and encouraged him in this direction. But of all authors and of all men,
+Walt Whitman, in his personality and as a literary force, seems to have
+made the profoundest impression upon Mr. Burroughs, though doubtless
+Emerson had a greater influence on his style of writing.
+
+Expression appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1860, and most of his
+contributions to literature have been in the form of papers first
+published in the magazines, and afterwards collected into books. He more
+than once paid tribute to his teachers in literature. His first book,
+now out of print, was Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person,
+published in 1867; and Whitman: A Study, which appeared in 1896, is a
+more extended treatment of the man and his poetry and philosophy. Birds
+and Poets, too, contains a paper on Whitman, entitled The Flight of the
+Eagle, besides an essay on Emerson, whom he also treated incidentally in
+his paper, Matthew Arnold on Emerson and Carlyle, in Indoor Studies; and
+the latter volume contains his essay on Thoreau.
+
+In the autumn of 1863 he went to Washington, and in the following
+January entered the Treasury Department. He was for some years an
+assistant in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and later
+chief of the organization division of that Bureau. For some time he was
+keeper of one of the vaults, and for a great part of the day his only
+duty was to be at his desk. In these leisure hours his mind traveled off
+into the country, where his previous life had been spent, and with the
+help of his pen, always a faithful friend and magician, he lived over
+again those happy days, now happier still with the glamour of all
+past pleasures. In this way he wrote Wake-Robin and a part of Winter
+Sunshine. It must not be supposed, however, that he was deprived of
+outdoor pleasures while at Washington. On the contrary, he enjoyed many
+walks in the suburbs of the capital, and in those days the real country
+came up to the very edges of the city. His Spring at the Capital, Winter
+Sunshine, A March Chronicle, and other papers bear the fruit of his life
+on the Potomac. He went to England in 1871 on business for the Treasury
+Department, and again on his own account a dozen years later. The record
+of the two visits is to be found mainly in his chapters on An October
+Abroad, contained in the volume Winter Sunshine, and in the papers
+gathered into the volume Fresh Fields.
+
+He resigned his place in the Treasury in 1873, and was appointed
+receiver of a broken national bank. Later, until 1885, his business
+occupation was that of a National Bank Examiner. An article contributed
+by him to The Century Magazine for March, 1881, on Broken Banks and Lax
+Directors, is perhaps the only literary outcome of this occupation, but
+the keen powers of observation, trained in the field of nature, could
+not fail to disclose themselves in analyzing columns of figures. After
+leaving Washington Mr. Burroughs bought a fruit farm at West Park, near
+Esopus, on the Hudson, and there building his house from the stones
+found in his fields, has given himself the best conditions for that
+humanizing of nature which constitutes the charm of his books. He was
+married in 1857 to a lady living in the New York village where he was
+at the time teaching. He keeps his country home the year round, only
+occasionally visiting New York. The cultivation of grapes absorbs the
+greater part of his time; but he has by no means given over letters. His
+work, which has long found ready acceptance both at home and abroad,
+is now passing into that security of fame which comes from its entrance
+into the school-life of American children.
+
+Besides his outdoor sketches and the other papers already mentioned,
+Mr. Burroughs has written a number of critical essays on life and
+literature, published in Indoor Studies, and other volumes. He has also
+taken his readers into his confidence in An Egotistical Chapter,
+the final one of his Indoor Studies; and in the Introduction to the
+Riverside Edition of his writings he has given us further glimpses of
+his private intellectual life.
+
+Probably no other American writer has a greater sympathy with, and a
+keener enjoyment of, country life in all its phases--farming, camping,
+fishing, walking--than has John Burroughs. His books are redolent of the
+soil, and have such "freshness and primal sweetness," that we need not
+be told that the pleasure he gets from his walks and excursions is by no
+means over when he steps inside his doors again. As he tells us on more
+than one occasion, he finds he can get much more out of his outdoor
+experiences by thinking them over, and writing them out afterwards.
+
+Numbers 28, 36, and 92 of the Riverside Literature Series consist of
+selections from Mr. Burroughs's books. No. 28, which is entitled Birds
+and Bees, is made up of Bird Enemies and The Tragedies of the Nests from
+the volume Signs and Seasons, An Idyl of the Honey-Bee from Pepacton,
+and The Pastoral Bees from Locusts and Wild Honey. The Introduction,
+by Miss Mary E. Burt, gives an account of the use of Mr. Burroughs's
+writings in Chicago schools.
+
+In No. 36, Sharp Eyes, and Other Papers, the initial paper, Sharp
+Eyes, is drawn from Locusts and Wild Honey, The Apple comes from Winter
+Sunshine, A Taste of Maine Birch and Winter Neighbors from Signs and
+Seasons, and Notes by the Way (on muskrats, squirrels, foxes, and
+woodchucks) from Pepacton.
+
+The collection called A Bunch of Herbs, and Other Papers, forming No.
+92 of the Series, was designed with special reference to what the author
+has to say of trees and flowers, and contains A Bunch of Herbs from
+Pepacton, Strawberries from Locusts and Wild Honey, A March Chronicle
+and Autumn Tides from Winter Sunshine, A Spray of Pine and A Spring
+Relish from Signs and Seasons, and English Woods: A Contrast from Fresh
+Fields.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+
+It is seldom that I find a book so far above children that I cannot
+share its best thought with them. So when I first took up one of John
+Burroughs's essays, I at once foresaw many a ramble with my pupils
+through the enchanted country that is found within its breezy pages. To
+read John Burroughs is to live in the woods and fields, and to associate
+intimately with all their little timid inhabitants; to learn that--
+
+   "God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear,
+    To give sign, we and they are his children, one family here."
+
+When I came to use Pepacton in my class of the sixth grade, I soon
+found, not only that the children read better but that they came rapidly
+to a better appreciation of the finer bits of literature in their
+regular readers, while their interest in their new author grew quickly
+to an enthusiasm. Never was a little brother or sister more real to
+them than was "Peggy Mel" as she rushed into the hive laden with stolen
+honey, while her neighbors gossiped about it, or the stately elm that
+played sly tricks, or the log which proved to be a good bedfellow
+because it did not grumble. Burroughs's way of investing beasts, birds,
+insects, and inanimate things with human motives is very pleasing
+to children. They like to trace analogies between the human and the
+irrational, to think of a weed as a tramp stealing rides, of Nature as a
+tell-tale when taken by surprise.
+
+The quiet enthusiasm of John Burroughs's essays is much healthier
+than the over-wrought dramatic action which sets all the nerves
+a-quiver,--nerves already stimulated to excess by the comedies and
+tragedies forced upon the daily lives of children. It is especially
+true of children living in crowded cities, shut away from the woods and
+hills, constant witnesses of the effects of human passion, that they
+need the tonic of a quiet literature rather than the stimulant of a
+stormy or dramatic one,--a literature which develops gentle feelings,
+deep thought, and a relish for what is homely and homespun, rather than
+a literature which calls forth excited feelings.
+
+The essays in this volume are those in which my pupils have expressed an
+enthusiastic interest, or which, after careful reading, I have selected
+for future use. I have found in them few pages so hard as to require
+over much study, or a too frequent use of the dictionary. John
+Burroughs, more than almost any other writer of the time, has a
+prevailing taste for simple words and simple constructions. "He that
+runs may read" him. I have found many children under eleven years of age
+who could read a whole page without hesitating. If I discover some words
+which I foresee will cause difficulty, I place such on the blackboard
+and rapidly pronounce and explain them before the reading. Generally,
+however, I find the text the best interpreter of its words. What follows
+explains what goes before, if the child is led to read on to the end of
+the sentence. It is a mistake to allow children to be frightened away
+from choice reading by an occasional hard word. There is no better time
+than his reading lesson in which to teach a child that the hard things
+of life are to be grappled with and overcome. A mistake also, I think,
+is that toilsome process of explanation which I sometimes find teachers
+following, under the impression that it will be "parrot work" (as the
+stock phrase of the "institutes" has it) for the pupils to read anything
+which they do not clearly and fully comprehend. Teachers' definitions,
+in such cases, I have often noticed, are no better than dictionary
+definitions, and surely everybody knows that few more fruitless things
+than dictionary definitions are ever crammed into the memory of a child.
+Better far give free play to the native intelligence of the child, and
+trust it to apprehend, though it may not yet comprehend nor be able to
+express its apprehension in definition. On this subject I am glad to
+quote so high an authority as Sir Walter Scott: "Indeed I rather suspect
+that children derive impulses of a powerful and important kind from
+reading things which they do not comprehend, and therefore that to write
+down to children's understanding is a mistake. Set them on the scent and
+let them puzzle it out."
+
+From time to time I have allowed my pupils to give me written
+reports from memory of these essays, and have often found these little
+compositions sparkling with pleasing information, or full of that
+childlike fun which is characteristic of the author. I have marked the
+errors in these exercises, and have given them back to the children
+to rewrite. Sometimes the second papers show careful correction-and
+sometimes the mistakes are partially neglected. Very often the child
+wishes to improve on the first composition, and so adds new blunders as
+well as creates new interest.
+
+There is a law of self-preservation in Nature, which takes care of
+mistakes. Every human soul reaches toward the light in the most direct
+path open to it, and will correct its own errors as soon as it is
+developed far enough. There is no use in trying to force maturity;
+teachers who trouble children beyond all reason, and worry over their
+mistakes, are fumbling at the roots of young plants that will grow if
+they are let alone long enough.
+
+The average mechanical work (spelling, construction of sentences,
+writing, etc.) is better under this method than when more time is
+devoted to the mechanics and less to the thought of composition. I have
+seen many reports of Burroughs's essays from the pens of children more
+pleasing and reliable than the essays of some professional reviewers;
+in these papers I often find the children adding little suggestions of
+their own; as, "Do birds dream?" One of the girls says her bird "jumps
+in its sleep." A little ten year old writes, "Weeds are unuseful
+flowers," and, "I like this book because there are real things in it."
+Another thinks she "will look more carefully" if she ever gets out into
+the country again. For the development of close observation and good
+feeling toward the common things of life, I know of no writings better
+than those of John Burroughs.
+
+
+MARY E. BURT
+
+JONES SCHOOL, CHICAGO, Sept. 1, 1887.
+
+
+
+
+BIRDS.
+
+
+
+
+BIRD ENEMIES.
+
+
+How surely the birds know their enemies! See how the wrens and robins
+and bluebirds pursue and scold the cat, while they take little or no
+notice of the dog! Even the swallow will fight the cat, and, relying too
+confidently upon its powers of flight, sometimes swoops down so near
+to its enemy that it is caught by a sudden stroke of the cat's paw. The
+only case I know of in which our small birds fail to recognize their
+enemy is furnished by the shrike; apparently the little birds do not
+know that this modest-colored bird is an assassin. At least, I have
+never seen them scold or molest him, or utter any outcries at his
+presence, as they usually do at birds of prey. Probably it is because
+the shrike is a rare visitant, and is not found in this part of the
+country during the nesting season of our songsters.
+
+But the birds have nearly all found out the trick the jay, and when he
+comes sneaking through the trees in May and June in quest of eggs, he
+is quickly exposed and roundly abused. It is amusing to see the robins
+hustle him out of the tree which holds their nest. They cry "Thief,
+thief!" to the top of their voices as they charge upon him, and the jay
+retorts in a voice scarcely less complimentary as he makes off.
+
+The jays have their enemies also, and need to keep an eye on their own
+eggs. It would be interesting to know if jays ever rob jays, or crows
+plunder crows; or is there honor among thieves even in the feathered
+tribes? I suspect the jay is often punished by birds which are otherwise
+innocent of nest-robbing. One season I found a jay's nest in a small
+cedar on the side of a wooded ridge. It held five eggs, every one of
+which had been punctured. Apparently some bird had driven its sharp beak
+through their shells, with the sole intention of destroying them, for no
+part of the contents of the eggs had been removed. It looked like a case
+of revenge; as if some thrush or warbler, whose nest had suffered at
+the hands of the jays, had watched its opportunity, and had in this way
+retaliated upon its enemies. An egg for an egg. The jays were lingering
+near, very demure and silent, and probably ready to join a crusade
+against nest-robbers.
+
+The great bugaboo of the birds is the owl. The owl snatches them from
+off their roosts at night, and gobbles up their eggs and young in their
+nests. He is a veritable ogre to them, and his presence fills them with
+consternation and alarm.
+
+One season, to protect my early cherries I placed a large stuffed owl
+amid the branches of the tree. Such a racket as there instantly began
+about my grounds is not pleasant to think upon! The orioles and robins
+fairly "shrieked out their affright." The news instantly spread in every
+direction, and apparently every bird in town came to see that owl in
+the cherry-tree, and every bird took a cherry, so that I lost more fruit
+than if I had left the owl in-doors. With craning necks and horrified
+looks the birds alighted upon the branches, and between their screams
+would snatch off a cherry, as if the act was some relief to their
+outraged feelings.
+
+The chirp and chatter of the young of birds which build in concealed or
+inclosed places, like the woodpeckers, the house wren, the high-hole,
+the oriole, is in marked contrast to the silence of the fledglings
+of most birds that build open and exposed nests. The young of the
+sparrows,--unless the social sparrow be an exception,--warblers,
+fly-catchers, thrushes, never allow a sound to escape them; and on
+the alarm note of their parents being heard, sit especially close
+and motionless, while the young of chimney swallows, woodpeckers, and
+orioles are very noisy. The latter, in its deep pouch, is quite safe
+from birds of prey, except perhaps the owl. The owl, I suspect, thrusts
+its leg into the cavities of woodpeckers and into the pocket-like nest
+of the oriole, and clutches and brings forth the birds in its talons.
+In one case which I heard of, a screech-owl had thrust its claw into a
+cavity in a tree, and grasped the head of a red-headed woodpecker; being
+apparently unable to draw its prey forth, it had thrust its own round
+head into the hole, and in some way became fixed there, and had thus
+died with the woodpecker in its talons.
+
+The life of birds is beset with dangers and mishaps of which we know
+little. One day, in my walk, I came upon a goldfinch with the tip of one
+wing securely fastened to the feathers of its rump, by what appeared
+to be the silk of some caterpillar. The bird, though uninjured, was
+completely crippled, and could not fly a stroke. Its little body was hot
+and panting in my hands, as I carefully broke the fetter. Then it
+darted swiftly away with a happy cry. A record of all the accidents
+and tragedies of bird life for a single season would show many curious
+incidents. A friend of mine opened his box-stove one fall to kindle a
+fire in it, when he beheld in the black interior the desiccated forms of
+two bluebirds. The birds had probably taken refuge in the chimney during
+some cold spring storm, and had come down the pipe to the stove, from
+whence they were unable to ascend. A peculiarly touching little incident
+of bird life occurred to a caged female canary. Though unmated, it laid
+some eggs, and the happy bird was so carried away by her feelings that
+she would offer food to the eggs, and chatter and twitter, trying, as it
+seemed, to encourage them to eat! The incident is hardly tragic, neither
+is it comic.
+
+Certain birds nest in the vicinity of our houses and outbuildings, or
+even in and upon them, for protection from their enemies, but they often
+thus expose themselves to a plague of the most deadly character.
+
+I refer to the vermin with which their nests often swarm, and which kill
+the young before they are fledged. In a state of nature this probably
+never happens; at least I have never seen or heard of it happening to
+nests placed in trees or under rocks. It is the curse of civilization
+falling upon the birds which come too near man. The vermin, or the germ
+of the vermin, is probably conveyed to the nest in hen's feathers, or in
+straws and hairs picked up about the barn or hen-house. A robin's nest
+upon your porch or in your summer-house will occasionally become an
+intolerable nuisance from the swarms upon swarms of minute vermin with
+which it is filled. The parent birds stem the tide as long as they can,
+but are often compelled to leave the young to their terrible fate.
+
+One season a phoebe-bird built on a projecting stone under the eaves
+of the house, and all appeared to go well till the young were nearly
+fledged, when the nest suddenly became a bit of purgatory. The birds
+kept their places in their burning bed till they could hold no longer,
+when they leaped forth and fell dead upon the ground.
+
+After a delay of a week or more, during which I imagine the parent
+birds purified themselves by every means known to them, the couple built
+another nest a few yards from the first, and proceeded to rear a second
+brood; but the new nest developed into the same bed of torment that the
+first did, and the three young birds, nearly ready to fly, perished as
+they sat within it. The parent birds then left the place as if it had
+been accursed.
+
+I imagine the smaller birds have an enemy in our native white-footed
+mouse, though I have not proof enough to convict him. But one season the
+nest of a chickadee which I was observing was broken up in a position
+where nothing but a mouse could have reached it. The bird had chosen a
+cavity in the limb of an apple-tree which stood but a few yards from the
+house. The cavity was deep, and the entrance to it, which was ten feet
+from the ground, was small. Barely light enough was admitted, when the
+sun was in the most favorable position, to enable one to make out the
+number of eggs, which was six, at the bottom of the dim interior. While
+one was peering in and trying to get his head out of his own light, the
+bird would startle him by a queer kind of puffing sound. She would not
+leave her nest like most birds, but really tried to blow or scare the
+intruder away; and after repeated experiments I could hardly refrain
+from jerking my head back when that little explosion of sound came
+up from the dark interior. One night, when incubation was about half
+finished, the nest was harried. A slight trace of hair or fur at the
+entrance led me to infer that some small animal was the robber. A weasel
+might have done it, as they sometimes climb trees, but I doubt if either
+a squirrel or a rat could have passed the entrance.
+
+Probably few persons have ever suspected the cat-bird of being an
+egg-sucker; I do not know that she has ever been accused of such a
+thing, but there is something uncanny and disagreeable about her, which
+I at once understood, when I one day caught her in the very act of going
+through a nest of eggs.
+
+A pair of the least fly-catchers, the bird which says chebec, chebec,
+and is a small edition of the pewee, one season built their nest where
+I had them for many hours each day under my observation. The nest was
+a very snug and compact structure placed in the forks of a small maple
+about twelve feet from the ground. The season before, a red squirrel
+had harried the nest of a wood-thrush in this same tree, and I was
+apprehensive that he would serve the fly-catchers the same trick; so,
+as I sat with my book in a summer-house near by, I kept my loaded gun
+within easy reach. One egg was laid, and the next morning, as I made my
+daily inspection of the nest, only a fragment of its empty shell was
+to be found. This I removed, mentally imprecating the rogue of a red
+squirrel. The birds were much disturbed by the event, but did not desert
+the nest, as I had feared they would, but after much inspection of it
+and many consultations together, concluded, it seems, to try again. Two
+more eggs were laid, when one day I heard the birds utter a sharp cry,
+and on looking up I saw a cat-bird perched upon the rim of the nest,
+hastily devouring the eggs. I soon regretted my precipitation in killing
+her, because such interference is generally unwise. It turned out
+that she had a nest of her own with five eggs in a spruce-tree near my
+window.
+
+Then this pair of little fly-catchers did what I had never seen birds
+do before; they pulled the nest to pieces and rebuilt it in a peach-tree
+not many rods away, where a brood was successfully reared. The nest was
+here exposed to the direct rays of the noon-day sun, and to shield her
+young when the heat was greatest, the mother-bird would stand above them
+with wings slightly spread, as other birds have been know to do under
+like circumstances.
+
+To what extent the cat-bird is a nest-robber I have no evidence, but
+that feline mew of hers, and that flirting, flexible tail, suggest
+something not entirely bird-like.
+
+Probably the darkest tragedy of the nest is enacted when a snake
+plunders it. All birds and animals, so far I have observed, behave in
+a peculiar manner toward a snake. They seem to feel something of the
+loathing toward it that the human species experiences. The bark of a dog
+when he encounters a snake is different from that which he gives out on
+any other occasion; it is a mingled note of alarm, inquiry, and disgust.
+
+One day a tragedy was enacted a few yards from where I was sitting with
+a book; two song-sparrows trying to defend their nest against a black
+snake. The curious, interrogating note of a chicken who had suddenly
+come upon the scene in his walk caused me to look up from my reading.
+There were the sparrows, with wings raised in a way peculiarly
+expressive of horror and dismay, rushing about a low clump of grass and
+bushes. Then, looking more closely, I saw the glistening form of the
+black snake and the quick movement of his head as he tried to seize the
+birds. The sparrows darted about and through the grass and weeds, trying
+to beat the snake off. Their tails and wings were spread, and, panting
+with the heat and the desperate struggle, they presented a most singular
+spectacle. They uttered no cry, not a sound escaped them; they were
+plainly speechless with horror and dismay. Not once did they drop their
+wings, and the peculiar expression of those uplifted palms, as it were,
+I shall never forget. It occurred to me that perhaps here was a case of
+attempted bird-charming on the part of the snake, so I looked on from
+behind the fence. The birds charged the snake and harassed him from
+every side, but were evidently under no spell save that of courage in
+defending their nest. Every moment or two I could see the head and neck
+of the serpent make a sweep at the birds, when the one struck at would
+fall back, and the other would renew the assault from the rear. There
+appeared to be little danger that the snake could strike and hold one of
+the birds, though I trembled for them, they were so bold and approached
+so near to the snake's head. Time and again he sprang at them, but
+without success. How the poor things panted, and held up their wings
+appealingly! Then the snake glided off to the near fence, barely
+escaping the stone which I hurled at him. I found the nest rifled and
+deranged; whether it had contained eggs or young I know not. The male
+sparrow had cheered me many a day with his song, and I blamed myself for
+not having rushed at once to the rescue, when the arch enemy was upon
+him. There is probably little truth in the popular notion that snakes
+charm birds. The black snake is the most subtle, alert, and devilish of
+our snakes, and I have never seen him have any but young, helpless birds
+in his mouth.
+
+We have one parasitical bird, the cow-bird, so-called because it walks
+about amid the grazing cattle and seizes the insects which their heavy
+tread sets going, which is an enemy of most of the smaller birds. It
+drops its egg in the nest of the song-sparrow, the social sparrow, the
+snow-bird, the vireos, and the wood-warblers, and as a rule it is the
+only egg in the nest that issues successfully. Either the eggs of
+the rightful owner of the nest are not hatched, or else the young are
+overridden and overreached by the parasite and perish prematurely.
+
+Among the worst enemies of our birds are the so-called "collectors," men
+who plunder nests and murder their owners in the name of science. Not
+the genuine ornithologist, for no one is more careful of squandering
+bird life than he; but the sham ornithologist, the man whose vanity or
+affectation happens to take an ornithological turn. He is seized with an
+itching for a collection of eggs and birds because it happens to be the
+fashion, or because it gives him the air of a man of science. But in the
+majority of cases the motive is a mercenary one; the collector expects
+to sell these spoils of the groves and orchards. Robbing the nests
+and killing birds becomes a business with him. He goes about it
+systematically, and becomes expert in circumventing and slaying our
+songsters. Every town of any considerable size is infested with one or
+more of these bird highwaymen, and every nest in the country round about
+that the wretches can lay hands on is harried. Their professional term
+for a nest of eggs is "a clutch," a word that well expresses the work of
+their grasping, murderous fingers. They clutch and destroy in the germ
+the life and music of the woodlands. Certain of our natural history
+journals are mainly organs of communication between these human weasels.
+They record their exploits at nest-robbing and bird-slaying in their
+columns. One collector tells with gusto how he "worked his way" through
+an orchard, ransacking every tree, and leaving, as he believed, not one
+nest behind him. He had better not be caught working his way through my
+orchard. Another gloats over the number of Connecticut warblers--a rare
+bird--he killed in one season in Massachusetts. Another tells how a
+mocking-bird appeared in southern New England and was hunted down by
+himself and friend, its eggs "clutched," and the bird killed. Who knows
+how much the bird lovers of New England lost by that foul deed? The
+progeny of the birds would probably have returned to Connecticut to
+breed, and their progeny, or a part of them, the same, till in time the
+famous songster would have become a regular visitant to New England.
+In the same journal still another collector describes minutely how he
+outwitted three humming birds and captured their nests and eggs,--a
+clutch he was very proud of. A Massachusetts bird harrier boasts of his
+clutch of the egg's of that dainty little warbler, the blue yellow-back.
+One season he took two sets, the next five sets, the next four sets,
+besides some single eggs, and the next season four sets, and says he
+might have found more had he had more time. One season he took, in
+about twenty days, three from one tree. I have heard of a collector who
+boasted of having taken one hundred sets of the eggs of the marsh wren,
+in a single day; of another, who took in the same time, thirty nests
+of the yellow-breasted chat; and of still another, who claimed to have
+taken one thousand sets of eggs of different birds in one season. A
+large business has grown up under the influence of this collecting
+craze. One dealer in eggs has those of over five hundred species. He
+says that his business in 1883 was twice that of 1882; in 1884 it was
+twice that of 1883, and so on. Collectors vie with each other in the
+extent and variety of their cabinets. They not only obtain eggs in sets,
+but aim to have a number of sets of the same bird so as to show all
+possible variations. I hear of a private collection that contains twelve
+sets of kingbirds' eggs, eight sets of house-wrens' eggs, four sets
+mocking-birds' eggs, etc.; sets of eggs taken in low trees, high trees,
+medium trees; spotted sets, dark sets, plain sets, and light sets of the
+same species of bird. Many collections are made on this latter plan.
+
+Thus are our birds hunted and cut off and all in the name of science; as
+if science had not long ago finished with these birds. She has weighed
+and measured, and dissected, and described them, and their nests, and
+eggs, and placed them in her cabinet; and the interest of science and
+of humanity now demands that this wholesale nest-robbing cease. These
+incidents I have given above, it is true, are but drops in the bucket,
+but the bucket would be more than full if we could get all the facts.
+Where one man publishes his notes, hundreds, perhaps thousands, say
+nothing, but go as silently about their nest-robbing as weasels.
+
+It is true that the student of ornithology often feels compelled to take
+bird-life. It is not an easy matter to "name all the birds without a
+gun," though an opera-glass will often render identification entirely
+certain, and leave the songster unharmed; but once having mastered the
+birds, the true ornithologist leaves his gun at home. This view of the
+case may not be agreeable to that desiccated mortal called the "closet
+naturalist," but for my own part the closet naturalist is a person with
+whom I have very little sympathy. He is about the most wearisome and
+profitless creature in existence. With his piles of skins, his cases of
+eggs, his laborious feather-splitting, and his outlandish nomenclature,
+he is not only the enemy of the birds but the enemy of all those who
+would know them rightly.
+
+Not the collectors alone are to blame for the diminishing numbers of our
+wild birds, but a large share of the responsibility rests upon quite a
+different class of persons, namely, the milliners. False taste in dress
+is as destructive to our feathered friends as are false aims in science.
+It is said that the traffic in the skins of our brighter plumaged
+birds, arising from their use by the milliners, reaches to hundreds of
+thousands annually. I am told of one middleman who collected from the
+shooters in one district, in four months, seventy thousand skins. It
+is a barbarous taste that craves this kind of ornamentation. Think of a
+woman or girl of real refinement appearing upon the street with her head
+gear adorned with the scalps of our songsters!
+
+It is probably true that the number of our birds destroyed by man is but
+a small percentage of the number cut off by their natural enemies; but
+it is to be remembered that those he destroys are in addition to those
+thus cut off, and that it is this extra or artificial destruction that
+disturbs the balance of nature. The operation of natural causes keeps
+the birds in check, but the greed of the collectors and milliners tends
+to their extinction.
+
+I can pardon a man who wishes to make a collection of eggs and birds
+for his own private use, if he will content himself with one or two
+specimens of a kind, though he will find any collection much less
+satisfactory and less valuable than he imagines, but the professional
+nest-robber and skin collector should be put down, either by legislation
+or with dogs and shotguns.
+
+I have remarked above that there is probably very little truth in
+the popular notion that snakes can "charm" birds. But two of my
+correspondents have each furnished me with an incident from his own
+experience, which seems to confirm the popular belief. One of them
+writes from Georgia as follows:--
+
+"Some twenty-eight years ago I was in Calaveras County, California,
+engaged in cutting lumber. One day in coming out of the camp or cabin,
+my attention was attracted to the curious action of a quail in the air,
+which, instead of flying low and straight ahead as usual, was some fifty
+feet high, flying in a circle, and uttering cries of distress. I watched
+the bird and saw it gradually descend, and following with my eye in a
+line from the bird to the ground saw a large snake with head erect and
+some ten or twelve inches above the ground, and mouth wide open, and
+as far as I could see, gazing intently on the quail (I was about thirty
+feet from the snake). The quail gradually descended, its circles growing
+smaller and smaller and all the time uttering cries of distress, until
+its feet were within two or three inches of the mouth of the snake; when
+I threw a stone, and though not hitting the snake, yet struck the ground
+so near as to frighten him, and he gradually started off. The quail,
+however, fell to the ground, apparently lifeless. I went forward and
+picked it up and found it was thoroughly overcome with fright, its
+little heart beating as if it would burst through the skin. After
+holding it in my hand a few moments it flew away. I then tried to find
+the snake, but could not. I am unable to say whether the snake was
+venomous or belonged to the constricting family, like the black snake.
+I can well recollect it was large and moved off rather slow. As I had
+never seen anything of the kind before, it made a great impression on
+my mind, and after the lapse of so long a time, the incident appears as
+vivid to me as though it had occurred yesterday."
+
+It is not probable that the snake had its mouth open; its darting tongue
+may have given that impression.
+
+The other incident comes to me from Vermont. "While returning from
+church in 1876," says the writer, "as I was crossing a bridge... I
+noticed a striped snake in the act of charming a song-sparrow. They were
+both upon the sand beneath the bridge. The snake kept his head swaying
+slowly from side to side, and darted his tongue out continually. The
+bird, not over a foot away, was facing the snake, hopping from one foot
+to the other, and uttering a dissatisfied little chirp. I watched them
+till the snake seized the bird, having gradually drawn nearer. As he
+seized it, I leaped over the side of the bridge; the snake glided away
+and I took up the bird, which he had dropped. It was too frightened to
+try to fly and I carried it nearly a mile before it flew from my open
+hand."
+
+If these observers are quite sure of what they saw, then undoubtedly
+snakes have the power to draw birds within their grasp. I remember that
+my mother told me that while gathering wild strawberries she had on one
+occasion come upon a bird fluttering about the head of a snake as if
+held there by a spell. On her appearance, the snake lowered its head and
+made off, and the panting bird flew away. A neighbor of mine killed
+a black snake which had swallowed a full-grown red squirrel, probably
+captured by the same power of fascination.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS
+
+
+The life of the birds, especially of our migratory song-birds, is a
+series of adventures and of hair-breadth escapes by flood and field.
+Very few of them probably die a natural death, or even live out half
+their appointed days. The home instinct is strong in birds as it is in
+most creatures; and I am convinced that every spring a large number
+of those which have survived the Southern campaign return to their old
+haunts to breed. A Connecticut farmer took me out under his porch, one
+April day, and showed me a phoebe bird's nest six stories high. The same
+bird had no doubt returned year after year; and as there was room for
+only one nest upon her favorite shelf, she had each season reared a new
+superstructure upon the old as a foundation. I have heard of a white
+robin--an albino--that nested several years in succession in the suburbs
+of a Maryland city. A sparrow with a very marked peculiarity of song I
+have heard several seasons in my own locality. But the birds do not all
+live to return to their old haunts: the bobolinks and starlings run a
+gauntlet of fire from the Hudson to the Savannah, and the robins and
+meadow-larks and other song-birds are shot by boys and pot-hunters in
+great numbers,--to say nothing of their danger from hawks and owls. But
+of those that do return, what perils beset their nests, even in the most
+favored localities! The cabins of the early settlers, when the country
+was swarming with hostile Indians, were not surrounded by such dangers.
+The tender households of the birds are not only exposed to hostile
+Indians in the shape of cats and collectors, but to numerous murderous
+and bloodthirsty animals, against whom they have no defense but
+concealment. They lead the darkest kind of pioneer life, even in our
+gardens and orchards, and under the walls of our houses. Not a day or a
+night passes, from the time the eggs are laid till the young are flown,
+when the chances are not greatly in favor of the nest being rifled and
+its contents devoured,--by owls, skunks, minks, and coons at night, and
+by crows, jays, squirrels, weasels, snakes, and rats during the day.
+Infancy, we say, is hedged about by many perils; but the infancy of
+birds is cradled and pillowed in peril. An old Michigan settler told
+me that the first six children that were born to him died; malaria and
+teething invariably carried them off when they had reached a certain
+age; but other children were born, the country improved, and by and by
+the babies weathered the critical period and the next six lived and grew
+up. The birds, too, would no doubt persevere six times and twice six
+times, if the season were long enough, and finally rear their family,
+but the waning summer cuts them short, and but a few species have the
+heart and strength to make even the third trial.
+
+The first nest-builders in spring, like the first settlers near hostile
+tribes, suffer the most casualties. A large portion of the nests of
+April and May are destroyed; their enemies have been many months without
+eggs and their appetites are keen for them. It is a time, too, when
+other food is scarce, and the crows and squirrels are hard put. But the
+second nests of June, and still more the nests of July and August, are
+seldom molested. It is rarely that the nest of the goldfinch or the
+cedar-bird is harried.
+
+My neighborhood on the Hudson is perhaps exceptionally unfavorable as
+a breeding haunt for birds, owing to the abundance of fish-crows and
+of red squirrels; and the season of which this chapter is mainly a
+chronicle, the season of 1881, seems to have been a black-letter one
+even for this place, for at least nine nests out of every ten that I
+observed during that spring and summer failed of their proper issue.
+From the first nest I noted, which was that of a bluebird,--built
+(very imprudently I thought at the time) in a squirrel-hole in a decayed
+apple-tree, about the last of April, and which came to naught, even
+the mother-bird, I suspect, perishing by a violent death,--to the last,
+which was that of a snow-bird, observed in August, among the Catskills,
+deftly concealed in a mossy bank by the side of a road that skirted a
+wood, where the tall thimble blackberries grew in abundance, from which
+the last young one was taken, when it was about half grown, by some
+nocturnal walker or daylight prowler, some untoward fate seemed hovering
+about them. It was a season of calamities, of violent deaths, of pillage
+and massacre, among our feathered neighbors. For the first time I
+noticed that the orioles were not safe in their strong, pendent nests.
+Three broods were started in the apple-trees, only a few yards from
+the house, where, for previous seasons, the birds had nested without
+molestation; but this time the young were all destroyed when about half
+grown. Their chirping and chattering, which was so noticeable one day,
+suddenly ceased the next. The nests were probably plundered at night,
+and doubtless by the little red screech-owl, which I know is a denizen
+of these old orchards, living in the deeper cavities of the trees. The
+owl could alight on the top of the nest, and easily thrust his murderous
+claw down into its long pocket and seize the young and draw them forth.
+The tragedy of one of the nests was heightened, or at least made more
+palpable, by one of the half-fledged birds, either in its attempt to
+escape or while in the clutches of the enemy, being caught and entangled
+in one of the horse-hairs by which the nest was stayed and held to the
+limb above. There it hung bruised and dead, gibbeted to its own cradle.
+This nest was the theatre of another little tragedy later in the season.
+Some time in August a bluebird, indulging its propensity to peep and
+pry into holes and crevices, alighted upon it and probably inspected the
+interior; but by some unlucky move it got its wings entangled in this
+same fatal horse-hair. Its efforts to free itself appeared only to
+result in its being more securely and hopelessly bound; and there it
+perished; and there its form, dried and embalmed by the summer heats,
+was yet hanging in September, the outspread wings and plumage showing
+nearly as bright as in life.
+
+A correspondent writes me that one of his orioles got entangled in a
+cord while building her nest, and that though by the aid of a ladder
+he reached and liberated her, she died soon afterward. He also found
+a "chippie" (called also "hair bird") suspended from a branch by a
+horse-hair, beneath a partly constructed nest. I heard of a cedar-bird
+caught and destroyed in the same way, and of two young bluebirds,
+around whose legs a horse-hair had become so tightly wound that the legs
+withered up and dropped off. The birds became fledged, and left the nest
+with the others. Such tragedies are probably quite common.
+
+Before the advent of civilization in this country, the oriole probably
+built a much deeper nest than it usually does at present. When now it
+builds in remote trees and along the borders of the woods, its nest,
+I have noticed, is long and gourd-shaped; but in orchards and near
+dwellings it is only a deep cup or pouch. It shortens it up in
+proportion as the danger lessens. Probably a succession of disastrous
+years, like the one under review, would cause it to lengthen it again
+beyond the reach of owl's talons or jay-bird's beak.
+
+The first song-sparrow's nest I observed in the spring of 1881 was in
+the field under a fragment of a board, the board being raised from the
+ground a couple of inches by two poles. It had its full complement of
+eggs, and probably sent forth a brood of young birds, though as to this
+I cannot speak positively, as I neglected to observe it further. It was
+well sheltered and concealed, and was not easily come at by any of its
+natural enemies, save snakes and weasels. But concealment often avails
+little. In May, a song-sparrow, that had evidently met with disaster
+earlier in the season, built its nest in a thick mass of woodbine
+against the side of my house, about fifteen feet from the ground.
+Perhaps it took the hint from its cousin, the English sparrow. The nest
+was admirably placed, protected from the storms by the overhanging
+eaves and from all eyes by the thick screen of leaves. Only by patiently
+watching the suspicious bird, as she lingered near with food in her
+beak, did I discover its whereabouts. That brood is safe, I thought,
+beyond doubt. But it was not; the nest was pillaged one night, either
+by an owl, or else by a rat that had climbed into the vine, seeking
+an entrance to the house. The mother-bird, after reflecting upon her
+ill-luck about a week, seemed to resolve to try a different system of
+tactics and to throw all appearances of concealment aside. She built a
+nest few yards from the house beside the drive, upon a smooth piece
+of greensward. There was not a weed or a shrub or anything whatever to
+conceal it or mark its site. The structure was completed and incubation
+had begun before I discovered what was going on. "Well, well," I said,
+looking down upon the bird almost at my feet, "this is going to the
+other extreme indeed; now, the cats will have you." The desperate little
+bird sat there day after day, looking like a brown leaf pressed down in
+the short green grass. As the weather grew hot, her position became very
+trying. It was no longer a question of keeping the eggs warm, but of
+keeping them from roasting. The sun had no mercy on her, and she fairly
+panted in the middle of the day. In such an emergency the male robin
+has been known to perch above the sitting female and shade her with his
+outstretched wings. But in this case there was no perch for the male
+bird, had he been disposed to make a sunshade of himself. I thought to
+lend a hand in this direction myself, and so stuck a leafy twig beside
+the nest. This was probably an unwise interference; it guided disaster
+to the spot; the nest was broken up, and the mother-bird was probably
+caught, as I never saw her afterward.
+
+For several previous summers a pair of kingbirds had reared, unmolested,
+a brood of young in an apple-tree, only a few yards from the house; but
+during this season disaster overtook them also. The nest was completed,
+the eggs laid, and incubation had begun, when, one morning about
+sunrise, I heard cries of distress and alarm proceed from the old
+apple-tree. Looking out of the window I saw a crow, which I knew to be a
+fish-crow, perched upon the edge of the nest, hastily bolting the eggs.
+The parent birds, usually so ready for the attack, seemed over-come
+with grief and alarm. They fluttered about in the most helpless and
+bewildered manner, and it was not till the robber fled on my approach
+that they recovered themselves and charged upon him. The crow scurried
+away with upturned, threatening head, the furious kingbirds fairly upon
+his back. The pair lingered around their desecrated nest for several
+days, almost silent, and saddened by their loss, and then disappeared.
+They probably made another trial elsewhere.
+
+The fish-crow only fishes when it has destroyed all the eggs and young
+birds it can find. It is the most despicable thief and robber among
+our feathered creatures. From May to August, it is gorged with the
+fledglings of the nest. It is fortunate that its range is so limited.
+In size it is smaller than the common crow, and is a much less noble
+and dignified bird. Its caw is weak and feminine--a sort of split and
+abortive caw, that stamps it the sneak-thief it is. This crow is
+common farther south, but is not found in this State, so far as I have
+observed, except in the valley of the Hudson.
+
+One season a pair of them built a nest in a Norway Spruce that stood
+amid a dense growth of other ornamental trees near a large unoccupied
+house. They sat down amid plenty. The wolf established himself in the
+fold. The many birds--robins, thrushes, finches, vireos, pewees--that
+seek the vicinity of dwellings (especially of these large country
+residences with their many trees and park-like grounds), for the greater
+safety of their eggs and young, were the easy and convenient victims
+of these robbers. They plundered right and left, and were not disturbed
+till their young were nearly fledged, when some boys, who had long
+before marked them as their prize, rifled the nest.
+
+The song-birds nearly all build low; their cradle is not upon the
+tree-top. It is only birds of prey that fear danger from below more than
+from above, and that seek the higher branches for their nests. A line
+five feet from the ground would run above more than half the nests, and
+one ten feet would bound more than three fourths of them. It is only
+the oriole and the wood pewee that, as a rule, go higher than this. The
+crows and jays and other enemies of the birds have learned to explore
+this belt pretty thoroughly. But the leaves and the protective coloring
+of most nests baffle them as effectually, no doubt as they do the
+professional ooelogist. The nest of the red-eyed vireo is one of the most
+artfully placed in the wood. It is just beyond the point where the eye
+naturally pauses in its search; namely, on the extreme end of the lowest
+branch of the tree, usually four or five feet from the ground. One looks
+up and down through the tree,--shoots his eye-beams into it as he might
+discharge his gun at some game hidden there, but the drooping tip of
+that low horizontal branch--who would think of pointing his piece just
+there? If a crow or other marauder were to alight upon the branch or
+upon those above it, the nest would be screened from him by the large
+leaf that usually forms a canopy immediately above it. The nest-hunter
+standing at the foot of the tree and looking straight before him, might
+discover it easily, were it not for its soft, neutral gray tint which
+blends so thoroughly with the trunks and branches of trees. Indeed,
+I think there is no nest in the woods--no arboreal nest--so well
+concealed. The last one I saw was a pendent from the end of a low branch
+of a maple, that nearly grazed the clapboards of an unused hay-barn in
+a remote backwoods clearing. I peeped through a crack and saw the old
+birds feed the nearly fledged young within a few inches of my face. And
+yet the cow-bird finds this nest and drops her parasitical egg in
+it. Her tactics in this as in other cases are probably to watch the
+movements of the parent bird. She may often be seen searching anxiously
+through the trees or bushes for a suitable nest, yet she may still
+oftener be seen perched upon some good point of observation watching
+the birds as they come and go about her. There is no doubt that, in many
+cases, the cow-bird makes room for her own illegitimate egg in the nest
+by removing one of the bird's own. When the cow-bird finds two or more
+eggs in a nest in which she wishes to deposit her own, she will remove
+one of them. I found a sparrow's nest with two sparrow's eggs and one
+cow-bird's egg, another egg lying a foot or so below it on the ground.
+I replaced the ejected egg, and the next day found it again removed, and
+another cow-bird's egg in its place; I put it back the second time, when
+it was again ejected, or destroyed, for I failed to find it anywhere.
+Very alert and sensitive birds like the warblers often bury the strange
+egg beneath a second nest built on top of the old. A lady, living in the
+suburbs of an eastern city, one morning heard cries of distress from a
+pair of house-wrens that had a nest in a honeysuckle on her front porch.
+On looking out of the window, she beheld this little comedy--comedy from
+her point of view, but no doubt grim-tragedy from the point of view
+of the wrens; a cow-bird with a wren's egg in its beak running rapidly
+along the walk with the outraged wrens forming a procession behind it,
+screaming, scolding, and gesticulating as only these voluble little
+birds can. The cow-bird had probably been surprised in the act of
+violating the nest, and the wrens were giving her a piece of theirs
+minds.
+
+Every cow-bird is reared at the expense of two or more song-birds.
+For every one of these dusky little pedestrians there amid the grazing
+cattle there are two more sparrows, or vireos, or warblers, the less.
+It is a big price to pay--two larks for a bunting-two sovereigns for
+a shilling; but Nature does not hesitate occasionally to
+contradict herself in just this way. The young of the cow-bird is
+disproportionately large and aggressive, one might say hoggish.
+When disturbed it will clasp the nest and scream, and snap its beak
+threateningly. One hatched out in a song-sparrow's nest which was under
+my observation, and would soon have overridden and overborne the young
+sparrow, which came out of the shell a few hours later, had I not
+interfered from time to time and lent the young sparrow a helping hand.
+Every day I would visit the nest and take the sparrow out from under the
+pot-bellied interloper and place it on top so that presently it was able
+to hold its own against its enemy. Both birds became fledged and left
+the nest about the same time. Whether the race was an even one after
+that, I know not.
+
+I noted but two warblers' nests during that season, one of the
+black-throated blue-back and one of the redstart,--the latter built in
+an apple-tree but a few yards from a little rustic summer-house where
+I idle away many summer days. The lively little birds, darting and
+flashing about, attracted my attention for a week before I discovered
+their nest. They probably built it by working early in the morning,
+before I appeared upon the scene, as I never saw them with material in
+their beaks. Guessing from their movements that the nest was in a large
+maple that stood near by, I climbed the tree and explored it thoroughly,
+looking especially in the forks of the branches, as the authorities say
+these birds build in a fork. But no nest could I find. Indeed, how can
+one by searching find a bird's nest? I overshot the mark; the nest was
+much nearer me, almost under my very nose, and I discovered it, not by
+searching but by a casual glance of the eye, while thinking of other
+matters. The bird was just settling upon it as I looked up from my book
+and caught her in the act. The nest was built near the end of a long,
+knotty, horizontal branch of an apple-tree, but effectually hidden by
+the grouping of the leaves; it had three eggs, one of which proved to be
+barren. The two young birds grew apace, and were out of the nest early
+in the second week; but something caught one of them the first night.
+The other probably grew to maturity, as it disappeared from the vicinity
+with its parents after some days.
+
+The blue-back's nest was scarcely a foot from the ground, in a little
+bush situated in a low, dense wood of hemlock and beech and maple,
+amid the Catskills,--a deep, massive, elaborate structure, in which the
+sitting bird sank till her beak and tail alone were visible above the
+brim. It was a misty, chilly day when I chanced to find the nest, and
+the mother-bird knew instinctively that it was not prudent to leave her
+four half incubated eggs uncovered and exposed for a moment. When I sat
+down near the nest she grew very uneasy, and after trying in vain
+to decoy me away by suddenly dropping from the branches and dragging
+herself over the ground as if mortally wounded, she approached and
+timidly and half doubtingly covered her eggs within two yards of where
+I sat. I disturbed her several times to note her ways. There came to be
+something almost appealing in her looks and manner, and she would keep
+her place on her precious eggs till my outstretched hand was within a
+few feet of her. Finally, I covered the cavity of the nest with a dry
+leaf. This she did not remove with her beak, but thrust her head deftly
+beneath it and shook it off upon the ground. Many of her sympathizing
+neighbors, attracted by her alarm note, came and had a peep at the
+intruder and then flew away, but the male bird did not appear upon the
+scene. The final history of this nest I am unable to give, as I did not
+again visit it till late in the season, when, of course, it was empty.
+
+Years pass without my finding a brown-thrasher's nest; it is not a nest
+you are likely to stumble upon in your walk; it is hidden as a miser
+hides his gold, and watched as jealously. The male pours out his rich
+and triumphant song from the tallest tree he can find, and fairly
+challenges you to come and look for his treasures in his vicinity. But
+you will not find them if you go. The nest is somewhere on the outer
+circle of his song; he is never so imprudent as to take up his stand
+very near it. The artists who draw those cosy little pictures of a
+brooding mother-bird with the male perched but a yard away in full song,
+do not copy from nature. The thrasher's nest I found thirty or forty
+rods from the point where the male was wont to indulge in his brilliant
+recitative. It was in an open field under a low ground-juniper. My dog
+disturbed the sitting bird as I was passing near. The nest could be
+seen only by lifting up and parting away the branches. All the arts of
+concealment had been carefully studied. It was the last place you would
+think of looking, and, if you did look, nothing was visible but the
+dense green circle of the low-spreading juniper. When you approached,
+the bird would keep her place till you had begun to stir the branches,
+when she would start out, and, just skimming the ground, make a bright
+brown line to the near fence and bushes. I confidently expected that
+this nest would escape molestation, but it did not. Its discovery by
+myself and dog probably opened the door for ill luck, as one day, not
+long afterward, when I peeped in upon it, it was empty. The proud song
+of the male had ceased from his accustomed tree, and the pair were seen
+no more in that vicinity.
+
+The phoebe-bird is a wise architect, and perhaps enjoys as great an
+immunity from danger, both in its person and its nest, as any other
+bird. Its modest, ashen-gray suit is the color of the rocks where it
+builds, and the moss of which it makes such free use gives to its nest
+the look of a natural growth or accretion. But when it comes into the
+barn or under the shed to build, as it so frequently does, the moss is
+rather out of place. Doubtless in time the bird will take the hint, and
+when she builds in such places will leave the moss out. I noted but two
+nests, the summer I am speaking of: one, in a barn, failed of issue, on
+account of the rats, I suspect, though the little owl may have been the
+depredator; the other, in the woods, sent forth three young. This latter
+nest was most charmingly and ingeniously placed. I discovered it while
+in quest of pond-lilies, in a long, deep level stretch of water in the
+woods. A large tree had blown over at the edge of the water, and its
+dense mass of up-turned roots, with the black, peaty soil filling the
+interstices, was like the fragment of a wall several feet high, rising
+from the edge of the languid current. In a niche in this earthy wall,
+and visible and accessible only from the water, a phoebe had built her
+nest, and reared her brood. I paddled my boat up and came alongside
+prepared to take the family aboard. The young, nearly ready to fly, were
+quite undisturbed by my presence, having probably been assured that no
+danger need be apprehended from that side. It was not a likely place for
+minks, or they would not have been so secure.
+
+I noted but one nest of the wood pewee, and that, too, like so many
+other nests, failed of issue. It was saddled upon a small dry limb of a
+plane-tree that stood by the roadside, about forty feet from the ground.
+Every day for nearly a week, as I passed by I saw the sitting bird upon
+the nest. Then one morning she was not in her place, and on examination
+the nest proved to be empty--robbed, I had no doubt, by the red
+squirrels, as they were very abundant in its vicinity, and appeared to
+make a clean sweep of every nest. The wood pewee builds an exquisite
+nest, shaped and finished as if cast in a mould. It is modeled
+without and within with equal neatness and art, like the nest of the
+humming-bird and the little gray gnat-catcher. The material is much
+more refractory than that used by either of these birds, being, in the
+present case, dry, fine cedar twigs; but these were bound into a shape
+as rounded and compact as could be moulded out of the most plastic
+material. Indeed, the nest of this bird looks precisely like a large,
+lichen-covered, cup-shaped excrescence of the limb upon which it is
+placed. And the bird, while sitting, seems entirely at ease. Most birds
+seem to make very hard work of incubation. It is a kind of martyrdom
+which appears to tax all their powers of endurance. They have such a
+fixed, rigid, predetermined look, pressed down into the nest and as
+motionless as if made of cast-iron. But the wood pewee is an exception.
+She is largely visible above the rim of the nest. Her attitude is easy
+and graceful; she moves her head this way and that, and seems to take
+note of whatever goes on about her; and if her neighbor were to drop in
+for a little social chat, she could doubtless do her part. In fact,
+she makes light and easy work of what, to most other birds, is such a
+serious and engrossing matter. If it does not look like play with her,
+it at least looks like leisure and quiet contemplation.
+
+There is no nest-builder that suffers more from crows and squirrels
+and other enemies than the wood-thrush. It builds as openly and
+unsuspiciously as if it thought the whole world as honest as itself.
+Its favorite place is the fork of a sapling, eight or ten feet from
+the ground, where it falls an easy prey to every nest-robber that comes
+prowling through the woods and groves. It is not a bird that skulks and
+hides, like the cat-bird, the brown-thrasher, the chat, or the cheewink,
+and its nest is not concealed with the same art as theirs. Our thrushes
+are all frank, open-mannered birds; but the veery and the hermit build
+upon the ground, where they at least escape the crows, owls, and jays,
+and stand a better chance to be overlooked, by the red squirrel and
+weasel also; while the robin seeks the protection of dwellings and
+out-buildings. For years I have not known the nest of a wood-thrush
+to succeed. During the season referred to I observed but two, both
+apparently a second attempt, as the season was well advanced, and both
+failures. In one case, the nest was placed in a branch that an apple
+tree, standing near a dwelling, held out over the highway. The structure
+was barely ten feet above the middle of the road, and would just escape
+a passing load of hay. It was made conspicuous by the use of a large
+fragment of newspaper in its foundation--an unsafe material to build
+upon in most cases. Whatever else the press may guard, this particular
+newspaper did not guard this nest from harm. It saw the egg and probably
+the chick, but not the fledgeling. A murderous deed was committed
+above the public highway, but whether in the open day or under cover
+of darkness I have no means of knowing. The frisky red squirrel was
+doubtless the culprit. The other nest was in a maple sapling, within
+a few yards of the little rustic summer-house already referred to. The
+first attempt of the season, I suspect, had failed in a more secluded
+place under the hill; so the pair had come up nearer the house for
+protection. The male sang in the trees near by for several days before
+I chanced to see the nest. The very morning, I think, it was finished,
+I saw a red squirrel exploring a tree but a few yards away; he probably
+knew what the singing meant as well as I did. I did not see the inside
+of the nest, for it was almost instantly deserted, the female having
+probably laid a single egg, which the squirrel had devoured.
+
+If I were a bird, in building my nest I should follow the example of the
+bobolink, placing it in the midst of a broad meadow, where there was no
+spear of grass, or flower or growth unlike another to mark its site. I
+judge that the bobolink escapes the dangers to which I have adverted
+as few or no other birds do. Unless the mowers come along at an earlier
+date than she has anticipated, that is, before July lst, or a skunk goes
+nosing through the grass, which is unusual, she is as safe as bird well
+can be in the great open of nature. She selects the most monotonous and
+uniform place she can find amid the daisies or the timothy and clover,
+and places her simple structure upon the ground in the midst of it.
+There is no concealment, except as the great conceals the little, as
+the desert conceals the pebble, as the myriad conceals the unit. You
+may find the nest once, if your course chances to lead you across it
+and your eye is quick enough to note the silent brown bird as she darts
+quickly away; but step three paces in the wrong direction, and your
+search will probably be fruitless. My friend and I found a nest by
+accident one day, and then lost it again one minute afterward. I moved
+away a few yards to be sure of the mother-bird, charging my friend not
+to stir from his tracks. When I returned, he had moved two paces, he
+said (he had really moved four), and we spent a half hour stooping
+over the daisies and the buttercups, looking for the lost clew. We
+grew desperate, and fairly felt the ground all over with our hands, but
+without avail. I marked the spot with a bush, and came the next day, and
+with the bush as a centre, moved about it in slowly increasing circles,
+covering, I thought, nearly every inch of ground with my feet, and
+laying hold of it with all the visual power that I could command, till
+my patience was exhausted, and I gave up, baffled. I began to doubt
+the ability of the parent birds themselves to find it, and so secreted
+myself and watched. After much delay, the male bird appeared with food
+in his beak, and satisfying himself that the coast was clear, dropped
+into the grass which I had trodden down in my search. Fastening my eye
+upon a particular meadow-lily, I walked straight to the spot, bent down,
+and gazed long and intently into the grass. Finally my eye separated the
+nest and its young from its surroundings. My foot had barely missed them
+in my search, but by how much they had escaped my eye I could not tell.
+Probably not by distance at all, but simply by unrecognition. They were
+virtually invisible. The dark gray and yellowish brown dry grass and
+stubble of the meadow-bottom were exactly copied in the color of the
+half-fledged young. More than that, they hugged the nest so closely and
+formed such a compact mass, that though there were five of them, they
+preserved the unit of expression,--no single head or form was defined;
+they were one, and that one was without shape or color, and
+not separable, except by closest scrutiny, from the one of the
+meadow-bottom. That nest prospered, as bobolinks' nests doubtless
+generally do; for, notwithstanding the enormous slaughter of the birds
+during their fall migrations by Southern sportsmen, the bobolink
+appears to hold its own, and its music does not diminish in our Northern
+meadows.
+
+Birds with whom the struggle for life is the sharpest seem to be more
+prolific than those whose nest and young are exposed to fewer dangers.
+The robin, the sparrow, the pewee, etc., will rear, or make the attempt
+to rear, two and sometimes three broods in a season; but the bobolink,
+the oriole, the kingbird, the goldfinch, the cedar-bird, the birds of
+prey, and the woodpeckers, that build in safe retreats, in the trunks
+of trees, have usually but a single brood. If the boblink reared two
+broods, our meadows would swarm with them.
+
+I noted three nests of the cedar-bird in August in a single orchard,
+all productive, but all with one or more unfruitful eggs in them. The
+cedar-bird is the most silent of our birds having but a single fine
+note, so far as I have observed, but its manners are very expressive at
+times. No bird known to me is capable of expressing so much silent alarm
+while on the nest as this bird. As you ascend the tree and draw near it,
+it depresses its plumage and crest, stretches up its neck, and becomes
+the very picture of fear. Other birds, under like circumstances, hardly
+change their expression at all till they launch into the air, when by
+their voice they express anger rather than alarm.
+
+I have referred to the red squirrel as a destroyer of the eggs and young
+of birds. I think the mischief it does in this respect can hardly be
+over estimated. Nearly all birds look upon it as their enemy, and attack
+and annoy it when it appears near their breeding haunts. Thus, I have
+seen the pewee, the cuckoo, the robin, and the wood-thrush pursuing it
+with angry voice and gestures. A friend of mine saw a pair of robins
+attack one in the top of a tall tree so vigorously that they caused it
+to lose its hold, when it fell to the ground, and was so stunned by the
+blow as to allow him to pick it up. If you wish the birds to breed and
+thrive in your orchard and groves, kill every red squirrel that infests
+the place; kill every weasel also. The weasel is a subtle and arch enemy
+of the birds. It climbs trees and explores them with great ease and
+nimbleness. I have seen it do so on several occasions. One day my
+attention was arrested by the angry notes of a pair of brown-thrashers
+that were flitting from bush to bush along an old stone row in a remote
+field. Presently I saw what it was that excited them--three large red
+weasels, or ermines coming along the stone wall, and leisurely and half
+playfully exploring every tree that stood near it. They had probably
+robbed the thrashers. They would go up the trees with great ease, and
+glide serpent-like out upon the main branches. When they descended the
+tree they were unable to come straight down, like a squirrel, but went
+around it spirally. How boldly they thrust their heads out of the wall,
+and eyed me and sniffed me, as I drew near,--their round, thin ears,
+their prominent, glistening, bead-like eyes, and the curving, snake-like
+motions of the head and neck being very noticeable. They looked like
+blood-suckers and egg-suckers. They suggested something extremely
+remorseless and cruel. One could understand the alarm of the rats when
+they discover one of these fearless, subtle, and circumventing creatures
+threading their holes. To flee must be like trying to escape death
+itself. I was one day standing in the woods upon a flat stone, in what
+at certain seasons was the bed of a stream, when one of these weasels
+came undulating along and ran under the stone upon which I was standing.
+As I remained motionless, he thrust his wedge-shaped head, and turned it
+back above the stone as if half in mind to seize my foot; then he drew
+back, and presently went his way. These weasels often hunt in packs like
+the British stoat. When I was a boy, my father one day armed me with
+an old musket and sent me to shoot chipmunks around the corn. While
+watching the squirrels, a troop of weasels tried to cross a bar-way
+where I sat, and were so bent on doing it that I fired at them,
+boy-like, simply to thwart their purpose. One of the weasels was
+disabled by my shot, but the troop was not discouraged, and, after
+making several feints to cross, one of them seized the wounded one and
+bore it over, and the pack disappeared in the wall on the other side.
+
+Let me conclude this chapter with two or three notes about this alert
+enemy of the birds and the lesser animals, the weasel.
+
+A farmer one day heard a queer growling sound in the grass; on
+approaching the spot he saw two weasels contending over a mouse; each
+had hold of the mouse pulling in opposite directions, and were so
+absorbed in the struggle that the farmer cautiously put his hands down
+and grabbed them both by the back of the neck. He put them in a cage,
+and offered them bread and other food. This they refused to eat, but in
+a few days one of them had eaten the other up, picking his bones clean
+and leaving nothing but the skeleton.
+
+The same farmer was one day in his cellar when two rats came out of a
+hole near him in great haste, and ran up the cellar wall and along its
+top till they came to a floor timber that stopped their progress, when
+they turned at bay, and looked excitedly back along the course they had
+come. In a moment a weasel, evidently in hot pursuit of them, came out
+of the hole, and seeing the farmer, checked his course and darted back.
+The rats had doubtless turned to give him fight, and would probably have
+been a match for him.
+
+The weasel seems to track its game by scent. A hunter of my acquaintance
+was one day sitting in the woods, when he saw a red squirrel run with
+great speed up a tree near him, and out upon a long branch, from which
+he leaped to some rocks, and disappeared beneath them. In a moment a
+weasel came in full course upon his trail, ran up the tree, then out
+along the branch, from the end of which he leaped to the rocks as the
+squirrel did, and plunged beneath them.
+
+Doubtless the squirrel fell a prey to him. The squirrel's best game
+would have been to have kept to the higher tree-tops, where he could
+easily have distanced the weasel. But beneath the rocks he stood a very
+poor chance. I have often wondered what keeps such an animal as the
+weasel in check, for weasels are quite rare. They never need go hungry,
+for rats and squirrels and mice and birds are everywhere. They probably
+do not fall a prey to any other animal, and very rarely to man. But
+the circumstances or agencies that check the increase of any species of
+animal are, as Darwin says, very obscure and but little known.
+
+
+
+
+BEES.
+
+
+
+
+AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.
+
+
+There is no creature with which man has surrounded himself that seems
+so much like a product of civilization, so much like the result of
+development on special lines and in special fields, as the honey-bee.
+Indeed, a colony of bees, with their neatness and love of order, their
+division of labor, their public spiritedness, their thrift, their
+complex economies and their inordinate love of gain, seems as far
+removed from a condition of rude nature as does a walled city or a
+cathedral town. Our native bee, on the other hand, "the burly, dozing
+humble-bee," affects one more like the rude, untutored savage. He
+has learned nothing from experience. He lives from hand to mouth. He
+luxuriates in time of plenty, and he starves in times of scarcity.
+He lives in a rude nest or in a hole in the ground, and in small
+communities; he builds a few deep cells or sacks in which he stores a
+little honey and bee-bread for his young, but as a worker in wax he is
+of the most primitive and awkward. The Indian regarded the honey-bee as
+an ill-omen. She was the white man's fly. In fact she was the epitome of
+the white man himself. She has the white man's craftiness, his industry,
+his architectural skill, his neatness and love of system, his foresight;
+and above all his eager, miserly habits. The honeybee's great ambition
+is to be rich, to lay up great stores, to possess the sweet of every
+flower that blooms. She is more than provident. Enough will not satisfy
+her, she must have all she can get by hook or by crook. She comes from
+the oldest country, Asia, and thrives best in the most fertile and
+long-settled lands.
+
+Yet the fact remains that the honey-bee is essentially a wild creature,
+and never has been and cannot be thoroughly domesticated. Its proper
+home is the woods, and thither every new swarm counts on going;
+and thither many do go in spite of the care and watchfulness of the
+bee-keeper. If the woods in any given locality are deficient in trees
+with suitable cavities, the bees resort to all sorts of makeshifts; they
+go into chimneys, into barns and outhouses, under stones, into rocks,
+and so forth. Several chimneys in my locality with disused flues are
+taken possession of by colonies of bees nearly every season. One day,
+while bee-hunting, I developed a line that went toward a farm-house
+where I had reason to believe no bees were kept. I followed it up and
+questioned the farmer about his bees. He said he kept no bees, but that
+a swarm had taken possession of his chimney, and another had gone under
+the clapboards in the gable end of his house. He had taken a large lot
+of honey out of both places the year before. Another farmer told me that
+one day his family had seen a number of bees examining a knot-hole in
+the side of his house; the next day as they were sitting down to
+dinner their attention was attracted by a loud humming noise, when
+they discovered a swarm of bees settling upon the side of the house and
+pouring into the knot-hole. In subsequent years other swarms came to the
+same place.
+
+Apparently, every swarm of bees before it leaves the parent hive sends
+out exploring parties to look up the future home. The woods and groves
+are searched through and through, and no doubt the privacy of many a
+squirrel and many a wood mouse is intruded upon. What cozy nooks and
+retreats they do spy out, so much more attractive than the painted hive
+in the garden, so much cooler in summer and so much warmer in winter!
+
+The bee is in the main an honest citizen; she prefers legitimate to
+illegitimate business; she is never an outlaw until her proper sources
+of supply fail; she will not touch honey as long as honey-yielding
+flowers can be found; she always prefers to go to the fountain-head, and
+dislikes to take her sweets at second hand. But in the fall, after the
+flowers have failed, she can be tempted. The bee-hunter takes advantage
+of this fact; he betrays her with a little honey. He wants to steal her
+stores, and he first encourages her to steal his, then follows the thief
+home with her booty. This is the whole trick of the bee-hunter. The bees
+never suspect his game, else by taking a circuitous route they could
+easily baffle him. But the honey-bee has absolutely no wit or cunning
+outside of her special gifts as a gatherer and storer of honey. She is a
+simple-minded creature, and can be imposed upon by any novice. Yet it is
+not every novice that can find a bee-tree. The sportsman may track his
+game to its retreat by the aid of his dog, but in hunting the honey-bee
+one must be his own dog, and track his game through an element in which
+it leaves no trail. It is a task for a sharp, quick eye, and may test
+the resources of the best wood-craft. One autumn when I devoted much
+time to this pursuit, as the best means of getting at nature and the
+open-air exhilaration, my eye became so trained that bees were nearly
+as easy to it as birds. I saw and heard bees wherever I went. One day,
+standing on a street corner in a great city, I saw above the trucks
+and the traffic a line of bees carrying off sweets from some grocery or
+confectionery shop.
+
+One looks upon the woods with a new interest when he suspects they hold
+a colony of bees. What a pleasing secret it is; a tree with a heart
+of comb-honey, a decayed oak or maple with a bit of Sicily or Mount
+Hymettus stowed away in its trunk or branches; secret chambers where
+lies hidden the wealth of ten thousand little freebooters, great nuggets
+and wedges of precious ore gathered with risk and labor from every field
+and wood about.
+
+But if you would know the delights of bee-hunting, and how many sweets
+such a trip yields beside honey, come with me some bright, warm, late
+September or early October day. It is the golden season of the year,
+and any errand or pursuit that takes us abroad upon the hills or by
+the painted woods and along the amber colored streams at such a time is
+enough. So, with haversacks filled with grapes and peaches and apples
+and a bottle of milk,--for we shall not be home to dinner,--and armed
+with a compass, a hatchet, a pail, and a box with a piece of comb-honey
+neatly fitted into it--any box the size of your hand with a lid will do
+nearly as well as the elaborate and ingenious contrivance of the regular
+bee-hunter--we sally forth. Our course at first lies along the highway,
+under great chestnut-trees whose nuts are just dropping, then through an
+orchard and across a little creek, thence gently rising through a long
+series of cultivated fields toward some high, uplying land, behind which
+rises a rugged wooded ridge or mountain, the most sightly point in all
+this section. Behind this ridge for several miles the country is wild,
+wooded, and rocky, and is no doubt the home of many wild swarms of
+bees. What a gleeful uproar the robins, cedar-birds, high-holes, and
+cow black-birds make amid the black cherry-trees as we pass along. The
+raccoons, too, have been here after black cherries, and we see their
+marks at various points. Several crows are walking about a newly
+sowed wheat field we pass through, and we pause to note their graceful
+movements and glossy coats. I have seen no bird walk the ground with
+just the same air the crow does. It is not exactly pride; there is no
+strut or swagger in it, though perhaps just a little condescension; it
+is the contented, complaisant, and self-possessed gait of a lord over
+his domains. All these acres are mine, he says, and all these crops; men
+plow and sow for me, and I stay here or go there, and find life sweet
+and good wherever I am. The hawk looks awkward and out of place on the
+ground; the game birds hurry and skulk, but the crow is at home and
+treads the earth as if there were none to molest him or make him afraid.
+
+The crows we have always with us, but it is not every day or every
+season that one sees an eagle. Hence I must preserve the memory of one I
+saw the last day I went bee-hunting. As I was laboring up the side of a
+mountain at the head of a valley, the noble bird sprang from the top of
+a dry tree above me and came sailing directly over my head. I saw him
+bend his eye down upon me, and I could hear the low hum of his plumage,
+as if the web off every quill in his great wings vibrated in his strong,
+level flight. I watched him as long as my eye could hold him. When he
+was fairly clear of the mountain he began that sweeping spiral movement
+in which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went without once breaking his
+majestic poise till he appeared to sight some far-off alien geography,
+when he bent his course thitherward and gradually vanished in the blue
+depths. The eagle is a bird of large ideas, he embraces long distances;
+the continent is his home. I never look upon one without emotion; I
+follow him with my eye as long as I can. I think of Canada, of the Great
+Lakes, of the Rocky Mountains, of the wild and sounding sea-coast. The
+waters are his, and the woods and the inaccessible cliffs. He pierces
+behind the veil of the storm, and his joy is height and depth and vast
+spaces.
+
+We go out of our way to touch at a spring run in the edge of the woods,
+and are lucky to find a single scarlet lobelia lingering there. It seems
+almost to light up the gloom with its intense bit of color. Beside
+a ditch in a field beyond we find the great blue lobelia (Lobelia
+syphilitica), and near it amid the weeds and wild grasses and purple
+asters the most beautiful of our fall flowers, the fringed gentian. What
+a rare and delicate, almost aristocratic look the gentian has amid its
+coarse, unkempt surroundings. It does not lure the bee, but it lures and
+holds every passing human eye. If we strike through the corner of yonder
+woods, where the ground is moistened by hidden springs and where there
+is a little opening amid the trees, we shall find the closed gentian, a
+rare flower in this locality. I had walked this way many times before
+I chanced upon its retreat; and then I was following a line of bees. I
+lost the bees but I got the gentians. How curiously this flower looks,
+with its deep blue petals folded together so tightly--a bud and yet a
+blossom. It is the nun among our wild flowers, a form closely veiled
+and cloaked. The buccaneer bumble-bee sometimes tries to rifle it of
+its sweets. I have seen the blossom with the bee entombed in it. He
+had forced his way into the virgin corolla as if determined to know its
+secret, but he had never returned with the knowledge he had gained.
+
+After a refreshing walk of a couple of miles we reach a point where we
+will make our first trial--a high stone wall that runs parallel with the
+wooded ridge referred to, and separated from it by a broad field. There
+are bees at work there on that goldenrod, and it requires but little
+maneuvering to sweep one into our box. Almost any other creature rudely
+and suddenly arrested in its career and clapped into a cage in this way
+would show great confusion and alarm. The bee is alarmed for a moment,
+but the bee has a passion stronger than its love of life or fear of
+death, namely, desire for honey, not simply to eat, but to carry home
+as booty. "Such rage of honey in their bosom beats," says Virgil. It is
+quick to catch the scent of honey in the box, and as quick to fall to
+filling itself. We now set the box down upon the wall and gently remove
+the cover. The bee is head and shoulders in one of the half-filled
+cells, and is oblivious to everything else about it. Come rack, come
+ruin, it will die at work. We step back a few paces, and sit down upon
+the ground so as to bring the box against the blue sky as a background.
+In two or three minutes the bee is seen rising slowly and heavily from
+the box. It seems loath to leave so much honey behind and it marks the
+place well. It mounts aloft in a rapidly increasing spiral, surveying
+the near and minute objects first, then the larger and more distant,
+till having circled about the spot five or six times and taken all its
+bearings it darts away for home. It is a good eye that holds fast to the
+bee till it is fairly off. Sometimes one's head will swim following it,
+and often one's eyes are put out by the sun. This bee gradually drifts
+down the hill, then strikes away toward a farm-house half a mile away,
+where I know bees are kept. Then we try another and another, and the
+third bee, much to our satisfaction, goes straight toward the woods. We
+could see the brown speck against the darker background for many yards.
+The regular bee-hunter professes to be able to tell a wild bee from a
+tame one by the color, the former, he says, being lighter. But there is
+no difference; they are both alike in color and in manner. Young bees
+are lighter than old, and that is all there is of it. If a bee
+lived many years in the woods it would doubtless come to have some
+distinguishing marks, but the life of a bee is only a few months at the
+farthest, and no change is wrought in this brief time.
+
+Our bees are all soon back, and more with them, for we have touched
+the box here and there with the cork of a bottle of anise oil, and this
+fragrant and pungent oil will attract bees half a mile or more. When no
+flowers can be found, this is the quickest way to obtain a bee.
+
+It is a singular fact that when the bee first finds the hunter's box
+its first feeling is one of anger; it is as mad as a hornet; its tone
+changes, it sounds its shrill war trumpet and darts to and fro, and
+gives vent to its rage and indignation in no uncertain manner. It seems
+to scent foul play at once. It says, "Here is robbery; here is the
+spoil of some hive, may be my own," and its blood is up. But its ruling
+passion soon comes to the surface, its avarice gets the better of its
+indignation, and it seems to say, "Well, I had better take possession
+of this and carry it home." So after many feints and approaches and
+dartings off with a loud angry hum as if it would none of it, the bee
+settles down and fills itself.
+
+It does not entirely cool off and get soberly to work till it has made
+two or three trips home with its booty. When other bees come, even if
+all from the same swarm, they quarrel and dispute over the box, and clip
+and dart at each other like bantam cocks. Apparently the ill feeling
+which the sight of the honey awakens is not one of jealousy or rivalry,
+but wrath.
+
+A bee will usually make three or four trips from the hunter's box before
+it brings back a companion. I suspect the bee does not tell its fellows
+what it has found, but that they smell out the secret; it doubtless
+bears some evidence with it upon its feet or proboscis that it has been
+upon honey-comb and not upon flowers, and its companions take the hint
+and follow, arriving always many seconds behind. Then the quantity and
+quality of the booty would also betray it. No doubt, also, there are
+plenty of gossips about a hive that note and tell everything. "Oh, did
+you see that? Peggy Mel came in a few moments ago in great haste, and
+one of the up-stairs packers says she was loaded till she groaned with
+apple-blossom honey which she deposited, and then rushed off again
+like mad. Apple-blossom honey in October! Fee, fi, fo, fum! I smell
+something! Let's after."
+
+In about half an hour we have three well-defined lines of bees
+established--two to farm-houses and one to the woods, and our box is
+being rapidly depleted of its honey. About every fourth bee goes to the
+woods, and now that they have learned the way thoroughly they do not
+make the long preliminary whirl above the box, but start directly from
+it. The woods are rough and dense and the hill steep, and we do not like
+to follow the line of bees until we have tried at least to settle the
+problem as to the distance they go into the woods-whether the tree is on
+this side of the ridge or in the depth of the forest on the other side.
+So we shut up the box when it is full of bees and carry it about
+three hundred yards along the wall from which we are operating. When
+liberated, the bees, as they always will in such cases, go off in the
+same directions they have been going; they do not seem to know that they
+have been moved. But other bees have followed our scent, and it is not
+many minutes before a second line to the woods is established. This is
+called cross-lining the bees. The new line makes a sharp angle with the
+other line, and we know at once that the tree is only a few rods
+into the woods. The two lines we have established form two sides of a
+triangle of which the wall is the base; at the apex of the triangle, or
+where the two lines meet in the woods, we are sure to find the tree. We
+quickly follow up these lines, and where they cross each other on the
+side of the hill we scan every tree closely. I pause at the foot of an
+oak and examine a hole near the root; now the bees are in this tree and
+their entrance is on the upper side near the ground, not two feet from
+the hole I peer into, and yet so quiet and secret is their going and
+coming that I fail to discover them and pass on up the hill. Failing in
+this direction, I return to the oak again, and then perceive the bees
+going out in a small crack in the tree. The bees do not know they are
+found out and that the game is in our hands, and are as oblivious of our
+presence as if we were ants or crickets. The indications are that the
+swarm is a small one, and the store of honey trifling. In "taking up" a
+bee-tree it is usual first to kill or stupefy the bees with the fumes of
+burning sulfur or with tobacco smoke. But this course is impracticable
+on the present occasion, so we boldly and ruthlessly assault the tree
+with an ax we have procured. At the first blow the bees set up a loud
+buzzing, but we have no mercy, and the side of the cavity is soon
+cut away and the interior with its white-yellow mass of comb-honey is
+exposed, and not a bee strikes a blow in defense of its all. This may
+seem singular, but it has nearly always been my experience. When a swarm
+of bees are thus rudely assaulted with an ax, they evidently think the
+end of the world has come, and, like true misers as they are, each one
+seizes as much of the treasure as it can hold; in other words they all
+fall to and gorge themselves with honey, and calmly await the issue.
+When in this condition they make no defense and will not sting unless
+taken hold of. In fact they are as harmless as flies. Bees are always to
+be managed with boldness and decision.
+
+Any half-way measures, any timid poking about, any feeble attempts to
+reach their honey, are sure to be quickly resented. The popular notion
+that bees have a special antipathy toward certain persons and a liking
+for certain others has only this fact at the bottom of it; they will
+sting a person who is afraid of them and goes skulking and dodging
+about, and they will not sting a person who faces them boldly and has no
+dread of them. They are like dogs. The way to disarm a vicious dog is to
+show him you do not fear him; it is his turn to be afraid then. I never
+had any dread of bees and am seldom stung by them. I have climbed up
+into a large chestnut that contained a swarm in one of its cavities and
+chopped them out with an ax, being obliged at times to pause and brush
+the bewildered bees from my hands and face, and not been stung once.
+I have chopped a swarm out of an apple-tree in June and taken out the
+cards of honey and arranged them in a hive, and then dipped out the
+bees with a dipper, and taken the whole home with me in pretty good
+condition, with scarcely any opposition on the part of the bees. In
+reaching your hand into the cavity to detach and remove the comb you
+are pretty sure to get stung, for when you touch the "business end" of a
+bee, it will sting even though its head be off. But the bee carries the
+antidote to its own poison. The best remedy for bee sting is honey, and
+when your hands are besmeared with honey, as they are sure to be on such
+occasions, the wound is scarcely more painful than the prick of a pin.
+Assault your bee-tree, then, boldly with your ax, and you will find that
+when the honey is exposed every bee has surrendered and the whole swarm
+is cowering in helpless bewilderment and terror. Our tree yields only a
+few pounds of honey, not enough to have lasted the swarm till January,
+but no matter; we have the less burden to carry.
+
+In the afternoon we go nearly half a mile farther along the ridge to
+a cornfield that lies immediately in front of the highest point of the
+mountain. The view is superb; the ripe autumn landscape rolls away to
+the east, cut through by the great placid river; in the extreme north
+the wall of the Catskills stands out clear and strong, while in the
+south the mountains of the Highlands bound the view. The day is warm and
+the bees are very busy there in that neglected corner of the field, rich
+in asters, flea-bane, and golden-rod. The corn has been cut, and upon a
+stout, but a few rods from the woods, which here drop quickly down from
+the precipitous heights, we set up our bee-box, touched again with
+the pungent oil. In a few moments a bee has found it; she comes up
+to leeward, following the scent. On leaving the box she goes straight
+toward the woods. More bees quickly come, and it is not long before the
+line is well established. Now we have recourse to the same tactics we
+employed before, and move along the ridge to another field to get our
+cross line. But the bees still go in almost the same direction they did
+from the corn stout. The tree is then either on the top of the mountain
+or on the other or west side of it. We hesitate to make the plunge into
+the woods and seek to scale those precipices, for the eye can plainly
+see what is before us. As the afternoon sun gets lower the bees are seen
+with wonderful distinctness. They fly toward and under the sun and are
+in a strong light, while the near woods which form the background are
+in deep shadow. They look like large luminous motes. Their swiftly
+vibrating, transparent wings surround their bodies with a shining nimbus
+that makes them visible for a long distance. They seem magnified many
+times. We see them bridge the little gulf between us and the woods, then
+rise up over the tree-tops with their burdens, swerving neither to the
+right hand nor to the left. It is almost pathetic to see them labor so,
+climbing the mountain and unwittingly guiding us to their treasures.
+When the sun gets down so that his direction corresponds exactly with
+the course of the bees, we make the plunge. It proves even harder
+climbing than we had anticipated; the mountain is faced by a broken and
+irregular wall of rock, up which we pull ourselves slowly and cautiously
+by main strength. In half an hour, the perspiration streaming from
+every pore, we reach the summit. The trees here are all small, a second
+growth, and we are soon convinced the bees are not here. Then down we
+go on the other side, clambering down the rocky stairways till we reach
+quite a broad plateau that forms something like the shoulder of the
+mountain. On the brink of this there are many large hemlocks, and we
+scan them closely and rap upon them with our ax. But not a bee is seen
+or heard; we do not seem as near the tree as we were in the fields
+below; yet if some divinity would only whisper the fact to us we are
+within a few rods of the coveted prize, which is not in one of the large
+hemlocks or oaks that absorb our attention, but in an old stub or stump
+not six feet high, and which we have seen and passed several times
+without giving it a thought. We go farther down the mountain and beat
+about to the right and left and get entangled in brush and arrested by
+precipices, and finally as the day is nearly spent, give up the search
+and leave the woods quite baffled, but resolved to return on the morrow.
+The next day we come back and commence operations in an opening in
+the woods well down on the side of the mountain, where we gave up the
+search. Our box is soon swarming with the eager bees, and they go back
+toward the summit we have passed. We follow back and establish a new
+line where the ground will permit; then another and another, and yet the
+riddle is not solved. One time we are south of them, then north, then
+the bees get up through the trees and we cannot tell where they go. But
+after much searching, and after the mystery seems rather to deepen than
+to clear up, we chance to pause beside the old stump. A bee comes out of
+a small opening, like that made by ants in decayed wood, rubs its eyes
+and examines its antennae as bees always do before leaving their hive,
+then takes flight. At the same instant several bees come by us loaded
+with our honey and settle home with that peculiar low complacent buzz
+of the well-filled insect. Here then is our idyl, our bit of Virgil and
+Theocritus, in a decayed stump of a hemlock tree. We could tear it open
+with our hands, and a bear would find it an easy prize, and a rich one
+too, for we take from it fifty pounds of excellent honey. The bees have
+been here many years, and have of course sent out swarm after swarm
+into the wilds. They have protected themselves against the weather and
+strengthened their shaky habitation by a copious use of wax.
+
+When a bee-tree is thus "taken up" in the middle of the day, of course a
+good many bees are away from home and have not heard the news. When they
+return and find the ground flowing with honey, and piles of bleeding
+combs lying about, they apparently do not recognize the place, and their
+first instinct is to fall to and fill themselves; this done, their next
+thought is to carry it home, so they rise up slowly through the branches
+of the trees till they have attained an altitude that enables them to
+survey the scene, when they seem to say, "Why, this is home," and down
+they come again; beholding the wreck and ruins once more they still
+think there is some mistake, and get up a second or a third time and
+then drop back pitifully as before. It is the most pathetic sight of
+all, the surviving and bewildered bees struggling to save a few drops of
+their wasted treasures.
+
+Presently, if there is another swarm in the woods, robber-bees appear.
+You may know them by their saucy, chiding, devil-may-care hum. It is
+an ill wind that blows nobody good, and they make the most of the
+misfortune of their neighbors; and thereby pave the way for their own
+ruin. The hunter marks their course and the next day looks them up. On
+this occasion the day was hot and the honey very fragrant, and a line of
+bees was soon established S. S. W. Though there was much refuse honey in
+the old stub, and though little golden rills trickled down the hill from
+it, and the near branches and saplings were besmeared with it where we
+wiped our murderous hands, yet not a drop was wasted. It was a feast to
+which not only honey-bees came, but bumble-bees, wasps, hornets, flies,
+ants. The bumble-bees, which at this season are hungry vagrants with
+no fixed place of abode, would gorge themselves, then creep beneath the
+bits of empty comb or fragments of bark and pass the night, and renew
+the feast next day. The bumble-bee is an insect of which the bee-hunter
+sees much. There are all sorts and sizes of them. They are dull and
+clumsy compared with the honey-bee. Attracted in the fields by the
+bee-hunter's box, they will come up the wind on the scent and blunder
+into it in the most stupid, lubberly fashion.
+
+The honey-bee that licked up our leavings on the old stub belonged to a
+swarm, as it proved, about half a mile farther down the ridge, and a few
+days afterward fate overtook them, and their stores in turn became the
+prey of another swarm in the vicinity, which also tempted Providence
+and were overwhelmed. The first mentioned swarm I had lined from several
+points, and was following up the clew over rocks and through gulleys,
+when I came to where a large hemlock had been felled a few years before
+and a swarm taken from a cavity near the top of it; fragments of the old
+comb were yet to be seen. A few yards away stood another short, squatty
+hemlock, and I said my bees ought to be there. As I paused near it I
+noticed where the tree had been wounded with an ax a couple of feet from
+the ground many years before. The wound had partially grown over, but
+there was an opening there that I did not see at the first glance. I
+was about to pass on when a bee passed me making that peculiar shrill,
+discordant hum that a bee makes when besmeared with honey. I saw it
+alight in the partially closed wound and crawl home; then came others
+and others, little bands and squads of them heavily freighted with honey
+from the box. The tree was about twenty inches through and hollow at
+the butt, or from the ax mark down. This space the bees had completely
+filled with honey. With an ax we cut away the outer ring of live wood
+and exposed the treasure. Despite the utmost care, we wounded the comb
+so that little rills of the golden liquid issued from the root of the
+tree and trickled down the hill.
+
+The other bee-tree in the vicinity, to which I have referred, we found
+one warm November day in less than half an hour after entering the
+woods. It also was a hemlock, that stood in a niche in a wall of hoary,
+moss-covered rocks thirty feet high. The tree hardly reached to the top
+of the precipice. The bees entered a small hole at the root, which was
+seven or eight feet from the ground. The position was a striking one.
+Never did apiary have a finer outlook or more rugged surroundings. A
+black, wood-embraced lake lay at our feet; the long panorama of the
+Catskills filled the far distance, and the more broken outlines of the
+Shawangunk range filled the rear. On every hand were precipices and a
+wild confusion of rocks and trees.
+
+The cavity occupied by the bees was about three feet and a half long and
+eight or ten inches in diameter. With an ax we cut away one side of the
+tree and laid bare its curiously wrought heart of honey. It was a most
+pleasing sight. What winding and devious ways the bees had through their
+palace! What great masses and blocks of snow-white comb there were!
+Where it was sealed up, presenting that slightly dented, uneven surface,
+it looked like some precious ore. When we carried a large pail full of
+it out of the woods, it seemed still more like ore.
+
+Your native bee-hunter predicates the distance of the tree by the time
+the bee occupies in making its first trip. But this is no certain guide.
+You are always safe in calculating that the tree is inside of a mile,
+and you need not as a rule look for your bee's return under ten minutes.
+One day I picked up a bee in an opening in the woods and gave it honey,
+and it made three trips to my box with an interval of about twelve
+minutes between them; it returned alone each time; the tree, which I
+afterward found, was about half a mile distant.
+
+In lining bees through the woods, the tactics of the hunter are to
+pause every twenty or thirty rods, lop away the branches or cut down the
+trees, and set the bees to work again. If they still go forward, he goes
+forward also and repeats his observations till the tree is found or till
+the bees turn and come back upon the trail. Then he knows he has passed
+the tree, and he retraces his steps to a convenient distance and tries
+again, and thus quickly reduces the space to be looked over till the
+swarm is traced home. On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where the
+surface alternated between deep gulfs and chasms filled with thick,
+heavy growths of timber and sharp, precipitous, rocky ridges like a
+tempest tossed sea, I carried my bees directly under their tree, and
+set them to work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not thirty feet
+distant. One would have expected them under such circumstances to have
+gone straight home, as there were but few branches intervening, but
+they did not; they labored up through the trees and attained an altitude
+above the woods as if they had miles to travel, and thus baffled me for
+hours. Bees will always do this. They are acquainted with the woods only
+from the top side, and from the air above they recognize home only by
+land-marks here, and in every instance they rise aloft to take their
+bearings. Think how familiar to them the topography of the forest
+summits must be-an umbrageous sea or plain where every mask and point is
+known.
+
+Another curious fact is that generally you will get track of a bee-tree
+sooner when you are half a mile from it than when you are only a few
+yards. Bees, like us human insects, have little faith in the near at
+hand; they expect to make their fortune in a distant field, they are
+lured by the remote and the difficult, and hence overlook the flower and
+the sweet at their very door. On several occasions I have unwittingly
+set my box within a few paces of a bee-tree and waited long for bees
+without getting them, when, on removing to a distant field or opening in
+the woods I have got a clew at once.
+
+I have a theory that when bees leave the hive, unless there is some
+special attraction in some other direction, they generally go against
+the wind. They would thus have the wind with them when they returned
+home heavily laden, and with these little navigators the difference
+is an important one. With a full cargo, a stiff head-wind is a great
+hindrance, but fresh and empty-handed they can face it with more ease.
+Virgil says bees bear gravel stones as ballast, but their only ballast
+is their honey bag. Hence, when I go bee-hunting, I prefer to get to
+windward of the woods in which the swarm is supposed to have taken
+refuge.
+
+Bees, like the milkman, like to be near a spring. They do water their
+honey, especially in a dry time. The liquid is then of course thicker
+and sweeter, and will bear diluting. Hence, old bee-hunters look for
+bee-trees along creeks and near spring runs in the woods. I once found a
+tree a long distance from any water, and the honey had a peculiar bitter
+flavor imparted to it, I was convinced, by rainwater sucked from the
+decayed and spongy hemlock tree, in which the swarm was found. In
+cutting into the tree, the north side of it was found to be saturated
+with water like a spring, which ran out in big drops, and had a bitter
+flavor. The bees had thus found a spring or a cistern in their own
+house.
+
+Bees are exposed to many hardships and many dangers. Winds and storms
+prove as disastrous to them as to other navigators. Black spiders lie in
+wait for them as do brigands for travelers. One day as I was looking for
+a bee amid some golden-rod, I spied one partly concealed under a leaf.
+Its baskets were full of pollen, and it did not move. On lifting up the
+leaf I discovered that a hairy spider was ambushed there and had the bee
+by the throat. The vampire was evidently afraid of the bee's sting, and
+was holding it by the throat till quite sure of its death. Virgil speaks
+of the painted lizard, perhaps a species of salamander, as an enemy
+of the honey-bee. We have no lizard that destroys the bee; but our
+tree-toad, ambushed among the apple and cherry blossoms, snaps them up
+wholesale. Quick as lightning that subtle but clammy tongue darts forth,
+and the unsuspecting bee is gone. Virgil also accuses the titmouse
+and the woodpecker of preying upon the bees, and our kingbird has been
+charged with the like crime, but the latter devours only the drones. The
+workers are either too small and quick for it, or else it dreads their
+sting.
+
+Virgil, by the way, had little more than a child's knowledge of the
+honey-bee. There is little fact and much fable in his fourth Georgic. If
+he had ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is hard to
+see how he could have believed that the bee in its flight abroad carried
+a gravel stone for ballast:--
+
+   "And as when empty barks on billows float,
+    With Sandy ballast sailors trim the boat;
+    So bees bear gravel stones, whose poising weight
+    Steers through the whistling winds their steady flight;"
+
+or that when two colonies made war upon each other they issued forth
+from their hives led by their kings and fought in the air, strewing the
+ground with the dead and dying:--
+
+   "Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the plain,
+    Nor shaken oaks such show'rs of acorns rain."
+
+It is quite certain he had never been bee-hunting. If he had, we should
+have had a fifth Georgic. Yet he seems to have known that bees sometimes
+escaped to the woods:--
+
+   "Nor bees are lodged in hives alone, but found
+    In chambers of their own beneath the ground:
+    Their vaulted roofs are hung in pumices,
+    And in the rotten trunks of hollow trees."
+
+Wild honey is as near like tame as wild bees are like their brothers
+in hive. The only difference is that wild honey is flavored with your
+adventure, which makes it a little more delectable than the domestic
+article.
+
+
+
+
+THE PASTORAL BEES
+
+
+The honey-bee goes forth from the hive in spring like the dove from
+Noah's ark, and it is not till after many days that she brings back the
+olive leaf, which in this case is a pellet of golden pollen upon each
+hip, usually obtained from the alder or the swamp willow. In a country
+where maple sugar is made, the bees get their first taste of sweet from
+the sap as it flows from the spiles, or as it dries and is condensed
+upon the sides of the buckets. They will sometimes, in their eagerness,
+come about the boiling place and be overwhelmed by the steam and the
+smoke. But bees appear to be more eager for bread in the spring than for
+honey; their supply of this article, perhaps, does not keep as well
+as their stores of the latter, hence fresh bread, in the shape of new
+pollen, is diligently sought for. My bees get their first supplies from
+the catkins of the willows. How quickly they find them out. If but one
+catkin opens anywhere within range, a bee is on hand that very hour to
+rifle it, and it is a most pleasing experience to stand near the hive
+some mild April day and see them come pouring in with their little
+baskets packed with this first fruitage of the spring. They will have
+new bread now; they have been to mill in good earnest; see their dusty
+coats, and the golden grist they bring home with them.
+
+When a bee brings pollen into the hive, he advances to the cell in which
+it is to be deposited and kicks it off as one might his overalls or
+rubber boots, making one foot help the other; then he walks off without
+ever looking behind him; another bee, one of the indoor hands, comes
+along and rams it down with his head and packs it into the cell as the
+dairymaid packs butter into a firkin.
+
+The first spring wild-flowers, whose shy faces among the dry leaves and
+rocks are so welcome, yield no honey. The anemone, the hepatica, the
+bloodroot, the arbutus, the numerous violets, the spring beauty, the
+corydalis, etc., woo lovers of nature, but do not woo the honey-loving
+bee. It requires more sun and warmth to develop the saccharine element,
+and the beauty of these pale striplings of the woods and groves is their
+sole and sufficient excuse for being. The arbutus, lying low and keeping
+green all winter, attains to perfume, but not to honey.
+
+The first honey is perhaps obtained from the flowers of the red maple
+and the golden willow. The latter sends forth a wild, delicious perfume.
+The sugar maple blooms a little later, and from its silken tassels
+a rich nectar is gathered. My bees will not label these different
+varieties for me as I really wish they would. Honey from the maples, a
+tree so clean and wholesome, and full of such virtues every way, would
+be something to put one's tongue to. Or that from the blossoms of the
+apple, the peach, the cherry, the quince, the currant,--one would like
+a card of each of these varieties to note their peculiar qualities. The
+apple-blossom is very important to the bees. A single swarm has been
+known to gain twenty pounds in weight during its continuance. Bees love
+the ripened fruit, too, and in August and September will suck themselves
+tipsy upon varieties such as the sops-of-wine.
+
+The interval between the blooming of the fruit-trees and that of the
+clover and the raspberry is bridged over in many localities by the honey
+locust. What a delightful summer murmur these trees send forth at this
+season. I know nothing about the quality of the honey, but it ought to
+keep well. But when the red raspberry blooms, the fountains of plenty
+are unsealed indeed; what a commotion about the hives then, especially
+in localities where it is extensively cultivated, as in places along the
+Hudson. The delicate white clover, which begins to bloom about the
+same time, is neglected; even honey itself is passed by for this modest
+colorless, all but odorless flower. A field of these berries in June
+sends forth a continuous murmur like that of an enormous hive. The honey
+is not so white as that obtained from clover but it is easier gathered;
+it is in shallow cups while that of the clover is in deep tubes. The
+bees are up and at it before sunrise, and it takes a brisk shower to
+drive them in. But the clover blooms later and blooms everywhere, and
+is the staple source of supply of the finest quality of honey. The
+red clover yields up its stores only to the longer proboscis of the
+bumble-bee, else the bee pasturage of our agricultural districts would
+be unequaled. I do not know from what the famous honey of Chamouni
+in the Alps is made, but it can hardly surpass our best products. The
+snow-white honey of Anatolia in Asiatic Turkey, which is regularly sent
+to Constantinople for the use of the grand seignior and the ladies of
+his seraglio, is obtained from the cotton plant, which makes me think
+that the white clover does not flourish these. The white clover is
+indigenous with us; its seeds seem latent in the ground, and the
+application of certain stimulants to the soil, such as wood ashes,
+causes them to germinate and spring up.
+
+The rose, with all its beauty and perfume, yields no honey to the bee,
+unless the wild species be sought by the bumble-bee.
+
+Among the humbler plants, let me not forget the dandelion that so
+early dots the sunny slopes, and upon which the bee languidly grazes,
+wallowing to his knees in the golden but not over-succulent pasturage.
+From the blooming rye and wheat the bee gathers pollen, also from
+the obscure blossoms of Indian corn. Among weeds, catnip is the great
+favorite. It lasts nearly the whole season and yields richly. It could
+no doubt be profitably cultivated in some localities, and catnip honey
+would be a novelty in the market. It would probably partake of the
+aromatic properties of the plant from which it was derived.
+
+Among your stores of honey gathered before midsummer, you may chance
+upon a card, or mayhap only a square inch or two of comb, in which the
+liquid is as transparent as water, of a delicious quality, with a slight
+flavor of mint. This is the product of the linden or basswood, of all
+the trees in our forest the one most beloved by the bees. Melissa, the
+goddess of honey, has placed her seal upon this tree. The wild swarms
+in the woods frequently reap a choice harvest from it. I have seen
+a mountain side thickly studded with it, its straight, tall, smooth,
+light-gray shaft carrying its deep-green crown far aloft, like the
+tulip-tree or the maple.
+
+In some of the Northwestern States there are large forests of it, and
+the amount of honey reported stored by strong swarms in this section
+during the time the tree is in bloom is quite incredible. As a shade and
+ornamental tree the linden is fully equal to the maple, and if it were
+as extensively planted and cared for, our supplies of virgin honey would
+be greatly increased. The famous honey of Lithuania in Russia is the
+product of the linden.
+
+It is a homely old stanza current among bee folk that--
+
+   "A swarm of bees in May
+    Is worth a load of hay;
+    A swarm of bees in June
+    Is worth a silver spoon;
+    But a swarm in July
+    Is not worth a fly."
+
+A swarm in May is indeed a treasure; it is, like an April baby, sure
+to thrive, and will very likely itself send out a swarm a month or
+two later; but a swarm in July is not to be despised; it will store no
+clover or linden honey for the "grand seignior and the ladies of his
+seraglio," but plenty of the rank and wholesome poor man's nectar, the
+sun-tanned product of the plebeian buckwheat. Buckwheat honey is the
+black sheep in this white flock, but there is spirit and character in
+it. It lays hold of the taste in no equivocal manner, especially when at
+a winter breakfast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat cake. Bread
+with honey to cover it from the same stalk is double good fortune. It is
+not black, either, but nut-brown, and belongs to the same class of goods
+as Herrick's
+
+   "Nut-brown mirth and russet wit."
+
+How the bees love it, and they bring the delicious odor of the blooming
+plant to the hive with them, so that in the moist warm twilight the
+apiary is redolent with the perfume of buckwheat.
+
+Yet evidently it is not the perfume of any flower that attracts
+the bees; they pay no attention to the sweet-scented lilac, or to
+heliotrope, but work upon sumach, silkweed, and the hateful snapdragon.
+In September they are hard pressed, and do well if they pick up enough
+sweet to pay the running expenses of their establishment. The purple
+asters and the golden-rod are about all that remain to them.
+
+Bees will go three or four miles in quest of honey, but it is a great
+advantage to move the hive near the good pasturage, as has been the
+custom from the earliest times in the Old World. Some enterprising
+person, taking a hint perhaps from the ancient Egyptians, who had
+floating apiaries on the Nile, has tried the experiment of floating
+several hundred colonies north on the Mississippi, starting from New
+Orleans and following the opening season up, thus realizing a sort of
+perpetual May or June, the chief attraction being the blossoms of the
+river willow, which yield honey of rare excellence. Some of the bees
+were no doubt left behind, but the amount of virgin honey secured must
+have been very great. In September they should have begun the return
+trip, following the retreating summer South.
+
+It is the making of the wax that costs with the bee. As with the poet,
+the form, the receptacle, gives him more trouble than the sweet that
+fills it, though, to be sure, there is always more or less empty comb in
+both cases. The honey he can have for the gathering, but the wax he must
+make himself--must evolve from his own inner consciousness. When wax
+is to be made the wax-makers fill themselves with honey and retire into
+their chamber for private meditation; it is like some solemn religious
+rite; they take hold of hands, or hook themselves together in long lines
+that hang in festoons from the top of the hive, and wait for the miracle
+to transpire. After about twenty-four hours their patience is rewarded,
+the honey is turned into wax, minute scales of which are secreted from
+between the rings of the abdomen of each bee; this is taken off and from
+it the comb is built up. It is calculated that about twenty-five pounds
+of honey are used in elaborating one pound of comb, to say nothing of
+the time that is lost. Hence the importance in an economical point of
+view, of a recent device by which the honey is extracted and the comb
+returned intact to the bees. But honey without the comb is the perfume
+without the rose,--it is sweet merely, and soon degenerates into candy.
+Half the delectableness is in breaking down these frail and exquisite
+walls yourself, and tasting the nectar before it has lost its freshness
+by the contact with the air. Then the comb is a sort of shield or foil
+that prevents the tongue from being overwhelmed by the shock of the
+sweet.
+
+The drones have the least enviable time of it. Their foothold in the
+hive is very precarious. They look like the giants, the lords of the
+swarm, but they are really the tools. Their loud, threatening hum has
+no sting to back it up, and their size and noise make them only the more
+conspicuous marks for the birds.
+
+Toward the close of the season, say in July or August, the fiat goes
+forth that the drones must die; there is no further use for them. Then
+the poor creatures, how they are huddled and hustled about, trying to
+hide in corners and by-ways. There is no loud, defiant humming now, but
+abject fear seizes them. They cower like hunted criminals. I have seen
+a dozen or more of them wedge themselves into a small space between the
+glass and the comb, where the bees could not get hold of them or where
+they seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter. They will also
+crawl outside and hide under the edges of the hive. But sooner or later
+they are all killed or kicked out. The drone makes no resistance, except
+to pull back and try to get away; but (putting yourself in his place)
+with one bee a-hold of your collar or the hair of your head, and another
+a-hold of each arm or leg, and still another feeling for your waistbands
+with his sting, the odds are greatly against you.
+
+It is a singular fact, also, that the queen is made, not born. If the
+entire population of Spain or Great Britain were the offspring of one
+mother, it might be found necessary to hit upon some device by which a
+royal baby could be manufactured out of an ordinary one, or else give
+up the fashion of royalty. All the bees in the hive have a common
+parentage, and the queen and the worker are the same in the egg and in
+the chick; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in the food; the
+cell being much larger, and the food a peculiar stimulating kind of
+jelly. In certain contingencies, such as the loss of the queen with no
+eggs in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an ordinary bee,
+enlarge the cell by taking in the two adjoining ones, and nurse it and
+stuff it and coddle it, till at the end of sixteen days it comes out a
+queen. But ordinarily, in the natural course of events, the young queen
+is kept a prisoner in her cell till the old queen has left with the
+swarm. Later on, the unhatched queen is guarded against the reigning
+queen, who only wants an opportunity to murder every royal scion in the
+hive. At this time both the queens, the one a prisoner and the other at
+large, pipe defiance at each other, a shrill, fine, trumpet-like note
+that any ear will at once recognize. This challenge, not being allowed
+to be accepted by either party, is followed, in a day or two by the
+abdication of the reigning queen; she leads out the swarm, and her
+successor is liberated by her keepers, who, in her time, abdicates
+in favor of the next younger. When the bees have decided that no more
+swarms can issue, the reigning queen is allowed to use her stiletto upon
+her unhatched sisters. Cases have been known where two queens issued at
+the same time, when a mortal combat ensued, encouraged by the workers,
+who formed a ring about them, but showed no preference, and recognized
+the victor as the lawful sovereign. For these and many other curious
+facts we are indebted to the blind Huber.
+
+It is worthy of note that the position of the queen cells is always
+vertical, while that of the drones and workers is horizontal; majesty
+stands on its head, which fact may be a part of the secret.
+
+The notion has always very generally prevailed that the queen of the
+bees is an absolute ruler, and issues her royal orders to willing
+subjects. Hence Napoleon the First sprinkled the symbolic bees over the
+imperial mantle that bore the arms of his dynasty; and in the country
+of the Pharaohs the bee was used as the emblem of a people sweetly
+submissive to the orders of its king. But the fact is, a swarm of bees
+is an absolute democracy, and kings and despots can find no warrant in
+their example. The power and authority are entirely vested in the great
+mass, the workers. They furnish all the brains and foresight of the
+colony, and administer its affairs. Their word is law, and both king and
+queen must obey. They regulate the swarming, and give the signal for the
+swarm to issue from the hive; they select and make ready the tree in the
+woods and conduct the queen to it.
+
+The peculiar office and sacredness of the queen consists in the fact
+that she is the mother of the swarm, and the bees love and cherish her
+as a mother and not as a sovereign. She is the sole female bee in the
+hive, and the swarm clings to her because she is their life. Deprived
+of their queen, and of all brood from which to rear one, the swarm loses
+all heart and soon dies, though there be an abundance of honey in the
+hive.
+
+The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is
+to be disposed of they starve her to death; and the queen herself will
+sting nothing but royalty--nothing but a rival queen.
+
+The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting her
+to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is
+a superb creature, and looks every inch a queen. It is an event to
+distinguish her amid the mass of bees when the swarm alights; it awakens
+a thrill. Before you have seen a queen you wonder if this or that bee,
+which seems a little larger than its fellows, is not she, but when you
+once really set eyes upon her you do not doubt for a moment. You
+know that is the queen. That long, elegant, shining, feminine-looking
+creature can be none less than royalty. How beautifully her body tapers,
+how distinguished she looks, how deliberate her movements! The bees
+do not fall down before her, but caress her and touch her person.
+The drones or males, are large bees too, but coarse, blunt,
+broad-shouldered, masculine-looking. There is but one fact or incident
+in the life of the queen that looks imperial and authoritative: Huber
+relates that when the old queen is restrained in her movements by the
+workers, and prevented from destroying the young queens in their cells,
+she assumes a peculiar attitude and utters a note that strikes every bee
+motionless, and makes every head bow; while this sound lasts not a bee
+stirs, but all look abashed and humbled, yet whether the emotion is one
+of fear, or reverence, or of sympathy with the distress of the queen
+mother, is hard to determine. The moment it ceases and she advances
+again toward the royal cells, the bees bite and pull and insult her as
+before.
+
+I always feel that I have missed some good fortune if I am away from
+home when my bees swarm. What a delightful summer sound it is; how
+they come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees each
+striving to get out first; it is as when the dam gives way and lets the
+waters loose; it is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air,
+and becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the eye and a soft chorus
+of myriad musical sounds to the ear. This way and that way they drift,
+now contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick about
+some branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some other point,
+till finally they begin to alight in earnest, when in a few moments the
+whole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming a bunch perhaps as
+large as a two-gallon measure. Here they will hang from one to three or
+four hours, or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked up, when, if
+they have not been offered a hive in the mean time, they are up and
+off. In hiving them, if any accident happens to the queen the enterprise
+miscarries at once. One day I shook a swarm from a small pear-tree into
+a tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath the tree, and put
+the hive over it. The bees presently all crawled up into it, and all
+seemed to go well for ten or fifteen minutes, when I observed that
+something was wrong; the bees began to buzz excitedly and to rush about
+in a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and all returned to
+the parent stock. On lifting up the pan, I found beneath it the queen
+with three or four other bees. She had been one of the first to fall,
+had missed the pan in her descent, and I had set it upon her. I conveyed
+her tenderly back to the hive, but either the accident terminated
+fatally with her or else the young queen had been liberated in the
+interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it was ten days
+before the swarm issued a second time.
+
+No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees house-hunting in the
+woods. Yet there can be no doubt that they look up new quarters either
+before or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are wild bees and
+incapable of domestication; that is, the instinct to go back to nature
+and take up again their wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated.
+Years upon years of life in the apiary seems to have no appreciable
+effect towards their final, permanent domestication. That every new
+swarm contemplates migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the fact
+that they will only come out when the weather is favorable to such an
+enterprise, and that a passing cloud or a sudden wind, after the bees
+are in the air, will usually drive them back into the parent hive. Or
+an attack upon them with sand or gravel, or loose earth or water, will
+quickly cause them to change their plans. I would not even say but
+that, when the bees are going off, the apparently absurd practice, now
+entirely discredited by regular bee-keepers but still resorted to by
+unscientific folk, of beating upon tin pans, blowing horns, and creating
+an uproar generally, might not be without good results. Certainly not by
+drowning the "orders" of the queen, but by impressing the bees as
+with some unusual commotion in nature. Bees are easily alarmed and
+disconcerted, and I have known runaway swarms to be brought down by a
+farmer ploughing in the field who showered them with handfuls of loose
+soil.
+
+I love to see a swarm go off--if it is not mine, and if mine must go I
+want to be on hand to see the fun. It is a return to first principles
+again by a very direct route. The past season I witnessed two such
+escapes. One swarm had come out the day before, and, without alighting,
+had returned to the parent hive--some hitch in the plan, perhaps, or may
+be the queen had found her wings too weak. The next day they came out
+again, and were hived. But something offended them, or else the tree in
+the woods--perhaps some royal old maple or birch holding its head
+high above all others, with snug, spacious, irregular chambers and
+galleries--had too many attractions; for they were presently discovered
+filling the air over the garden, and whirling excitedly around.
+Gradually they began to drift over the street; a moment more, and they
+had become separated from the other bees, and, drawing together in a
+more compact mass or cloud, away they went, a humming, flying vortex of
+bees, the queen in the centre, and the swarm revolving around her as a
+pivot,--over meadows, across creeks and swamps, straight for the heart
+of the mountain, about a mile distant,--slow at first, so that the youth
+who gave chase kept up with them, but increasing their speed till only a
+fox hound could have kept them in sight. I saw their pursuer laboring
+up the side of the mountain; saw his white shirt-sleeves gleam as he
+entered the woods; but he returned a few hours afterward without any
+clew as to the particular tree in which they had taken refuge out of the
+ten thousand that covered the side of the mountain.
+
+The other swarm came out about one o'clock of a hot July day, and
+at once showed symptoms that alarmed the keeper, who, however, threw
+neither dirt nor water. The house was situated on a steep side-hill.
+Behind it the ground rose, for a hundred rods or so, at an angle of
+nearly forty-five degrees, and the prospect of having to chase them up
+this hill, if chase them we should, promised a good trial of wind
+at least; for it soon became evident that their course lay in this
+direction. Determined to have a hand, or rather a foot, in the chase,
+I threw off my coat and hurried on, before the swarm was yet fairly
+organized and under way. The route soon led me into a field of
+standing rye, every spear of which held its head above my own. Plunging
+recklessly forward, my course marked to those watching from below by the
+agitated and wriggling grain, I emerged from the miniature forest just
+in time to see the runaways disappearing over the top of the hill, some
+fifty rods in advance of me. Lining them as well as I could, I soon
+reached the hill-top, my breath utterly gone and the perspiration
+streaming from every pore of my skin. On the other side the country
+opened deep and wide. A large valley swept around to the north, heavily
+wooded at its head and on its sides. It became evident at once that the
+bees had made good their escape, and that whether they had stopped on
+one side of the valley or the other, or had indeed cleared the opposite
+mountain and gone into some unknown forest beyond, was entirely
+problematical. I turned back, therefore, thinking of the honey-laden
+tree that some of these forests would hold before the falling of the
+leaf.
+
+I heard of a youth in the neighborhood, more lucky than myself on a like
+occasion. It seems that he had got well in advance of the swarm, whose
+route lay over a hill, as in my case, and as he neared the summit, hat
+in hand, the bees had just come up and were all about him. Presently he
+noticed them hovering about his straw hat, and alighting on his arm; and
+in almost as brief a time as it takes to relate it, the whole swarm
+had followed the queen into his hat. Being near a stone wall, he
+coolly deposited his prize upon it, quickly disengaged himself from the
+accommodating bees, and returned for a hive. The explanation of this
+singular circumstance no doubt is, that the queen, unused to such long
+and heavy flights, was obliged to alight from very exhaustion. It is
+not very unusual for swarms to be thus found in remote fields, collected
+upon a bush or branch of a tree.
+
+When a swarm migrates to the woods in this manner, the individual bees,
+as I have intimated, do not move in right lines or straight forward,
+like a flock of birds, but round and round, like chaff in a whirlwind.
+Unitedly they form a humming, revolving, nebulous mass, ten or fifteen
+feet across, which keeps just high enough to clear all obstacles, except
+in crossing deep valleys, when, of course, it may be very high. The
+swarm seems to be guided by a line of couriers, which may be seen (at
+least at the outset) constantly going and coming. As they take a direct
+course, there is always some chance of following them to the tree,
+unless they go a long distance, and some obstruction, like a wood, or
+a swamp, or a high hill, intervenes--enough chance, at any rate, to
+stimulate the lookers-on to give vigorous chase as long as their wind
+holds out. If the bees are successfully followed to their retreat, two
+plans are feasible: either to fell the tree at once, and seek to hive
+them, perhaps bring them home in the section of the tree that contains
+the cavity; or to leave the tree till fall, then invite your neighbors,
+and go and cut it, and see the ground flow with honey. The former course
+is more business-like; but the latter is the one usually recommended by
+one's friends and neighbors.
+
+Perhaps nearly one third of all the runaway swarms leave when no one
+is about, and hence are unseen and unheard, save, perchance, by some
+distant laborers in the field, or by some youth ploughing on the side
+of the mountain, who hears an unusual humming noise, and sees the swarm
+dimly whirling by overhead, and, may be, gives chase; or he may simply
+catch the sound, when he pauses, looks quickly around, but sees nothing.
+When he comes in at night he tells how he heard or saw a swarm of bees
+go over; and, perhaps from beneath one of the hives in the garden a
+black mass of bees has disappeared during the day.
+
+They are not partial as to the kind of tree,--pine, hemlock, elm, birch,
+maple, hickory,--any tree with a good cavity high up or low down. A
+swarm of mine ran away from the new patent hive I gave them, and took
+up their quarters in the hollow trunk of an old apple-tree across an
+adjoining field. The entrance was a mouse-hole near the ground.
+
+Another swarm in the neighborhood deserted their keeper and went into
+the cornice of an out-house that stood amid evergreens in the rear of
+a large mansion. But there is no accounting for the taste of bees,
+as Samson found when he discovered the swarm in the carcass, or more
+probably the skeleton, of the lion he had slain.
+
+In any given locality, especially in the more wooded and mountainous
+districts, the number of swarms that thus assert their independence
+forms quite a large per cent. In the Northern States these swarms very
+often perish before spring; but in such a country as Florida they seem
+to multiply, till bee-trees are very common. In the West, also, wild
+honey is often gathered in large quantities. I noticed not long since,
+that some wood-choppers on the west slope of the Coast Range felled a
+tree that had several pailfuls in it.
+
+One night on the Potomac a party of us unwittingly made our camp near
+the foot of a bee-tree, which next day the winds of heaven blew down,
+for our special delectation, at least so we read the sign. Another time
+while sitting by a waterfall in the leafless April woods I discovered
+a swarm in the top of a large hickory. I had the season before remarked
+the tree as a likely place for bees, but the screen of leaves concealed
+them from me. This time my former presentiment occurred to me, and,
+looking sharply, sure enough there were the bees, going out and in a
+large, irregular opening. In June a violent tempest of wind and rain
+demolished the tree, and the honey was all lost in the creek into which
+it fell. I happened along that way two or three days after the tornado,
+when I saw a remnant of the swarm, those, doubtless, that escaped the
+flood and those that were away when the disaster came, hanging in a
+small black mass to a branch high up near where their home used to be.
+They looked forlorn enough. If the queen was saved the remnant probably
+sought another tree; otherwise the bees have soon died.
+
+I have seen bees desert their hive in the spring when it was infested
+with worms, or when the honey was exhausted; at such times the swarm
+seems to wander aimlessly, alighting here and there, and perhaps in the
+end uniting with some other colony. In case of such union, it would be
+curious to know if negotiations were first opened between the parties,
+and if the houseless bees are admitted at once to all the rights and
+franchises of their benefactors. It would be very like the bees to have
+some preliminary plan and understanding about the matter on both sides.
+
+Bees will accommodate themselves to almost any quarters, yet no hive
+seems to please them so well as a section of a hollow tree--"gums" as
+they are called in the South and West where the sweet gum grows. In some
+European countries the hive is always made from the trunk of a tree, a
+suitable cavity being formed by boring. The old-fashioned straw hive is
+picturesque, and a great favorite with the bees also.
+
+The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign
+of an army; the ranks are being continually depleted, and continually
+recruited. What adventures they have by flood and field, and what
+hair-breadth escapes! A strong swarm during the honey season loses, on
+an average, about four or five thousand per month, or one hundred and
+fifty per day. They are overwhelmed by wind and rain, caught by spiders,
+benumbed by cold, crushed by cattle, drowned in rivers and ponds, and
+in many nameless ways cut off or disabled. In the spring the principal
+mortality is from the cold. As the sun declines they get chilled before
+they can reach home. Many fall down outside the hive, unable to get
+in with their burden. One may see them come utterly spent and drop
+hopelessly into the grass in front of their very doors. Before they can
+rest the cold has stiffened them. I go out in April and May and pick
+them up by the handfuls, their baskets loaded with pollen, and warm them
+in the sun or in the house, or by the simple warmth of my hand, until
+they can crawl into the hive. Heat is their life, and an apparently
+lifeless bee may be revived by warming him. I have also picked them up
+while rowing on the river and seen them safely to shore. It is amusing
+to see them come hurrying home when there is a thunderstorm approaching.
+They come piling in till the rain is upon them. Those that are overtaken
+by the storm doubtless weather it as best they can in the sheltering
+trees or grass. It is not probable that a bee ever gets lost by
+wandering into strange and unknown parts. With their myriad eyes they
+see everything; and then, their sense of locality is very acute, is,
+indeed, one of their ruling traits. When a bee marks the place of his
+hive, or of a bit of good pasturage in the fields or swamps, or of the
+bee-hunter's box of honey on the hills or in the woods, he returns to it
+as unerringly as fate.
+
+Honey was a much more important article of food with the ancients than
+it is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar,
+honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for the
+modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the appetite of
+youth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live much in
+the open air. It is a more wholesome food than sugar, and modern
+confectionery is poison beside it. Beside grape sugar, honey contains
+manna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous
+substances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of wild natural bread
+added. The manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungent
+vegetable extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the excretions and
+dissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system.
+
+Hence it is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowing
+with milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things;
+and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat
+"bread and honey" while the "king was in the parlor counting out his
+money," was doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said to have
+rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augustus one day
+inquired of a centenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and body so
+long; to which the veteran replied that it was by "oil without and honey
+within." Cicero, in his "Old Age," classes honey with meat and milk and
+cheese as among the staple articles with which a well-kept farm-house
+will be supplied.
+
+Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean countries, appear to
+have been famous lands for honey. Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and
+Mount Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity, an
+article doubtless in nowise superior to our best products. Leigh Hunt's
+"Jar of Honey" is mainly distilled from Sicilian history and literature,
+Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has always been rich in
+bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says the woods on
+this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many
+hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to the
+island in this respect, and abound in bees--"Flat-nosed bees" as he
+calls them in the Seventh Idyl--and comparisons in which comb-honey is
+the standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. His goatherds
+can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with
+honey-combs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and fed on the
+combs of bees; and among the delectables with which Arsinoe cherishes
+Adonis are "honey-cakes," and other tid-bits made of "sweet honey." In
+the country of Theocritus this custom is said still to prevail: when a
+couple are married the attendants place honey in their mouths, by which
+they would symbolize the hope that their love may be as sweet to their
+souls as honey to the palate.
+
+It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess whose breasts
+distilled honey; and that once when Pindar lay asleep the bees dropped
+honey upon his lips. In the Old Testament the food of the promised
+Immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt about the
+butter in the original), that he might know good from evil; and
+Jonathan's eyes were enlightened, by partaking of some wood or wild
+honey: "See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because
+I tasted a little of this honey." So far as this part of his diet
+was concerned, therefore, John the Baptist, during his sojourn in the
+wilderness, his divinity school-days in the mountains and plains of
+Judea, fared extremely well. About the other part, the locusts, or, not
+to put too fine a point on it, the grasshoppers, as much cannot be said,
+though they were among the creeping and leaping things the children
+of Israel were permitted to eat. They were probably not eaten raw, but
+roasted in that most primitive of ovens, a hole in the ground made hot
+by building a fire in it. The locusts and honey may have been served
+together, as the Bedas of Ceylon are said to season their meat with
+honey. At any rate, as the locust is often a great plague in Palestine,
+the prophet in eating them found his account in the general weal, and
+in the profit of the pastoral bees; the fewer locusts, the more flowers.
+Owing to its numerous wild-flowers and flowering shrubs, Palestine
+has always been a famous country for bees. They deposit their honey in
+hollow trees as our bees do when they escape from the hive, and in holes
+in the rocks as ours do not. In a tropical or semi-tropical climate
+bees are quite apt to take refuge in the rocks, but where ice and snow
+prevail, as with us, they are much safer high up in the trunk of a
+forest tree.
+
+The best honey is the product of the milder parts of the temperate zone.
+There are too many rank and poisonous plants in the tropics. Honey from
+certain districts of Turkey produces headache and vomiting, and that
+from Brazil is used chiefly as medicine. The honey of Mount Hymettus
+owes its fine quality to wild thyme. The best honey in Persia and in
+Florida is collected from the orange blossom. The celebrated honey of
+Narbonne in the south of France is obtained from a species of rosemary.
+In Scotland good honey is made from the blossoming heather.
+
+California honey is white and delicate and highly perfumed, and now
+takes the lead in the market. But honey is honey the world over; and the
+bee is the bee still. "Men may degenerate," says an old traveler, "may
+forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactories may fail,
+and commodities be debased, but the sweets of the wild-flowers of the
+wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will continue
+without change or derogation."
+
+
+
+
+II. SHARP EYES AND OTHER PAPERS
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+SHARP EYES
+
+THE APPLE
+
+A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH
+
+WINTER NEIGHBORS
+
+NOTES BY THE WAY.
+
+    I. The Weather-wise Muskrat
+   II. Cheating the Squirrels
+  III. Fox and Hound
+   IV. The Woodchuck
+
+
+
+
+SHARP EYES.
+
+
+Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often amused
+myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on opening
+eye after eye to the number say of a dozen or more. What would he see?
+Perhaps not the invisible--not the odors of flowers nor the fever
+germs in the air--not the infinitely small of the microscope nor the
+infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require, not more eyes
+so much as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but would
+he not see with augmented power within the natural limits of vision? At
+any rate some persons seem to have opened more eyes than others, they
+see with such force and distinctness; their vision penetrates the
+tangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a spent or impotent
+bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how many did Henry
+Thoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the hunter, matching his
+sight against the keen and alert sense of a deer or a moose, or a fox
+or a wolf? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open another eye whenever we
+see beyond the first general features or outlines of things--whenever
+we grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this mask
+covers. Science confers new powers of vision.
+
+Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or
+the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes
+were added.
+
+Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees.
+The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like
+written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or the
+writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key. A female oriole was
+one day observed very much preoccupied under a shed where the refuse
+from the horse stable was thrown. She hopped about among the barn fowls,
+scolding them sharply when they came too near her. The stable, dark
+and cavernous, was just beyond. The bird, not finding what she wanted
+outside, boldly ventured into the stable, and was presently captured by
+the farmer. What did she want? was the query. What, but a horsehair
+for her nest which was in an apple-tree near by; and she was so bent on
+having one that I have no doubt she would have tweaked one out of the
+horse's tail had he been in the stable. Later in the season I examined
+her nest and found it sewed through and through with several long horse
+hairs, so that the bird persisted in her search till the hair was found.
+
+Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes,
+are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes are
+sharp enough to see them. Some clever observer saw this little comedy
+played among some English sparrows and wrote an account of it in his
+newspaper; it is too good not to be true: A male bird brought to his
+box a large, fine goose feather, which is a great find for a sparrow
+and much coveted. After he had deposited his prize and chattered his
+gratulations over it he went away in quest of his mate. His next-door
+neighbor, a female bird, seeing her chance, quickly slipped in and
+seized the feather,--and here the wit of the bird came out, for instead
+of carrying it into her own box she flew with it to a near tree and
+hid it in a fork of the branches, then went home, and when her neighbor
+returned with his mate was innocently employed about her own affairs.
+The proud male, finding his feather gone, came out of his box in a high
+state of excitement, and, with wrath in his manner and accusation on
+his tongue, rushed into the cot of the female. Not finding his goods and
+chattels there as he had expected, he stormed around a while, abusing
+everybody in general and his neighbor in particular, and then went away
+as if to repair the loss. As soon as he was out of sight, the shrewd
+thief went and brought the feather home and lined her own domicile with
+it.
+
+I was much amused one summer day in seeing a bluebird feeding her young
+one in the shaded street of a large town. She had captured a cicada or
+harvest-fly, and after bruising it a while on the ground flew with it
+to a tree and placed it in the beak of the young bird. It was a large
+morsel, and the mother seemed to have doubts of her chick's ability to
+dispose of it, for she stood near and watched its efforts with great
+solicitude. The young bird struggled valiantly with the cicada, but made
+no head way in swallowing it, when the mother took it from him and flew
+to the sidewalk, and proceeded to break and bruise it more thoroughly.
+Then she again placed it in his beak, and seemed to say, "There, try it
+now," and sympathized so thoroughly with his efforts that she repeated
+many of his motions and contortions. But the great fly was unyielding,
+and, indeed, seemed ridiculously disproportioned to the beak that held
+it. The young bird fluttered and fluttered and screamed, "I'm stuck, I'm
+stuck," till the anxious parent again seized the morsel and carried
+it to an iron railing, where she came down upon it for the space of a
+minute with all the force and momentum her beak could command. Then
+she offered it to her young a third time, but with the same result as
+before, except that this time the bird dropped it; but she was at the
+ground as soon as the cicada was, and taking it in her beak flew
+some distance to a high board fence where she sat motionless for some
+moments. While pondering the problem how that fly should be broken,
+the male bluebird approached her, and said very plainly, and I thought
+rather curtly, "Give me that bug," but she quickly resented his
+interference and flew farther away, where she sat apparently quite
+discouraged when I last saw her.
+
+The bluebird is a home bird, and I am never tired of recurring to him.
+His coming or reappearance in the spring marks a new chapter in the
+progress of the season; things are never quite the same after one has
+heard that note. The past spring the males came about a week in advance
+of the females. A fine male lingered about my grounds and orchard all
+the time, apparently waiting the arrival of his mate. He called and
+warbled every day, as if he felt sure she was within ear-shot, and
+could be hurried up. Now he warbled half-angrily or upbraidingly,
+then coaxingly, then cheerily and confidently, the next moment in a
+plaintive, far-away manner. He would half open his wings, and twinkle
+them caressingly, as if beckoning his mate to his heart. One morning she
+had come, but was shy and reserved. The fond male flew to a knot-hole
+in an old apple-tree, and coaxed her to his side. I heard a fine
+confidential warble,--the old, old story. But the female flew to a near
+tree, and uttered her plaintive, homesick note. The male went and got
+some dry grass or bark in his beak, and flew again to the hole in the
+old tree, and promised unremitting devotion, but the other said "nay,"
+and flew away in the distance. When he saw her going, or rather heard
+her distant note, he dropped his stuff, and cried out in a tone that
+said plainly enough, "Wait a minute. One word, please," and flew swiftly
+in pursuit. He won her before long, however, and early in April the pair
+were established in one of the four or five boxes I had put up for them,
+but not until they had changed their minds several times. As soon as
+the first brood had flown, and while they were yet under their parents'
+care, they began another nest in one of the other boxes, the female, as
+usual, doing all the work, and the male all the complimenting.
+
+A source of occasional great distress to the mother-bird was a white cat
+that sometimes followed me about. The cat had never been known to catch
+a bird, but she had a way of watching them that was very embarrassing to
+the bird. Whenever she appeared, the mother bluebird would set up that
+pitiful melodious plaint. One morning the cat was standing by me, when
+the bird came with her beak loaded with building material, and alighted
+above me to survey the place before going into the box. When she saw the
+cat, she was greatly disturbed, and in her agitation could not keep her
+hold upon all her material. Straw after straw came eddying down, till
+not half her original burden remained. After the cat had gone away, the
+bird's alarm subsided, till, presently seeing the coast clear, she flew
+quickly to the box and pitched in her remaining straws with the greatest
+precipitation, and, without going in to arrange them, as was her wont,
+flew away in evident relief.
+
+In the cavity of an apple-tree but a few yards off, and much nearer the
+house than they usually build, a pair of high-holes, or golden-shafted
+woodpeckers, took up their abode. A knot-hole which led to the decayed
+interior was enlarged, the live wood being cut away as clean as a
+squirrel would have done it. The inside preparations I could not
+witness, but day after day, as I passed near, I heard the bird hammering
+away, evidently beating down obstructions and shaping and enlarging the
+cavity. The chips were not brought out, but were used rather to
+floor the interior. The woodpeckers are not nest-builders, but rather
+nest-carvers.
+
+The time seemed very short before the voices of the young were heard in
+the heart of the old tree,--at first feebly, but waxing stronger day by
+day until they could be heard many rods distant. When I put my hand upon
+the trunk of the tree, they would set up an eager, expectant chattering;
+but if I climbed up it toward the opening, they soon detected the
+unusual sound and would hush quickly, only now and then uttering a
+warning note. Long before they were fully fledged they clambered up to
+the orifice to receive their food. As but one could stand in the opening
+at a time, there was a good deal of elbowing and struggling for this
+position. It was a very desirable one aside from the advantages it had
+when food was served; it looked out upon the great shining world, into
+which the young birds seemed never tired of gazing. The fresh air
+must have been a consideration also, for the interior of a high-hole's
+dwelling is not sweet. When the parent birds came with food the young
+one in the opening did not get it all, but after he had received a
+portion, either on his own motion or on a hint from the old one, he
+would give place to the one behind him. Still, one bird evidently
+outstripped his fellows, and in the race of life, was two or three days
+in advance of them. His voice was loudest and his head oftenest at the
+window. But I noticed that when he had kept the position too long,
+the others evidently made it uncomfortable in his rear, and, after
+"fidgeting" about a while, he would be compelled to "back down." But
+retaliation was then easy, and I fear his mates spent few easy moments
+at that lookout. They would close their eyes and slide back into the
+cavity as if the world had suddenly lost all its charms for them.
+
+This bird was, of course, the first to leave the nest. For two days
+before that event he kept his position in the opening most of the time
+and sent forth his strong voice incessantly. The old ones abstained from
+feeding him almost entirely, no doubt to encourage his exit. As I
+stood looking at him one afternoon and noting his progress, he suddenly
+reached a resolution,--seconded, I have no doubt, from the rear,--and
+launched forth upon his untried wings. They served him well and carried
+him about fifty yards up-hill the first heat. The second day after, the
+next in size and spirit left in the same manner; then another, till only
+one remained. The parent birds ceased their visits to him, and for one
+day he called and called till our ears were tired of the sound. His
+was the faintest heart of all. Then he had none to encourage him from
+behind. He left the nest and clung to the outer bowl of the tree, and
+yelped and piped for an hour longer; then he committed himself to his
+wings and went his way like the rest.
+
+A young farmer in the western part of New York, who has a sharp,
+discriminating eye, sends me some interesting notes about a tame
+high-hole he once had.
+
+"Did you ever notice," says he, "that the high-hole never eats anything
+that he cannot pick up with his tongue? At least this was the case with
+a young one I took from the nest and tamed. He could thrust out his
+tongue two or three inches, and it was amusing to see his efforts to eat
+currants from the hand. He would run out his tongue and try to stick it
+to the currant; failing in that, he would bend his tongue around it like
+a hook and try to raise it by a sudden jerk. But he never succeeded,
+the round fruit would roll and slip away every time. He never seemed to
+think of taking it in his beak. His tongue was in constant use to find
+out the nature of everything he saw; a nail-hole in a board or any
+similar hole was carefully explored. If he was held near the face he
+would soon be attracted by the eye and thrust his tongue into it. In
+this way he gained the respect of a number of half-grown cats that were
+around the house. I wished to make them familiar to each other, so there
+would be less danger of their killing him. So I would take them both on
+my knee, when the bird would soon notice the kitten's eyes, and leveling
+his bill as carefully as a marksman levels his rifle, he would remain so
+a minute when he would dart his tongue into the cat's eye. This was held
+by the cats to be very mysterious: being struck in the eye by something
+invisible to them. They soon acquired such a terror of him that they
+would avoid him and run away whenever they saw his bill turned in their
+direction. He never would swallow a grasshopper even when it was placed
+in his throat; he would shake himself until he had thrown it out of his
+mouth. His 'best hold' was ants. He never was surprised at anything, and
+never was afraid of anything. He would drive the turkey gobbler and
+the rooster. He would advance upon them holding one wing up as high as
+possible, as if to strike with it, and shuffle along the ground toward
+them, scolding all the while in a harsh voice. I feared at first that
+they might kill him, but I soon found that he was able to take care of
+himself. I would turn over stones and dig into ant-hills for him, and he
+would lick up the ants so fast that a stream of them seemed going
+into his mouth unceasingly. I kept him till late in the fall, when he
+disappeared, probably going south, and I never saw him again."
+
+My correspondent also sends me some interesting observations about the
+cuckoo. He says a large gooseberry bush standing in the border of an old
+hedgerow, in the midst of open fields, and not far from his house, was
+occupied by a pair of cuckoos for two seasons in succession, and, after
+an interval of a year, for two seasons more. This gave him a good chance
+to observe them. He says the mother-bird lays a single egg, and sits
+upon it a number of days before laying the second, so that he has seen
+one young bird nearly grown, a second just hatched, and a whole egg
+all in the nest at once. "So far as I have seen, this is the settled
+practice,--the young leaving the nest one at a time to the number of six
+or eight. The young have quite the look of the young of the dove in many
+respects. When nearly grown they are covered with long blue pin-feathers
+as long as darning-needles, without a bit of plumage on them. They part
+on the back and hang down on each side by their own weight. With its
+curious feathers and misshapen body the young bird is anything but
+handsome. They never open their mouths when approached, as many young
+birds do, but sit perfectly still, hardly moving when touched." He also
+notes the unnatural indifference of the mother-bird when her nest and
+young are approached. She makes no sound, but sits quietly on a near
+branch in apparent perfect unconcern.
+
+These observations, together with the fact that the egg of the cuckoo
+is occasionally found in the nests of other birds, raise the inquiry
+whether our bird is slowly relapsing into the habit of the European
+species, which always foists its egg upon other birds; or whether, on
+the other hand, it is not mending its manners in this respect. It has
+but little to unlearn or to forget in the one case, but great progress
+to make in the other. How far is its rudimentary nest--a mere platform
+of coarse twigs and dry stalks of weeds--from the deep, compact, finely
+woven and finely modeled nest of the goldfinch or king-bird, and what a
+gulf between its indifference toward its young and their solicitude! Its
+irregular manner of laying also seems better suited to a parasite like
+our cow-bird, or the European cuckoo, than to a regular nest-builder.
+
+This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees plenty of interesting
+things as he goes about his work. He one day saw a white swallow, which
+is of rare occurrence. He saw a bird, a sparrow he thinks, fly against
+the side of a horse and fill his beak with hair from the loosened coat
+of the animal. He saw a shrike pursue a chickadee, when the latter
+escaped by taking refuge in a small hole in a tree. One day in early
+spring he saw two hen-hawks that were circling and screaming high in
+air, approach each other, extend a claw, and, clasping them together,
+fall toward the earth flapping and struggling as if they were tied
+together; on nearing the ground they separated and soared aloft again.
+He supposed that it was not a passage of war but of love, and that the
+hawks were toying fondly with each other.
+
+He further relates a curious circumstance of finding a humming-bird in
+the upper part of a barn with its bill stuck fast in a crack of one of
+the large timbers, dead, of course, with wings extended, and as dry as a
+chip. The bird seems to have died as it had lived, on the wing, and its
+last act was indeed a ghastly parody of its living career. Fancy this
+nimble, flashing sprite, whose life was passed probing the honeyed
+depths of flowers, at last thrusting its bill into a crack in a dry
+timber in a hayloft, and, with spread wings, ending its existence.
+
+When the air is damp and heavy, swallows frequently hawk for insects
+about cattle and moving herds in the field. My farmer describes how
+they attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with a
+mowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows were
+very hungry, and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of his
+machine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a brood
+of hungry chickens. He says there was a continued rush of purple wings
+over the "cut-bar," and just where it was causing the grass to tremble
+and fall. Without his assistance the swallows would doubtless have gone
+hungry yet another day.
+
+Of the hen-hawk, he has observed that both male and female take part in
+incubation. "I was rather surprised," he says, "on one occasion, to
+see how quickly they change places on the nest. The nest was in a tall
+beech, and the leaves were not yet fully out. I could see the head and
+neck of the hawk over the edge of the nest, when I saw the other hawk
+coming down through the air at full speed. I expected he would alight
+near by, but instead of that he struck directly upon the nest, his mate
+getting out of the way barely in time to avoid being hit; it seemed
+almost as if he had knocked her off the nest. I hardly see how they can
+make such a rush on the nest without danger to the eggs."
+
+The king-bird will worry the hawk as a whiffet dog will worry a bear. It
+is by his persistence and audacity, not by any injury he is capable of
+dealing his great antagonist. The king-bird seldom more than dogs the
+hawk, keeping above and between his wings, and making a great ado; but
+my correspondent says he once "saw a king-bird riding on a hawk's
+back. The hawk flew as fast as possible, and the king-bird sat upon his
+shoulders in triumph until they had passed out of sight,"--tweaking his
+feathers, no doubt, and threatening to scalp him the next moment.
+
+That near relative of the king-bird, the great crested fly-catcher,
+has one well known peculiarity: he appears never to consider his nest
+finished until it contains a cast-off snake-skin. My alert correspondent
+one day saw him eagerly catch up an onion skin and make off with it,
+either deceived by it or else thinking it a good substitute for the
+coveted material.
+
+One day in May, walking in the woods, I came upon the nest of a
+whippoorwill, or rather its eggs, for it builds no nest,--two elliptical
+whitish spotted eggs lying upon the dry leaves. My foot was within a
+yard of the mother-bird before she flew. I wondered what a sharp eye
+would detect curious or characteristic in the ways of the bird, so I
+came to the place many times and had a look. It was always a task to
+separate the bird from her surroundings though I stood within a few feet
+of her, and knew exactly where to look. One had to bear on with his eye,
+as it were, and refuse to be baffled. The sticks and leaves, and bits of
+black or dark-brown bark, were all exactly copied in the bird's plumage.
+And then she did sit so close, and simulate so well a shapeless decaying
+piece of wood or bark! Twice I brought a companion, and guiding his eye
+to the spot, noted how difficult it was for him to make out there, in
+full view upon the dry leaves, any semblance to a bird. When the bird
+returned after being disturbed, she would alight within a few inches of
+her eggs, and then, after a moment's pause, hobble awkwardly upon them.
+
+After the young had appeared, all the wit of the bird came into play. I
+was on hand the next day, I think. The mother-bird sprang up when I was
+within a pace of her, and in doing so fanned the leaves with her wings
+till they sprang up too; as the leaves started the young started, and,
+being of the same color, to tell which was the leaf and which the bird
+was a trying task to any eye. I came the next day, when the same tactics
+were repeated. Once a leaf fell upon one of the young birds and
+nearly hid it. The young are covered with a reddish down like a young
+partridge, and soon follow their mother about. When disturbed, they gave
+but one leap, then settled down, perfectly motionless and stupid, with
+eyes closed. The parent bird, on these occasions made frantic efforts
+to decoy me away from her young. She would fly a few paces and fall
+upon her breast, and a spasm, like that of death, would run through her
+tremulous outstretched wings and prostrate body. She kept a sharp eye
+out the meanwhile to see if the ruse took, and if it did not, she was
+quickly cured, and moving about to some other point tried to draw my
+attention as before. When followed she always alighted upon the ground,
+dropping down in a sudden peculiar way. The second or third day both old
+and young had disappeared.
+
+The whippoorwill walks as awkwardly as a swallow, which is as awkward as
+a man in a bag, and yet she manages to lead her young about the woods.
+The latter, I think, move by leaps and sudden spurts, their protective
+coloring shielding them most effectively. Wilson once came upon the
+mother-bird and her brood in the woods, and, though they were at his
+very feet, was so baffled by the concealment of the young that he
+was about to give up the search, much disappointed, when he perceived
+something "like a slight moldiness among the withered leaves, and,
+on stooping down, discovered it to be a young whippoorwill seemingly
+asleep." Wilson's description of the young is very accurate, as its
+downy covering does look precisely like a "slight moldiness." Returning
+a few moments afterward to the spot to get a pencil he had forgotten, he
+could find neither old nor young.
+
+It takes an eye to see a partridge in the woods motionless upon the
+leaves; this sense needs to be as sharp as that of smell in hounds and
+pointers; and yet I know an unkempt youth that seldom fails to see the
+bird and shoot it before it takes wing. I think he sees it as soon as it
+sees him and before it suspects itself seen. What a training to the eye
+is hunting! To pick out the game from its surroundings, the grouse
+from the leaves, the gray squirrel from the mossy oak limb it hugs so
+closely, the red fox from the ruddy or brown or gray field, the rabbit
+from the stubble, or the white hare from the snow requires the best
+powers of this sense. A woodchuck, motionless in the fields or upon
+a rock, looks very much like a large stone or bowlder, yet a keen eye
+knows the difference at a glance, a quarter of a mile away.
+
+A man has a sharper eye than a dog, or a fox, or than any of the wild
+creatures, but not so sharp an ear or nose. But in the birds he finds
+his match. How quickly the old turkey discovers the hawk, a mere speck
+against the sky, and how quickly the hawk discovers you if you happen to
+be secreted in the bushes or behind the fence near which he alights!
+One advantage the bird surely has, and that is, owing to the form,
+structure, and position of the eye, it has a much larger field of
+vision--indeed, can probably see in nearly every direction at the same
+instant, behind as well as before. Man's field of vision embraces less
+than half a circle horizontally, and still less vertically; his brow and
+brain prevent him from seeing within many degrees of the zenith without
+a movement of the head; the bird on the other hand, takes in nearly the
+whole sphere at a glance.
+
+I find I see almost without effort nearly every bird within sight in the
+field or wood I pass through (a flit of the wing, a flirt of the tail
+are enough, though the flickering leaves do all conspire to hide them),
+and that with like ease the birds see me, though, unquestionably, the
+chances are immensely in their favor. The eye sees what it has the means
+of seeing, truly. You must have the bird in your heart before you can
+find it in the bush. The eye must have purpose and aim. No one ever yet
+found the walking fern who did not have the walking fern in his mind. A
+person whose eye is full of Indian relics picks them up in every field
+he walks through.
+
+One season I was interested in the tree-frogs; especially the tiny piper
+that one hears about the woods and brushy fields--the hyla of the swamps
+become a denizen of the trees; I had never seen him in this new role.
+But this season, having hylas in mind, or rather being ripe for them, I
+several times came across them. One Sunday, walking amid some bushes,
+I captured two. They leaped before me as doubtless they had done many
+times before; but though I was not looking for or thinking of them, yet
+they were quickly recognized, because the eye had been commissioned
+to find them. On another occasion, not long afterward, I was hurriedly
+loading my gun in the October woods in hopes of overtaking a gray
+squirrel that was fast escaping through the tree-tops, when one of these
+lilliput frogs, the color of the fast-yellowing leaves, leaped near me.
+I saw him only out of the corner of my eye and yet bagged him, because I
+had already made him my own.
+
+Nevertheless, the habit of observation is the habit of clear and
+decisive gazing. Not by a first casual glance, but by a steady
+deliberate aim of the eye are the rare and characteristic things
+discovered. You must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the spot,
+to see more than do the rank and file of mankind. The sharp-shooter
+picks out his man and knows him with fatal certainty from a stump, or a
+rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to locate, not only
+form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye, but also a faculty
+which they call individuality--that which separates, discriminates, and
+sees in every object its essential character. This is just as necessary
+to the naturalist as to the artist or the poet. The sharp eye notes
+specific points and differences,--it seizes upon and preserves the
+individuality of the thing. Persons frequently describe to me some bird
+they have seen or heard and ask me to name it, but in most cases the
+bird might be any one of a dozen, or else it is totally unlike any bird
+found in this continent. They have either seen falsely or else vaguely.
+Not so the farm youth who wrote me one winter day that he had seen a
+single pair of strange birds, which he describes as follows: "They were
+about the size of the 'chippie,' the tops of their heads were red, and
+the breast of the male was of the same color, while that of the female
+was much lighter; their rumps were also faintly tinged with red. If I
+have described them so that you would know them, please write me their
+names." There can be little doubt but the young observer had seen a pair
+of red-polls,--a bird related to the goldfinch, and that occasionally
+comes down to us in the winter from the far north. Another time,
+the same youth wrote that he had seen a strange bird, the color of
+a sparrow, that alighted on fences and buildings as well as upon
+the ground, and that walked. This last fact shoved the youth's
+discriminating eye and settled the case. I knew it to be a species of
+the lark, and from the size, color, season, etc., the tit-lark. But how
+many persons would have observed that the bird walked instead of hopped?
+
+Some friends of mine who lived in the country tried to describe to me a
+bird that built a nest in a tree within a few feet of the house. As it
+was a brown bird, I should have taken it for a wood-thrush, had not
+the nest been described as so thin and loose that from beneath the eggs
+could be distinctly seen. The most pronounced feature in the description
+was the barred appearance of the under side of the bird's tail. I was
+quite at sea, until one day, when we were driving out, a cuckoo flew
+across the road in front of us, when my friends exclaimed, "There is our
+bird!" I had never known a cuckoo to build near a house, and I had never
+noted the appearance the tail presents when viewed from beneath; but if
+the bird had been described in its most obvious features, as slender,
+with a long tail, cinnamon brown above and white beneath, with a curved
+bill, anyone who knew the bird would have recognized the portrait.
+
+We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for its
+specific features. I thought I knew exactly the form of the leaf of the
+tulip-tree, until one day a lady asked me to draw the outline of one. A
+good observer is quick to take a hint and to follow it up. Most of the
+facts of nature, especially in the life of the birds and animals, are
+well screened. We do not see the play because we do not look intently
+enough. The other day I was sitting with a friend upon a high rock
+in the woods, near a small stream, when we saw a water-snake swimming
+across a pool toward the opposite bank. Any eye would have noted it,
+perhaps nothing more. A little closer and sharper gaze revealed the fact
+that the snake bore something in its mouth, which, as we went down to
+investigate, proved to be a small cat-fish, three or four inches long.
+The snake had captured it in the pool, and, like any other fisherman,
+wanted to get its prey to dry land, although itself lived mostly in the
+water. Here, we said, is being enacted a little tragedy, that would have
+escaped any but sharp eyes. The snake, which was itself small, had the
+fish by the throat, the hold of vantage among all creatures, and clung
+to it with great tenacity. The snake knew that its best tactics was to
+get upon dry land as soon as possible. It could not swallow its victim
+alive, and it could not strangle it in the water. For a while it tried
+to kill its game by holding it up out of the water, but the fish grew
+heavy, and every few moments its struggles brought down the snake's
+head. This would not do. Compressing the fish's throat would not shut
+off its breath under such circumstances, so the wily serpent tried to
+get ashore with it, and after several attempts succeeded in effecting a
+landing on a flat rock. But the fish died hard. Cat-fish do not give up
+the ghost in a hurry. Its throat was becoming congested, but the snake's
+distended jaws must have ached. It was like a petrified gape. Then the
+spectators became very curious and close in their scrutiny, and the
+snake determined to withdraw from the public gaze and finish the
+business in hand to its own notions. But, when gently but firmly
+remonstrated with by my friend with his walking-stick, it dropped the
+fish and retreated in high dudgeon beneath a stone in the bed of the
+creek. The fish, with a swollen and angry throat, went its way also.
+
+Birds, I say, have wonderfully keen eyes. Throw a fresh bone or a
+piece of meat upon the snow in winter, and see how soon the crows will
+discover it and be on hand. If it be near the house or barn, the crow
+that first discovers it will alight near it, to make sure he is not
+deceived; then he will go away, and soon return with a companion. The
+two alight a few yards from the bone, and after some delay, during which
+the vicinity is sharply scrutinized, one of the crows advances boldly to
+within a few feet of the coveted prize. Here he pauses, and if no trick
+is discovered, and the meat be indeed meat, he seizes it and makes off.
+
+One midwinter I cleared away the snow under an apple-tree near the house
+and scattered some corn there. I had not seen a blue-jay for weeks, yet
+that very day one found my corn, and after that several came daily and
+partook of it, holding the kernels under their feet upon the limbs of
+the trees and pecking them vigorously.
+
+Of course the woodpecker and his kind have sharp eyes; still I was
+surprised to see how quickly Downy found out some bones that were placed
+in a convenient place under the shed to be pounded up for the hens. In
+going out to the barn I often disturbed him making a meal off the bite
+of meat that still adhered to them.
+
+"Look intently enough at anything," said a poet to me one day, "and you
+will see something that would otherwise escape you." I thought of the
+remark as I sat on a stump in an opening of the woods one spring day. I
+saw a small hawk approaching; he flew to a tall tulip-tree and alighted
+on a large limb near the top. He eyed me and I eyed him. Then the bird
+disclosed a trait that was new to me: he hopped along the limb to a
+small cavity near the trunk, when he thrust in his head and pulled out
+some small object and fell to eating it. After he had partaken of it for
+some minutes he put the remainder back in his larder and flew away. I
+had seen something like feathers eddying slowly down as the hawk ate,
+and on approaching the spot found the feathers of a sparrow here and
+there clinging to the bushes beneath the tree. The hawk then--commonly
+called the chicken hawk--is as provident as a mouse or a squirrel, and
+lays by a store against a time of need, but I should not have discovered
+the fact had I not held my eye on him.
+
+An observer of the birds is attracted by any unusual sound or commotion
+among them. In May or June, when other birds are most vocal, the jay
+is a silent bird; he goes sneaking about the orchards and the groves
+as silent as a pickpocket; he is robbing bird's-nests and he is very
+anxious that nothing should be said about it; but in the fall none so
+quick and loud to cry "Thief, thief!" as he. One December morning a
+troop of jays discovered a little screech-owl secreted in the hollow
+trunk of an old apple-tree near my house. How they found the owl out is
+a mystery, since it never ventures forth in the light of day; but
+they did, and proclaimed the fact with great emphasis. I suspect the
+bluebirds first told them, for these birds are constantly peeping into
+holes and crannies, both spring and fall. Some unsuspecting bird had
+probably entered the cavity prospecting for a place for next year's
+nest, or else looking out a likely place to pass a cold night, and then
+had rushed out with important news. A boy who should unwittingly venture
+into a bear's den when Bruin was at home could not be more astonished
+and alarmed than a bluebird would be on finding itself in the cavity of
+a decayed tree with an owl. At any rate the bluebirds joined the jays
+in calling the attention of all whom it might concern to the fact that
+a culprit of some sort was hiding from the light of day in the old
+apple-tree. I heard the notes of warning and alarm and approached to
+within eye-shot. The bluebirds were cautious and hovered about uttering
+their peculiar twittering calls; but the jays were bolder and took turns
+looking in at the cavity, and deriding the poor shrinking owl. A
+jay would alight in the entrance of the hole and flirt and peer and
+attitudinize, and then flyaway crying "Thief, thief, thief!" at the top
+of his voice.
+
+I climbed up and peered into the opening, and could just descry the
+owl clinging to the inside of the tree. I reached in and took him out,
+giving little heed to the threatening snapping of his beak. He was as
+red as a fox and as yellow-eyed as a cat. He made no effort to escape,
+but planted his claws in my forefinger and clung there with a grip that
+soon grew uncomfortable. I placed him in the loft of an out-house
+in hopes of getting better acquainted with him. By day he was a very
+willing prisoner, scarcely moving at all, even when approached and
+touched with the hand, but looking out upon the world with half-closed,
+sleepy eyes. But at night what a change; how alert, how wild, how
+active! He was like another bird; he darted about with wide, fearful
+eyes, and regarded me like a cornered cat. I opened the window, and
+swiftly, but as silent as a shadow, he glided out into the congenial
+darkness, and perhaps, ere this, has revenged himself upon the sleeping
+jay or bluebird that first betrayed his hiding-place.
+
+
+
+
+THE APPLE.
+
+
+   Lo! sweetened with the summer light,
+   The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
+   Drops in a silent autumn night.--TENNYSON.
+
+
+Not a little of the sunshine of our northern winters is surely wrapped
+up in the apple. How could we winter over without it! How is life
+sweetened by its mild acids! A cellar well filled with apples is more
+valuable than a chamber filled with flax and wool. So much sound ruddy
+life to draw upon, to strike one's roots down into, as it were.
+
+Especially to those whose soil of life is inclined to be a little clayey
+and heavy, is the apple a winter necessity. It is the natural antidote
+of most of the ills the flesh is heir to. Full of vegetable acids and
+aromatics, qualities which act as refrigerants and antiseptics, what an
+enemy it is to jaundice, indigestion, torpidity of liver, etc. It is a
+gentle spur and tonic to the whole biliary system. Then I have read that
+it has been found by analysis to contain more phosphorus than any
+other vegetable. This makes it the proper food of the scholar and the
+sedentary man; it feeds his brain and it stimulates his liver. Nor is
+this all. Besides its hygienic properties, the apple is full of
+sugar and mucilage, which make it highly nutritious. It is said,
+"The operators of Cornwall, England, consider ripe apples nearly
+as nourishing as bread, and far more so than potatoes. In the year
+1801--which was a year of much scarcity--apples, instead of being
+converted into cider, were sold to the poor, and the laborers asserted
+that they could 'stand their work' on baked apples without meat; whereas
+a potato diet required either meat or some other substantial nutriment.
+The French and Germans use apples extensively, so do the inhabitants
+of all European nations. The laborers depend upon them as an article of
+food, and frequently make a dinner of sliced apples and bread."
+
+Yet the English apple is a tame and insipid affair compared with the
+intense, sun-colored and sun-steeped fruit our orchards yield.
+The English have no sweet apple, I am told, the saccharine element
+apparently being less abundant in vegetable nature in that sour and
+chilly climate than in our own. It is well known that the European maple
+yields no sugar, while both our birch and hickory have sweet in their
+veins. Perhaps this fact accounts for our excessive love of sweets,
+which may be said to be a national trait.
+
+The Russian apple has a lovely complexion, smooth and transparent,
+but the Cossack is not yet all eliminated from it. The only one I have
+seen--the Duchess of Oldenburg--is as beautiful as a Tartar princess,
+with a distracting odor, but it is the least bit puckery to the taste.
+
+The best thing I know about Chili is not its guano beds, but this fact
+which I learn from Darwin's "Voyage," namely, that the apple thrives
+well there. Darwin saw a town there so completely buried in a wood of
+apple-trees, that its streets were merely paths in an orchard. The tree
+indeed thrives so well, that large branches cut off in the spring and
+planted two or three feet deep in the ground send out roots and develop
+into fine full-bearing trees by the third year. The people know the
+value of the apple too. They make cider and wine of it and then from
+the refuse a white and finely flavored spirit; then by another process
+a sweet treacle is obtained called honey. The children and the pigs eat
+little or no other food. He does not add that the people are healthy
+and temperate, but I have no doubt they are. We knew the apple had many
+virtues, but these Chilians have really opened a deep beneath a deep.
+We had found out the cider and the spirits, but who guessed the wine and
+the honey, unless it were the bees? There is a variety in our orchards
+called the winesap, a doubly liquid name that suggests what might be
+done with this fruit.
+
+The apple is the commonest and yet the most varied and beautiful of
+fruits. A dish of them is as becoming to the centre-table in winter as
+was the vase of flowers in the summer,--a bouquet of spitzenbergs and
+greenings and northern spies. A rose when it blooms, the apple is a rose
+when it ripens. It pleases every sense to which it can be addressed, the
+touch, the smell, the sight, the taste; and when it falls in the still
+October days it pleases the ear. It is a call to a banquet, it is a
+signal that the feast is ready. The bough would fain hold it, but it can
+now assert its independence; it can now live a life of its own.
+
+Daily the stem relaxes its hold, till finally it lets go completely, and
+down comes the painted sphere with a mellow thump to the earth, towards
+which it has been nodding so long. It bounds away to seek its bed,
+to hide under a leaf, or in a tuft of grass. It will now take time to
+meditate and ripen! What delicious thoughts it has there nestled with
+its fellows under the fence, turning acid into sugar, and sugar into
+wine!
+
+How pleasing to the touch! I love to stroke its polished rondure with
+my hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or
+through the early spring woods. You are company, you red-cheeked spitz,
+or you salmon-fleshed greening! I toy with you; press your face to mine,
+toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out where you
+lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You are so alive! You glow
+like a ruddy flower. You look so animated I almost expect to see you
+move. I postpone the eating of you, you are so beautiful! How compact;
+how exquisitely tinted! Stained by the sun and varnished against the
+rains. An independent vegetable existence, alive and vascular as my own
+flesh; capable of being wounded, bleeding, wasting away, and almost of
+repairing damages!
+
+How it resists the cold! holding out almost as long as the red cheeks
+of the boys do. A frost that destroys the potatoes and other roots only
+makes the apple more crisp and vigorous; it peeps out from the chance
+November snows unscathed. When I see the fruit-vender on the street
+corner stamping his feet and beating his hands to keep them warm, and
+his naked apples lying exposed to the blasts, I wonder if they do not
+ache too to clap their hands and enliven their circulation. But they can
+stand it nearly as long as the vender can.
+
+Noble common fruit, best friend of man and most loved by him, following
+him like his dog or his cow, wherever he goes. His homestead is not
+planted till you are planted, your roots intertwine with his; thriving
+best where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost, the
+plow and the pruning-knife, you are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful
+industry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste fruit!
+you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor indolence,
+neither enervating heats nor the Frigid Zones. Uncloying fruit, fruit
+whose best sauce is the open air, whose finest flavors only he whose
+taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking knows; winter fruit, when
+the fire of life burns brightest; fruit always a little hyperborean,
+leaning towards the cold; bracing, sub-acid, active fruit. I think you
+must come from the north, you are so frank and honest, so sturdy and
+appetizing. You are stocky and homely like the northern races. Your
+quality is Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous south is not akin to
+you. Not spices or olives or the sumptuous liquid fruits, but the grass,
+the snow, the grains, the coolness is akin to you. I think if I could
+subsist on you or the like of you, I should never have an intemperate
+or ignoble thought, never be feverish or despondent. So far as I could
+absorb or transmute your quality I should be cheerful, continent,
+equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmth and
+contentment around.
+
+Is there any other fruit that has so much facial expression as the
+apple? What boy does not more than half believe they can see with that
+single eye of theirs? Do they not look and nod to him from the bough?
+The swaar has one look, the rambo another, the spy another. The youth
+recognizes the seek-no-further buried beneath a dozen other varieties,
+the moment he catches a glance of its eye, or the bonny-cheeked Newtown
+pippin, or the gentle but sharp-nosed gilliflower. He goes to the great
+bin in the cellar and sinks his shafts here and there in the garnered
+wealth of the orchards, mining for his favorites, sometimes coming plump
+upon them, sometimes catching a glimpse of them to the right or left,
+or uncovering them as keystones in an arch made up of many varieties.
+In the dark he can usually tell them by the sense of touch. There is
+not only the size and shape, but there is the texture and polish. Some
+apples are coarse grained and some are fine; some are thin-skinned and
+some are thick. One variety is quick and vigorous beneath the touch;
+another gentle and yielding. The pinnock has a thick skin with a spongy
+lining, a bruise in it becomes like a piece of cork. The tallow apple
+has an unctuous feel, as its name suggests. It sheds water like a duck.
+What apple is that with a fat curved stem that blends so prettily
+with its own flesh,--the wine-apple? Some varieties impress me as
+masculine,--weather-stained, freckled, lasting and rugged; others
+are indeed lady apples, fair, delicate, shining, mild-flavored,
+white-meated, like the egg-drop and the lady-finger. The practiced hand
+knows each kind by the touch. Do you remember the apple hole in the
+garden or back of the house, Ben Bolt? In the fall after the bins in the
+cellar had been well stocked, we excavated a circular pit in the warm,
+mellow earth, and covering the bottom with clean rye straw, emptied in
+basketful after basketful of hardy choice varieties, till there was a
+tent-shaped mound several feet high of shining variegated fruit. Then
+wrapping it about with a thick layer of long rye straw, and tucking it
+up snug and warm, the mound was covered, with a thin coating of earth, a
+flat stone on the top holding down the straw. As winter set in, another
+coating of earth was put upon it, with perhaps an overcoat of coarse dry
+stable manure, and the precious pile was left in silence and darkness
+till spring. No marmot hibernating under-ground in his nest of leaves
+and dry grass, more cosy and warm. No frost, no wet, but fragrant
+privacy and quiet. Then how the earth tempers and flavors the apples! It
+draws out all the acrid unripe qualities, and infuses into them a subtle
+refreshing taste of the soil. Some varieties perish; but the ranker,
+hardier kinds, like the northern spy, the greening, or the black apple,
+or the russet, or the pinnock, how they ripen and grow in grace, how the
+green becomes gold, and the bitter becomes sweet!
+
+As the supply in the bins and barrels gets low and spring approaches,
+the buried treasures in the garden are remembered. With spade and axe
+we go out and penetrate through the snow and frozen earth till the inner
+dressing of straw is laid bare. It is not quite as clear and bright as
+when we placed it there last fall, but the fruit beneath, which the
+hand soon exposes, is just as bright and far more luscious. Then, as day
+after day you resort to the hole, and, removing the straw and earth from
+the opening, thrust your arm into the fragrant pit, you have a better
+chance than ever before to become acquainted with your favorites by the
+sense of touch. How you feel for them, reaching to the right and left!
+Now you have got a Tolman sweet; you imagine you can feel that single
+meridian line that divides it into two hemispheres. Now a greening fills
+your hand, you feel its fine quality beneath its rough coat. Now you
+have hooked a swaar, you recognize its full face; now a Vandevere or a
+King rolls down from the apex above, and you bag it at once. When you
+were a school-boy you stowed these away in your pockets and ate them
+along the road and at recess, and again at noon time; and they, in
+a measure, corrected the effects of the cake and pie with which your
+indulgent mother filled your lunch-basket.
+
+The boy is indeed the true apple-eater, and is not to be questioned how
+he came by the fruit with which his pockets are filled. It belongs to
+him...His own juicy flesh craves the juicy flesh of the apple. Sap draws
+sap. His fruit-eating has little reference to the state of his appetite.
+Whether he be full of meat or empty of meat he wants the apple just
+the same. Before meal or after meal it never comes amiss. The farm-boy
+munches apples all day long. He has nests of them in the hay-mow,
+mellowing, to which he makes frequent visits. Sometimes old Brindle,
+having access through the open door, smells them out and makes short
+work of them.
+
+In some countries the custom remains of placing a rosy apple in the hand
+of the dead that they may find it when they enter paradise. In northern
+mythology the giants eat apples to keep off old age.
+
+The apple is indeed the fruit of youth. As we grow old we crave apples
+less. It is an ominous sign. When you are ashamed to be seen eating them
+on the street; when you can carry them in your pocket and your hand not
+constantly find its way to them; when your neighbor has apples and you
+have none, and you make no nocturnal visits to his orchard; when your
+lunch-basket is without them, and you can pass a winter's night by the
+fireside with no thought of the fruit at your elbow, then be assured you
+are no longer a boy, either in heart or years.
+
+The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an apple in their season
+as others with a pipe or cigar. When he has nothing else to do, or is
+bored, he eats an apple. While he is waiting for the train he eats an
+apple, sometimes several of them. When he takes a walk, he arms himself
+with apples. His traveling bag is full of apples. He offers an apple to
+his companion, and takes one himself. They are his chief solace when
+on the road. He sows their seed all along the route. He tosses the core
+from the car-window and from the top of the stage-coach. He would, in
+time, make the land one vast orchard. He dispenses with a knife. He
+prefers that his teeth shall have the first taste. Then he knows the
+best flavor is immediately beneath the skin, and that in a pared apple
+this is lost. If you will stew the apple, he says, instead of baking
+it, by all means leave the skin on. It improves the color and vastly
+heightens the flavor of the dish.
+
+The apple is a masculine fruit; hence women are poor apple-eaters. It
+belongs to the open air, and requires an open-air taste and relish.
+
+I instantly sympathized with that clergyman I read of, who on pulling
+out his pocket-handkerchief in the midst of his discourse, pulled out
+two bouncing apples with it that went rolling across the pulpit floor
+and down the pulpit stairs. These apples were, no doubt, to be eaten
+after the sermon on his way home, or to his next appointment. They would
+take the taste of it out of his mouth. Then, would a minister be apt to
+grow tiresome with two big apples in his coat-tail pockets? Would he not
+naturally hasten along to "lastly," and the big apples? If they were the
+dominie apples, and it was April or May, he certainly....
+
+How the early settlers prized the apple! When their trees broke down or
+were split asunder by the storms, the neighbors turned out, the divided
+tree was put together again and fastened with iron bolts. In some of the
+oldest orchards one may still occasionally see a large dilapidated tree
+with the rusty iron bolt yet visible. Poor, sour fruit, too, but sweet
+in those early pioneer days. My grandfather, who was one of these heroes
+of the stump, used every fall to make a journey of forty miles for a
+few apples, which he brought home in a bag on horseback. He frequently
+started from home by two or three o'clock in the morning, and at one
+time both he and his horse were much frightened by the screaming of
+panthers in a narrow pass in the mountains through which the road led.
+
+Emerson, I believe, has spoken of the apple as the social fruit of New
+England. Indeed, what a promoter or abettor of social intercourse among
+our rural population the apple has been, the company growing more merry
+and unrestrained as soon as the basket of apples was passed round!
+When the cider followed, the introduction and good understanding were
+complete. Then those rural gatherings that enlivened the autumn in the
+country, known as "apple cuts," now, alas! nearly obsolete, where so
+many things were cut and dried besides apples! The larger and more
+loaded the orchard, the more frequently the invitations went round and
+the higher the social and convivial spirit ran. Ours is eminently a
+country of the orchard. Horace Greeley said he had seen no land in
+which the orchard formed such a prominent feature in the rural and
+agricultural districts. Nearly every farmhouse in the Eastern and
+Northern States has its setting or its background of apple-trees, which
+generally date back to the first settlement of the farm. Indeed, the
+orchard, more than almost any other thing, tends to soften and humanize
+the country, and to give the place of which it is an adjunct, a settled,
+domestic look. The apple-tree takes the rawness and wildness off any
+scene. On the top of a mountain, or in remote pastures, it sheds the
+sentiment of home. It never loses its domestic air, or lapses into a
+wild state. And in planting a homestead, or in choosing a building
+site for the new house, what a help it is to have a few old, maternal
+apple-trees near by; regular old grandmothers, who have seen trouble,
+who have been sad and glad through so many winters and summers, who have
+blossomed till the air about them is sweeter than elsewhere, and borne
+fruit till the grass beneath them has become thick and soft from human
+contact, and who have nourished robins and finches in their branches
+till they have a tender, brooding look. The ground, the turf, the
+atmosphere of an old orchard, seem several stages nearer to man than
+that of the adjoining field, as if the trees had given back to the soil
+more than they had taken from it; as if they had tempered the elements
+and attracted all the genial and beneficent influences in the landscape
+around.
+
+An apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops beside the apple.
+There is the crop of sweet and tender reminiscences dating from
+childhood and spanning the seasons from May to October, and making the
+orchard a sort of outlying part of the household. You have played
+there as a child, mused there as a youth or lover, strolled there as a
+thoughtful, sad-eyed man. Your father, perhaps, planted the trees, or
+reared them from the seed, and you yourself have pruned and grafted
+them, and worked among them, till every separate tree has a peculiar
+history and meaning in your mind. Then there is the never-failing crop
+of birds--robins, goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds, hair-birds,
+orioles, starlings--all nesting and breeding in its branches, and fitly
+described by Wilson Flagg as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard." Whether
+the pippin and sweetbough bear or not, the "punctual birds" can always
+be depended on. Indeed, there are few better places to study ornithology
+than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many of the birds
+of the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the season. The
+cuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen apples,
+the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds' eggs, the
+woodpecker and chickadees for their food, and the high-hole for ants.
+The red-bird comes too, if only to see what a friendly covert its
+branches form; and the wood-thrush now and then comes out of the grove
+near by, and nests alongside of its cousin, the robin. The smaller hawks
+know that this is a most likely spot for their prey; and in spring the
+shy northern warblers may be studied as they pause to feed on the fine
+insects amid its branches. The mice love to dwell here also, and hither
+comes from the near woods the squirrel and the rabbit. The latter will
+put his head through the boy's slipper-noose any time for taste of the
+sweet apple, and the red squirrel and chipmunk esteem its seeds a great
+rarity.
+
+All the domestic animals love the apple, but none so much so as the cow.
+The taste of it wakes her up as few other things do, and bars and fences
+must be well looked after. No need to assort them or pick out the ripe
+ones for her. An apple is an apple, and there is no best about it. I
+heard of a quick-witted old cow that learned to shake them down from
+the tree. While rubbing herself she had observed that an apple sometimes
+fell. This stimulated her to rub a little harder, when more apples fell.
+She then took the hint and rubbed her shoulder with such vigor that the
+farmer had to check her and keep an eye on her to save his fruit.
+
+But the cow is the friend of the apple. How many trees she has planted
+about the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields and
+pastures. The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her
+planting. She browses them down to be sure, but they are hers, and why
+should she not?
+
+What an individuality the apple-tree has, each variety being nearly
+as marked by its form as by its fruit. What a vigorous grower, for
+instance, is the Ribston pippin, an English apple. Wide branching like
+the oak, and its large ridgy fruit, in late fall or early winter, is one
+of my favorites. Or the thick and more pendent top of the belleflower,
+with its equally rich, sprightly uncloying fruit.
+
+Sweet apples are perhaps the most nutritious, and when baked are a feast
+in themselves. With a tree of the Jersey sweet or of Tolman's sweeting
+in bearing, no man's table need be devoid of luxuries and one of the
+most wholesome of all deserts. Or the red astrachan, an August apple,
+what a gap may be filled in the culinary department of a household at
+this season, by a single tree of this fruit! And what a feast is its
+shining crimson coat to the eye before its snow-white flesh has
+reached the tongue. But the apple of apples for the household is the
+spitzenberg. In this casket Pomona has put her highest flavors. It can
+stand the ordeal of cooking and still remain a spitz. I recently saw
+a barrel of these apples from the orchard of a fruit-grower in the
+northern part of New York, who has devoted special attention to this
+variety. They were perfect gems. Not large, that had not been the aim,
+but small, fair, uniform, and red to the core. How intense, how spicy
+and aromatic!
+
+But all the excellences of the apple are not confined to the cultivated
+fruit. Occasionally a seedling springs up about the farm that produces
+fruit of rare beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to the
+apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, I have noticed that
+most of the wild unbidden trees bear good, edible fruit. In cold and
+ungenial districts, the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in
+more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. I know wild
+apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had,
+Thoreau's sauce of sharp November air to be eaten with. At the foot of
+a hill near me and striking its roots deep in the shale, is a giant
+specimen of native tree that bears an apple that has about the clearest,
+waxiest, most transparent complexion I ever saw. It is good size, and
+the color of a tea-rose. Its quality is best appreciated in the kitchen.
+I know another seedling of excellent quality and so remarkable for its
+firmness and density, that it is known on the farm where it grows as the
+"heavy apple."
+
+I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of the apple and its tree
+are under obligation. His chapter on Wild Apples is a most delicious
+piece of writing. It has a "tang and smack" like the fruit it
+celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in the same manner.
+It has the hue and perfume of the crab, and the richness and raciness of
+the pippin. But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts and was
+obliged to confess that his favorites could not be eaten in-doors. Late
+in November he found a blue-pearmain tree growing within the edge of a
+swamp, almost as good as wild. "You would not suppose," he says, "that
+there was any fruit left there on the first survey, but you must look
+according to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten
+now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there
+amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I explore amid
+the bare alders, and the huckleberry bushes, and the withered sedge, and
+in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under
+the fallen and decayed ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly
+strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen into
+hollows long since, and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself--a
+proper kind of packing. From these lurking places, everywhere within the
+circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit all wet and glossy,
+maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and perhaps
+a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript from a
+monastery's mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it, and at
+least as ripe and well kept, if no better than those in barrels, more
+crisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to yield anything,
+I have learned to look between the leaves of the suckers which spring
+thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or
+in the very midst of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves,
+safe from cows which may have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set, for I
+do not refuse the blue-pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as
+I retrace my steps, in the frosty eve being perhaps four or five miles
+from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep
+my balance."
+
+
+
+
+A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.
+
+
+The traveler and camper-out in Maine, unless he penetrates its more
+northern portions, has less reason to remember it as a pine-tree State
+than a birch-tree State. The white-pine forests have melted away like
+snow in the spring and gone down stream, leaving only patches here and
+there in the more remote and inaccessible parts. The portion of the
+State I saw--the valley of the Kennebec and the woods about Moxie
+Lake--had been shorn of its pine timber more than forty years before,
+and is now covered with a thick growth of spruce and cedar and various
+deciduous trees. But the birch abounds. Indeed, when the pine goes out
+the birch comes in; the race of men succeeds the race of giants.
+This tree has great stay-at-home virtues. Let the sombre, aspiring,
+mysterious pine go; the birch has humble every-day uses. In Maine, the
+paper or canoe birch is turned to more account than any other tree. I
+read in Gibbon that the natives of ancient Assyria used to celebrate
+in verse or prose the three hundred and sixty uses to which the various
+parts and products of the palm-tree were applied. The Maine birch is
+turned to so many accounts that it may well be called the palm of this
+region. Uncle Nathan, our guide, said it was made especially for the
+camper-out; yes, and for the wood-man and frontiersman generally. It is
+a magazine, a furnishing store set up in the wilderness, whose goods are
+free to every comer. The whole equipment of the camp lies folded in it,
+and comes forth at the beck of the woodman's axe; tent, waterproof
+roof, boat, camp utensils, buckets, cups, plates, spoons, napkins,
+table cloths, paper for letters or your journal, torches, candles,
+kindling-wood, and fuel. The canoe-birch yields you its vestments with
+the utmost liberality. Ask for its coat, and it gives you its waistcoat
+also. Its bark seems wrapped about it layer upon layer, and comes off
+with great ease. We saw many rude structures and cabins shingled and
+sided with it, and haystacks capped with it. Near a maple-sugar camp
+there was a large pile of birch-bark sap-buckets,--each bucket made of
+a piece of bark about a yard square, folded up as the tinman folds up
+a sheet of tin to make a square vessel, the corners bent around against
+the sides and held by a wooden pin. When, one day, we were overtaken
+by a shower in traveling through the woods, our guide quickly stripped
+large sheets of the bark from a near tree, and we had each a perfect
+umbrella as by magic. When the rain was over, and we moved on, I wrapped
+mine about me like a large leather apron, and it shielded my clothes
+from the wet bushes. When we came to a spring, Uncle Nathan would have
+a birch-bark cup ready before any of us could get a tin one out of his
+knapsack, and I think water never tasted so sweet as from one of these
+bark cups. It is exactly the thing. It just fits the mouth and it seems
+to give new virtues to the water. It makes me thirsty now when I think
+of it. In our camp at Moxie we made a large birch-bark box to keep the
+butter in; and the butter in this box, covered with some leafy boughs,
+I think improved in flavor day by day. Maine butter needs something to
+mollify and sweeten it a little, and I think birch bark will do it. In
+camp Uncle Nathan often drank his tea and coffee from a bark cup; the
+china closet in the birch-tree was always handy, and our vulgar tin
+ware was generally a good deal mixed, and the kitchen-maid not at all
+particular about dish-washing. We all tried the oatmeal with the maple
+syrup in one of these dishes, and the stewed mountain cranberries,
+using a birch-bark spoon, and never found service better. Uncle Nathan
+declared he could boil potatoes in a bark kettle, and I did not doubt
+him. Instead of sending our soiled napkins and table-spreads to the
+wash, we rolled them up into candles and torches, and drew daily upon
+our stores in the forest for new ones.
+
+But the great triumph of the birch is of course the bark canoe. When
+Uncle Nathan took us out under his little wood-shed, and showed us, or
+rather modestly permitted us to see, his nearly finished canoe, it was
+like a first glimpse of some new and unknown genius of the woods or
+streams. It sat there on the chips and shavings and fragments of bark
+like some shy delicate creature just emerged from its hiding-place, or
+like some wild flower just opened. It was the first boat of the kind
+I had ever seen, and it filled my eye completely. What woodcraft it
+indicated, and what a wild free life, sylvan life, it promised! It had
+such a fresh, aboriginal look as I had never before seen in any kind of
+handiwork. Its clear yellow-red color would have become the cheek of an
+Indian maiden. Then its supple curves and swells, its sinewy stays
+and thwarts, its bow-like contour, its tomahawk stem and stern rising
+quickly and sharply from its frame, were all vividly suggestive of the
+race from which it came. An old Indian had taught Uncle Nathan the art,
+and the soul of the ideal red man looked out of the boat before us.
+Uncle Nathan had spent two days ranging the mountains looking for a
+suitable tree, and had worked nearly a week on the craft. It was
+twelve feet long, and would seat and carry five men nicely. Three trees
+contribute to the making of a canoe besides the birch, namely, the white
+cedar for ribs and lining, the spruce for roots and fibres to sew its
+joints and bind its frame, and the pine for pitch or rosin to stop its
+seams and cracks. It is hand-made and home-made, or rather wood-made,
+in a sense that no other craft is, except a dug-out, and it suggests a
+taste and a refinement that few products of civilization realize. The
+design of a savage, it yet looks like the thought of a poet, and its
+grace and fitness haunt the imagination. I suppose its production was
+the inevitable result of the Indian's wants and surroundings, but that
+does not detract from its beauty. It is, indeed, one of the fairest
+flowers the thorny plant of necessity ever bore. Our canoe, as I have
+intimated, was not yet finished when we first saw it, nor yet when we
+took it up, with its architect, upon our metaphorical backs and bore it
+to the woods. It lacked part of its cedar lining and the rosin upon its
+joints, and these were added after we reached our destination.
+
+Though we were not indebted to the birch-tree for our guide, Uncle
+Nathan, as he was known in all the country, yet he matched well these
+woodsy products and conveniences. The birch-tree had given him a large
+part of his tuition, and kneeling in his canoe and making it shoot
+noiselessly over the water with that subtle yet indescribably expressive
+and athletic play of the muscles of the back and shoulders, the boat and
+the man seemed born of the same spirit. He had been a hunter and trapper
+for over forty years; he had grown gray in the woods, had ripened and
+matured there, and everything about him was as if the spirit of the
+woods had had the ordering of it; his whole make-up was in a minor
+and subdued key, like the moss and the lichens, or like the protective
+coloring of the game,--everything but his quick sense and penetrative
+glance. He was as gentle and modest as a girl; his sensibilities were
+like plants that grow in the shade. The woods and the solitudes had
+touched him with their own softening and refining influence; had indeed
+shed upon his soil of life a rich deep leaf mould that was delightful,
+and that nursed, half concealed, the tenderest and wildest growths.
+There was grit enough back of and beneath it all, but he presented
+none of the rough and repelling traits of character of the conventional
+backwoods-man. In the spring he was a driver of logs on the Kennebec,
+usually having charge of a large gang of men; in the winter he was a
+solitary trapper and hunter in the forests.
+
+Our first glimpse of Maine waters was Pleasant Pond, which we found by
+following a white, rapid, musical stream from the Kennebec three
+miles back into the mountains. Maine waters are for the most part
+dark-complexioned, Indian-colored streams, but Pleasant Pond is a
+pale-face among them both in name and nature. It is the only strictly
+silver lake I ever saw. Its waters seem almost artificially white and
+brilliant, though of remarkable transparency. I think I detected minute
+shining motes held in suspension in it. As for the trout they are
+veritable bars of silver until you have cut their flesh, when they
+are the reddest of gold. They have no crimson or other spots, and the
+straight lateral line is but a faint pencil mark. They appeared to be
+a species of lake trout peculiar to these waters, uniformly from ten to
+twelve inches in length. And these beautiful fish, at the time of our
+visit (last of August) at least, were to be taken only in deep water
+upon a hook baited with salt pork. And then you needed a letter
+of introduction to them. They were not to be tempted or cajoled by
+strangers. We did not succeed in raising a fish, although instructed how
+it was to be done, until one of the natives, a young and obliging farmer
+living hard by, came and lent his countenance to the enterprise. I sat
+in one end of the boat and he in the other; my pork was the same as his,
+and I maneuvered it as directed, and yet those fish knew his hook
+from mine in sixty feet of water, and preferred it four times in five.
+Evidently they did not bite because they were hungry, but solely for old
+acquaintance' sake.
+
+Pleasant Pond is an irregular sheet of water, two miles or more in
+its greatest diameter, with high, rugged mountains rising up from its
+western shore, and low rolling hills sweeping back from its eastern and
+northern, covered by a few sterile farms. I was never tired, when the
+wind was still, of floating along its margin and gazing down into its
+marvelously translucent depths. The boulders and fragments of rocks were
+seen, at a depth of twenty-five or thirty feet, strewing its floor,
+and apparently as free from any covering of sediment as when they were
+dropped there by the old glaciers aeons ago. Our camp was amid a dense
+grove of second growth of white pine on the eastern shore, where, for
+one, I found a most admirable cradle in a little depression, outside of
+the tent, carpeted with pine needles, in which to pass the night. The
+camper-out is always in luck if he can find, sheltered by the trees, a
+soft hole in the ground, even if he has a stone for a pillow. The earth
+must open its arms a little for us even in life, if we are to sleep well
+upon its bosom. I have often heard my grand-father, who was a soldier of
+the Revolution, tell with great gusto how he once bivouacked in a little
+hollow made by the overturning of a tree, and slept so soundly that he
+did not wake up till his cradle was half full of water from a passing
+shower.
+
+What bird or other creature might represent the divinity of Pleasant
+Pond I do not know, but its demon, as of most northern inland waters, is
+the loon, and a very good demon he is too, suggesting something not so
+much malevolent, as arch, sardonic, ubiquitous, circumventing, with just
+a tinge of something inhuman and uncanny. His fiery red eyes gleaming
+forth from that jet-black head are full of meaning. Then his strange
+horse laughter by day and his weird, doleful cry at night, like that of
+a lost and wandering spirit, recall no other bird or beast. He suggests
+something almost supernatural in his alertness and amazing quickness,
+cheating the shot and the bullet of the sportsman out of their aim. I
+know of but one other bird so quick, and that is the humming-bird, which
+I have never been able to kill with a gun. The loon laughs the shot-gun
+to scorn, and the obliging young farmer above referred to told me he
+had shot at them hundreds of times with his rifle, without effect,--they
+always dodged his bullet. We had in our party a breach-loading rifle,
+which weapon is perhaps an appreciable moment of time quicker than
+the ordinary muzzleloader, and this the poor loon could not or did not
+dodge. He had not timed himself to that species of fire-arm, and when,
+with his fellow, he swam about within rifle range of our camp, letting
+off volleys of his wild ironical ha-ha, he little suspected the
+dangerous gun that was matched against him. As the rifle cracked both
+loons made the gesture of diving, but only one of them disappeared
+beneath the water; and when he came to the surface in a few moments, a
+hundred or more yards away, and saw his companion did not follow, but
+was floating on the water where he had last seen him, he took the alarm
+and sped away in the distance. The bird I had killed was a magnificent
+specimen, and I looked him over with great interest. His glossy
+checkered coat, his banded neck, his snow-white breast, his powerful
+lance-shaped beak, his red eyes, his black, thin, slender, marvelously
+delicate feet and legs, issuing from his muscular thighs, and looking
+as if they had never touched the ground, his strong wings well forward
+while his legs were quite at the apex, and the neat, elegant model of
+the entire bird, speed and quickness and strength stamped upon every
+feature,--all delighted and lingered in the eye. The loon appears like
+anything but a silly bird, unless you see him in some collection, or
+in the shop of the taxidermist, where he usually looks very tame and
+goose-like. Nature never meant the loon to stand up, or to use his
+feet and legs for other purposes than swimming. Indeed, he cannot stand
+except upon his tail in a perpendicular attitude, but in the collections
+he is poised upon his feet like a barn-yard fowl, all the wildness and
+grace and alertness goes out of him. My specimen sits upon a table as
+upon the surface of the water, his feet trailing behind him, his body
+low and trim, his head elevated and slightly turned as if in the act
+of bringing that fiery eye to bear upon you, and vigilance and power
+stamped upon every lineament.
+
+The loon is to the fishes what the hawk is to the birds; he swoops down
+to unknown depths upon them, and not even the wary trout can elude him.
+Uncle Nathan said he had seen the loon disappear and in a moment come up
+with a large trout, which he would cut in two with his strong beak, and
+swallow piecemeal. Neither the loon nor the otter can bolt a fish under
+the water; he must come to the surface to dispose of it. (I once saw a
+man eat a cake under water in London.) Our guide told me he had seen the
+parent loon swimming with a single young one upon its back. When closely
+pressed it dove, or "div" as he would have it, and left the young bird
+sitting upon the water. Then it too disappeared, and when the old one
+returned and called, it came out from the shore. On the wing overhead,
+the loon looks not unlike a very large duck, but when it alights it
+ploughs into the water like a bombshell. It probably cannot take flight
+from the land, as the one Gilbert White saw and describes in his letters
+was picked up in a field, unable to launch itself into the air.
+
+From Pleasant Pond we went seven miles through the woods to Moxie Lake,
+following an overgrown lumberman's "tote" road, our canoe and supplies,
+etc., hauled on a sled by the young farmer with his three-year-old
+steers. I doubt if birch-bark ever made rougher voyage than that. As I
+watched it above the bushes, the sled and the luggage being hidden, it
+appeared as if tossed in the wildest and most tempestuous sea. When the
+bushes closed above it I felt as if it had gone down, or been broken
+into a hundred pieces. Billows of rocks and logs, and chasms of creeks
+and spring runs, kept it rearing and pitching in the most frightful
+manner. The steers went at a spanking pace; indeed, it was a regular
+bovine gale; but their driver clung to their side amid the brush and
+boulders with desperate tenacity, and seemed to manage them by signs
+and nudges, for he hardly uttered his orders aloud. But we got through
+without any serious mishap, passing Mosquito Creek and Mosquito Pond,
+and flanking Mosquito Mountain, but seeing no mosquitoes, and brought up
+at dusk at a lumberman's old hay-barn, standing in the midst of a lonely
+clearing on the shores of Moxie Lake.
+
+Here we passed the night, and were lucky in having a good roof over our
+heads, for it rained heavily. After we were rolled in our blankets and
+variously disposed upon the haymow, Uncle Nathan lulled us to sleep by a
+long and characteristic yarn.
+
+I had asked him, half jocosely, if he believed in "spooks"; but he took
+my question seriously, and without answering it directly, proceeded to
+tell us what he himself had known and witnessed. It was, by the way,
+extremely difficult either to surprise or to steal upon any of Uncle
+Nathan's private opinions and beliefs about matters and things. He
+was as shy of all debatable subjects as a fox is of a trap. He usually
+talked in a circle, just as he hunted moose and caribou, so as not to
+approach his point too rudely and suddenly. He would keep on the lee
+side of his interlocutor in spite of all one could do. He was thoroughly
+good and reliable, but the wild creatures of the woods, in pursuit
+of which he had spent so much of his life, had taught him a curious
+gentleness and indirection, and to keep himself in the back-ground; he
+was careful that you should not scent his opinions upon any subject at
+all polemic, but he would tell you what he had seen and known. What he
+had seen and known about spooks was briefly this:--In company with
+a neighbor he was passing the night with an old recluse who lived
+somewhere in these woods. Their host was an Englishman, who had the
+reputation of having murdered his wife some years before in another part
+of the country, and, deserted by his grown-up children, was eking out
+his days in poverty amid these solitudes. The three men were sleeping
+upon the floor, with Uncle Nathan next to a rude partition that divided
+the cabin into two rooms. At his head there was a door that opened into
+this other apartment. Late at night, Uncle Nathan said, he awoke and
+turned over, and his mind was occupied with various things, when he
+heard somebody behind the partition. He reached over and felt that both
+of his companions were in their places beside him, and he was somewhat
+surprised. The person, or whatever it was, in the other room moved about
+heavily, and pulled the table from its place beside the wall to the
+middle of the floor. "I was not dreaming," said Uncle Nathan; "I felt of
+my eyes twice to make sure, and they were wide open." Presently the door
+opened; he was sensible of the draught upon his head, and a woman's form
+stepped heavily past him; he felt the "swirl" of her skirts as she went
+by. Then there was a loud noise in the room as if some one had fallen
+their whole length upon the floor. "It jarred the house," said he, "and
+woke everybody up. I asked old Mr. ------ if he heard that noise. 'Yes,'
+said he, 'it was thunder.' But it was not thunder, I know that;" and
+then added, "I was no more afraid than I am this minute. I never was the
+least mite afraid in my life. And my eyes were wide open," he repeated;
+"I felt of them twice; but whether that was the speret of that man's
+murdered wife or not I cannot tell. They said she was an uncommon heavy
+woman." Uncle Nathan was a man of unusually quick and acute senses, and
+he did not doubt their evidence on this occasion any more than he did
+when they prompted him to level his rifle at a bear or a moose.
+
+Moxie Lake lies much lower than Pleasant Pond, and its waters compared
+with those of the latter are as copper compared with silver. It is very
+irregular in shape; now narrowing to the dimensions of a slow moving
+grassy creek, then expanding into a broad deep basin with rocky shores,
+and commanding the noblest mountain scenery. It is rarely that the
+pond-lily and the speckled trout are found together,--the fish the soul
+of the purest spring water, the flower the transfigured spirit of the
+dark mud and slime of sluggish summer streams and ponds; yet in Moxie
+they were both found in perfection. Our camp was amid the birches,
+poplars, and white cedars near the head of the lake, where the best
+fishing at this season was to be had. Moxie has a small oval head,
+rather shallow, but bumpy with rocks; a long, deep neck, full of
+springs, where the trout lie; and a very broad chest, with two islands
+tufted with pine-trees for breasts. We swam in the head, we fished in
+the neck, or in a small section of it, a space about the size of the
+Adam's apple, and we paddled across and around the broad expanse below.
+Our birch bark was not finished and christened till we reached Moxie.
+The cedar lining was completed at Pleasant Pond, where we had the use
+of a bateau, but the rosin was not applied to the seams till we reached
+this lake. When I knelt down in it for the first time and put its
+slender maple paddle into the water, it sprang away with such quickness
+and speed that it disturbed me in my seat. I had spurred a more restive
+and spirited steed than I was used to. In fact, I had never been in
+a craft that sustained so close a relation to my will, and was so
+responsive to my slightest wish. When I caught my first large trout from
+it, it sympathized a little too closely, and my enthusiasm started a
+leak, which, however, with a live coal and a piece of rosin, was quickly
+ended. You cannot perform much of a war-dance in a birch-bark canoe:
+better wait till you get on dry land. Yet as a boat it is not so shy and
+"ticklish" as I had imagined. One needs to be on the alert, as becomes a
+sportsman and an angler, and in his dealings with it must charge himself
+with three things,--precision, moderation, and circumspection.
+
+Trout weighing four and five pounds have been taken at Moxie, but none
+of that size came to our hand. I realized the fondest hopes I had dared
+to indulge in when I hooked the first two-pounder of my life, and my
+extreme solicitude lest he get away I trust was pardonable. My friend,
+in relating the episode in camp, said I implored him to row me down in
+the middle of the lake that I might have room to manoeuver my fish. But
+the slander has barely a grain of truth in it. The water near us showed
+several old stakes broken off just below the surface, and my fish was
+determined to wrap my leader about one of these stakes; it was only for
+the clear space a few yards farther out that I prayed. It was not long
+after that my friend found himself in an anxious frame of mind. He
+hooked a large trout, which came home on him so suddenly that he had
+not time to reel up his line, and in his extremity he stretched his tall
+form into the air and lifted up his pole to an incredible height. He
+checked the trout before it got under the boat, but dared not come down
+an inch, and then began his amusing further elongation in reaching for
+his reel with one hand while he carried it ten feet into the air with
+the other. A step-ladder would perhaps have been more welcome to him
+just then than at any other moment during his life. But the trout was
+saved, though my friend's buttons and suspenders suffered.
+
+We learned a new trick in fly-fishing here, worth disclosing. It was not
+one day in four that the trout would take the fly on the surface. When
+the south wind was blowing and the clouds threatened rain, they would
+at times, notably about three o'clock, rise handsomely. But on all other
+occasions it was rarely that we could entice them up through the twelve
+or fifteen feet of water. Earlier in the season they are not so lazy and
+indifferent, but the August languor and drowsiness were now upon them.
+So we learned by a lucky accident to fish deep for them, even weighting
+our leaders with a shot, and allowing the flies to sink nearly to the
+bottom. After a moment's pause we would draw them slowly up, and when
+half or two thirds of the way to the top the trout would strike, when
+the sport became lively enough. Most of our fish were taken in this
+way. There is nothing like the flash and the strike at the surface, and
+perhaps only the need of food will ever tempt the genuine angler into
+any more prosaic style of fishing; but if you must go below the surface,
+a shotted leader is the best thing to use.
+
+Our camp-fire at night served more purposes than one; from its embers
+and flickering shadows, Uncle Nathan read us many a tale of his life
+in the woods. They were the same old hunter's stories, except that they
+evidently had the merit of being strictly true, and hence were not very
+thrilling or marvelous. Uncle Nathan's tendency was rather to tone down
+and belittle his experiences than to exaggerate them. If he ever bragged
+at all (and I suspect he did just a little, when telling us how he
+outshot one of the famous riflemen of the American team, whom he was
+guiding through these woods), he did it in such a sly, round-about
+way that it was hard to catch him at it. His passage with the rifleman
+referred to shows the difference between the practical off-hand skill of
+the hunter in the woods and the science of the long-range target hitter.
+Mr. Bull's Eye had heard that his guide was a capital shot and had seen
+some proof of it, and hence could not rest till he had had a trial of
+skill with him. Uncle Nathan, being the challenged party, had the right
+to name the distance and the conditions. A piece of white paper the size
+of a silver dollar was put upon a tree twelve rods off, the contestants
+to fire three shots each off-hand. Uncle Nathan's first bullet barely
+missed the mark, but the other two were planted well into it. Then the
+great rifleman took his turn, and missed every time.
+
+"By hemp!" said Uncle Nathan, "I was sorry I shot so well, Mr. ------
+took it so to heart; and I had used his own rifle, too. He did not get
+over it for a week."
+
+But far more ignominious was the failure of Mr. Bull's Eye when he saw
+his first bear. They were paddling slowly and silently down Dead River,
+when the guide heard a slight noise in the bushes just behind a little
+bend. He whispered to the rifleman, who sat kneeling in the bow of
+the boat, to take his rifle. But instead of doing so he picked up his
+two-barreled shot-gun. As they turned the point, there stood a bear
+not twenty yards away, drinking from the stream. Uncle Nathan held the
+canoe, while the man who had come so far in quest of this very game was
+trying to lay down his shot-gun and pick up his rifle. "His hand moved
+like the hand of a clock," said Uncle Nathan, "and I could hardly keep
+my seat. I knew the bear would see us in a moment more, and run." Instead
+of laying his gun by his side, where it belonged, he reached it across
+in front of him and laid it upon his rifle, and in trying to get the
+latter from under it a noise was made; the bear heard it and raised his
+head. Still there was time, for as the bear sprang into the woods he
+stopped and looked back,--"as I knew he would," said the guide; yet
+the marksman was not ready. "By hemp! I could have shot three bears,"
+exclaimed Uncle Nathan, "while he was getting that rifle to his face!"
+
+Poor Mr. Bull's Eye was deeply humiliated. "Just the chance I had been
+looking for," he said, "and my wits suddenly left me."
+
+As a hunter Uncle Nathan always took the game on its own terms, that of
+still-hunting. He even shot foxes in this way, going into the fields in
+the fall just at break of day, and watching for them about their mousing
+haunts. One morning, by these tactics, he shot a black fox; a fine
+specimen, he said, and a wild one, for he stopped and looked and
+listened every few yards.
+
+He had killed over two hundred moose, a large number of them at night on
+the lakes. His method was to go out in his canoe and conceal himself by
+some point or island, and wait till he heard the game. In the fall
+the moose comes into the water to eat the large fibrous roots of the
+pond-lilies. He splashes along till he finds a suitable spot, when he
+begins feeding, sometimes thrusting his bead and neck several feet under
+water. The hunter listens, and when the moose lifts his head and the
+rills of water run from it, and he hears him "swash" the lily roots
+about to get off the mud, it is his time to start. Silently as a shadow
+he creeps up on the moose, who by the way, it seems, never expects the
+approach of danger from the water side. If the hunter accidentally
+makes a noise the moose looks toward the shore for it. There is always a
+slight gleam on the water, Uncle Nathan says, even in the darkest night,
+and the dusky form of the moose can be distinctly seen upon it. When the
+hunter sees this darker shadow he lifts his gun to the sky and gets the
+range of its barrels, then lowers it till it covers the mark, and fires.
+
+The largest moose Uncle Nathan ever killed is mounted in the State House
+at Augusta. He shot him while hunting in winter on snow-shoes. The moose
+was reposing upon the ground, with his head stretched out in front of
+him, as one may sometimes see a cow resting. The position was such that
+only a quartering shot through the animal's hip could reach its heart.
+Studying the problem carefully, and taking his own time, the hunter
+fired. The moose sprang into the air, turned, and came with tremendous
+strides straight toward him. "I knew he had not seen or scented me,"
+said Uncle Nathan, "but, by hemp, I wished myself somewhere else just
+then; for I was lying right down in his path." But the noble animal
+stopped, a few yards short, and fell dead with a bullet-hole through his
+heart.
+
+When the moose yard in the winter, that is, restrict their wanderings
+to a well-defined section of the forest or mountain, trampling down the
+snow and beating paths in all directions, they browse off only the most
+dainty morsels first; when they go over the ground a second time they
+crop a little cleaner; the third time they sort still closer, till by
+and by nothing is left. Spruce, hemlock, poplar, the barks of various
+trees, everything within reach, is cropped close. When the hunter comes
+upon one of these yards the problem for him to settle is, Where are the
+moose? for it is absolutely necessary that he keep on the lee side of
+them. So he considers the lay of the land, the direction of the wind,
+the time of day, the depth of the snow, examines the spoor, the cropped
+twigs, and studies every hint and clew like a detective. Uncle Nathan
+said he could not explain to another how he did it, but he could usually
+tell in a few minutes in what direction to look for the game. His
+experience had ripened into a kind of intuition or winged reasoning that
+was above rules.
+
+He said that most large game, deer, caribou, moose, bear, when started
+by the hunter and not much scared, were sure to stop and look back
+before disappearing from sight: he usually waited for this last and best
+chance to fire. He told us of a huge bear he had seen one morning while
+still-hunting foxes in the fields; the bear saw him, and got into the
+woods before he could get a good shot. In her course some distance up
+the mountain was a bald, open spot, and he felt sure when she crossed
+this spot she would pause and look behind her; and sure enough, like
+Lot's wife, her curiosity got the better of her; she stopped to have a
+final look, and her travels ended there and then.
+
+Uncle Nathan had trapped and shot a great many bears, and some of his
+experiences revealed an unusual degree of sagacity in this animal. One
+April, when the weather began to get warm and thawy, an old bear left
+her den in the rocks and built a large, warm nest of grass, leaves, and
+the bark of the white cedar, under a tall balsam fir that stood in a
+low, sunny, open place amid the mountains. Hither she conducted her two
+cubs, and the family began life in what might be called their spring
+residence. The tree above them was for shelter, and for refuge for the
+cubs in case danger approached, as it soon did in the form of Uncle
+Nathan. He happened that way soon after the bear had moved. Seeing her
+track in the snow, he concluded to follow it. When the bear had passed,
+the snow had been soft and sposhy, and she had "slumped," he said,
+several inches. It was now hard and slippery. As he neared the tree the
+track turned and doubled, and tacked this way and that, and led through
+the worst brush and brambles to be found. This was a shrewd thought of
+the old bear; she could thus hear her enemy coming a long time before he
+drew very near. When Uncle Nathan finally reached the nest, he found it
+empty, but still warm. Then he began to circle about and look for the
+bear's footprints or nail-prints upon the frozen snow. Not finding them
+the first time, he took a larger circle, then a still larger; finally he
+made a long detour, and spent nearly an hour searching for some clew
+to the direction the bear had taken, but all to no purpose. Then he
+returned to the tree and scrutinized it. The foliage was very dense, but
+presently he made out one of the cubs near the top, standing up amid the
+branches, and peering down at him. This he killed. Further search only
+revealed a mass of foliage apparently more dense than usual, but a
+bullet sent into it was followed by loud whimpering and crying, and
+the other baby bear came tumbling down. In leaving the place, greatly
+puzzled as to what had become of the mother bear, Uncle Nathan followed
+another of her frozen tracks, and after about a quarter of a mile saw
+beside it, upon the snow, the fresh trail he had been in search of. In
+making her escape the bear had stepped exactly in her old tracks that
+were hard and icy, and had thus left no mark till she took to the snow
+again.
+
+During his trapping expeditions into the woods in midwinter, I was
+curious to know how Uncle Nathan passed the nights, as we were twice
+pinched with the cold at that season in our tent and blankets. It was
+no trouble to keep warm, he said, in the coldest weather. As night
+approached, he would select a place for his camp on the side of a hill.
+With one of his snow-shoes he would shovel out the snow till the ground
+was reached, carrying the snow out in front, as we scrape the earth out
+of the side of a hill to level up a place for the house and yard. On
+this level place, which, however, was made to incline slightly toward
+the hill, his bed of boughs was made. On the ground he had uncovered he
+built his fire. His bed was thus on a level with the fire, and the heat
+could not thaw the snow under him and let him down, or the burning logs
+roll upon him. With a steep ascent behind it the fire burned better, and
+the wind was not so apt to drive the smoke and blaze in upon him. Then,
+with the long, curving branches of the spruce stuck thickly around three
+sides of the bed, and curving over and uniting their tops above it, a
+shelter was formed that would keep out the cold and the snow, and that
+would catch and retain the warmth of the fire. Rolled in his blanket in
+such a nest, Uncle Nathan had passed hundreds of the most frigid winter
+nights.
+
+One day we made an excursion of three miles through the woods to Bald
+Mountain, following a dim trail. We saw, as we filed silently along,
+plenty of signs of caribou, deer, and bear, but were not blessed with a
+sight of either of the animals themselves. I noticed that Uncle Nathan,
+in looking through the woods, did not hold his head as we did, but
+thrust it slightly forward, and peered under the branches like a deer or
+other wild creature.
+
+The summit of Bald Mountain was the most impressive mountain-top I had
+ever seen, mainly, perhaps, because it was one enormous crown of nearly
+naked granite. The rock had that gray, elemental, eternal look which
+granite alone has. One seemed to be face to face with the gods of the
+fore-world. Like an atom, like a breath of to-day, we were suddenly
+confronted by abysmal geologic time,--the eternities past and the
+eternities to come. The enormous cleavage of the rocks, the appalling
+cracks and fissures, the rent boulders, the smitten granite floors, gave
+one a new sense of the power of heat and frost. In one place we
+noticed several deep parallel grooves, made by the old glaciers. In the
+depressions on the summit there was a hard, black, peaty-like soil that
+looked indescribably ancient and unfamiliar. Out of this mould, that
+might have come from the moon or the interplanetary spaces, were growing
+mountain cranberries and blueberries or huckleberries. We were soon so
+absorbed in gathering the latter that we were quite oblivious of the
+grandeurs about us. It is these blueberries that attract the bears. In
+eating them, Uncle Nathan said, they take the bushes in their mouths,
+and by an upward movement strip them clean of both leaves and berries.
+We were constantly on the lookout for the bears, but failed to see
+any. Yet a few days afterward, when two of our party returned here and
+encamped upon the mountain, they saw five during their stay, but failed
+to get a good shot. The rifle was in the wrong place each time. The
+man with the shot-gun saw an old bear and two cubs lift themselves
+from behind a rock and twist their noses around for his scent, and then
+shrink away. They were too far off for his buckshot. I must not forget
+the superb view that lay before us, a wilderness of woods and waters
+stretching away to the horizon on every band. Nearly a dozen lakes and
+ponds could be seen, and in a clearer atmosphere the foot of Moosehead
+Lake would have been visible. The highest and most striking mountain to
+be seen was Mount Bigelow, rising above Dead River, far to the west,
+and its two sharp peaks notching the horizon like enormous saw-teeth.
+We walked around and viewed curiously a huge boulder on the top of the
+mountain that had been split in two vertically, and one of the halves
+moved a few feet out of its bed. It looked recent and familiar, but
+suggested gods instead of men. The force that moved the rock had plainly
+come from the north. I thought of a similar boulder I had seen not long
+before on the highest point of the Shawangunk Mountains in New York, one
+side of which is propped up with a large stone, as wall-builders prop up
+a rock to wrap a chain around it. The rock seems poised lightly, and has
+but a few points of bearing. In this instance, too, the power had come
+from the north.
+
+The prettiest botanical specimen my trip yielded was a little plant that
+bears the ugly name of horned bladderwort (Utricularia cornuta), and
+which I found growing in marshy places along the shores of Moxie Lake.
+It has a slender, naked stem nearly a foot high, crowned by two or
+more large deep yellow flowers,--flowers the shape of little bonnets or
+hoods. One almost expected to see tiny faces looking out of them. This
+illusion is heightened by the horn or spur of the flower, which projects
+from the hood like a long tapering chin,--some masker's device. Then
+the cape behind,--what a smart upward curve it has, as if spurned by
+the fairy shoulders it was meant to cover! But perhaps the most notable
+thing about the flower was its fragrance,--the richest and strongest
+perfume I have ever found in a wild flower. This our botanist, Gray,
+does not mention; as if one should describe the lark and forget its
+song. The fragrance suggested that of white clover, but was more rank
+and spicy.
+
+The woods about Moxie Lake were literally carpeted with Linnaea. I had
+never seen it in such profusion. In early summer, the period of its
+bloom, what a charming spectacle the mossy floors of these remote woods
+must present! The flowers are purple rose-color, nodding and fragrant.
+Another very abundant plant in these woods was the Clintonia borealis.
+Uncle Nathan said it was called "bear's corn," though he did not know
+why. The only noticeable flower by the Maine roadsides at this season
+that is not common in other parts of the country is the harebell. Its
+bright blue, bell-shaped corolla shone out from amid the dry grass and
+weeds all along the route. It was one of the most delicate roadside
+flowers I had ever seen.
+
+The only new bird I saw in Maine was the pileated woodpecker, or black
+"log cock," called by Uncle Nathan "wood cock." I had never before seen
+or heard this bird, and its loud cackle in the woods about Moxie was
+a new sound to me. It is the wildest and largest of our northern
+woodpeckers, and the rarest. Its voice and the sound of its hammer are
+heard only in the depths of the northern woods. It is about as large as
+a crow, and nearly as black.
+
+We stayed a week at Moxie, or until we became surfeited with its trout,
+and had killed the last Merganser duck that lingered about our end of
+the lake. The trout that had accumulated on our hands we had kept alive
+in a large champagne basket submerged in the lake, and the morning we
+broke camp the basket was towed to the shore and opened; and after we
+had feasted our eyes upon the superb spectacle, every trout, twelve or
+fifteen in number, some of them two-pounders, was allowed to swim back
+into the lake. They went leisurely, in couples and in trios, and were
+soon kicking up their heels in their old haunts. I expect that the
+divinity who presides over Moxie will see to it that every one of those
+trout, doubled in weight, comes to our basket in the future.
+
+
+
+
+WINTER NEIGHBORS.
+
+
+The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude, in
+the winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The urban, the
+cultivated, is hidden or negatived. You shall hardly know a good field
+from a poor, a meadow from a pasture, a park from a forest. Lines and
+boundaries are disregarded; gates and bar-ways are unclosed; man lets go
+his hold upon the earth; title-deeds are deep buried beneath the snow;
+the best-kept grounds relapse to a state of nature; under the pressure
+of the cold all the wild creatures become outlaws, and roam abroad
+beyond their usual haunts. The partridge comes to the orchard for buds;
+the rabbit comes to the garden and lawn; the crows and jays come to
+the ash-heap and corn-crib, the snow-buntings to the stack and to
+the barn-yard; the sparrows pilfer from the domestic fowls; the pine
+grosbeak comes down from the north and shears your maples of their buds;
+the fox prowls about your premises at night, and the red squirrels find
+your grain in the barn or steal the butternuts from your attic. In fact,
+winter, like some great calamity, changes the status of most creatures
+and sets them adrift. Winter, like poverty, makes us acquainted with
+strange bedfellows.
+
+For my part, my nearest approach to a strange bedfellow is the little
+gray rabbit that has taken up her abode under my study floor. As she
+spends the day here and is out larking at night, she is not much of a
+bedfellow after all. It is probable that I disturb her slumbers more
+than she does mine. I think she is some support to me under there-a
+silent wild-eyed witness and backer; a type of the gentle and harmless
+in savage nature. She has no sagacity to give me or lend me, but that
+soft, nimble foot of hers, and that touch as of cotton wherever she
+goes, are worthy of emulation. I think I can feel her good-will through
+the floor, and I hope she can mine. When I have a happy thought I
+imagine her ears twitch, especially when I think of the sweet apple
+I will place by her doorway at night. I wonder if that fox chanced to
+catch a glimpse of her the other night when he stealthily leaped over
+the fence near by and walked along between the study and the house?
+How clearly one could read that it was not a little dog that had passed
+there. There was something furtive in the track; it shied off away from
+the house and around it, as if eying it suspiciously; and then it had
+the caution and deliberation of the fox--bold, bold, but not too bold;
+wariness was in every footprint. If it had been a little dog that
+had chanced to wander that way, when he crossed my path he would have
+followed it up to the barn and have gone smelling around for a bone; but
+this sharp, cautious track held straight across all others, keeping five
+or six rods from the house, up the hill, across the highway towards
+a neighboring farmstead, with its nose in the air and its eye and ear
+alert, so to speak.
+
+A winter neighbor of mine in whom I am interested, and who perhaps lends
+me his support after his kind, is a little red owl, whose retreat is
+in the heart of an old apple-tree just over the fence. Where he keeps
+himself in spring and summer I do not know, but late every fall, and
+at intervals all winter, his hiding-place is discovered by the jays and
+nut-hatches, and proclaimed from the tree-tops for the space of half an
+hour or so, with all the powers of voice they can command. Four times
+during one winter they called me out to behold this little ogre feigning
+sleep in his den, sometimes in one apple-tree, sometimes in another.
+Whenever I heard their cries, I knew my neighbor was being berated.
+The birds would take turns at looking in upon him and uttering their
+alarm-notes. Every jay within hearing would come to the spot and at once
+approach the hole in the trunk or limb, and with a kind of breathless
+eagerness and excitement take a peep at the owl, and then join the
+outcry. When I approached they would hastily take a final look and then
+withdraw and regard my movements intently. After accustoming my eye to
+the faint light of the cavity for a few moments, I could usually make
+out the owl at the bottom feigning sleep. Feigning, I say, because this
+is what he really did, as I first discovered one day when I cut into
+his retreat with the axe. The loud blows and the falling chips did not
+disturb him at all. When I reached in a stick and pulled him over on his
+side, leaving one of his wings spread out, he made no attempt to recover
+himself, but lay among the chips and fragments of decayed wood, like a
+part of themselves. Indeed, it took a sharp eye to distinguish him. Nor
+till I had pulled him forth by one wing, rather rudely, did he abandon
+his trick of simulated sleep or death. Then, like a detected pickpocket,
+he was suddenly transformed into another creature. His eyes flew wide
+open, his talons clutched my finger, his ears were depressed, and every
+motion and look said, "Hands off, at your peril." Finding this game did
+not work, he soon began to "play 'possum" again. I put a cover over my
+study wood-box and kept him captive for a week. Look in upon him any
+time, night or day, and he was apparently wrapped in the profoundest
+slumber; but the live mice which I put into his box from time to time
+found his sleep was easily broken; there would be a sudden rustle in the
+box, a faint squeak, and then silence. After a week of captivity I gave
+him his freedom in the full sunshine: no trouble for him to see which
+way and where to go.
+
+Just at dusk in the winter nights, I often hear his soft bur-r-r-r, very
+pleasing and bell-like. What a furtive, woody sound it is in the winter
+stillness, so unlike the harsh scream of the hawk. But all the ways
+of the owl are ways of softness and duskiness. His wings are shod with
+silence, his plumage is edged with down.
+
+Another owl neighbor of mine, with whom I pass the time of day more
+frequently than with the last, lives farther away. I pass his castle
+every night on my way to the post-office, and in winter, if the hour
+is late enough, am pretty sure to see him standing in his doorway,
+surveying the passers-by and the landscape through narrow slits in
+his eyes. For four successive winters now have I observed him. As the
+twilight begins to deepen he rises out of his cavity in the apple-tree,
+scarcely faster than the moon rises from behind the hill, and sits in
+the opening, completely framed by its outlines of gray bark and dead
+wood, and by his protective coloring virtually invisible to every eye
+that does not know he is there. Probably my own is the only eye that has
+ever penetrated his secret, and mine never would have done so had I not
+chanced on one occasion to see him leave his retreat and make a
+raid upon a shrike that was impaling a shrew-mouse upon a thorn in a
+neighboring tree and which I was watching. Failing to get the mouse,
+the owl returned swiftly to his cavity, and ever since, while going
+that way, I have been on the lookout for him. Dozens of teams and
+foot-passengers pass him late in the day, but he regards them not, nor
+they him. When I come alone and pause to salute him, he opens his eyes a
+little wider, and, appearing to recognize me, quickly shrinks and fades
+into the background of his door in a very weird and curious manner. When
+he is not at his outlook, or when he is, it requires the best powers
+of the eye to decide the point, as the empty cavity itself is almost
+an exact image of him. If the whole thing had been carefully studied
+it could not have answered its purpose better. The owl stands quite
+perpendicular, presenting a front of light mottled gray; the eyes are
+closed to a mere slit, the ear-feathers depressed, the beak buried in
+the plumage, and the whole attitude is one of silent, motionless waiting
+and observation. If a mouse should be seen crossing the highway, or
+scudding over any exposed part of the snowy surface in the twilight, the
+owl would doubtless swoop down upon it. I think the owl has learned to
+distinguish me from the rest of the passers-by; at least, when I stop
+before him, and he sees himself observed, he backs down into his den, as
+I have said, in a very amusing manner. Whether bluebirds, nut-hatches,
+and chickadees--birds that pass the night in cavities of trees--ever
+run into the clutches of the dozing owl, I should be glad to know. My
+impression is, however, that they seek out smaller cavities. An old
+willow by the roadside blew down one summer, and a decayed branch broke
+open, revealing a brood of half-fledged owls, and many feathers and
+quills of bluebirds, orioles, and other songsters, showing plainly
+enough why all birds fear and berate the owl.
+
+The English house sparrows, that are so rapidly increasing among us, and
+that must add greatly to the food supply of the owls and other birds of
+prey, seek to baffle their enemies by roosting in the densest evergreens
+they can find, in the arbor-vitae, and in hemlock hedges. Soft-winged as
+the owl is, he cannot steal in upon such a retreat without giving them
+warning.
+
+These sparrows are becoming about the most noticeable of my winter
+neighbors, and a troop of them every morning watch me put out the hens'
+feed, and soon claim their share. I rather encouraged them in their
+neighborliness, till one day I discovered the snow under a favorite
+plum-tree where they most frequently perched covered with the scales of
+the fruit-buds. On investigating I found that the tree had been nearly
+stripped of its buds--a very unneighborly act on the part of the
+sparrows, considering, too, all the cracked corn I had scattered for
+them. So I at once served notice on them that our good understanding was
+at an end. And a hint is as good as a kick with this bird. The stone I
+hurled among them, and the one with which I followed them up, may have
+been taken as a kick; but they were only a hint of the shot-gun that
+stood ready in the corner. The sparrows left in high dungeon, and were
+not back again in some days, and were then very shy. No doubt the
+time is near at hand when we shall have to wage serious war upon these
+sparrows, as they long have had to do on the continent of Europe. And
+yet it will be hard to kill the little wretches, the only Old World bird
+we have. When I take down my gun to shoot them I shall probably remember
+that the Psalmist said, "I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the
+house-top," and maybe the recollection will cause me to stay my hand.
+The sparrows have the Old World hardiness and prolificness; they are
+wise and tenacious of life, and we shall find it by and by no small
+matter to keep them in check. Our native birds are much different, less
+prolific, less shrewd, less aggressive and persistent, less quick-witted
+and able to read the note of danger or hostility--in short, less
+sophisticated. Most of our birds are yet essentially wild, that is,
+little changed by civilization. In winter, especially, they sweep by
+me and around me in flocks,--the Canada sparrow, the snow-bunting, the
+shore-lark, the pine grosbeak, the red-poll, the cedar-bird,--feeding
+upon frozen apples in the orchard, upon cedar-berries, upon maple-buds,
+and the berries of the mountain ash, and the celtis, and upon the seeds
+of the weeds that rise above the snow in the field, or upon the hay-seed
+dropped where the cattle have been foddered in the barn-yard or about
+the distant stack; but yet taking no heed of man, in no way changing
+their habits so as to take advantage of his presence in nature. The pine
+grosbeak will come in numbers upon your porch, to get the black drupes
+of the honeysuckle or the woodbine, or within reach of your windows to
+get the berries of the mountain-ash, but they know you not; they look
+at you as innocently and unconcernedly as at a bear or moose in their
+native north, and your house is no more to them than a ledge of rocks.
+
+The only ones of my winter neighbors that actually rap at my door are
+the nut-hatches and woodpeckers, and these do not know that it is my
+door. My retreat is covered with the bark of young chestnut-trees, and
+the birds, I suspect, mistake it for a huge stump that ought to hold
+fat grubs (there is not even a bookworm inside of it), and their loud
+rapping often makes me think I have a caller indeed. I place fragments
+of hickory-nuts in the interstices of the bark, and thus attract the
+nut-hatches; a bone upon my window-sill attracts both nut-hatches and
+the downy woodpecker. They peep in curiously through the window upon me,
+pecking away at my bone, too often a very poor one. A bone nailed to a
+tree a few feet in front of the window attracts crows as well as lesser
+birds. Even the slate-colored snow-bird, a seed-eater, comes and nibbles
+it occasionally.
+
+The bird that seems to consider he has the best right to the bone both
+upon the tree and upon the sill is the downy woodpecker, my favorite
+neighbor among the winter birds, to whom I will mainly devote the
+remainder of this chapter. His retreat is but a few paces from my own,
+in the decayed limb of an apple-tree which he excavated several autumns
+ago. I say "he" because the red plume on the top of his head proclaims
+the sex. It seems not to be generally known to our writers upon
+ornithology that certain of our woodpeckers--probably all the winter
+residents--each fall excavate a limb or the trunk of a tree in which
+to pass the winter, and that the cavity is abandoned in the spring,
+probably for a new one in which nidification takes place. So far as I
+have observed, these cavities are drilled out only by the males. Where
+the females take up their quarters I am not so well informed, though I
+suspect that they use the abandoned holes of the males of the previous
+year.
+
+The particular woodpecker to which I refer drilled his first hole in my
+apple-tree one fall four or five years ago. This he occupied till the
+following spring when he abandoned it. The next fall he began a hole
+in an adjoining limb, later than before, and when it was about half
+completed a female took possession of his old quarters. I am sorry to
+say that this seemed to enrage the male, very much, and he persecuted
+the poor bird whenever she appeared upon the scene. He would fly at her
+spitefully and drive her off. One chilly November morning, as I passed
+under the tree, I heard the hammer of the little architect in his
+cavity, and at the same time saw the persecuted female sitting at
+the entrance of the other hole as if she would fain come out. She was
+actually shivering, probably from both fear and cold. I understood the
+situation at a glance; the bird was afraid to come forth and brave the
+anger of the male. Not till I had rapped smartly upon the limb with my
+stick did she come out and attempt to escape; but she had not gone ten
+feet from the tree before the male was in hot pursuit, and in a few
+moments had driven her back to the same tree, where she tried to
+avoid him among the branches. A few days after, he rid himself of his
+unwelcome neighbor in the following ingenious manner: he fairly scuttled
+the other cavity; he drilled a hole into the bottom of it that let in
+the light and the cold, and I saw the female there no more. I did not
+see him in the act of rendering this tenement uninhabitable; but one
+morning, behold it was punctured at the bottom, and the circumstances
+all seemed to point to him as the author of it. There is probably no
+gallantry among the birds except at the mating season. I have frequently
+seen the male woodpecker drive the female away from the bone upon the
+tree. When she hopped around to the other end and timidly nibbled it,
+he would presently dart spitefully at her. She would then take up
+her position in his rear and wait till he had finished his meal. The
+position of the female among the birds is very much the same as that of
+woman among savage tribes. Most of the drudgery of life falls upon her,
+and the leavings of the males are often her lot.
+
+My bird is a genuine little savage, doubtless, but I value him as a
+neighbor. It is a satisfaction during the cold or stormy winter nights
+to know he is warm and cosy there in his retreat. When the day is bad
+and unfit to be abroad in; he is there too. When I wish to know if he
+is at home, I go and rap upon his tree, and, if he is not too lazy or
+indifferent, after some delay he shows his head in his round doorway
+about ten feet above, and looks down inquiringly upon me--sometimes
+latterly I think half resentfully, as much as to say, "I would thank you
+not to disturb me so often." After sundown, he will not put his head
+out any more when I call, but as I step away I can get a glimpse of him
+inside looking cold and reserved. He is a late riser, especially if it
+is a cold or disagreeable morning, in this respect being like the fowls;
+it is sometimes near nine o'clock before I see him leave his tree. On
+the other hand, he comes home early, being in if the day is unpleasant
+by four P. M. He lives all alone; in this respect I do not commend his
+example. Where his mate is I should like to know.
+
+I have discovered several other woodpeckers in adjoining orchards, each
+of which has a like home and leads a like solitary life. One of them has
+excavated a dry limb within easy reach of my hand, doing the work also
+in September. But the choice of tree was not a good one; the limb was
+too much decayed, and the workman had made the cavity too large; a chip
+had come out, making a hole in the outer wall. Then he went a few
+inches down the limb and began again, and excavated a large, commodious
+chamber, but had again come too near the surface; scarcely more than the
+bark protected him in one place, and the limb was very much weakened.
+Then he made another attempt still farther down the limb, and drilled in
+an inch or two, but seemed to change his mind; the work stopped, and
+I concluded the bird had wisely abandoned the tree. Passing there one
+cold, rainy November day, I thrust in my two fingers and was surprised
+to feel something soft and warm: as I drew away my hand the bird came
+out, apparently no more surprised than I was. It had decided, then, to
+make its home in the old limb; a decision it had occasion to regret, for
+not long after, on a stormy night, the branch gave way and fell to the
+ground.
+
+   "When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
+    and down will come baby, cradle and all."
+
+Such a cavity makes a snug, warm home, and when the entrance is on the
+under side if the limb, as is usual, the wind and snow cannot reach
+the occupant. Late in December, while crossing a high, wooded mountain,
+lured by the music of fox-hounds, I discovered fresh yellow chips
+strewing the new-fallen snow, and at once thought of my woodpeckers. On
+looking around I saw where one had been at work excavating a lodge in a
+small yellow birch. The orifice was about fifteen feet from the ground,
+and appeared as round as if struck with a compass. It was on the east
+side of the tree, so as to avoid the prevailing west and northeast
+winds. As it was nearly two inches in diameter, it could not have been
+the work of the downy, but must have been that of the hairy, or else the
+yellow-bellied woodpecker. His home had probably been wrecked by some
+violent wind, and he was thus providing himself another. In digging out
+these retreats the woodpeckers prefer a dry, brittle, trunk, not too
+soft. They go in horizontally to the centre and then turn downward,
+enlarging the tunnel as they go, till when finished it is the shape of a
+long, deep pear.
+
+Another trait our woodpeckers have that endears them to me, and that has
+never been pointedly noticed by our ornithologists, is their habit
+of drumming in the spring. They are songless birds, and yet all are
+musicians; they make the dry limbs eloquent of the coming change. Did
+you think that loud, sonorous hammering which proceeded from the orchard
+or from the near woods on that still March or April morning was only
+some bird getting its breakfast? It is downy, but he is not rapping at
+the door of a grub; he is rapping at the door of spring, and the dry
+limb thrills beneath the ardor of his blows. Or, later in the season,
+in the dense forest or by some remote mountain lake, does that measured
+rhythmic beat that breaks upon the silence, first three strokes
+following each other rapidly, succeeded by two louder ones with longer
+intervals between them, and that has an effect upon the alert ear as
+if the solitude itself had at last found a voice--does that suggest
+anything less than a deliberate musical performance? In fact, our
+woodpeckers are just as characteristically drummers as is the ruffed
+grouse, and they have their particular limbs and stubs to which they
+resort for that purpose. Their need of expression is apparently just
+as great as that of the song-birds, and it is not surprising that they
+should have found out that there is music in a dry, seasoned limb which
+can be evoked beneath their beaks.
+
+A few seasons ago a downy woodpecker, probably the individual one who is
+now my winter neighbor, began to drum early in March in a partly decayed
+apple-tree that stands in the edge of a narrow strip of woodland near
+me. When the morning was still and mild I would often hear him through
+my window before I was up, or by half-past six o'clock, and he would
+keep it up pretty briskly till nine or ten o'clock, in this respect
+resembling the grouse, which do most of their drumming in the forenoon.
+His drum was the stub of a dry limb about the size of one's wrist. The
+heart was decayed and gone, but the outer shell was hard and resonant.
+The bird would keep his position there for an hour at a time. Between
+his drummings he would preen his plumage and listen as if for the
+response of the female, or for the drum of some rival. How swift his
+head would go when he was delivering his blows upon the limb! His beak
+wore the surface perceptibly. When he wished to change the key, which
+was quite often, he would shift his position an inch or two to a knot
+which gave out a higher, shriller note. When I climbed up to examine his
+drum he was much disturbed. I did not know he was in the vicinity,
+but it seems he saw me from a near tree, and came in haste to the
+neighboring branches, and with spread plumage and a sharp note demanded
+plainly enough what my business was with his drum. I was invading his
+privacy, desecrating his shrine, and the bird was much put out. After
+some weeks the female appeared; he had literally drummed up a mate; his
+urgent and oft-repeated advertisement was answered. Still the drumming
+did not cease, but was quite as fervent as before. If a mate could be
+won by drumming she could be kept and entertained by more drumming;
+courtship should not end with marriage. If the bird felt musical before,
+of course he felt much more so now. Besides that, the gentle deities
+needed propitiating in behalf of the nest and young as well as in behalf
+of the mate. After a time a second female came, when there was war
+between the two. I did not see them come to blows, but I saw one female
+pursuing the other about the place, and giving her no rest for several
+days. She was evidently trying to run her out of the neighborhood. Now
+and then she, too, would drum briefly as if sending a triumphant message
+to her mate.
+
+The woodpeckers do not each have a particular dry limb to which they
+resort at all times to drum, like the one I have described. The woods
+are full of suitable branches, and they drum more or less here and
+there as they are in quest of food; yet I am convinced each one has its
+favorite spot, like the grouse, to which it resorts, especially in the
+morning. The sugar-maker in the maple-woods may notice that their
+sound proceeds from the same tree or trees about his camp with great
+regularity. A woodpecker in my vicinity has drummed for two seasons on
+a telegraph pole, and he makes the wires and glass insulators ring.
+Another drums on a thin board on the end of a long grape-arbor, and on
+still mornings can be heard a long distance.
+
+A friend of mine in a Southern city tells me of a red-headed woodpecker
+that drums upon a lightning-rod on his neighbor's house. Nearly every
+clear, still morning at certain seasons, he says, this musical rapping
+may be heard. "He alternates his tapping with his stridulous call, and
+the effect on a cool, autumn-like morning is very pleasing."
+
+The high-hole appears to drum more promiscuously than does the downy. He
+utters his long, loud spring call, whick--whick--whick--whick, and then
+begins to rap with his beak upon his perch before the last note has
+reached your ear. I have seen him drum sitting upon the ridge of the
+barn. The log cock, or pileated woodpecker, the largest and wildest of
+our Northern species, I have never heard drum. His blows should wake the
+echoes.
+
+When the woodpecker is searching for food, or laying siege to some
+hidden grub, the sound of his hammer is dead or muffled, and is heard
+but a few yards. It is only upon dry, seasoned timber, freed of its
+bark, that he beats his reveille to spring and wooes his mate.
+
+Wilson was evidently familiar with this vernal drumming of the
+woodpeckers, but quite misinterprets it. Speaking of the red-bellied
+species, he says: "It rattles like the rest of the tribe on the dead
+limbs, and with such violence as to be heard in still weather more than
+half a mile off; and listens to hear the insect it has alarmed." He
+listens rather to hear the drum of his rival or the brief and coy
+response of the female; for there are no insects in these dry limbs.
+
+On one occasion I saw downy at his drum when a female flew quickly
+through the tree and alighted a few yards beyond him. He paused
+instantly, and kept his place, apparently without moving a muscle. The
+female, I took it, had answered his advertisement. She flitted about
+from limb to limb (the female may be known by the absence of the crimson
+spot on the back of the head), apparently full of business of her own,
+and now and then would drum in a shy, tentative manner. The male watched
+her a few moments and, convinced perhaps that she meant business, struck
+up his liveliest tune, then listened for her response. As it came back
+timidly but promptly, he left his perch and sought a nearer acquaintance
+with the prudent female. Whether or not a match grew out of this little
+flirtation I cannot say.
+
+Our smaller woodpeckers are sometimes accused of injuring the apple and
+other fruit trees, but the depredator is probably the larger and rarer
+yellow-bellied species. One autumn I caught one of these fellows in
+the act of sinking long rows of his little wells in the limb of an
+apple-tree. There were series of rings of them, one above another, quite
+around the stem, some of them the third of an inch across. They are
+evidently made to get at the tender, juicy bark, or cambium layer, next
+to the hard wood of the tree. The health and vitality of the branch are
+so seriously impaired by them that it often dies.
+
+In the following winter the same bird (probably) tapped a maple-tree in
+front of my window in fifty-six places; and when the day was sunny, and
+the sap oozed out, he spent most of his time there. He knew the good
+sap-days, and was on hand promptly for his tipple; cold and cloudy
+days he did not appear. He knew which side of the tree to tap, too, and
+avoided the sunless northern exposure. When one series of well-holes
+failed to supply him, he would sink another, drilling through the bark
+with great ease and quickness. Then, when the day was warm, and the sap
+ran freely, he would have a regular sugar-maple debauch, sitting there
+by his wells hour after hour, and as fast as they became filled sipping
+out the sap. This he did in a gentle, caressing manner that was very
+suggestive. He made a row of wells near the foot of the tree, and other
+rows higher up, and he would hop up and down the trunk as these became
+filled. He would hop down the tree backward with the utmost ease,
+throwing his tail outward and his head inward at each hop. When the
+wells would freeze or his thirst become slaked, he would ruffle his
+feathers, draw himself together, and sit and doze in the sun on the side
+of the tree. He passed the night in a hole in an apple-tree not far off.
+He was evidently a young bird not yet having the plumage of the mature
+male or female, and yet he knew which tree to tap and where to tap it.
+I saw where he had bored several maples in the vicinity, but no oaks
+or chestnuts. I nailed up a fat bone near his sap-works: the downy
+woodpecker came there several times a day to dine; the nut-hatch came,
+and even the snow-bird took a taste occasionally; but this sap-sucker
+never touched it; the sweet of the tree sufficed for him. This
+woodpecker does not breed or abound in my vicinity; only stray specimens
+are now and then to be met with in the colder months. As spring
+approached, the one I refer to took his departure.
+
+I must bring my account of my neighbor in the tree down to the latest
+date; so after the lapse of a year I add the following notes. The last
+day of February was bright and springlike. I heard the first sparrow
+sing that morning and the first screaming of the circling hawks, and
+about seven o'clock the first drumming of my little friend. His first
+notes were uncertain and at long intervals, but by and by he warmed up
+and beat a lively tattoo. As the season advanced he ceased to lodge in
+his old quarters. I would rap and find nobody at home. Was he out on a
+lark, I said, the spring fever working in his blood? After a time his
+drumming grew less frequent, and finally, in the middle of April, ceased
+entirely. Had some accident befallen him, or had he wandered away to
+fresh fields, following some siren of his species? Probably the latter.
+Another bird that I had under observation also left his winter-quarters
+in the spring. This, then, appears to be the usual custom. The wrens and
+the nut-hatches and chickadees succeed to these abandoned cavities, and
+often have amusing disputes over them. The nut-hatches frequently pass
+the night in them, and the wrens and chickadees nest in them. I have
+further observed that in excavating a cavity for a nest the downy
+woodpecker makes the entrance smaller than when he is excavating his
+winter-quarters. This is doubtless for the greater safety of the young
+birds.
+
+The next fall, the downy excavated another limb in the old apple-tree,
+but had not got his retreat quite finished, when the large hairy
+woodpecker appeared upon the scene. I heard his loud click, click, early
+one frosty November morning. There was something impatient and angry
+in the tone that arrested my attention. I saw the bird fly to the tree
+where downy had been at work, and fall with great violence upon the
+entrance to his cavity. The bark and the chips flew beneath his
+vigorous blows, and before I fairly woke up to what he was doing, he had
+completely demolished the neat, round doorway of downy. He had made a
+large ragged opening large enough for himself to enter. I drove him away
+and my favorite came back, but only to survey the ruins of his castle
+for a moment and then go away. He lingered about for a day or two and
+then disappeared. The big hairy usurper passed a night in the cavity,
+but on being hustled out of it the next night by me, he also left, but
+not till he had demolished the entrance to a cavity in a neighboring
+tree where downy and his mate had reared their brood that summer, and
+where I had hoped the female would pass the winter.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES BY THE WAY.
+
+
+
+
+I. THE WEATHER-WISE MUSKRAT
+
+
+I am more than half persuaded that the muskrat is a wise little animal,
+and that on the subject of the weather, especially, he possesses some
+secret that I should be glad to know. In the fall of 1878 I noticed that
+he built unusually high and massive nests. I noticed them in several
+different localities. In a shallow, sluggish pond by the roadside,
+which I used to pass daily in my walk, two nests were in process of
+construction throughout the month of November. The builders worked only
+at night, and I could see each day that the work had visibly advanced.
+When there was a slight skim of ice over the pond, this was broken up
+about the nests, with trails through it in different directions where
+the material had been brought. The houses were placed a little to one
+side of the main channel, and were constructed entirely of a species of
+coarse wild grass that grew all about. So far as I could see, from first
+to last they were solid masses of grass, as if the interior cavity or
+nest was to be excavated afterward, as doubtless it was. As they emerged
+from the pond they gradually assumed the shape of a miniature mountain,
+very bold and steep on the south side, and running down a long gentle
+grade to the surface of the water on the north. One could see that the
+little architect hauled all his material up this easy slope, and thrust
+it out boldly around the other side. Every mouthful was distinctly
+defined. After they were two feet or more above the water, I expected
+each day to see that the finishing stroke had been given and the work
+brought to a close. But higher yet, said the builder. December drew
+near, the cold became threatening, and I was apprehensive that winter
+would suddenly shut down upon those unfinished nests. But the wise
+rats knew better than I did; they had received private advices from
+headquarters that I knew not of. Finally, about the 6th of December, the
+nests assumed completion; the northern incline was absorbed or carried
+up, and each structure became a strong massive cone, three or four
+feet high, the largest nest of the kind I had ever seen. Does it mean a
+severe winter? I inquired. An old farmer said it meant "high water,"
+and he was right once, at least, for in a few days afterward we had the
+heaviest rainfall known in this section for half a century. The creeks
+rose to an almost unprecedented height. The sluggish pond became a
+seething, turbulent watercourse; gradually the angry element crept up
+the sides of these lake dwellings, till, when the rain ceased, about
+four o'clock they showed above the flood no larger than a man's hat.
+During the night the channel shifted till the main current swept over
+them, and next day not a vestige of the nests was to be seen; they
+had gone down-stream, as had many other dwellings of a less temporary
+character. The rats had built wisely, and would have been perfectly
+secure against any ordinary high water, but who can foresee a flood? The
+oldest traditions of their race did not run back to the time of such a
+visitation.
+
+Nearly a week afterward another dwelling was begun, well away from the
+treacherous channel, but the architects did not work at it with much
+heart; the material was very scarce, the ice hindered, and before the
+basement-story was fairly finished, winter had the pond under his lock
+and key.
+
+In other localities I noticed that where the nests were placed on the
+banks of streams, they were made secure against the floods by being
+built amid a small clump of bushes. When the fall of 1879 came, the
+muskrats were very tardy about beginning their house, laying the
+corner-stone--or the corner-sod-about December 1st, and continuing the
+work slowly and indifferently. On the 15th of the month the nest was not
+yet finished. This, I said, indicates a mild winter; and, sure enough,
+the season was one of the mildest known for many years. The rats had
+little use for their house.
+
+Again, in the fall of 1880, while the weather-wise were wagging their
+heads, some forecasting a mild, some a severe winter, I watched with
+interest for a sign from my muskrats. About November 1st, a month
+earlier than the previous year, they began their nest, and worked at it
+with a will. They appeared to have just got tidings of what was coming.
+If I had taken the hint so palpably given, my celery would not have been
+frozen in the ground, and my apples caught in unprotected places.
+When the cold wave struck us, about November 20th, my four-legged
+"I-told-you-so's" had nearly completed their dwelling; it lacked only
+the ridge-board, so to speak; it needed a little "topping out," to give
+it a finished look. But this it never got. The winter had come to stay,
+and it waxed more and more severe, till the unprecedented cold of the
+last days of December must have astonished even the wise muskrats in
+their snug retreat. I approached their nest at this time, a white mound
+upon the white, deeply frozen surface of the pond, and wondered if
+there was any life in that apparent sepulchre. I thrust my walking-stick
+sharply into it, when there was a rustle and a splash into the water,
+as the occupant made his escape. What a damp basement that house has, I
+thought, and what a pity to rout out a peaceful neighbor out of his bed
+in this weather and into such a state of things as this! But water does
+not wet the muskrat; his fur is charmed, and not a drop penetrates
+it. Where the ground is favorable, the muskrats do not build these
+mound-like nests, but burrow into the bank a long distance, and
+establish their winter-quarters there.
+
+Shall we not say, then, in view of the above facts, that this little
+creature is weather-wise? The hitting of the mark twice might be
+mere good luck; but three bull's-eyes in succession is not a mere
+coincidence; it is a proof of skill. The muskrat is not found in the Old
+World, which is a little singular, as other rats so abound there, and
+as those slow-going English streams especially, with their grassy banks,
+are so well suited to him. The water-rat of Europe is smaller, but of
+similar nature and habits. The muskrat does not hibernate like some
+rodents, but is pretty active all winter. In December I noticed in my
+walk where they had made excursions of a few yards to an orchard for
+frozen apples. One day, along a little stream, I saw a mink track amid
+those of the muskrat; following it up, I presently came to blood and
+other marks of strife upon the snow beside a stone wall. Looking in
+between the stones, I found the carcass of the luckless rat, with its
+head and neck eaten away. The mink had made a meal of him.
+
+
+
+
+II. CHEATING THE SQUIRRELS.
+
+
+FOR the largest and finest chestnuts I had last fall I was indebted to
+the gray squirrels. Walking through the early October woods one day, I
+came upon a place where the ground was thickly strewn with very large
+unopened chestnut burs. On examination I found that every bur had been
+cut square off with about an inch of the stem adhering, and not one
+had been left on the tree. It was not accident, then, but design. Whose
+design? The squirrels'. The fruit was the finest I had ever seen in the
+woods, and some wise squirrel had marked it for his own. The burs were
+ripe, and had just begun to divide, not "threefold," but fourfold, "to
+show the fruit within." The squirrel that had taken all this pains had
+evidently reasoned with himself thus: "Now, these are extremely fine
+chestnuts, and I want them; if I wait till the burs open on the tree the
+crows and jays will be sure to carry off a great many of the nuts before
+they fall; then, after the wind has rattled out what remain, there are
+the mice, the chipmunks, the red squirrels, the raccoons, the grouse, to
+say nothing of the boys and the pigs, to come in for their share; so I
+will forestall events a little; I will cut off the burs when they have
+matured, and a few days of this dry October weather will cause everyone
+of them to open on the ground; I shall be on hand in the nick of time to
+gather up my nuts." The squirrel, of course, had to take the chances of
+a prowler like myself coming along, but he had fairly stolen a march on
+his neighbors. As I proceeded to collect and open the burs, I was
+half prepared to hear an audible protest from the trees about, for I
+constantly fancied myself watched by shy but jealous eyes. It is an
+interesting inquiry how the squirrel knew the burs would open if left to
+know, but thought the experiment worth trying.
+
+The gray squirrel is peculiarly an American product, and might serve
+very well as a national emblem. The Old World can beat us on rats and
+mice, but we are far ahead on squirrels, having five or six species to
+Europe's one.
+
+
+
+
+III. FOX AND HOUND.
+
+
+I STOOD on a high hill or ridge one autumn day and saw a hound run a fox
+through the fields far beneath me. What odors that fox must have shaken
+out of himself, I thought, to be traced thus easily, and how great their
+specific gravity not to have been blown away like smoke by the breeze!
+The fox ran a long distance down the hill, keeping within a few feet of
+a stone wall; then turned a right angle and led off for the mountain,
+across a plowed field and a succession of pasture lands. In about
+fifteen minutes the hound came in full blast with her nose in the air,
+and never once did she put it to the ground while in my sight. When she
+came to the stone wall she took the other side from that taken by the
+fox, and kept about the same distance from it, being thus separated
+several yards from his track, with the fence between her and it. At the
+point where the fox turned sharply to the left, the hound overshot a few
+yards, then wheeled, and feeling the air a moment with her nose, took
+up the scent again and was off on his trail as unerringly as fate. It
+seemed as if the fox must have sowed himself broadcast as he went along,
+and that his scent was so rank and heavy that it settled in the hollows
+and clung tenaciously to the bushes and crevices in the fence. I thought
+I ought to have caught a remnant of it as I passed that way some minutes
+later, but I did not. But I suppose it was not that the light-footed fox
+so impressed himself upon the ground he ran over, but that the sense of
+the hound was so keen. To her sensitive nose these tracks steamed
+like hot cakes, and they would not have cooled off so as to be
+undistinguishable for several hours. For the time being she had but one
+sense: her whole soul was concentrated in her nose.
+
+It is amusing when the hunter starts out of a winter morning to see his
+hound probe the old tracks to determine how recent they are. He sinks
+his nose down deep in the snow so as to exclude the air from above, then
+draws a long full breath, giving sometimes an audible snort. If there
+remains the least effluvium of the fox the hound will detect it. If
+it be very slight it only sets his tail wagging; if it be strong it
+unloosens his tongue.
+
+Such things remind one of the waste, the friction that is going on all
+about us, even when the wheels of life run the most smoothly. A fox
+cannot trip along the top of a stone wall so lightly but that he will
+leave enough of himself to betray his course to the hound for hours
+afterward. When the boys play "hare and hounds" the hare scatters bits
+of paper to give a clew to the pursuers, but he scatters himself much
+more freely if only our sight and scent were sharp enough to detect the
+fragments. Even the fish leave a trail in the water, and it is said the
+otter will pursue them by it. The birds make a track in the air, only
+their enemies hunt by sight rather than by scent. The fox baffles the
+hound most upon a hard crust of frozen snow; the scent will not hold to
+the smooth, bead-like granules.
+
+Judged by the eye alone, the fox is the lightest and most buoyant
+creature that runs. His soft wrapping of fur conceals the muscular play
+and effort that is so obvious in the hound that pursues him, and he
+comes bounding along precisely as if blown by a gentle wind. His massive
+tail is carried as if it floated upon the air by its own lightness.
+
+The hound is not remarkable for his fleetness, but how he will
+hang!--often running late into the night and sometimes till morning,
+from ridge to ridge, from peak to peak; now on the mountain, now
+crossing the valley, now playing about a large slope of uplying pasture
+fields. At times the fox has a pretty well-defined orbit, and the hunter
+knows where to intercept him. Again he leads off like a comet, quite
+beyond the system of hills and ridges upon which he was started, and his
+return is entirely a matter of conjecture; but if the day be not more
+than half spent, the chances are that the fox will be back before night,
+though the sportsman's patience seldom holds out that long.
+
+The hound is a most interesting dog. How solemn and long-visaged he
+is--how peaceful and well-disposed! He is the Quaker among dogs. All
+the viciousness and currishness seem to have been weeded out of him;
+he seldom quarrels, or fights, or plays, like other dogs. Two strange
+hounds, meeting for the first time, behave as civilly toward each other
+as if two men. I know a hound that has an ancient, wrinkled, human,
+far-away look that reminds one of the bust of Homer among the Elgin
+marbles. He looks like the mountains toward which his heart yearns so
+much.
+
+The hound is a great puzzle to the farm dog; the latter, attracted by
+his baying, comes barking and snarling up through the fields bent on
+picking a quarrel; he intercepts the hound, snubs and insults and annoys
+him in every way possible, but the hound heeds him not; if the dog
+attacks him he gets away as best he can, and goes on with the trail; the
+cur bristles and barks and struts about for a while, then goes back to
+the house, evidently thinking the hound a lunatic, which he is for the
+time being--a monomaniac, the slave and victim of one idea. I saw the
+master of a hound one day arrest him in full course to give one of the
+hunters time to get to a certain runaway; the dog cried and struggled to
+free himself and would listen neither to threats nor caresses. Knowing
+he must be hungry, I offered him my lunch, but he would not touch it. I
+put it in his mouth, but he threw it contemptuously from him. We coaxed
+and petted and reassured him, but he was under a spell; he was bereft of
+all thought or desire but the one passion to pursue that trail.
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE WOODCHUCK
+
+
+Writers upon rural England and her familiar natural history make no
+mention of the marmot or woodchuck. In Europe this animal seems to
+be confined to high mountainous districts, as on our Pacific slope,
+burrowing near the snow line. It is more social or gregarious than the
+American species, living in large families like our prairie-dog. In
+the Middle and Eastern States our woodchuck takes the place, in some
+respects, of the English rabbit, burrowing in every hillside and under
+every stone wall and jutting ledge and large bowlder, from whence it
+makes raids upon the grass and clover and sometimes upon the garden
+vegetables. It is quite solitary in its habits, seldom more than one
+inhabiting the same den, unless it be a mother and her young. It is not
+now so much a wood chuck as a field chuck. Occasionally, however, one
+seems to prefer the woods, and is not seduced by the sunny slopes and
+the succulent grass, but feeds, as did his fathers before him, upon
+roots and twigs, the bark of young trees, and upon various wood plants.
+
+One summer day, as I was swimming across a broad, deep pool in the creek
+in a secluded place in the woods, I saw one of these sylvan chucks amid
+the rocks but a few feet from the edge of the water where I proposed to
+touch. He saw my approach, but doubtless took me for some water-fowl,
+or for some cousin of his of the muskrat tribe; for he went on with his
+feeding, and regarded me not till I paused within ten feet of him and
+lifted myself up. Then he did not know me; having, perhaps, never seen
+Adam in his simplicity, but he twisted his nose around to catch my
+scent; and the moment he had done so he sprang like a jumping-jack and
+rushed into his den with the utmost precipitation.
+
+The woodchuck is the true serf among our animals; he belongs to the
+soil, and savors of it. He is of the earth, earthy. There is generally
+a decided odor about his dens and lurking-places, but it is not at all
+disagreeable in the clover-scented air, and his shrill whistle, as he
+takes to his hole or defies the farm dog from the interior of the stone
+wall, is a pleasant summer sound. In form and movement the woodchuck is
+not captivating. His body is heavy and flabby. Indeed, such a flaccid,
+fluid, pouchy carcass, I have never before seen. It has absolutely no
+muscular tension or rigidity, but is as baggy and shaky as a skin
+filled with water. Let the rifleman shoot one while it lies basking on
+a sidelong rock, and its body slumps off, and rolls and spills down the
+hill, as if it were a mass of bowels only. The legs of the woodchuck are
+short and stout, and made for digging rather than running. The latter
+operation he performs by short leaps, his belly scarcely clearing the
+ground. For a short distance he can make very good time, but he
+seldom trusts himself far from his hole, and when surprised in that
+predicament, makes little effort to escape, but, grating his teeth,
+looks the danger squarely in the face.
+
+I knew a farmer in New York who had a very large bob-tailed churn-dog by
+the name of Cuff. The farmer kept a large dairy and made a great deal of
+butter, and it was the business of Cuff to spend nearly the half of each
+summer day treading the endless round of the churning-machine. During
+the remainder of the day he had plenty of time to sleep, and rest, and
+sit on his hips and survey the landscape. One day, sitting thus, he
+discovered a woodchuck about forty rods from the house, on a steep
+side-hill, feeding about near his hole, which was beneath a large rock.
+The old dog, forgetting his stiffness, and remembering the fun he had
+had with woodchucks in his earlier days, started off at his highest
+speed, vainly hoping to catch this one before he could get to his hole.
+But the woodchuck, seeing the dog come laboring up the hill, sprang to
+the mouth of his den, and, when his pursuer was only a few rods off,
+whistled tauntingly and went in. This occurred several times, the old
+dog marching up the hill, and then marching down again, having had his
+labor for his pains. I suspect that he revolved the subject in his mind
+while he revolved the great wheel of the churning-machine, and that
+some turn or other brought him a happy thought, for next time he showed
+himself a strategist. Instead of giving chase to the woodchuck when
+first discovered, he crouched down to the ground, and, resting his head
+on his paws, watched him. The woodchuck kept working away from the hole,
+lured by the tender clover, but, not unmindful of his safety,
+lifted himself up on his haunches every few moments and surveyed the
+approaches. Presently, after the woodchuck had let himself down from one
+of these attitudes of observation, and resumed his feeding, Cuff started
+swiftly but stealthily up the hill, precisely in the attitude of a cat
+when she is stalking a bird. When the woodchuck rose up again, Cuff was
+perfectly motionless and half hid by the grass. When he again resumed
+his clover, Cuff sped up the hill as before, this time crossing a fence,
+but in a low place, and so nimbly that he was not discovered. Again the
+wood chuck was on the outlook, again Cuff was motionless and hugging the
+ground. As the dog nears his victim he is partially hidden by a swell in
+the earth, but still the woodchuck from his outlook reports "all right,"
+when Cuff, having not twice as far to run as the 'chuck, throws all
+stealthiness aside and rushes directly for the hole. At that moment the
+woodchuck discovers his danger, and, seeing that it is a race for life,
+leaps as I never saw marmot leap before. But he is two seconds too late,
+his retreat is cut off, and the powerful jaws of the old dog close upon
+him.
+
+The next season Cuff tried the same tactics again with like success; but
+when the third woodchuck had taken up his abode at the fatal hole,
+the old churner's wits and strength had begun to fail him, and he was
+baffled in each attempt to capture the animal.
+
+The woodchuck always burrows on a side-hill. This enables him to guard
+against being drowned out, by making the termination of the hole higher
+than the entrance. He digs in slantingly for about two or three feet,
+then makes a sharp upward turn and keeps nearly parallel with the
+surface of the ground for a distance of eight or ten feet farther,
+according to the grade. Here he makes his nest and passes the winter,
+holing up in October or November and coming out again in April. This is
+a long sleep, and is rendered possible only by the amount of fat with
+which the system has become stored during the summer. The fire of life
+still burns, but very faintly and slowly, as with the draughts all
+closed and the ashes heaped up. Respiration is continued, but at longer
+intervals, and all the vital processes are nearly at a standstill. Dig
+one out during hibernation (Audubon did so), and you find it a mere
+inanimate ball, that suffers itself to be moved and rolled about
+without showing signs of awakening. But bring it in by the fire, and it
+presently unrolls and opens its eyes, and crawls feebly about, and if
+left to itself will seek some dark hole or corner, roll itself up again,
+and resume its former condition.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other
+Papers, by John Burroughs
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIRDS AND BEES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 3163.txt or 3163.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/1/6/3163/
+
+Produced by Patricia C. Franks, Lisa Carter, Danette Dulny,
+Charles Duvall, Cheri Ripley, and Cheryl Sullivan
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.