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+Project Gutenberg's Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes, Etc, by Burroughs
+#1 in our series by John Burroughs
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+Title:  Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and Other Papers
+
+Author: John Burroughs
+
+Release Date: April, 2002  [Etext #3163]
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+[The actual date this file first posted = 01/20/01]
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+This Project Gutenberg Etext was prepared by:
+Prof. Patricia C. Franks, Chairperson
+Business Information Technologies Department
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+Danette Dulny, BIT Student
+Charles Duvall, BIT Student
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+
+
+
+
+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
+a1so 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 the1r 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
+rembled 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
+legis1ation 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 oölogist.  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 fu1l 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 be 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 be 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 0ld 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 AND OTHER PAPERS.
+
+
+
+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 manœuver 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 Linnæa.  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, 1ike 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-vitæ, 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 actua1ly 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.  Wa1king 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 Project Gutenberg's Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes, Etc, by Burroughs
+
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