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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Writings of John Burroughs, by John Burroughs
+(#8 in our series by John Burroughs)
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+Title: The Writings of John Burroughs
+
+Author: John Burroughs
+
+Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7441]
+[This file was first posted on April 30, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS ***
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by Jack Eden; wakerobin.org
+
+
+
+THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS
+WITH PORTRAITS AND MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+VOLUME V
+
+PEPACTON
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+I HAVE all the more pleasure in calling my book after the title of 
+the first chapter, "Pepacton," because this is the Indian name of 
+my native stream. In its watershed I was born and passed my youth, 
+and here on its banks my kindred sleep. Here, also, I have gathered 
+much of the harvest, poor though it be, that I have put in this and 
+in previous volumes of my writings.
+
+The term "Pepacton" is said to mean "marriage of the waters;" and 
+with this significance it suits my purpose well, as this book is 
+also a union of many currents.
+
+The Pepacton rises in a deep cleft or gorge in the mountains, the 
+scenery of which is of the wildest and ruggedest character. For a 
+mile or more there is barely room for the road and the creek at the 
+bottom of the chasm. On either hand the mountains, interrupted by 
+shelving, overhanging precipices, rise abruptly to a great height. 
+About half a century ago a pious Scotch family, just arrived in 
+this country, came through this gorge. One of the little boys, 
+gazing upon the terrible desolation of the scene, so unlike in its 
+savage and inhuman aspects anything he had ever seen at home, 
+nestled close to his mother, and asked with bated breath, "Mither, 
+is there a God here?"
+
+Yet the Pepacton is a placid current, especially in its upper 
+portions, where my youth fell; but all its tributaries are swift 
+mountain brooks fed by springs the best in the world. It drains a 
+high pastoral country lifted into long, round-backed hills and 
+rugged, wooded ranges by the subsiding impulse of the Catskill 
+range of mountains, and famous for its superior dairy and other 
+farm products. It is many long years since, with the restlessness 
+of youth, I broke away from the old ties amid those hills; but my 
+heart has always been there, and why should I not come back and 
+name one of my books for the old stream?
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   I. PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE
+   II. SPRINGS
+   III. AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE
+   IV. NATURE AND THE POETS.
+   V. NOTES BY THE WAY
+   VI. FOOTPATHS....
+   VII. A BUNCH OF HERBS
+   VIII. WINTER PICTURES
+   INDEX 
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+   FRINGED GENTIAN
+         From a photograph by
+         Herbert W. Gleason
+   THE ASA GRAY SPRING.
+         From a photograph by
+         Herbert W. Gleason
+   KINGBIRD 
+         From a drawing by L. A.
+         Fuertes
+   RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD
+         From a photograph by
+         Herbert W. Gleason
+   IN THE ORCHARD
+         From a drawing by Charles
+         H. Woodbury
+   A MUSKRAT'S NEST
+         From a photograph by
+         Herbert W. Gleason
+   A FIELD PATH 
+         From a photograph by
+         Clifton Johnson
+
+
+
+
+
+PEPACTON
+
+I
+
+A SUMMER VOYAGE
+
+WHEN one summer day I bethought me of a voyage down the east or 
+Pepacton branch of the Delaware, I seemed to want some excuse for 
+the start, some send-off, some preparation, to give the enterprise 
+genesis and head. This I found in building my own boat. It was a 
+happy thought. How else should I have got under way, how else 
+should I have raised the breeze? The boat-building warmed the 
+blood; it made the germ take; it whetted my appetite for the 
+voyage. There is nothing like serving an apprenticeship to fortune, 
+like earning the right to your tools. In most enterprises the 
+temptation is always to begin too far along; we want to start where 
+somebody else leaves off. Go back to the stump, and see what an 
+impetus you get. Those fishermen who wind their own flies before 
+they go a-fishing,--how they bring in the trout; and those hunters 
+who run their own bullets or make their own cartridges,-- the game 
+is already mortgaged to them.
+
+When my boat was finished--and it was a very simple affair--I was 
+as eager as a boy to be off; I feared the river would all run by 
+before I could wet her bottom in it. This enthusiasm begat great 
+expectations of the trip. I should surely surprise Nature and win 
+some new secrets from her. I should glide down noiselessly upon her 
+and see what all those willow screens and baffling curves 
+concealed. As a fisherman and pedestrian I had been able to come at 
+the stream only at certain points: now the most private and 
+secluded retreats of the nymph would be opened to me; every bend 
+and eddy, every cove hedged in by swamps or passage walled in by 
+high alders, would be at the beck of my paddle.
+
+Whom shall one take with him when he goes a-courting Nature? This 
+is always a vital question. There are persons who will stand 
+between you and that which you seek: they obtrude themselves; they 
+monopolize your attention; they blunt your sense of the shy, half-
+revealed intelligences about you. I want for companion a dog or a 
+boy, or a person who has the virtues of dogs and boys,--
+transparency, good-nature, curiosity, open sense, and a nameless 
+quality that is akin to trees and growths and the inarticulate 
+forces of nature. With him you are alone, and yet have company; you 
+are free; you feel no disturbing element; the influences of nature 
+stream through him and around him; he is a good conductor of the 
+subtle fluid. The quality or qualification I refer to belongs to 
+most persons who spend their lives in the open air,--to soldiers, 
+hunters, fishers, laborers, and to artists and poets of the right 
+sort. How full of it, to choose an illustrious example, was such a 
+man as Walter Scott!
+
+But no such person came in answer to my prayer, so I set out alone.
+
+It was fit that I put my boat into the water at Arkville, but it 
+may seem a little incongruous that I should launch her into Dry 
+Brook; yet Dry Brook is here a fine large trout stream, and I soon 
+found its waters were wet enough for all practical purposes. The 
+Delaware is only one mile distant, and I chose this as the easiest 
+road from the station to it. A young farmer helped me carry the 
+boat to the water, but did not stay to see me off; only some calves 
+feeding alongshore witnessed my embarkation. It would have been a 
+godsend to boys, but there were no boys about. I stuck on a rift 
+before I had gone ten yards, and saw with misgiving the paint 
+transferred from the bottom of my little scow to the tops of the 
+stones thus early in the journey. But I was soon making fair 
+headway, and taking trout for my dinner as I floated along. My 
+first mishap was when I broke the second joint of my rod on a bass, 
+and the first serious impediment to my progress was when I 
+encountered the trunk of a prostrate elm bridging the stream within 
+a few inches of the surface.   My rod mended and the elm cleared, I 
+anticipated better sailing when I should reach the Delaware itself; 
+but I found on this day and on subsequent days that the Delaware 
+has a way of dividing up that is very embarrassing to the 
+navigator.    It is a stream of many minds: its waters cannot long 
+agree to go all in the same channel, and whichever branch I took I 
+was pretty sure to wish I had taken one of the others.  I was 
+constantly sticking on rifts, where I would have to dismount, or 
+running full tilt into willow banks, where I would lose my hat or 
+endanger my fishing-tackle.   On the whole, the result of my first 
+day's voyaging was not encouraging.  I made barely eight miles, and 
+my ardor was a good deal dampened, to say nothing about my 
+clothing.  In mid-afternoon I went to a well-to-do-looking 
+farmhouse and got some milk, which I am certain the thrifty 
+housewife skimmed, for its blueness infected my spirits, and I went 
+into camp that night more than half persuaded to abandon the 
+enterprise in the morning. The loneliness of the river, too, unlike 
+that of the fields and woods, to which I was more accustomed, 
+oppressed me.    In the woods, things are close to you, and you 
+touch them and seem to interchange something with them;  but upon 
+the river, even though it be a narrow and shallow one like this, 
+you are more isolated, farther removed from the soil and its 
+attractions, and an easier prey to the unsocial demons. The long, 
+unpeopled vistas ahead; the still, dark eddies; the endless 
+monotone and soliloquy of the stream; the unheeding rocks basking 
+like monsters along the shore, half out of the water, half in; a 
+solitary heron starting up here and there, as you rounded some 
+point, and flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to view, or 
+standing like a gaunt spectre on the umbrageous side of the 
+mountain, his motionless form revealed against the dark green as 
+you passed; the trees and willows and alders that hemmed you in on 
+either side, and hid the fields and the farmhouses and the road 
+that ran near by,--these things and others aided the skimmed milk 
+to cast a gloom over my spirits that argued ill for the success of 
+my undertaking. Those rubber boots, too, that parboiled my feet and 
+were clogs of lead about them,--whose spirits are elastic enough to 
+endure them? A malediction upon the head of him who invented them! 
+Take your old shoes, that will let the water in and let it out 
+again, rather than stand knee-deep all day in these extinguishers.
+
+I escaped from the river, that first night, and took to the woods, 
+and profited by the change. In the woods I was at home again, and 
+the bed of hemlock boughs salved my spirits. A cold spring run came 
+down off the mountain, and beside it, underneath birches and 
+hemlocks, I improvised my hearthstone. In sleeping on the ground it 
+is a great advantage to have a back-log; it braces and supports 
+you, and it is a bedfellow that will not grumble when, in the 
+middle of the night, you crowd sharply up against it. It serves to 
+keep in the warmth, also. A heavy stone or other point DE 
+RÉSISTANCE at your feet is also a help. Or, better still, scoop out 
+a little place in the earth, a few inches deep, so as to admit your 
+body from your hips to your shoulders; you thus get an equal 
+bearing the whole length of you. I am told the Western hunters and 
+guides do this. On the same principle, the sand makes a good bed, 
+and the snow. You make a mould in which you fit nicely. My berth 
+that night was between two logs that the bark-peelers had stripped 
+ten or more years before. As they had left the bark there, and as 
+hemlock bark makes excellent fuel, I had more reasons than one to 
+be grateful to them.
+
+In the morning I felt much refreshed, and as if the night had tided 
+me over the bar that threatened to stay my progress. If I can steer 
+clear of skimmed milk, I said, I shall now finish the voyage of 
+fifty miles to Hancock with increasing pleasure.
+
+When one breaks camp in the morning, he turns back again and again 
+to see what he has left. Surely, he feels, he has forgotten 
+something; what is it? But it is only his own sad thoughts and 
+musings he has left, the fragment of his life he has lived there. 
+Where he hung his coat on the tree, where he slept  on the boughs, 
+where he made his coffee or broiled his trout over the coals, where 
+he drank again and again at the little brown pool in the spring 
+run, where he looked long and long up into the whispering branches 
+overhead, he has left what he cannot bring away with him,--the 
+flame and the ashes of himself.
+
+Of certain game-birds it is thought that at times they have the 
+power of withholding their scent; no hint or particle of themselves 
+goes out upon the air. I think there are persons whose spiritual 
+pores are always sealed up, and I presume they have the best time 
+of it. Their hearts never radiate into the void; they do not yearn 
+and sympathize without return; they do not leave themselves by the 
+wayside as the sheep leaves her wool upon the brambles and thorns.
+
+This branch of the Delaware, so far as I could learn, had never 
+before been descended by a white man in a boat. Rafts of pine and 
+hemlock timber are run down on the spring and fall freshets, but of 
+pleasure-seekers in boats I appeared to be the first. Hence my 
+advent was a surprise to most creatures in the water and out. I 
+surprised the cattle in the field, and those ruminating leg-deep in 
+the water turned their heads at my approach, swallowed their 
+unfinished cuds, and scampered off as if they had seen a spectre. I 
+surprised the fish on their spawning-beds and feeding-grounds; they 
+scattered, as my shadow glided down upon them, like chickens when a 
+hawk appears. I surprised an ancient fisherman seated on a spit of 
+gravelly beach, with his back upstream, and   leisurely angling in 
+a deep, still eddy, and mumbling to himself.   As I slid into the 
+circle of his vision his grip on the pole relaxed, his jaw dropped, 
+and he was too bewildered to reply to my salutation for some 
+moments.   As I turned a bend in the river I looked back, and saw 
+him hastening away with great precipitation.  I presume he had 
+angled there for forty years without having his privacy thus 
+intruded upon.   I surprised hawks and herons and kingfishers.  I 
+came suddenly upon muskrats, and raced with them down the rifts, 
+they having no time to take to their holes.  At one point, as I 
+rounded an elbow in the stream, a black eagle sprang from the top 
+of a dead tree, and flapped hurriedly away.    A kingbird gave 
+chase, and disappeared for some moments in the gulf between the 
+great wings of the eagle, and I imagined him seated upon his back 
+delivering his puny blows upon the royal bird.    I interrupted two 
+or three minks fishing and hunting alongshore. They would dart 
+under the bank when they saw me, then presently thrust  out their  
+sharp,  weasel-like  noses, to see if the danger was imminent.   At 
+one point, in a little cove behind the willows, I surprised some 
+schoolgirls, with skirts amazingly abbreviated, wading and playing 
+in the water.    And as much surprised as  any, I am sure, was that 
+hard-worked-looking housewife, when I came up from under the bank 
+in front of her house, and with pail in hand appeared at her door 
+and asked for milk, taking the precaution to intimate that I had no 
+objection to the yellow scum that is supposed to rise on a fresh 
+article of that kind.
+
+"What kind of milk do you want?"
+
+"The best you have. Give me two quarts of it," I replied.
+
+"What do you want to do with it?" with an anxious tone, as if I 
+might want to blow up something or burn her barns with it.
+
+"Oh, drink it," I answered, as if I frequently put milk to that 
+use.
+
+"Well, I suppose I can get you some;" and she presently reappeared 
+with swimming pail, with those little yellow flakes floating about 
+upon it that one likes to see.
+
+I passed several low dams the second day, but had no trouble. I 
+dismounted and stood upon the apron, and the boat, with plenty of 
+line, came over as lightly as a chip, and swung around in the eddy 
+below like a steed that knows its master. In the afternoon, while 
+slowly drifting down a long eddy, the moist southwest wind brought 
+me the welcome odor of strawberries, and running ashore by a 
+meadow, a short distance below, I was soon parting the daisies and 
+filling my cup with the dead-ripe fruit. Berries, be they red, 
+blue, or black, seem like a special providence to the camper-out; 
+they are luxuries he has not counted on, and I prized these 
+accordingly. Later in the day it threatened rain, and I drew up to 
+shore under the shelter of some thick overhanging hemlocks, and 
+proceeded to eat my berries and milk, glad of an excuse not to 
+delay my lunch longer. While tarrying here I heard young voices 
+upstream, and looking in that direction saw two boys coming down 
+the rapids on rude floats. They were racing along at a lively pace, 
+each with a pole in his hand, dexterously avoiding the rocks and 
+the breakers, and schooling themselves thus early in the duties and 
+perils of the raftsmen. As they saw me one observed to the other, --
+
+
+"There is the man we saw go by when we were building our floats. If 
+we had known he was coming so far, maybe we could have got him to 
+give us a ride."
+
+They drew near, guided their crafts to shore beside me, and tied 
+up, their poles answering for hawsers. They proved to be Johnny and 
+Denny Dwire, aged ten and twelve. They were friendly boys, and 
+though not a bit bashful were not a bit impertinent. And Johnny, 
+who did the most of the talking, had such a sweet, musical voice; 
+it was like a bird's. It seems Denny had run away, a day or two 
+before, to his uncle's, five miles above, and Johnny had been after 
+him, and was bringing his prisoner home on a float; and it was hard 
+to tell which was enjoying the fun most, the captor or the 
+captured.
+
+"Why did you run away?" said I to Denny.
+
+"Oh, 'cause," replied he, with an air which said plainly, "The 
+reasons are too numerous to mention."
+
+"Boys, you know, will do so, sometimes," said Johnny, and he smiled 
+upon his brother in a way that made me think they had a very good 
+understanding upon the subject.
+
+They could both swim, yet their floats looked very perilous,--three 
+pieces of old plank or slabs, with two cross-pieces and a fragment 
+of a board for a rider, and made without nails or withes.
+
+"In some places," said Johnny, "one plank was here and another off 
+there, but we managed, somehow, to keep atop of them."
+
+"Let's leave our floats here, and ride with him the rest of the 
+way," said one to the other.
+
+"All right; may we, mister? "
+
+I assented, and we were soon afloat again. How they enjoyed the 
+passage; how smooth it was; how the boat glided along; how quickly 
+she felt the paddle! They admired her much; they praised my 
+steersmanship; they praised my fish-pole and all my fixings down to 
+my hateful rubber boots. When we stuck on the rifts, as we did 
+several times, they leaped out quickly, with their bare feet and 
+legs, and pushed us off.
+
+"I think," said Johnny, "if you keep her straight and let her have 
+her own way, she will find the deepest water. Don't you, Denny?"
+
+"I think she will," replied Denny; and I found the boys were pretty 
+nearly right.
+
+I tried them on a point of natural history. I had observed, coming 
+along, a great many dead eels lying on the bottom of the river, 
+that I supposed had died from spear wounds. "No," said Johnny, 
+"they are lamper eels. They die as soon as they have built their 
+nests and laid their eggs."
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"That's what they all say, and I know they are lampers."
+
+So I fished one up out of the deep water with my paddle-blade and 
+examined it; and sure enough it was a lamprey. There was the row of 
+holes along its head, and its ugly suction mouth. I had noticed 
+their nests, too, all along, where the water in the pools shallowed 
+to a few feet and began to hurry toward the rifts: they were low 
+mounds of small stones, as if a bushel or more of large pebbles had 
+been dumped upon the river bottom; occasionally they were so near 
+the surface as to make a big ripple. The eel attaches itself to the 
+stones by its mouth, and thus moves them at will. An old fisherman 
+told me that a strong man could not pull a large lamprey loose from 
+a rock to which it had attached itself. It fastens to its prey in 
+this way, and sucks the life out. A friend of mine says he once saw 
+in the St. Lawrence a pike as long as his arm with a lamprey eel 
+attached to him. The fish was nearly dead and was quite white, the 
+eel had so sucked out his blood and substance. The fish, when 
+seized, darts against rocks and stones, and tries in vain to rub 
+the eel off, then succumbs to the sucker.
+
+"The lampers do not all die," said Denny, "because they do not all 
+spawn;" and I observed that the dead ones were all of one size and 
+doubtless of the same age.
+
+The lamprey is the octopus, the devil-fish, of these waters, and 
+there is, perhaps, no tragedy enacted here that equals that of one 
+of these vampires slowly sucking the life out of a bass or a trout.
+
+My boys went to school part of the time. Did they have a good 
+teacher?
+
+"Good enough for me," said Johnny.
+
+"Good enough for me," echoed Denny.
+
+Just below Bark-a-boom--the name is worth keeping--they left me. I 
+was loath to part with them; their musical voices and their 
+thorough good-fellowship had been very acceptable. With a little 
+persuasion, I think they would have left their home and humble 
+fortunes, and gone a-roving with me.
+
+About four o'clock the warm, vapor-laden southwest wind brought 
+forth the expected thunder-shower. I saw the storm rapidly 
+developing behind the mountains in my front. Presently I came in 
+sight of a long covered wooden bridge that spanned the river about 
+a mile ahead, and I put my paddle into the water with all my force 
+to reach this cover before the storm. It was neck and neck most of 
+the way. The storm had the wind, and I had it--in my teeth. The 
+bridge was at Shavertown, and it was by a close shave that I got 
+under it before the rain was upon me. How it poured and rattled and 
+whipped in around the abutment of the bridge to reach me! I looked 
+out well satisfied upon the foaming water, upon the wet, unpainted 
+houses and barns of the Shavertowners, and upon the trees,
+
+      "Caught and cuffed by the gale."
+
+Another traveler--the spotted-winged nighthawk--was also roughly 
+used by the storm. He faced it bravely, and beat and beat, but was 
+unable to stem it, or even hold his own; gradually he drifted back, 
+till he was lost to sight in the wet obscurity. The water in the 
+river rose an inch while I waited, about three quarters of an hour. 
+Only one man, I reckon, saw me in Shavertown, and he came and 
+gossiped with me from the bank above when the storm had abated.
+
+The second night I stopped at the sign of the elm-tree. The woods 
+were too wet, and I concluded to make my boat my bed. A superb elm, 
+on a smooth grassy plain a few feet from the water's edge, looked 
+hospitable in the twilight, and I drew my boat up beneath it. I 
+hung my clothes on the jagged edges of its rough bark, and went to 
+bed with the moon, "in her third quarter," peeping under the 
+branches upon me. I had been reading Stevenson's amusing "Travels 
+with a Donkey," and the lines he pretends to quote from an old play 
+kept running in my head:--
+
+   'The bed was made, the room was fit,
+    By punctual eve the stars were lit;
+   The air was sweet, the water ran;
+   No need was there for maid or man,
+   When we put up, my ass and I,
+   At God's green caravanserai."
+
+But the stately elm played me a trick: it slyly and at long 
+intervals let great drops of water down upon me, now with a sharp 
+smack upon my rubber coat; then with a heavy thud upon the seat in 
+the bow or stern of my boat; then plump into my upturned ear, or 
+upon my uncovered arm, or with a ring into my tin cup, or with a 
+splash into my coffee-pail that stood at my side full of water from 
+a spring I had just passed. After two hours' trial I found dropping 
+off to sleep, under such circumstances, was out of the question; so 
+I sprang up, in no very amiable mood toward my host, and drew my 
+boat clean from under the elm. I had refreshing slumber 
+thenceforth, and the birds were astir in the morning long before I 
+was.
+
+There is one way, at least, in which the denuding the country of 
+its forests has lessened the rainfall: in certain conditions of the 
+atmosphere every tree is a great condenser of moisture, as I had 
+just observed in the case of the old elm; little showers are 
+generated in their branches, and in the aggregate the amount of 
+water precipitated in this way is considerable. Of a foggy summer 
+morning one may see little puddles of water standing on the stones 
+beneath maple-trees, along the street; and in winter, when there is 
+a sudden change from cold to warm, with fog, the water fairly runs 
+down the trunks of the trees, and streams from their naked 
+branches. The temperature of the tree is so much below that of the 
+atmosphere in such cases that the condensation is very rapid. In 
+lieu of these arboreal rains we have the dew upon the grass, but it 
+is doubtful if the grass ever drips as does a tree.
+
+The birds, I say, were astir in the morning before I was, and some 
+of them were more wakeful through the night, unless they sing in 
+their dreams. At this season one may hear at intervals numerous 
+bird voices during the night. The whip-poor-will was piping when I 
+lay down, and I still heard one when I woke up after midnight. I 
+heard the song sparrow and the kingbird also, like watchers calling 
+the hour, and several times I heard the cuckoo. Indeed, I am 
+convinced that our cuckoo is to a considerable extent a night bird, 
+and that he moves about freely from tree to tree. His peculiar 
+guttural note, now here, now there, may be heard almost any summer 
+night, in any part of the country, and occasionally his better 
+known cuckoo call. He is a great recluse by day, but seems to 
+wander abroad freely by night.
+
+The birds do indeed begin with the day. The farmer who is in the 
+field at work while he can yet see stars catches their first matin 
+hymns. In the longest June days the robin strikes up about half-
+past three o'clock, and is quickly followed by the song sparrow, 
+the oriole, the catbird, the wren, the wood thrush, and all the 
+rest of the tuneful choir. Along the Potomac I have heard the 
+Virginia cardinal whistle so loudly and persistently in the tree-
+tops above, that sleeping after four o'clock was out of the 
+question. Just before the sun is up, there is a marked lull, during 
+which, I imagine, the birds are at breakfast. While building their 
+nest, it is very early in the morning that they put in their big 
+strokes; the back of their day's work is broken before you have 
+begun yours.
+
+A lady once asked me if there was any individuality among the 
+birds, or if those of the same kind were as near alike as two peas. 
+I was obliged to answer that to the eye those of the same species 
+were as near alike as two peas, but that in their songs there were 
+often marks of originality. Caged or domesticated birds develop 
+notes and traits of their own, and among the more familiar orchard 
+and garden birds one may notice the same tendency. I observe a 
+great variety of songs, and even qualities of voice, among the 
+orioles and among the song sparrows. On this trip my ear was 
+especially attracted to some striking and original sparrow songs. 
+At one point I was half afraid I had let pass an opportunity to 
+identify a new warbler, but finally concluded it was a song 
+sparrow. On another occasion I used to hear day after day a sparrow 
+that appeared to have some organic defect in its voice: part of its 
+song was scarcely above a whisper, as if the bird was suffering 
+from a very bad cold. I have heard a bobolink and a hermit thrush 
+with similar defects of voice. I have heard a robin with a part of 
+the whistle of the quail in his song. It was out of time and out of 
+tune, but the robin seemed insensible of the incongruity, and sang 
+as loudly and as joyously as any of his mates. A catbird will 
+sometimes show a special genius for mimicry, and I have known one 
+to suggest very plainly some notes of the bobolink.
+
+There are numerous long covered bridges spanning the Delaware, and 
+under some of these I saw the cliff swallow at home, the nests 
+being fastened to the under sides of the timbers,--as it were, 
+suspended from the ceiling instead of being planted upon the 
+shelving or perpendicular side, as is usual with them. To have laid 
+the foundation, indeed, to have sprung the vault downward and 
+finished it successfully, must have required special engineering 
+skill. I had never before seen or heard of these nests being so 
+placed. But birds are quick to adjust their needs to the exigencies 
+of any case. Not long before, I had seen in a deserted house, on 
+the head of the Rondout, the chimney swallows entering the chamber 
+through a stove-pipe hole in the roof, and gluing their nests to 
+the sides of the rafters, like the barn swallows.
+
+I was now, on the third day, well down in the wilds of Colchester, 
+with a current that made between two and three miles an hour,--just 
+a summer idler's pace. The atmosphere of the river had improved 
+much since the first day,--was, indeed, without taint,--and the 
+water was sweet and good. There were farmhouses at intervals of a 
+mile or so; but the amount of tillable land in the river valley or 
+on the adjacent mountains was very small. Occasionally there would 
+be forty or fifty acres of flat, usually in grass or corn, with a 
+thrifty-looking farmhouse. One could see how surely the land made 
+the house and its surrounding; good land bearing good buildings, 
+and poor land poor
+
+In mid-forenoon I reached the long placid eddy at Downsville, and 
+here again fell in with two boys. They were out paddling about in a 
+boat when I drew near, and they evidently regarded me in the light 
+of a rare prize which fortune had wafted them.
+
+"Ain't you glad we come, Benny?" I heard one of them observe to the 
+other, as they were conducting me to the best place to land. They 
+were bright, good boys, off the same piece as my acquaintances of 
+the day before, and about the same ages,-- differing only in being 
+village boys. With what curiosity they looked me over! Where had I 
+come from; where was I going; how long had I been on the way; who 
+built my boat; was I a carpenter, to build such a neat craft, etc.? 
+They never had seen such a traveler before. Had I had no mishaps? 
+And then they bethought them of the dangerous passes that awaited 
+me, and in good faith began to warn and advise me. They had heard 
+the tales of raftsmen, and had conceived a vivid idea of the perils 
+of the river below, gauging their notions of it from the spring and 
+fall freshets tossing about the heavy and cumbrous rafts. There was 
+a whirlpool, a rock eddy, and a binocle within a mile. I might be 
+caught in the binocle, or engulfed in the whirlpool, or smashed up 
+in the eddy. But I felt much reassured when they told me I had 
+already passed several whirlpools and rock eddies; but that 
+terrible binocle,--what was that? I had never heard of such a 
+monster. Oh, it was a still, miry place at the head of a big eddy. 
+The current might carry me up there, but I could easily get out 
+again; the rafts did. But there was another place I must beware of, 
+where two eddies faced each other; raftsmen were sometimes swept 
+off there by the oars and drowned. And when I came to rock eddy, 
+which I would know, because the river divided there (a part of the 
+water being afraid to risk the eddy, I suppose), I must go ashore 
+and survey the pass; but in any case it would be prudent to keep to 
+the left. I might stick on the rift, but that was nothing to being 
+wrecked upon those rocks. The boys were quite in earnest, and I 
+told them I would walk up to the village and post some letters to 
+my friends before I braved all these dangers. So they marched me up 
+the street, pointing out to their chums what they had found.
+
+"Going way to Phil--  What place is that near where the river goes 
+into the sea?"
+
+"Philadelphia?"
+
+"Yes; thinks he may go way there. Won't he have fun?"
+
+The boys escorted me about the town, then back to the river, and 
+got in their boat and came down to the bend, where they could see 
+me go through the whirlpool and pass the binocle (I am not sure 
+about the orthography of the word, but I suppose it means a double, 
+or a sort of mock eddy). I looked back as I shot over the rough 
+current beside a gentle vortex, and saw them watching me with great 
+interest. Rock eddy, also, was quite harmless, and I passed it 
+without any preliminary survey.
+
+I nooned at Sodom, and found good milk in a humble cottage. In the 
+afternoon I was amused by a great blue heron that kept flying up in 
+advance of me. Every mile or so, as I rounded some point, I would 
+come unexpectedly upon him, till finally he grew disgusted with my 
+silent pursuit, and took a long turn to the left up along the side 
+of the mountain, and passed back up the river, uttering a hoarse, 
+low note.
+
+The wind still boded rain, and about four o'clock, announced by 
+deep-toned thunder and portentous clouds, it began to charge down 
+the mountain-side in front of me.  I ran ashore, covered my traps, 
+and took my way up through an orchard to a quaint little farmhouse.  
+But there was not a soul about, outside or in, that I could find, 
+though the door was unfastened;  so I went into an open shed with 
+the hens, and lounged upon some straw, while the unloosed floods 
+came down.  It was better than boating or fishing. Indeed, there 
+are few summer pleasures to be placed before that of reclining at 
+ease directly under a sloping roof, after toil or travel in the  
+hot sun,  and  looking  out into the rain-drenched air and fields.  
+It is such a vital yet soothing spectacle.   We sympathize with the 
+earth.   We know how good a bath is, and the unspeakable 
+deliciousness of water to a parched tongue.    The office of the 
+sunshine is slow, subtle, occult, unsuspected;   but when the 
+clouds do their work, the benefaction is so palpable and copious, 
+so direct and wholesale, that all creatures take note of it, and 
+for the most part rejoice in it. It is a completion, a 
+consummation, a paying of a debt with a royal hand; the measure is 
+heaped and overflowing. It was the simple vapor of water that the 
+clouds borrowed of the earth; now they pay back more than water: 
+the drops are charged with electricity and with the gases of the 
+air, and have new solvent powers. Then, how the slate is sponged 
+off, and left all clean and new again!
+
+In the shed where I was sheltered were many relics and odds and 
+ends of the farm. In juxtaposition with two of the most stalwart 
+wagon or truck wheels I ever looked upon was a cradle of ancient 
+and peculiar make,--an aristocratic cradle, with high-turned posts 
+and an elaborately carved and moulded body, that was suspended upon 
+rods and swung from the top. How I should have liked to hear its 
+history and the story of the lives it had rocked, as the rain sang 
+and the boughs tossed without! Above it was the cradle of a phœbe-
+bird saddled upon a stick that ran behind the rafter; its occupants 
+had not flown, and its story was easy to read.
+
+Soon after the first shock of the storm was over, and before I 
+could see breaking sky, the birds tuned up with new ardor,--the 
+robin, the indigo-bird, the purple finch, the song sparrow, and in 
+the meadow below the bobolink. The cockerel near me followed suit, 
+and repeated his refrain till my meditations were so disturbed that 
+I was compelled to eject him from the cover, albeit he had the best 
+right there. But he crowed his defiance with drooping tail from the 
+yard in front.  I, too, had mentally crowed over the good fortune 
+of the shower; but before I closed my eyes that night my crest was 
+a good deal fallen, and I could have wished the friendly elements 
+had not squared their accounts quite so readily and uproariously.
+
+The one shower did not exhaust the supply a bit; Nature's hand was 
+full of trumps yet,--yea, and her sleeve too.   I stopped at a 
+trout brook, which came down out of the mountains on the right, and 
+took a few trout for my supper; but its current was too roily from 
+the shower for fly-fishing.   Another farmhouse attracted me, but 
+there was no one at home; so I picked a quart of strawberries in 
+the meadow in front, not minding the wet grass, and about six 
+o'clock, thinking another storm that had been threatening on my 
+right had miscarried, I pushed off, and went floating down into the 
+deepening gloom of the river valley.    The mountains, densely 
+wooded from base to summit, shut in the view on every hand.    They 
+cut in from the right and from the left, one ahead of the other, 
+matching like the teeth of an enormous trap; the river was caught 
+and bent, but not long detained, by them. Presently I saw the rain 
+creeping slowly over them in my rear, for the wind had changed; but 
+I apprehended nothing but a moderate sundown drizzle, such as we 
+often get from the tail end of a shower, and drew up in the eddy of 
+a big rock under an overhanging tree till it should have passed. 
+But it did not pass; it thickened and deepened, and reached a 
+steady pour by the time I had calculated the sun would be gilding 
+the mountain-tops. I had wrapped my rubber coat about my blankets 
+and groceries, and bared my back to the storm. In sullen silence I 
+saw the night settling down and the rain increasing; my roof-tree 
+gave way, and every leaf poured its accumulated drops upon me. 
+There were streams and splashes where before there had been little 
+more than a mist. I was getting well soaked and uncomplimentary in 
+my remarks on the weather. A saucy catbird, near by, flirted and 
+squealed very plainly, "There! there!  What did I tell you!  what 
+did I tell you!  Pretty pickle!  pretty pickle! pretty pickle to be 
+in!"  But I had been in worse pickles, though if the water had been 
+salt, my pickling had been pretty thorough. Seeing the wind was in 
+the northeast, and that the weather had fairly stolen a march on 
+me, I let go my hold of the tree, and paddled rapidly to the 
+opposite shore, which was low and pebbly, drew my boat up on a 
+little peninsula, turned her over upon a spot which I cleared of 
+its coarser stone, propped up one end with the seat, and crept 
+beneath.  I would now test the virtues of my craft as a roof, and I 
+found she was without flaw, though she was pretty narrow. The 
+tension of her timber was such that the rain upon her bottom made a 
+low, musical hum.
+
+Crouched on my blankets and boughs,--for I had gathered a good 
+supply of the latter before the rain overtook me,--and dry only 
+about my middle, I placidly took life as it came.   A great blue 
+heron flew by, and let off something like ironical horse laughter.  
+Before it became dark I proceeded to eat my supper,--my berries, 
+but not my trout.   What a fuss we make about the "hulls" upon 
+strawberries!  We are hypercritical; we may yet be glad to dine off 
+the hulls alone.    Some people see something to pick and carp at 
+in every good that comes to them; I was thankful that I had the 
+berries, and resolutely ignored their little scalloped ruffles, 
+which I found pleased the eye and did not disturb the palate.
+
+When bedtime arrived, I found undressing a little awkward, my berth 
+was so low; there was plenty of room in the aisle, and the other 
+passengers were nowhere to be seen, but I did not venture out.  It 
+rained nearly all night, but the train made good speed, and reached 
+the land of daybreak nearly on time. The water in the river had 
+crept up during the night to within a few inches of my boat, but I 
+rolled over and took another nap, all the same. Then I arose, had a 
+delicious bath in the sweet, swift-running current, and turned my 
+thoughts toward breakfast. The making of the coffee was the only 
+serious problem.  With everything soaked and a fine rain still 
+falling, how shall one build a fire?  I made my way to a little 
+island above in quest of driftwood.  Before I had found the wood I 
+chanced upon another patch of delicious wild strawberries, and took 
+an appetizer of them out of hand. Presently I picked up a yellow 
+birch stick the size of my arm. The wood was decayed, but the bark 
+was perfect. I broke it in two, punched out the rotten wood, and 
+had the bark intact. The fatty or resinous substance in this bark 
+preserves it, and makes it excellent kindling. With some seasoned 
+twigs and a scrap of paper I soon had a fire going that answered my 
+every purpose. More berries were picked while the coffee was 
+brewing, and the breakfast was a success.
+
+The camper-out often finds himself in what seems a distressing 
+predicament to people seated in their snug, well-ordered houses; 
+but there is often a real satisfaction when things come to their 
+worst,--a satisfaction in seeing what a small matter it is, after 
+all; that one is really neither sugar nor salt, to be afraid of the 
+wet; and that life is just as well worth living beneath a scow or a 
+dug-out as beneath the highest and broadest roof in Christendom.
+
+By ten o'clock it became necessary to move, on account of the rise 
+of the water, and as the rain had abated, I picked up and continued 
+my journey. Before long, however, the rain increased again, and I 
+took refuge in a barn. The snug, tree-embowered farmhouse looked 
+very inviting, just across the road from the barn; but as no one 
+was about, and no faces appeared at the window that I might judge 
+of the inmates, I contented myself with the hospitality the barn 
+offered, filling my pockets with some dry birch shavings I found 
+there where the farmer had made an ox-yoke, against the needs of 
+the next kindling.
+
+After an hour's detention I was off again.  I stopped at Baxter's 
+Brook, which flows hard by the classic hamlet of Harvard, and tried 
+for trout, but with poor success, as I did not think it worth while 
+to go far upstream.
+
+At several points I saw rafts of hemlock lumber tied to the shore, 
+ready to take advantage of the first freshet. Rafting is an 
+important industry for a hundred miles or more along the Delaware. 
+The lumbermen sometimes take their families or friends, and have a 
+jollification all the way to Trenton or to Philadelphia.  In some 
+places the speed is very great, almost equaling that of an express 
+train. The passage of such places as Cochecton Falls and "Foul 
+Rift" is attended with no little danger. The raft is guided by two 
+immense oars, one before and one behind. I frequently saw these 
+huge implements in the driftwood alongshore, suggesting some 
+colossal race of men.  The raftsmen have names of their own.  From 
+the upper Delaware, where I had set in, small rafts are run down 
+which they call "colts."  They come frisking down at a lively pace.  
+At Hancock they usually couple two rafts together, when I suppose 
+they have a span of colts; or do two colts make one horse?  Some 
+parts of the framework of the raft they call "grubs;" much depends 
+upon these grubs. The lumbermen were and are a hardy, virile race. 
+The Hon. Charles Knapp, of Deposit, now eighty-three years of age, 
+but with the look and step of a man of sixty, told me he had stood 
+nearly all one December day in the water to his waist, 
+reconstructing his raft, which had gone to pieces on the head of an 
+island. Mr. Knapp had passed the first half of his life in 
+Colchester and Hancock, and, although no sportsman, had once taken 
+part in a great bear hunt there. The bear was an enormous one, and 
+was hard pressed by a gang of men and dogs.   Their muskets and 
+assaults upon the beast with clubs had made no impression.  Mr. 
+Knapp saw where the bear was coming, and he thought he would show 
+them how easy it was to dispatch a bear with a club, if you only 
+knew where to strike.   He had seen how quickly the largest hog 
+would wilt beneath a slight blow across the "small of the back."   
+So, armed with an immense handspike, he took up a position by a 
+large rock that the bear must pass. On she came, panting and nearly 
+exhausted, and at the right moment down came the club with great 
+force upon the small of her back. "If a fly had alighted upon her," 
+said Mr. Knapp, "I think she would have paid just as much attention 
+to it as she did to me."
+
+Early in the afternoon I encountered another boy, Henry Ingersoll, 
+who was so surprised by my sudden and unwonted appearance that he 
+did not know east from west.  "Which way is west?"  I inquired, to 
+see if my own head was straight on the subject.
+
+"That way," he said, indicating east within a few degrees.
+
+"You are wrong," I replied. "Where does the sun rise?"
+
+"There," he said, pointing almost in the direction he had pointed 
+before.
+
+"But does not the sun rise in the east here as well as elsewhere?" 
+I rejoined.
+
+"Well, they call that west, anyhow."
+
+But Henry's needle was subjected to a disturbing influence just 
+then. His house was near the river, and he was its sole guardian 
+and keeper for the time; his father had gone up to the next 
+neighbor's (it was Sunday), and his sister had gone with the 
+schoolmistress down the road to get black birch. He came out in the 
+road, with wide eyes, to view me as I passed, when I drew rein, and 
+demanded the points of the compass, as above. Then I shook my sooty 
+pail at him and asked for milk.  Yes, I could have some milk, but I 
+would have to wait till his sister came back; after he had 
+recovered a little, he concluded he could get it.  He came for my 
+pail, and then his boyish curiosity appeared.  My story  interested 
+him  immensely.     He  had  seen twelve summers, but he had been 
+only four miles from home up and down the river : he had been down 
+to the East Branch, and he had been up to Trout Brook.   He took a 
+pecuniary interest in me. What did my pole cost?    What my rubber 
+coat, and what my revolver?  The latter he must take in his hand; 
+he had never seen such a thing to shoot with before in HIS life, 
+etc.  He thought I might make the trip cheaper and easier by stage 
+and by the cars.  He went to school: there were six scholars in 
+summer, one or two more in winter.   The population is not crowded 
+in the town of Hancock, certainly, and never will be.  The people 
+live close to the bone, as Thoreau would say, or rather close to 
+the stump.  Many years ago the young men there resolved upon having 
+a ball.   They concluded not to go to a hotel, on account of the 
+expense, and so chose a private house.  There was a man in the 
+neighborhood who could play the fife; he offered to furnish the 
+music for seventy-five cents.  But this was deemed too much, so one 
+of the party agreed to whistle.  History does not tell how many 
+beaux there were bent upon this reckless enterprise, but there were 
+three girls. For refreshments they bought a couple of gallons of 
+whiskey and a few pounds of sugar. When the spree was over, and the 
+expenses were reckoned up, there was a shilling--a York shilling--
+apiece to pay. Some of the revelers were dissatisfied with this 
+charge, and intimated that the managers had not counted themselves 
+in, but taxed the whole expense upon the rest of the party.
+
+As I moved on, I saw Henry's sister and the schoolmistress picking 
+their way along the muddy road near the river's bank.  One of them 
+saw me, and, dropping her skirts, said to the other (I could read 
+the motions), "See that man!"  The other lowered her flounces, and 
+looked up and down the road, then glanced over into the field, and 
+lastly out upon the river.  They paused and had a good look at me, 
+though I could see that their impulse to run away, like that of a 
+frightened deer, was strong.
+
+At the East Branch the Big Beaver Kill joins the Delaware, almost 
+doubling its volume. Here I struck the railroad, the forlorn 
+Midland, and here another set of men and manners cropped out,--what 
+may be called the railroad conglomerate overlying this mountain 
+freestone.
+
+"Where did you steal that boat?" and "What you running away for?" 
+greeted me from a handcar that went by.
+
+I paused for some time and watched the fish hawks, or ospreys, of 
+which there were nearly a dozen sailing about above the junction of 
+the two streams, squealing and diving, and occasionally striking a 
+fish on the rifts.  I am convinced that the fish hawk sometimes 
+feeds on the wing.  I saw him do it on this and on another 
+occasion. He raises himself by a peculiar motion, and brings his 
+head and his talons together, and apparently takes a bite of a 
+fish. While doing this his flight presents a sharply undulating 
+line; at the crest of each rise the morsel is taken.
+
+In a long, deep eddy under the west shore I came upon a brood of 
+wild ducks, the hooded merganser. The young were about half grown, 
+but of course entirely destitute of plumage.    They started off at 
+great speed, kicking the water into foam behind them, the mother 
+duck keeping upon their flank and rear.  Near the outlet of the 
+pool I saw them go  ashore, and  I  expected they would conceal 
+themselves in the woods; but as I drew near the place they came 
+out, and I saw by their motions they were going to make a rush by 
+me upstream.  At a signal from the old one, on they came, and 
+passed within a few feet of me.  It was almost incredible, the 
+speed they made.  Their pink feet were like swiftly revolving 
+wheels  placed a little to the rear; their breasts just skimmed the 
+surface, and the water was beaten into spray behind them.  They had  
+no   need  of wings; even  the mother bird did not use hers; a 
+steamboat could hardly have kept up with them.  I dropped my paddle 
+and cheered. They kept the race up for a long distance, and I saw 
+them making a fresh spirt as I entered upon the rift and dropped 
+quickly out of sight.  I next disturbed an eagle in his meditations 
+upon a dead treetop, and a cat sprang out of some weeds near the 
+foot of the tree. Was he watching for puss, while she was watching 
+for some smaller prey?
+
+I passed Partridge Island--which is or used to be the name of a 
+post-office--unwittingly, and encamped for the night on an island 
+near Hawk's Point. I slept in my boat on the beach, and in the 
+morning my locks were literally wet with the dews of the night, and 
+my blankets too; so I waited for the sun to dry them. As I was 
+gathering driftwood for a fire, a voice came over from the shadows 
+of the east shore: "Seems to me you lay abed pretty late!"
+
+"I call this early," I rejoined, glancing at the sun.
+
+"Wall, it may be airly in the forenoon, but it ain't very airly in 
+the mornin';" a distinction I was forced to admit. Before I had 
+reëmbarked some cows came down to the shore, and I watched them 
+ford the river to the island. They did it with great ease and 
+precision. I was told they will sometimes, during high water, swim 
+over to the islands, striking in well upstream, and swimming 
+diagonally across.  At one point some cattle had crossed the river, 
+and evidently got into mischief, for a large dog rushed them down 
+the bank into the current, and worried them all the way over, part 
+of the time swimming and part of the time leaping very high, as a 
+dog will in deep snow, coming down with a great splash. The cattle 
+were shrouded with spray as they ran, and altogether it was a novel 
+picture.
+
+My voyage ended that forenoon at Hancock, and was crowned by a few 
+idyllic days with some friends in their cottage in the woods by 
+Lake Oquaga, a body of crystal water on the hills near Deposit, and 
+a haven as peaceful and perfect as voyager ever came to port in.
+
+
+
+II
+
+SPRINGS
+
+      "I'll show thee the best springs." 
+                                            --TEMPEST.
+
+A MAN who came back to the place of his birth in the East, after an 
+absence of a quarter of a century in the West, said the one thing 
+he most desired to see about the old homestead was the spring. 
+This, at least, he would find unchanged. Here his lost youth would 
+come back to him. The faces of his father and mother he might not 
+look upon; but the face of the spring, that had mirrored theirs and 
+his own so oft, he fondly imagined would beam on him as of old. I 
+can well believe that, in that all but springless country in which 
+he had cast his lot, the vision, the remembrance, of the fountain 
+that flowed by his father's doorway, so prodigal of its precious 
+gifts, had awakened in him the keenest longings and regrets.
+
+Did he not remember the path, also? for next to the spring itself 
+is the path that leads to it.  Indeed, of all foot-paths, the 
+spring-path is the most suggestive.
+
+This is a path with something at the end of it, and the best of 
+good fortune awaits him who walks therein.  It is a well-worn path, 
+and, though generally up or down a hill, it is the easiest of all 
+paths to travel: we forget our fatigue when going to the spring, 
+and we have lost it when we turn to come away.  See with what 
+alacrity the laborer hastens along it, all sweaty from the fields; 
+see the boy or girl running with pitcher or pail; see the welcome 
+shade of the spreading tree that presides over its marvelous birth!
+
+In the woods or on the mountain-side, follow the path and you are 
+pretty sure to find a spring; all creatures are going that way 
+night and day, and they make a path.
+
+A spring is always a vital point in the landscape; it is indeed the 
+eye of the fields, and how often, too, it has a noble eyebrow in 
+the shape of an overhanging bank or ledge!  Or else its site is 
+marked by some tree which the pioneer has wisely left standing, and 
+which sheds a coolness and freshness that make the water more 
+sweet. In the shade of this tree the harvesters sit and eat their 
+lunch, and look out upon the quivering air of the fields. Here the 
+Sunday saunterer stops and lounges with his book, and bathes his 
+hands and face in the cool fountain. Hither the strawberry-girl 
+comes with her basket and pauses a moment in the green shade.  The 
+plowman leaves his plow, and in long strides approaches the life-
+renewing spot, while his team, that cannot follow, look wistfully 
+after him. Here the cattle love to pass the heat of the day, and 
+hither come the birds to wash themselves and make their toilets.
+
+Indeed, a spring is always an oasis in the desert of the fields.  
+It is a creative and generative centre.  It attracts all things to 
+itself,--the grasses, the mosses, the flowers, the wild plants, the 
+great trees.  The walker finds it out, the camping party seek it, 
+the pioneer builds his hut or his house near it.  When the settler 
+or squatter has found a good spring, he has found a good place to 
+begin life; he has found the fountain-head of much that he is 
+seeking in this world.  The chances are that he has found a 
+southern and eastern exposure, for it is a fact that water does not 
+readily flow north; the valleys mostly open the other way; and it 
+is quite certain he has found a measure of salubrity, for where 
+water flows fever abideth not. The spring, too, keeps him to the 
+right belt, out of the low valley, and off the top of the hill.
+
+When John Winthrop decided upon the site where now stands the city 
+of Boston, as a proper place for a settlement, he was chiefly 
+attracted by a large and excellent spring of water that flowed 
+there.  The infant city was born of this fountain.
+
+There seems a kind of perpetual springtime about the place where 
+water issues from the ground,--a freshness and a greenness that are 
+ever renewed.  The grass never fades, the ground is never parched 
+or frozen. There is warmth there in winter and coolness in summer.  
+The temperature is equalized.  In March or April the spring runs 
+are a bright emerald while the surrounding fields are yet brown and 
+sere, and in fall they are yet green when the first snow covers 
+them.  Thus every fountain by the roadside is a fountain of youth 
+and of life.  This is what the old fables finally mean.
+
+An intermittent spring is shallow; it has no deep root, and is like 
+an inconstant friend.  But a perennial spring, one whose ways are 
+appointed, whose foundation is established, what a profound and 
+beautiful symbol!  In fact, there is no more large and universal 
+symbol in nature than the spring, if there is any other capable of 
+such wide and various applications.
+
+What preparation seems to have been made for it in the conformation 
+of the ground, even in the deep underlying geological strata!  Vast 
+rocks and ledges are piled for it, or cleft asunder that it may 
+find a way.  Sometimes it is a trickling thread of silver down the 
+sides of a seamed and scarred precipice.  Then again the stratified 
+rock is like a just-lifted lid, from beneath which the water 
+issues.  Or it slips noiselessly out of a deep dimple in the 
+fields.  Occasionally it bubbles up in the valley, as if forced up 
+by the surrounding hills.  Many springs, no doubt, find an outlet 
+in the beds of the large rivers and lakes, and are unknown to all 
+but the fishes.  They probably find them out and make much of them.  
+The trout certainly do.   Find a place in the creek where a spring 
+issues, or where it flows into it from a near bank, and you have 
+found a most likely place for trout.  They deposit their spawn 
+there in the fall, warm their noses there in winter, and cool 
+themselves there in summer.   I have seen the patriarchs of the 
+tribe of an old and much-fished stream, seven or eight enormous 
+fellows, congregated in such a place.  The boys found it out, and 
+went with a bag and bagged them all.  In another place a trio of 
+large trout, that knew and despised all the arts of the fishermen, 
+took up their abode in a deep, dark hole in the edge of the wood, 
+that had a spring flowing into a shallow part of it.   In midsummer 
+they were wont to come out from their safe retreat and bask in the 
+spring, their immense bodies but a few inches under water.   A 
+youth, who had many times vainly sounded their dark hiding-place 
+with his hook, happening to come along with his rifle one day, shot 
+the three, one after another, killing them by the concussion of the 
+bullet on the water immediately over them.
+
+The ocean itself is known to possess springs, copious ones, in many 
+places the fresh water rising up through the heavier salt as 
+through a rock, and affording supplies to vessels at the surface. 
+Off the coast of Florida many of these submarine springs have been 
+discovered, the outlet, probably, of the streams and rivers that 
+disappear in the "sinks" of that State.
+
+It is a pleasant conception, that of the unscientific folk, that 
+the springs are fed directly by the sea, or that the earth is full 
+of veins or arteries that connect with the great reservoir of 
+waters.  But when science turns the conception over and makes the 
+connection in the air,--disclosing the great water-main in the 
+clouds, and that the mighty engine of the hydraulic system of 
+nature is the sun,--the fact becomes even more poetical, does it 
+not?  This is one of the many cases where science, instead of 
+curtailing the imagination, makes new and large demands upon it.
+
+The hills are great sponges that do not and cannot hold the water 
+that is precipitated upon them, but let it filter through at the 
+bottom. This is the way the sea has robbed the earth of its various 
+salts, its potash, its lime, its magnesia, and many other mineral 
+elements.  It is found that the oldest upheavals, those sections of 
+the country that have been longest exposed to the leeching and 
+washing of the rains, are poorest in those substances that go to 
+the making of the osseous framework of man and of the animals.  
+Wheat does not grow well there, and the men born and reared there 
+are apt to have brittle bones.  An important part of those men went 
+downstream ages before they were born.  The water of such sections 
+is now soft and free from mineral substances, but not more 
+wholesome on that account.
+
+The gigantic springs of the country that have not been caught in 
+any of the great natural basins are mostly confined to the 
+limestone region of the Middle and Southern States,--the valley of 
+Virginia and its continuation and deflections into Kentucky, 
+Tennessee, northern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.  Through this 
+belt are found the great caves and the subterranean rivers.  The 
+waters have here worked like enormous moles, and have honeycombed 
+the foundations of the earth.  They have  great  highways  beneath 
+the  hills.  Water charged with carbonic acid gas has a very sharp 
+tooth and a powerful digestion, and no limestone rock can long 
+resist it.   Sherman's soldiers tell of a monster spring in 
+northern Alabama,--a river leaping full-grown from the bosom of the 
+earth; and of another at the bottom of a large, deep pit in the 
+rocks, that continues its way under ground.
+
+There are many springs in Florida of this character, large 
+underground streams that have breathing-holes, as  it were, here  
+and  there.  In  some places the water rises and fills the bottoms 
+of deep bowl-shaped depressions; in other localities it is reached 
+through round natural well-holes; a bucket is let down by a rope, 
+and if it becomes detached is quickly swept away by the current.  
+Some  of the Florida springs are perhaps the largest in the world, 
+affording room and depth enough for steamboats to move and turn in 
+them.  Green Cove Spring is said to be like a waterfall reversed; a 
+cataract rushing upward through a transparent liquid instead of 
+leaping downward through the air.  There are one or two of these 
+enormous springs also in northern Mississippi,--springs so large 
+that it seems as if the whole continent must nurse them.
+
+The Valley of the Shenandoah is remarkable for its large springs.  
+The town of Winchester, a town of several thousand inhabitants, is 
+abundantly supplied with water from a single spring that issues on 
+higher ground near by.    Several other springs in the vicinity 
+afford rare mill-power.    At Harrisonburg, a county town farther 
+up the valley, I was attracted by a low ornamental dome resting 
+upon a circle of columns, on the edge of the square that contained 
+the court-house, and was surprised to find that it gave shelter to 
+an immense spring.  This spring was also capable of watering the 
+town or several towns; stone  steps led  down to it at the bottom 
+of a large stone basin.   There was a pretty constant string of 
+pails to and from it.    Aristotle called certain springs of his 
+country "cements of society," because the young people so 
+frequently met there and sang and conversed; and I have little 
+doubt this spring is of like social importance.  There is a famous 
+spring at San Antonio, Texas, which is described by that excellent 
+traveler, Frederick Law Olmsted.  "The whole river," he says, 
+"gushes up in one sparkling burst from the earth, with all the 
+accessories of smaller springs,--moss, pebbles, foliage, seclusion, 
+etc. Its effect is overpowering. It is beyond your possible 
+conception of a spring."
+
+Of like copiousness and splendor is the Caledonia spring, or 
+springs, in western New York. They give birth to a white-pebbled, 
+transparent stream, several rods wide and two or three feet deep, 
+that flows eighty barrels of water per second, and is alive with 
+trout. The trout are fat and gamy even in winter.
+
+The largest spring in England, called the Well of St. Winifred, at 
+Holywell, flows less than three barrels per second.   I recently 
+went many miles out of my way to see the famous trout spring in 
+Warren County, New Jersey.  This spring flows about one thousand 
+gallons of water per minute, which has a uniform temperature of 
+fifty degrees winter and summer.  It is near the Musconetcong 
+Creek, which looks as if it were made up of similar springs.   On 
+the parched and sultry summer day upon which my visit fell, it was 
+well worth walking many miles just to see such a volume of water 
+issue from the ground.  I felt with the boy Petrarch, when he first 
+beheld a famous spring, that "were I master of such a fountain I 
+would prefer it to the finest of cities."   A large oak leans down 
+over the spring and affords an abundance of shade. The water does 
+not bubble up, but comes straight out with great speed, like a 
+courier with important news, and as if its course underground had 
+been a direct and an easy one for a long distance.  Springs that 
+issue in this way have a sort of vertebra, a ridgy and spine-like 
+centre that suggests the gripe and push there is in this element.
+
+What would one not give for such a spring in his back yard, or 
+front yard, or anywhere near his house, or in any of his fields? 
+One would be tempted to move his house to it, if the spring could 
+not be brought to the house. Its mere poetic value and suggestion 
+would be worth all the art and ornament to be had.  It would 
+irrigate one's heart and character as well as his acres.  Then one 
+might have a Naiad Queen to do his churning and to saw his wood; 
+then one might "see his chore done by the gods themselves," as 
+Emerson says, or by the nymphs, which is just as well.
+
+I know a homestead, situated on one of the picturesque branch 
+valleys of the Housatonic, that has such a spring flowing by the 
+foundation walls of the house, and not a little of the strong 
+overmastering local attachment that holds the owner there is born 
+of that, his native spring.  He could not, if he would, break from 
+it.  He says that when he looks down into it he has a feeling that 
+he is an amphibious animal that has somehow got stranded.  A long, 
+gentle flight of stone steps leads from the back porch down to it 
+under the branches of a lofty elm.  It wells up through the white 
+sand and gravel as through a sieve, and fills the broad space that 
+has been arranged for it so gently and imperceptibly that one does 
+not suspect its copiousness until he has seen the overflow.  It 
+turns no wheel, yet it lends a pliant hand to many of the affairs 
+of that household. It is a refrigerator in summer and a frost-proof 
+envelope in winter, and a fountain of delights the year round. 
+Trout come up from the Weebutook River and dwell there and become 
+domesticated, and take lumps of butter from your hand, or rake the 
+ends of your fingers if you tempt them.  It is a kind of sparkling 
+and ever-washed larder.  Where are the berries? where is the 
+butter, the milk, the steak, the melon?  In the spring.  It 
+preserves, it ventilates, it cleanses.  It is a board of health and 
+a general purveyor.  It is equally for use and for pleasure.  
+Nothing degrades it, and nothing can enhance its beauty.  It is 
+picture and parable, and an instrument of music.  It is servant and 
+divinity in one.  The milk of forty cows is cooled in it, and never 
+a drop gets into the cans, though they are plunged to the brim. It 
+is as insensible to drought and rain as to heat and cold.  It is 
+planted upon the sand, and yet it abideth like a house upon a rock. 
+It evidently has some relation to a little brook that flows down 
+through a deep notch in the hills half a mile distant, because on 
+one occasion, when the brook was being ditched or dammed, the 
+spring showed great perturbation.  Every nymph in it was filled 
+with sudden alarm and kicked up a commotion.
+
+In some sections of the country, when there is no spring near the 
+house, the farmer, with much labor and pains, brings one from some 
+uplying field or wood.  Pine and poplar logs are bored and laid in 
+a trench, and the spring practically moved to the desired spot. The 
+ancient Persians had a law that whoever thus conveyed the water of 
+a spring to a spot not watered before should enjoy many immunities 
+under the state, not granted to others.
+
+Hilly and mountainous countries do not always abound in good 
+springs.  When the stratum is vertical, or has too great a dip, the 
+water is not collected in large veins, but is rather held as it 
+falls, and oozes out slowly at the surface over the top of the 
+rock.  On this account one of the most famous grass and dairy 
+sections of New York is poorly supplied with springs.  Every creek 
+starts in a bog or marsh, and good water can be had only by 
+excavating.
+
+What a charm lurks about those springs that are found near the tops 
+of mountains, so small that they get lost amid the rocks and debris 
+and never reach the valley, and so cold that they make the throat 
+ache!  Every hunter and mountain-climber can tell you of such, 
+usually on the last rise before the summit is cleared.  It is 
+eminently the hunter's spring.  I do not know whether or not the 
+foxes and other wild creatures lap at it, but their pursuers are 
+quite apt to pause there to take breath or to eat their lunch.  The 
+mountain-climbers in summer hail it with a shout.  It is always a 
+surprise, and raises the spirits of the dullest. Then it seems to 
+be born of wildness and remoteness, and to savor of some special 
+benefit or good fortune.  A spring in the valley is an idyl, but a 
+spring on the mountain is a genuine lyrical touch.  It imparts a 
+mild thrill; and if one were to call any springs "miracles," as the 
+natives of Cashmere are said to regard their fountains, it would be 
+such as these.
+
+What secret attraction draws one in his summer walk to touch at all 
+the springs on his route, and to pause a moment at each, as if what 
+he was in quest of would be likely to turn up there?  I can seldom 
+pass a spring without doing homage to it.  It is the shrine at 
+which I oftenest worship.  If I find one fouled with leaves or 
+trodden full by cattle, I take as much pleasure in cleaning it out 
+as a devotee in setting up the broken image of his saint.  Though I 
+chance not to want to drink there, I like to behold a clear 
+fountain, and I may want to drink next time I pass, or some 
+traveler, or heifer, or milch cow may.  Leaves have a strange 
+fatality for the spring. They come from afar to get into it.  In a 
+grove or in the woods they drift into it and cover it up like snow.  
+Late in November, in clearing one out, I brought forth a frog from 
+his hibernacle in the leaves at the bottom. He was very black, and 
+he rushed about in a bewildered manner like one suddenly aroused 
+from his sleep.
+
+There is no place more suitable for statuary than about a spring or 
+fountain, especially in parks or improved fields.  Here one seems 
+to expect to see figures and bending forms.  "Where a spring rises 
+or a river flows," says Seneca, "there should we build altars and 
+offer sacrifices."
+
+I have spoken of the hunter's spring. The traveler's spring is a 
+little cup or saucer shaped fountain set in the bank by the 
+roadside.  The harvester's spring is beneath a widespreading tree 
+in the fields.  The lover's spring is down a lane under a hill.  
+There is a good screen of rocks and bushes.  The hermit's spring is 
+on the margin of a lake in the woods.  The fisherman's spring is by 
+the river.  The miner finds his spring in the bowels of the 
+mountain.  The soldier's spring is wherever he can fill his 
+canteen.  The spring where schoolboys go to fill the pail is a long 
+way up or down a hill, and has just been roiled by a frog or 
+muskrat, and the boys have to wait till it settles.  There is yet 
+the milkman's spring that never dries, the water of which is milky 
+and opaque.  Sometimes it flows out of a chalk cliff.  This last is 
+a hard spring: all the others are soft.
+
+There is another side to this subject,-- the marvelous, not to say 
+the miraculous; and if I were to advert to all the curious or 
+infernal springs that are described by travelers or others,--the 
+sulphur springs, the mud springs, the sour springs, the soap 
+springs, the soda springs, the blowing springs, the spouting 
+springs, the boiling springs not one mile from Tophet, the springs 
+that rise and fall with the tide; the spring spoken of by 
+Vitruvius, that gave unwonted loudness to the voice; the spring 
+that Plutarch tells about, that had something of the flavor of 
+wine, because it was supposed that Bacchus had been washed in it 
+immediately after his birth; the spring that Herodotus describes,--
+wise man and credulous boy that he was,--called the "Fountain of 
+the Sun," which was warm at dawn, cold at noon, and hot at 
+midnight; the springs at San Filippo, Italy, that have built up a 
+calcareous wall over a mile long and several hundred feet thick; 
+the renowned springs of Cashmere, that are believed by the people 
+to be the source of the comeliness of their women,--if I were to 
+follow up my subject in this direction, I say, it would lead me 
+into deeper and more troubled waters than I am in quest of at 
+present.
+
+Pliny, in a letter to one of his friends, gives the following 
+account of a spring that flowed near his Laurentine villa:--
+
+"There is a spring which rises in a neighboring mountain, and 
+running among the rocks is received into a little banqueting-room, 
+artificially formed for that purpose, from whence, after being 
+detained a short time, it falls into the Larian Lake.  The nature 
+of this spring is extremely curious: it ebbs and flows regularly 
+three times a day. The increase and decrease are plainly visible, 
+and exceedingly interesting to observe.  You sit down by the side 
+of the fountain, and while you are taking a repast and drinking its 
+water, which is exceedingly cool, you see it gradually rise and 
+fall.  If you place a ring or anything else at the bottom when it 
+is dry, the water creeps gradually up, first gently washing, 
+finally covering it entirely, and then, little by little, subsides 
+again.  If you wait long enough, you may see it thus alternately 
+advance and recede three successive times."
+
+Pliny suggests four or five explanations of this phenomenon, but is 
+probably wide of the mark in all but the fourth one:--
+
+"Or is there rather a certain reservoir that contains these waters 
+in the bowels of the earth, and, while it is recruiting its 
+discharges, the stream in consequence flows more slowly and in less 
+quantity, but, when it has collected its due measure, runs on again 
+in its usual strength and fullness."
+
+There are several of these intermitting springs in different parts 
+of the world, and they are perhaps all to be explained on the 
+principle of the siphon.
+
+In the Idyls of Theocritus there are frequent allusions to springs. 
+It was at a spring--and a mountain spring at that--that Castor and 
+Pollux encountered the plug-ugly Amycus:--
+
+"And spying on a mountain a wild wood of vast size, they found 
+under a smooth cliff an ever-flowing spring, filled with pure 
+water, and the pebbles beneath seemed like crystal or silver from 
+the depths; and near there had grown tall pines, and poplars, and 
+plane-trees, and cypresses with leafy tops, and fragrant flowers, 
+pleasant work for hairy bees," etc.
+
+Or the story of Hylas, the auburn-haired boy, who went to the 
+spring to fetch water for supper for Hercules and stanch Telamon, 
+and was seized by the enamored nymphs and drawn in. The spring was 
+evidently a marsh or meadow spring: it was in a "low-lying spot, 
+and around it grew many rushes, and the pale blue swallow-wort, and 
+green maidenhair, and blooming parsley, and couch grass stretching 
+through the marshes."  As Hercules was tramping through the bog, 
+club in hand, and shouting "Hylas!" to the full depth of his 
+throat, he heard a thin voice come from the water,--it was Hylas 
+responding, and Hylas, in the shape of the little frog, has been 
+calling from our marsh springs ever since.
+
+The characteristic flavor and suggestion of these Idyls is like 
+pure spring-water.  This is, perhaps, why the modern reader is apt 
+to be disappointed in them when he takes them up for the first 
+time.  They appear minor and literal and tasteless, as does most 
+ancient poetry; but it is mainly because we have got to the 
+fountain-head; and have come in contact with a mind that has been 
+but little shaped by artificial indoor influences.  The stream of 
+literature is now much fuller and broader than it was in ancient 
+times, with currents and counter-currents, and diverse and curious 
+phases; but the primitive sources seem far behind us, and for the 
+refreshment of simple spring-water in art we must still go back to 
+Greek poetry.
+
+
+
+III
+
+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 bumblebee," 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 time 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 honey-
+bee'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, etc.  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 farmhouse 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 
+knothole 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 knothole. 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 woodcraft.  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 besides 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 swarms of wild bees. What a gleeful uproar the robins, 
+cedar-birds, high-holes, and cow blackbirds 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 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 of every quill 
+in his great wings vibrated in his strong, level flight.  I watched 
+him as long as my eye could hold him.  When he was fairly clear of 
+the mountain, he began that sweeping spiral movement in which he 
+climbs the sky.  Up and up he went, without once breaking his 
+majestic poise, till he appeared to sight some far-off alien 
+geography, when he bent his course thitherward and gradually 
+vanished in the blue depths. The eagle is a bird of large ideas; he 
+embraces long distances; the continent is his home. I never look 
+upon one without emotion; I follow him with my eye as long as I 
+can. I think of Canada, of the Great Lakes, of the Rocky Mountains, 
+of the wild and sounding seacoast.  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, 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 curious 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 bumblebee 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 golden-rod, and it 
+requires but little manœuvring 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 above 
+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 off toward a farmhouse 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 can 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 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, maybe 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 honeycomb 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 
+upstairs 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 farmhouses 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 into 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 in 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 but 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 sulphur 
+or with tobacco smoke. But this course is impracticable on the 
+present occasion, so we boldly and ruthlessly assault the tree with 
+an axe 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 
+axe, 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.  While 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 halfway 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 axe, 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 axe, 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 corn-field 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, fleabane, and 
+goldenrod.  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 treetops 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 axe.  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 still 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 antennæ, 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 
+plies 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 thinking 
+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 south-
+southwest.  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 bumblebees, wasps, hornets, 
+flies, ants.  The bumblebees, 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 honeybee. 
+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-bees 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 gullies, 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 axe 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 axe-mark down.  
+This space the bees had completely filled with honey.  With an axe 
+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 axe 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 pailful of it out of 
+the woods, it seemed still more like ore.
+
+Your native bee-hunter predicates the distance of the tree by the 
+time the bee occupies in making its first trip.  But this is no 
+certain guide. You are always safe in calculating that the tree is 
+inside of a mile, and you need not as a rule look for your bee's 
+return under ten minutes.  One day I picked up a bee in an opening 
+in the woods and gave it honey, and it made three trips to my box 
+with an interval of about twelve minutes between them; it returned 
+alone each time; the tree, which I afterward found, was about half 
+a mile distant.
+
+In lining bees through the woods, the tactics of the hunter are to 
+pause every twenty or thirty rods, lop away the branches or cut 
+down the trees, and set the bees to work again.  If they still go 
+forward, he goes forward also, and repeats his observations till 
+the tree is found, or till the bees turn and come back upon the 
+trail.  Then he knows he has passed the tree, and he retraces his 
+steps to a convenient distance and tries again, and thus quickly 
+reduces the space to be looked over till the swarm is traced home.  
+On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where the surface alternated 
+between deep gulfs and chasms filled with thick, heavy growths of 
+timber, and sharp, precipitous, rocky ridges like a tempest-tossed 
+sea, I carried my bees directly under their tree, and set them to 
+work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not thirty feet distant. 
+One would have expected them under such circumstances to have gone 
+straight home, as there were but few branches intervening, but they 
+did not; they labored up through the trees and attained an altitude 
+above the woods as if they had miles to travel, and thus baffled me 
+for hours.  Bees will always do this.  They are acquainted with the 
+woods only from the top side, and from the air above; they 
+recognize home only by landmarks 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 mark 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 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 the hive.  The only difference is, that wild honey is 
+flavored with your adventure, which makes it a little more 
+delectable than the domestic article.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+NATURE AND THE POETS
+
+I HAVE said on a former occasion that "the true poet knows more 
+about Nature than the naturalist, because he carries her open 
+secrets in his heart. Eckermann could instruct Goethe in 
+ornithology, but could not Goethe instruct Eckermann in the meaning 
+and mystery of the bird?"  But the poets sometimes rely too 
+confidently upon their supposed intuitive knowledge of nature, and 
+grow careless about the accuracy of the details of their pictures.  
+I am not aware that this was ever the case with Goethe; I think it 
+was not, for as a rule, the greater the poet, the more correct and 
+truthful will be his specifications.  It is the lesser poets who 
+trip most over their facts.  Thus a New England poet speaks of 
+"plucking the apple from the pine," as if the pineapple grew upon 
+the pine-tree.  A Western poet sings of the bluebird in a strain in 
+which every feature and characteristic of the bird is lost; not one 
+trait of the bird is faithfully set down.  When the robin and the 
+swallow come, he says, the bluebird hies him to some mossy old 
+wood, where, amid the deep seclusion, he pours out his song. 
+
+In a poem by a well-known author in one of the popular journals, a 
+hummingbird's nest is shown the reader, and it has BLUE eggs in it.  
+A more cautious poet would have turned to Audubon or Wilson before 
+venturing upon such a statement.  But then it was necessary to have 
+a word to rhyme with "view," and what could be easier than to make 
+a white egg "blue"?  Again, one of our later poets has evidently 
+confounded the hummingbird with that curious parody upon it, the 
+hawk or sphinx moth, as in his poem upon the subject he has hit off 
+exactly the habits of the moth, or, rather, his creature seems a 
+cross between the moth and the bird, as it has the habits of the 
+one and the plumage of the other.  The time to see the hummingbird, 
+he says, is after sunset in the summer gloaming; then it steals 
+forth and hovers over the flowers.  Now, the hummingbird is 
+eminently a creature of the sun and of the broad open day, and I 
+have never seen it after sundown, while the moth is rarely seen 
+except at twilight.  It is much smaller and less brilliant than the 
+hummingbird; but its flight and motions are so nearly the same that 
+a poet, with his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, might easily mistake 
+one for the other.  It is but a small slip in such a poet as poor 
+George Arnold, when he makes the sweet-scented honeysuckle bloom 
+for the bee, for surely the name suggests the bee, though in fact 
+she does not work upon it; but what shall we say of the Kansas 
+poet, who, in his published volume, claims both the yew and the 
+nightingale for his native State?  Or of a Massachusetts poet, who 
+finds the snowdrop and the early primrose blooming along his native 
+streams, with the orchis and the yellow violet, and makes the 
+blackbird conspicuous among New England songsters?  Our ordinary 
+yew is not a tree at all, but a low spreading evergreen shrub that 
+one may step over; and as for the nightingale, if they have the 
+mockingbird in Kansas, they can very well do without him.  We have 
+several varieties of blackbirds, it is true; but when an American 
+poet speaks in a general way of the blackbird piping or singing in 
+a tree, as he would speak of a robin or a sparrow, the suggestion 
+or reminiscence awakened is always that of the blackbird of English 
+poetry.
+
+ "In days when daisies deck the ground,
+       And blackbirds whistle clear,
+   With honest joy our hearts will bound
+       To see the coming year"--
+
+sings Burns.  I suspect that the English reader of even some of 
+Emerson's and Lowell's poems would infer that our blackbird was 
+identical with the British species.  I refer to these lines of 
+Emerson:--
+
+ "Where arches green the livelong day
+   Echo the blackbirds' roundelay;"
+
+and to these lines from Lowell's "Rosaline:"--
+
+ "A blackbird whistling overhead
+  Thrilled through my brain;"
+
+and again these from "The Fountain of Youth:"--
+
+ " 'T is a woodland enchanted;
+   By no sadder spirit
+   Than blackbirds and thrushes
+   That whistle to cheer it,
+   All day in the bushes."
+
+The blackbird of the English poets is like our robin in everything 
+except color. He is familiar, hardy, abundant, thievish, and his 
+habits, manners, and song recall our bird to the life.  Our own 
+native blackbirds, the crow blackbird, the rusty grackle, the 
+cowbird, and the red-shouldered starling, are not songsters, even 
+in the latitude allowable to poets; neither are they whistlers, 
+unless we credit them with a "split-whistle," as Thoreau does.  The 
+two first named have a sort of musical cackle and gurgle in spring 
+(as at times both our crow and jay have), which is very pleasing, 
+and to which Emerson aptly refers in these lines from "May-Day:"--
+
+ "The blackbirds make the maples ring
+   With social cheer and jubilee"--
+
+but it is not a song.  The note of the starling in the trees and 
+alders along the creeks and marshes is better calculated to arrest 
+the attention of the casual observer; but it is far from being a 
+song or a whistle like that of the European blackbird, or our 
+robin.  Its most familiar call is like the word "BAZIQUE," 
+"BAZIQUE," but it has a wild musical note which Emerson has 
+embalmed in this line:--
+
+   "The redwing flutes his O-KA-LEE."
+
+Here Emerson discriminates; there is no mistaking his blackbird 
+this time for the European species, though it is true there is 
+nothing fluty or flute-like in the redwing's voice.  The flute is 
+mellow, while the "O-KA-LEE" of the starling is strong and sharply 
+accented. The voice of the thrushes (and our robin and the European 
+blackbird are thrushes) is flute-like.  Hence the aptness of this 
+line of Tennyson:--
+
+ "The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm,"--
+
+the blackbird being the ouzel, or ouzel-cock, as Shakespeare calls 
+him.
+
+In the line which precedes this, Tennyson has stamped the cuckoo:--
+
+ "To left and right,
+   The cuckoo told his name to all the
+             hills."
+
+The cuckoo is a bird that figures largely in English poetry, but he 
+always has an equivocal look in American verse, unless sharply 
+discriminated.  We have a cuckoo, but he is a great recluse; and I 
+am sure the poets do not know when he comes or goes, while to make 
+him sing familiarly like the British species, as I have known at 
+least one of our poets to do, is to come very wide of the mark.  
+Our bird is as solitary and joyless as the most veritable 
+anchorite.  He contributes nothing to the melody or the gayety of 
+the season.  He is, indeed, known in some sections as the rain-
+crow," but I presume that not one person in ten of those who spend 
+their lives in the country has ever seen or heard him.  He is like 
+the showy orchis, or the lady's-slipper, or the shooting star among 
+plants,-- a stranger to all but the few; and when an American poet 
+says cuckoo, he must say it with such specifications as to leave no 
+doubt what cuckoo he means, as Lowell does in his "Nightingale in 
+the Study:"--
+
+ "And, hark, the cuckoo, weatherwise,
+   Still hiding farther onward, wooes 
+             you."
+
+In like manner the primrose is an exotic in American poetry, to say 
+nothing of the snowdrop and the daisy.  Its prominence in English 
+poetry can be understood when we remember that the plant is so 
+abundant in England as to be almost a weed, and that it comes early 
+and is very pretty.  Cowslip and oxlip are familiar names of 
+varieties of the same plant, and they bear so close a resemblance 
+that it is hard to tell them apart.  Hence Tennyson, in "The 
+Talking Oak:"--
+
+      "As cowslip unto oxlip is,
+        So seems she to the boy."
+
+Our familiar primrose is the evening primrose,--a rank, tall weed 
+that blooms with the mullein in late summer.  Its small, yellow, 
+slightly fragrant blossoms open only at night, but remain open 
+during the next day.  By cowslip, our poets and writers generally 
+mean the yellow marsh marigold, which belongs to a different family 
+of plants, but which, as a spring token and a pretty flower, is a 
+very good substitute for the cowslip.  Our real cowslip, the 
+shooting star, is very rare, and is one of the most beautiful of 
+native flowers.  I believe it is not found north of Pennsylvania.  
+I have found it in a single locality in the District of Columbia, 
+and the day is memorable upon which I first saw its cluster of pink 
+flowers, with their recurved petals cleaving the air.  I do not 
+know that it has ever been mentioned in poetry.
+
+Another flower, which I suspect our poets see largely through the 
+medium of English literature and invest with borrowed charms, is 
+the violet.  The violet is a much more winsome and poetic flower in 
+England than it is in this country, for the reason that it comes 
+very early and is sweet-scented; our common violet is not among the 
+earliest flowers, and it is odorless.  It affects sunny slopes, 
+like the English flower; yet Shakespeare never could have made the 
+allusion to it which he makes to his own species in these lines:--
+
+ "That strain again! it had a dying fall:
+  Oh! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south 
+  That breathes upon a bank of violets,
+  Stealing and giving odor,"
+
+or lauded it as
+
+ "Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
+  Or Cytherea's breath."
+
+Our best known sweet-scented violet is a small, white, lilac-veined 
+species (not yellow, as Bryant has it in his poem), that is common 
+in wet, out-of-the-way places.  Our common blue violet--the only 
+species that is found abundantly everywhere in the North--blooms in 
+May, and makes bright many a grassy meadow slope and sunny nook.  
+Yet, for all that, it does not awaken the emotion in one that the 
+earlier and more delicate spring flowers do,--the hepatica, say, 
+with its shy wood habits, its pure, infantile expression, and at 
+times its delicate perfume; or the houstonia,--"innocence,"--
+flecking or streaking the cold spring earth with a milky way of 
+minute stars; or the trailing arbutus, sweeter scented than the 
+English violet, and outvying in tints Cytherea's or any other 
+blooming goddess's cheek.  Yet these flowers have no classical 
+associations, and are consequently far less often upon the lips of 
+our poets than the violet.
+
+To return to birds, another dangerous one for the American poet is 
+the lark, and our singers generally are very shy of him.  The term 
+has been applied very loosely in this country to both the meadow-
+lark and the bobolink, yet it is pretty generally understood now 
+that we have no genuine skylark east of the Mississippi.  Hence I 
+am curious to know what bird Bayard Taylor refers to when he speaks 
+in his "Spring Pastoral" of
+
+       "Larks responding aloft to the mellow flute of the 
+bluebird."
+
+Our so-called meadowlark is no lark at all, but a starling, and the 
+titlark and shore lark breed and pass the summer far to the north, 
+and are never heard in song in the United States. [Footnote: The 
+shore lark has changed its habits in this respect of late years.  
+It now breeds regularly on my native hills in Delaware County, New 
+York, and may be heard in full song there from April to June or 
+later.]
+
+The poets are entitled to a pretty free range, but they must be 
+accurate when they particularize.  We expect them to see the fact 
+through their imagination, but it must still remain a fact; the 
+medium must not distort it into a lie.  When they name a flower or 
+a tree or a bird, whatever halo of the ideal they throw around it, 
+it must not be made to belie the botany or the natural history.  I 
+doubt if you can catch Shakespeare transgressing the law in this 
+respect, except where he followed the superstition and the 
+imperfect knowledge of his time, as in his treatment of the honey-
+bee.  His allusions to nature are always incidental to his main 
+purpose, but they reveal a careful and loving observer.  For 
+instance, how are fact and poetry wedded in this passage, put into 
+the mouth of Banquo!--
+
+ "This guest of summer,
+   The temple-haunting martlet, does
+             approve,
+   By his loved masonry that the
+             heaven's breath
+   Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze.
+   Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but
+             this bird
+   Hath made his pendent bed and
+             procreant cradle:
+   Where they most breed and haunt,
+   I have observed,
+   The air is delicate."
+
+Nature is of course universal, but in the same sense is she local 
+and particular,--cuts every suit to fit the wearer, gives every 
+land an earth and sky of its own, and a flora and fauna to match.  
+The poets and their readers delight in local touches.  We have both 
+the hare and the rabbit in America, but this line from Thomson's 
+description of a summer morning,--
+
+ "And from the bladed field the fearful
+   hare limps awkward,"--
+
+or this from Beattie,--
+
+ "Through rustling corn the hare
+   astonished sprang"--
+
+would not apply with the same force in New England, because our 
+hare is never found in the fields, but in dense, remote woods.  In 
+England both hares and rabbits abound to such an extent that in 
+places the fields and meadows swarm with them, and the ground is 
+undermined by their burrows, till they become a serious pest to the 
+farmer, and are trapped in vast numbers.  The same remark applies 
+to this from Tennyson:--
+
+ "From the woods 
+   Came voices of the well-contented
+             doves."
+
+Doves and wood-pigeons are almost as abundant in England as hares 
+and rabbits, and are also a serious annoyance to the farmer; while 
+in this country the dove and pigeon are much less marked and 
+permanent features in our rural scenery,--less permanent, except in 
+the case of the mourning dove, which is found here and there the 
+season through; and less marked, except when the hordes of the 
+passenger pigeon once in a decade or two invade the land, rarely 
+tarrying longer than the bands of a foraging army.  I hardly know 
+what Trowbridge means by the "wood-pigeon" in his midsummer poem, 
+for, strictly speaking, the wood-pigeon is a European bird, and a 
+very common one in England.  But let me say here, however, that 
+Trowbridge, as a rule, keeps very close to the natural history of 
+his own country when he has occasion to draw material from this 
+source, and to American nature generally.  You will find in his 
+poems the wood pewee, the bluebird, the oriole, the robin, the 
+grouse, the kingfisher, the chipmunk, the mink, the bobolink, the 
+wood thrush, all in their proper places.  There are few bird-poems 
+that combine so much good poetry and good natural history as his 
+"Pewee." Here we have a glimpse of the catbird:--
+
+ "In the alders, dank with noonday
+             dews,
+   The restless catbird darts and mews;"
+
+here, of the cliff swallow: -
+
+ "In the autumn, when the hollows
+         All are filled with flying leaves
+   And the colonies of swallows
+         Quit the quaintly stuccoed eaves."
+
+Only the dates are not quite right.  The swallows leave their nests 
+in July, which is nearly three months before the leaves fall.  The 
+poet is also a little unfaithful to the lore of his boyhood when he 
+says
+
+ "The partridge beats his throbbing drum"
+
+in midsummer.  As a rule, the partridge does not drum later than 
+June, except fitfully during the Indian summer, while April and May 
+are his favorite months.  And let me say here, for the benefit of 
+the poets who do not go to the woods, that the partridge does not 
+always drum upon a log; he frequently drums upon a rock or a stone 
+wall, if a suitable log be not handy, and no ear can detect the 
+difference.  His drum is really his own proud breast, and beneath 
+his small hollow wings gives forth the same low, mellow thunder 
+from a rock as from a log.  Bryant has recognized this fact in one 
+of his poems.
+
+Our poets are quite apt to get ahead or behind the season with 
+their flowers and birds.  It is not often that we catch such a poet 
+as Emerson napping. He knows nature, and he knows the New England 
+fields and woods, as few poets do.  One may study our flora and 
+fauna in his pages.  He puts in the moose and the "surly bear," and 
+makes the latter rhyme with "woodpecker:"--
+
+ "He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous
+      beds,
+The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born
+      heads.
+   .        .        .        .        .        .        .        .        
+.
+He heard, when in the grove, at
+      intervals,
+With sudden roar the aged pine-tree
+      falls,--
+One crash, the death-hymn of the
+      perfect tree,
+Declares the close of its green
+      century."
+
+"They led me through the thicket
+      damp,
+   Through brake and fern, the beavers'
+      camp."
+
+ "He saw the partridge drum in the
+      woods;
+   He heard the woodcock's evening
+      hymn;
+   He found the tawny thrushes' broods;
+   And the shy hawk did wait for him."
+
+His "Titmouse" is studied in our winter woods, and his "Humble-Bee" 
+in our summer fields.  He has seen farther into the pine-tree than 
+any other poet; his "May-Day" is full of our spring sounds and 
+tokens; he knows the "punctual birds," and the "herbs and simples 
+of the wood:"--
+
+ "Rue, cinque-foil, gill, vervain, and
+      agrimony,
+   Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawk-weed, 
+      sassafras,
+   Milk-weeds and murky brakes, quaint 
+      pipes and sun-dew."
+
+Here is a characteristic touch:--
+
+ "A woodland walk
+   A quest of river-grapes, a mocking
+       thrush,
+   A wild rose, or rock-loving columbine,
+   Salve my worst wounds."
+
+That "rock-loving columbine" is better than Bryant's "columbines, 
+in purple dressed," as our flower is not purple, but yellow and 
+scarlet.  Yet Bryant set the example to the poets that have 
+succeeded him of closely studying Nature as she appears under our 
+own skies.
+
+I yield to none in my admiration of the sweetness and simplicity of 
+his poems of nature, and in general of their correctness of 
+observation.  They are tender and heartfelt, and they touch chords 
+that no other poet since Wordsworth has touched with so firm a 
+hand.  Yet he was not always an infallible observer; he sometimes 
+tripped up on his facts, and at other times he deliberately moulded 
+them, adding to, or cutting off, to suit the purposes of his verse.  
+I will cite here two instances in which his natural history is at 
+fault.  In his poem on the bobolink he makes the parent birds feed 
+their young with "seeds," whereas, in fact, the young are fed 
+exclusively upon insects and worms.  The bobolink is an 
+insectivorous bird in the North, or until its brood has flown, and 
+a granivorous bird in the South.  In his "Evening Revery" occur 
+these lines:--
+
+ "The mother bird hath broken for her 
+      brood
+   Their prison shells, or shoved them
+      from the nest,
+   Plumed for their earliest flight."
+
+It is not a fact that the mother bird aids her offspring in 
+escaping from the shell.  The young of all birds are armed with a 
+small temporary horn or protuberance upon the upper mandible, and 
+they are so placed in the shell that this point is in immediate 
+contact with its inner surface; as soon as they are fully developed 
+and begin to struggle to free themselves, the horny growth "pips" 
+the shell.  Their efforts then continue till their prison walls are 
+completely sundered and the bird is free.  This process is rendered 
+the more easy by the fact that toward the last the shell becomes 
+very rotten; the acids that are generated by the growing chick eat 
+it and make it brittle, so that one can hardly touch a fully 
+incubated bird's egg without breaking it.  To help the young bird 
+forth would insure its speedy death.  It is not true, either, that 
+the parent shoves its young from the nest when they are fully 
+fledged, except possibly in the case of some of the swallows and of 
+the eagle.  The young of all our more common birds leave the nest 
+of their own motion, stimulated probably by the calls of the 
+parents, and in some cases by the withholding of food for a longer 
+period than usual.
+
+As an instance where Bryant warps the facts to suit his purpose, 
+take his poems of the "Yellow Violet" and "The Fringed Gentian." Of 
+this last flower he says:--
+
+ "Thou waitest late and com'st alone,
+   When woods are bare and birds are 
+      flown,
+   And frosts and shortening days 
+      portend
+   The aged year is near his end."
+
+The fringed gentian belongs to September, and, when the severer 
+frosts keep away, it runs over into October.  But it does not come 
+alone, and the woods are not bare.  The closed gentian comes at the 
+same time, and the blue and purple asters are in all their glory.  
+Goldenrod, turtle-head, and other fall flowers also abound.  When 
+the woods are bare, which does not occur in New England till in or 
+near November, the fringed gentian has long been dead.  It is in 
+fact killed by the first considerable frost.  No, if one were to go 
+botanizing, and take Bryant's poem for a guide, he would not bring 
+home any fringed gentians with him.  The only flower he would find 
+would be the witch-hazel.  Yet I never see this gentian without 
+thinking of Bryant's poem, and feeling that he has brought it 
+immensely nearer to us.
+
+Bryant's poem of the "Yellow Violet" has all his accustomed 
+simplicity and pensiveness, but his love for the flower carries him 
+a little beyond the facts; he makes it sweet-scented,--
+
+                "Thy faint perfume
+            Alone is in the virgin air;"
+
+and he makes it the first flower of spring.  I have never been able 
+to detect any perfume in the yellow species (VIOLA ROTUNDIFOLIA).  
+This honor belongs alone to our two white violets, VIOLA BLANDA and 
+VIOLA CANADENSIS.
+
+Neither is it quite true that
+
+ "Of all her train, the hands of Spring
+   First plant thee in the watery mould."
+
+Now it is an interesting point which really is our first spring 
+flower.  Which comes second or third is of less consequence, but 
+which everywhere and in all seasons comes first; and in such a case 
+the poet must not place the honor where it does not belong.  I have 
+no hesitation in saying that, throughout the Middle and New England 
+States, the hepatica is the first spring flower. [Footnote: 
+excepting, of course, the skunk-cabbage.]  It is some days  ahead 
+of all others. The yellow violet belongs only to the more northern 
+sections,--to high, cold, beechen woods, where the poet rightly 
+places it; but in these localities, if you go to the spring woods 
+every day, you will gather the hepatica first.  I have also found 
+the claytonia and the coltsfoot first.  In a poem called "The 
+Twenty-Seventh of March," Bryant places both the hepatica and the 
+arbutus before it:--
+
+ "Within the woods
+   Tufts of ground-laurel, creeping
+      underneath
+   The leaves of the last summer, send 
+      their sweets 
+   Upon the chilly air, and by the oak,
+   The squirrel cups, a graceful 
+      company,
+   Hide in their bells, a soft aerial 
+      blue,"--
+
+ground-laurel being a local name for trailing arbutus, called also 
+mayflower, and squirrel-cups for hepatica, or liver-leaf.  But the 
+yellow violet may rightly dispute for the second place.
+
+In "The Song of the Sower" our poet covers up part of the truth 
+with the grain.  The point and moral of the song he puts in the 
+statement, that the wheat sown in the fall lies in the ground till 
+spring before it germinates; when, in fact, it sprouts and grows 
+and covers the ground with "emerald blades" in the fall:--
+
+ "Fling wide the generous grain; we fling 
+   O'er the dark mould the green of 
+      spring. 
+   For thick the emerald blades shall 
+      grow,
+   When first the March winds melt the 
+      snow,
+   And to the sleeping flowers, below,
+   The early bluebirds sing.
+   .        .        .        .        .        .        .        .        
+.
+   Brethren, the sower's task is done.
+   The seed is in its winter bed.
+   Now let the dark-brown mould be 
+      spread,
+             To hide it from the sun,
+   And leave it to the kindly care
+   Of the still earth and brooding air,
+   As when the mother, from her 
+      breast,
+   Lays the hushed babe apart to rest,
+   And shades its eyes and waits to see 
+   How sweet its waking smile will be.
+   The tempest now may smite, the 
+      sleet
+   All night on the drowned furrow beat, 
+   And winds that, from the cloudy hold 
+   Of winter, breathe the bitter cold, 
+   Stiffen to stone the mellow mould,
+             Yet safe shall lie the wheat;
+   Till, out of heaven's unmeasured 
+      blue,
+    Shall walk again the genial year,
+   To wake with warmth and nurse with 
+      dew
+   The germs we lay to slumber here."
+
+Of course the poet was not writing an agricultural essay, yet one 
+does not like to feel that he was obliged to ignore or sacrifice 
+any part of the truth to build up his verse.  One likes to see him 
+keep within the fact without being conscious of it or hampered by 
+it, as he does in "The Planting of the Apple-Tree," or in the 
+"Lines to a Water-Fowl."
+
+But there are glimpses of American scenery and climate in Bryant 
+that are unmistakable, as in these lines from "Midsummer:"--
+
+ "Look forth upon the earth--her
+      thousand plants 
+   Are smitten; even the dark, 
+      sun-loving maize
+   Faints in the field beneath the torrid
+      blaze;
+   The herd beside the shaded fountain
+      pants;
+   For life is driven from all the
+      landscape brown;
+   The bird has sought his tree, the
+      snake his den,
+   The trout floats dead in the hot
+      stream, and men
+   Drop by the sunstroke in the
+      populous town."
+
+Here is a touch of our "heated term" when the dogstar is abroad and 
+the weather runs mad.  I regret the "trout floating dead in the hot 
+stream," because, if such a thing ever has occurred, it is entirely 
+exceptional.  The trout in such weather seek the deep water and the 
+spring holes, and hide beneath rocks and willow banks. The 
+following lines would be impossible in an English poem:--
+
+ "The snowbird twittered on the
+      beechen bough,
+   And 'neath the hemlock, whose thick 
+      branches bent
+   Beneath its bright, cold burden, and
+      kept dry
+   A circle, on the earth, of withered 
+      leaves,
+   The partridge found a shelter."
+
+Both Bryant and Longfellow put their spring bluebird in the elm, 
+which is a much better place for the oriole,--the elm-loving 
+oriole.  The bluebird prefers a humbler perch.  Lowell puts him 
+upon a post in the fence, which is a characteristic attitude:--
+
+ "The bluebird, shifting his light load of 
+      song,
+   From post to post along the cheerless 
+      fence."
+
+Emerson calls him "April's bird," and makes him "fly before from 
+tree to tree," which is also good.  But the bluebird is not 
+strictly a songster in the sense in which the song sparrow or the 
+indigo-bird, or the English robin redbreast, is; nor do Bryant's 
+lines hit the mark:--
+
+ "The bluebird chants, from the elm's 
+      long branches,
+   A hymn to welcome the budding 
+      year."
+
+Lowell, again, is nearer the truth when he speaks of his "whiff of 
+song."  All his notes are call-notes, and are addressed directly to 
+his mate.  The songbirds take up a position and lift up their 
+voices and sing.  It is a deliberate musical performance, as much 
+so as that of Nilsson or Patti.  The bluebird, however, never 
+strikes an attitude and sings for the mere song's sake.  But the 
+poets are perhaps to be allowed this latitude, only their pages 
+lose rather than gain by it.  Nothing is so welcome in this field 
+as characteristic touches, a word or a phrase that fits this case 
+and no other.  If the bluebird chants a hymn, what does the wood 
+thrush do? Yet the bluebird's note is more pleasing than most bird-
+songs; if it could be reproduced in color, it would be the hue of 
+the purest sky.
+
+Longfellow makes the swallow sing:--
+
+ "The darting swallows soar and sing;"--
+
+which would leave him no room to describe the lark, if the lark had 
+been about.  Bryant comes nearer the mark this time:--
+
+ "There are notes of joy from the 
+      hang-bird and wren,
+   And the gossip of swallows through all 
+      the sky;"
+
+so does Tennyson when he makes his swallow
+
+ "Cheep and twitter twenty million 
+      loves;" 
+
+also Lowell again in this line:--
+
+ "The thin-winged swallow skating on
+      the air;"
+
+and Virgil:--
+
+ "Swallows twitter on the chimney
+      tops."
+
+Longfellow is perhaps less close and exact in his dealings with 
+nature than any of his compeers, although he has written some fine 
+naturalistic poems, as his "Rain in Summer," and others. When his 
+fancy is taken, he does not always stop to ask, Is this so? Is this 
+true? as when he applies the Spanish proverb, "There are no birds 
+in last year's nests," to the nests beneath the eaves; for these 
+are just the last year's nests that do contain birds in May. The 
+cliff swallow and the barn swallow always reoccupy their old nests, 
+when they are found intact; so do some other birds. Again, the 
+hawthorn, or whitethorn, field-fares, belong to English poetry more 
+than to American. The ash in autumn is not deep crimsoned, but a 
+purplish brown. "The ash her purple drops forgivingly," says Lowell 
+in his "Indian-Summer Reverie." Flax is not golden, lilacs are 
+purple or white and not flame-colored, and it is against the law to 
+go trouting in November. The pelican is not a wader any more than a 
+goose or a duck is, and the golden robin or oriole is not a bird of 
+autumn. This stanza from "The Skeleton in Armor" is a striking 
+one:--
+
+ "As with his wings aslant,
+   Sails the fierce cormorant,
+   Seeking some rocky haunt,
+       With his prey laden,
+   So toward the open main,
+   Beating to sea again,
+   Through the wild hurricane,
+       Bore I the maiden."
+
+But unfortunately the cormorant never does anything of the kind; it 
+is not a bird of prey: it is web-footed, a rapid swimmer and diver, 
+and lives upon fish, which it usually swallows as it catches them. 
+Virgil is nearer to fact when he says:--
+
+ "When crying cormorants forsake the 
+       sea
+   And, stretching to the covert, wing 
+       their way."
+
+But cormorant with Longfellow may stand for any of the large 
+rapacious birds, as the eagle or the condor. True, and yet the 
+picture is a purely fanciful one, as no bird of prey SAILS with his 
+burden; on the contrary, he flaps heavily and laboriously, because 
+he is always obliged to mount. The stress of the rhyme and metre 
+are of course in this case very great, and it is they, doubtless, 
+that drove the poet into this false picture of a bird of prey laden 
+with his quarry. It is an ungracious task, however, to cross-
+question the gentle Muse of Longfellow in this manner. He is a true 
+poet if there ever was one, and the slips I point out are only like 
+an obscure feather or two in the dove carelessly preened. The 
+burnished plumage and the bright hues hide them unless we look 
+sharply.
+
+Whittier gets closer to the bone of the New England nature. He 
+comes from the farm, and his memory is stored with boyhood's wild 
+and curious lore, with
+
+ "Knowledge never learned of schools,
+   Of the wild bee's morning chase,
+   Of the wild flower's time and place,
+   Flight of fowl and habitude
+   Of the tenants of the wood;
+   How the tortoise bears his shell,
+   How the woodchuck digs his cell,
+   And the ground-mole sinks his well;
+   How the robin feeds her young;
+   How the oriole's nest is hung;
+   Where the whitest lilies blow,
+   Where the freshest berries grow,
+   Where the ground-nut trails its vine,
+   Where the wood-grape's clusters 
+       shine;
+   Of the black wasp's cunning way,
+   Mason of his walls of clay,
+   And the architectural plans
+   Of gray hornet artisans!"
+
+The poet is not as exact as usual when he applies the epithet 
+"painted" to the autumn beeches, as the foliage of the beech is the 
+least painty of all our trees; nor when he speaks of
+
+ "Wind-flower and violet, amber and 
+       white,"
+
+as neither of the flowers named is amber-colored. From "A Dream of 
+Summer" the reader might infer that the fox shut up house in the 
+winter like the muskrat:--
+
+ "The fox his hillside cell forsakes,
+       The muskrat leaves his nook,
+   The bluebird in the meadow brakes
+       Is singing with the brook."
+
+The only one of these incidents that is characteristic of a January 
+thaw in the latitude of New England is the appearance of the 
+muskrat. The fox is never in his cell in winter, except he is 
+driven there by the hound, or by soft or wet weather, and the 
+bluebird does not sing in the brakes at any time of the year. A 
+severe stress of weather will drive the foxes off the mountains 
+into the low, sheltered woods and fields, and a thaw will send them 
+back again. In the winter the fox sleeps during the day upon a rock 
+or stone wall, or upon a snowbank, where he can command all the 
+approaches, or else prowls stealthily through the woods.
+
+But there is seldom a false note in any of Whittier's descriptions 
+of rural sights and sounds. What a characteristic touch is that in 
+one of his "Mountain Pictures:"--
+
+ "The pasture bars that clattered as
+       they fell."
+
+It is the only strictly native, original, and typical sound he 
+reports on that occasion. The bleating of sheep, the barking of 
+dogs, the lowing of cattle, the splash of the bucket in the well, 
+"the pastoral curfew of the cowbell," etc., are sounds we have 
+heard before in poetry, but that clatter of the pasture bars is 
+American; one can almost see the waiting, ruminating cows slowly 
+stir at the signal, and start for home in anticipation of the 
+summons. Every summer day, as the sun is shading the hills, the 
+clatter of those pasture bars is heard throughout the length and 
+breadth of the land.
+
+"Snow-Bound" is the most faithful picture of our Northern winter 
+that has yet been put into poetry. What an exact description is 
+this of the morning after the storm:-- 
+
+ "We looked upon a world unknown,
+   On nothing we could call our own.
+   Around the glistening wonder bent
+   The blue walls of the firmament,
+   No cloud above, no earth below,--
+   A universe of sky and snow!"
+
+In his little poem on the mayflower, Mr. Stedman catches and puts 
+in a single line a feature of our landscape in spring that I have 
+never before seen alluded to in poetry. I refer to the second line 
+of this stanza:--
+
+ "Fresh blows the breeze through 
+         hemlock-trees,
+       The fields are edged with green
+          below,
+   And naught but youth, and hope, and 
+         love
+       We know or care to know!"
+
+It is characteristic of our Northern and New England fields that 
+they are "edged with green" in spring long before the emerald tint 
+has entirely overspread them. Along the fences, especially along 
+the stone walls, the grass starts early; the land is fatter there 
+from the deeper snows and from other causes, the fence absorbs the 
+heat, and shelters the ground from the winds, and the sward quickly 
+responds to the touch of the spring sun.
+
+Stedman's poem is worthy of his theme, and is the only one I recall 
+by any of our well-known poets upon the much-loved mayflower or 
+arbutus. There is a little poem upon this subject by an unknown 
+author that also has the right flavor. I recall but one stanza:--
+
+ "Oft have I walked these woodland
+        ways,
+   Without the blest foreknowing,
+   That underneath the withered leaves 
+   The fairest flowers were blowing."
+
+Nature's strong and striking effects are best rendered by closest 
+fidelity to her. Listen and look intently, and catch the exact 
+effect as nearly as you can. It seems as if Lowell had done this 
+more than most of his brother poets. In reading his poems, one 
+wishes for a little more of the poetic unction (I refer, of course, 
+to his serious poems; his humorous ones are just what they should 
+be), yet the student of nature will find many close-fitting phrases 
+and keen observations in his pages, and lines that are exactly, and 
+at the same time poetically, descriptive. He is the only writer I 
+know of who has noticed the fact that the roots of trees do not 
+look supple and muscular like their boughs, but have a stiffened, 
+congealed look, as of a liquid hardened.
+
+ "Their roots, like molten metal cooled 
+       in flowing,
+   Stiffened in coils and runnels down 
+       the bank."
+
+This is exactly the appearance the roots of most trees, when 
+uncovered, present; they flow out from the trunk like diminishing 
+streams of liquid metal, taking the form of whatever they come in 
+contact with, parting around a stone and uniting again beyond it, 
+and pushing their way along with many a pause and devious turn. One 
+principal office of the roots of a tree is to gripe, to hold fast 
+the earth: hence they feel for and lay hold of every inequality of 
+surface; they will fit themselves to the top of a comparatively 
+smooth rock, so as to adhere amazingly, and flow into the seams and 
+crevices like metal into a mould.
+
+Lowell is singularly true to the natural history of his own 
+country. In his "Indian-Summer Reverie" we catch a glimpse of the 
+hen-hawk, silently sailing overhead
+
+ "With watchful, measuring eye,"
+ 
+the robin feeding on cedar berries, and the squirrel,
+
+ "On the shingly shagbark's bough."
+
+I do not remember to have met the "shagbark" in poetry before, or 
+that gray lichen-covered stone wall which occurs farther along in 
+the same poem, and which is so characteristic of the older farms of 
+New York and New England. I hardly know what the poet means by
+
+ "The wide-ranked mowers wading to
+       the knee,"
+
+as the mowers do not wade in the grass they are cutting, though 
+they might appear to do so when viewed athwart the standing grass; 
+perhaps this is the explanation of the line.
+
+But this is just what the bobolink does when the care of his young 
+begins to weigh upon him:--
+
+ "Meanwhile that devil-may-care,
+       the bobolink,
+   Remembering duty, in mid-quaver 
+       stops
+   Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's 
+       tremulous brink,
+   And 'twixt the winrows most 
+       demurely drops."
+
+I do not vouch for that dropping between the windrows, as in my 
+part of the country the bobolinks flee before the hay-makers, but 
+that sudden stopping on the brink of rapture, as if thoughts of his 
+helpless young had extinguished his joy, is characteristic.
+
+Another carefully studied description of Lowell's is this:--
+
+ "The robin sings as of old from the
+       limb!
+   The catbird croons in the lilac-bush!
+   Through the dim arbor, himself more 
+       dun, 
+    Silently hops the hermit thrush."
+
+Among trees Lowell has celebrated the oak, the pine, the birch; and 
+among flowers; the violet and the dandelion. The last, I think, is 
+the most pleasing of these poems:--
+
+ "Dear common flower, that grow'st 
+       beside the way,
+   Fringing the dusty road with harmless 
+       gold,
+   First pledge of blithesome May."
+
+The dandelion is indeed, in our latitude, the pledge of May. It 
+comes when the grass is short, and the fresh turf sets off its 
+"ring of gold" with admirable effect; hence we know the poet is a 
+month or more out of the season when, in "Al Fresco," he makes it 
+bloom with the buttercup and the clover:--
+
+ "The dandelions and buttercups
+   Gild all the lawn; the drowsy bee 
+   Stumbles among the clover-tops,
+   And summer sweetens all but me."
+
+Of course the dandelion blooms occasionally throughout the whole 
+summer, especially where the grass is kept short, but its proper 
+season, when it "gilds all the lawn," is, in every part of the 
+country, some weeks earlier than the tall buttercup and the clover. 
+These bloom in June in New England and New York, and are 
+contemporaries of the daisy. In the meadows and lawns, the 
+dandelion drops its flower and holds aloft its sphere of down, 
+touching the green surface as with a light frost, long before the 
+clover and the buttercup have formed their buds. In "Al Fresco" our 
+poet is literally in clover, he is reveling in the height of the 
+season, the full tide of summer is sweeping around him, and he has 
+riches enough without robbing May of her dandelions. Let him say,--
+
+ "The daisies and the buttercups
+   Gild all the lawn."
+
+I smile as I note that the woodpecker proves a refractory bird to 
+Lowell, as well as to Emerson:--
+
+   Emerson rhymes it with bear,
+   Lowell rhymes it with hear,
+   One makes it woodpeckair, 
+   The other, woodpeckear.
+
+But its hammer is a musical one, and the poets do well to note it. 
+Our most pleasing drummer upon dry limbs among the woodpeckers is 
+the yellow-bellied. His measured, deliberate tap, heard in the 
+stillness of the primitive woods, produces an effect that no bird-
+song is capable of.
+
+Tennyson is said to have very poor eyes, but there seems to be no 
+defect in the vision with which he sees nature, while he often hits 
+the nail on the head in a way that would indicate the surest sight. 
+True, he makes the swallow hunt the bee, which, for aught I know, 
+the swallow may do in England. Our purple martin has been accused 
+of catching the honey-bee, but I doubt his guilt. But those of our 
+swallows that correspond to the British species, the barn swallow, 
+the cliff swallow, and the bank swallow, subsist upon very small 
+insects. But what a clear-cut picture is that in the same poem 
+("The Poet's Song"):--
+
+ "The wild hawk stood, with the down on 
+       his beak,
+   And stared, with his foot on the 
+       prey."
+
+It takes a sure eye, too, to see
+
+ "The landscape winking thro' the 
+       heat"--
+
+or to gather this image:--
+
+ "He has a solid base of temperament; 
+   But as the water-lily starts and slides 
+   Upon the level in little puffs of wind, 
+   Though anchor'd to the bottom, such 
+       is he;"
+
+or this:--
+
+ "Arms on which the standing muscle 
+       sloped,
+   As slopes a wild brook o'er a little 
+       stone,
+   Running too vehemently to break 
+      upon it,"--
+
+and many other gems that abound in his poems. He does not cut and 
+cover in a single line, so far as I have observed. Great caution 
+and exact knowledge underlie his most rapid and daring flights. A 
+lady told me that she was once walking with him in the fields, when 
+they came to a spring that bubbled up through shifting sands in a 
+very pretty manner, and Tennyson, in order to see exactly how the 
+spring behaved, got down on his hands and knees and peered a long 
+time into the water. The incident is worth repeating as showing how 
+intently a great poet studies nature.
+
+Walt Whitman says he has been trying for years to find a word that 
+would express or suggest that evening call of the robin.    How 
+absorbingly this poet must have studied the moonlight to hit upon 
+this descriptive phrase:--
+
+ "The vitreous pour of the full moon 
+       just tinged with blue;"
+
+how long have looked upon the carpenter at his bench to have made 
+this poem:--
+
+ "The tongue of his fore-plane whistles 
+       its wild ascending lisp;"
+
+or how lovingly listened to the nocturne of the mockingbird to have 
+turned it into words in "A Word out of the Sea "!  Indeed, no poet 
+has studied American nature more closely than Whitman has, or is 
+more cautious in his uses of it. How easy are his descriptions!--
+
+ "Behold the daybreak!
+   The  little  light  fades  the  immense  
+       and  diaphanous shadows!"
+
+ "The comet that came unannounced
+       Out of the north, flaring in
+       heaven."
+
+ "The fan-shaped explosion."
+
+ "The slender and jagged threads of
+       lightning, as sudden and fast amid
+       the din they chased each other
+       across the sky."
+
+ "Where the heifers browse--where
+       geese nip their food with short
+       jerks;
+   Where sundown shadows lengthen 
+       over the limitless and lonesome 
+       prairie;
+   Where herds of buffalo make a 
+       crawling spread of the square miles        
+       far and near;
+   Where the hummingbird shimmers-- 
+       where the neck of the long-lived 
+       swan is curving and winding;
+   Where the laughing-gull scoots by the 
+       shore when she laughs her near 
+       human laugh;
+   Where band-neck'd partridges roost 
+       in a ring on the ground with their 
+       heads out."
+
+Whitman is less local than the New England poets, and faces more to 
+the West.  But he makes himself at home everywhere, and puts in 
+characteristic scenes and incidents, generally compressed into a 
+single line, from all trades and doings and occupations, North, 
+East, South, West, and identifies himself with man in all straits 
+and conditions on the continent. Like the old poets, he does not 
+dwell upon nature, except occasionally through the vistas opened up 
+by the great sciences, as astronomy and geology, but upon life and 
+movement and personality, and puts in a shred of natural history 
+here and there,--the "twittering redstart," the spotted hawk 
+swooping by, the oscillating sea-gulls, the yellow-crowned  heron,  
+the  razor-billed auk,  the lone wood duck, the migrating geese, 
+the sharp-hoofed moose, the  mockingbird "the thrush, the hermit," 
+etc.,--to help locate and define his position.  Everywhere in 
+nature Whitman finds human relations, human responsions. In entire 
+consistence with botany, geology, science, or what not, he endues 
+his very seas and woods with passion, more than the old hamadryads 
+or tritons. His fields, his rocks, his trees, are not dead 
+material, but living companions. This is doubtless one reason why 
+Addington Symonds, the young Hellenic scholar of England, finds him 
+more thoroughly Greek than any other man of modern times.
+
+Our natural history, and indeed all phases of life in this country, 
+is rich in materials for the poet that have yet hardly been 
+touched. Many of our most familiar birds, which are inseparably 
+associated with one's walks and recreations in the open air, and 
+with the changes of the seasons, are yet awaiting their poet,--as 
+the high-hole, with his golden-shafted quills and loud continued 
+spring call; the meadowlark, with her crescent-marked breast and 
+long-drawn, piercing, yet tender April and May summons forming, 
+with that of the high-hole, one of the three or four most 
+characteristic field sounds of our spring; the happy goldfinch, 
+circling round and round in midsummer with that peculiar undulating 
+flight and calling PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, at each 
+opening and shutting of the wings, or later leading her plaintive 
+brood among the thistle-heads by the roadside; the little indigo-
+bird, facing the torrid sun of August and singing through all the 
+livelong summer day; the contented musical soliloquy of the vireo, 
+like the whistle of a boy at his work, heard through all our woods 
+from May to September:--
+
+ "Pretty green worm, where are you?
+   Dusky-winged moth, how fare you,
+     When wind and rain are in the tree?
+       Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee,
+       Shadow and sun one are to me.
+   Mosquito and gnat, beware you,
+   Saucy chipmunk, how dare you
+     Climb to my nest in the maple-tree, 
+       And dig up the corn
+       At noon and at morn?
+       Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee."
+
+Or the phœbe-bird, with her sweet April call and mossy nest under 
+the bridge or woodshed, or under the shelving rocks; or the brown 
+thrasher--mocking thrush--calling half furtively, half archly from 
+the treetop back in the bushy pastures: "Croquet, croquet, hit it, 
+hit it, come to me, come to me, tight it, tight it, you're out, 
+you're out," with many musical interludes; or the chewink, rustling 
+the leaves and peering under the bushes at you; or the pretty 
+little oven-bird, walking round and round you in the woods, or 
+suddenly soaring above the treetops, and uttering its wild lyrical 
+strain; or, farther south, the whistling redbird, with his crest 
+and military bearing,--these and many others should be full of 
+suggestion and inspiration to our poets. It is only lately that the 
+robin's song has been put into poetry. Nothing could be happier 
+than this rendering of it by a nameless singer in "A Masque of 
+Poets:"--
+
+ "When the willows gleam along the
+          brooks,
+   And the grass grows green in sunny 
+          nooks,
+   In the sunshine and the rain
+   I hear the robin in the lane
+      Singing, 'Cheerily,
+      Cheer up, cheer up;
+      Cheerily, cheerily,
+         Cheer up.'
+
+ "But the snow is still
+   Along the walls and on the hill.
+   The days are cold, the nights forlorn, 
+   For one is here and one is gone.
+      'Tut, tut. Cheerily,
+      Cheer up, cheer up;
+      Cheerily, cheerily,
+          Cheer up.'
+
+ "When spring hopes seem to wane,
+   I hear the joyful strain--
+   A song at night, a song at morn,
+   A lesson deep to me is borne,
+      Hearing, 'Cheerily,
+      Cheer up, cheer up;
+      Cheerily, cheerily,
+        Cheer up.' " 
+
+The poetic interpretation of nature, which has come to be a 
+convenient phrase, and about which the Oxford professor of poetry 
+has written a book, is, of course, a myth, or is to be read the 
+other way. It is the soul the poet interprets, not nature. There is 
+nothing in nature but what the beholder supplies. Does the sculptor 
+interpret the marble or his own ideal? Is the music in the 
+instrument, or in the soul of the performer? Nature is a dead clod 
+until you have breathed upon it with your genius. You commune with 
+your own soul, not with woods or waters; they furnish the 
+conditions, and are what you make them. Did Shelley interpret the 
+song of the skylark, or Keats that of the nightingale? They 
+interpreted their own wild, yearning hearts. The trick of the poet 
+is always to idealize nature,--to see it subjectively. You cannot 
+find what the poets find in the woods until you take the poet's 
+heart to the woods. He sees nature through a colored glass, sees it 
+truthfully, but with an indescribable charm added, the aureole of 
+the spirit. A tree, a cloud, a bird, a sunset, have no hidden 
+meaning that the art of the poet is to unlock for us. Every poet 
+shall interpret them differently, and interpret them rightly, 
+because the soul is infinite. Milton's nightingale is not 
+Coleridge's; Burns's daisy is not Wordsworth's; Emerson's bumblebee 
+is not Lowell's; nor does Turner see in nature what Tintoretto 
+does, nor Veronese what Correggio does. Nature is all things to all 
+men. "We carry within us," says Sir Thomas Browne, "the wonders we 
+find without." The same idea is daintily expressed in these 
+tripping verses of Bryant's:--
+
+ "Yet these sweet sounds of the early 
+          season
+       And these fair sights of its early
+          days,
+   Are only sweet when we fondly listen, 
+       And only fair when we fondly gaze.
+
+"There is no glory in star or blossom, 
+       Till looked upon by a loving eye;
+   There is no fragrance in April breezes,
+       Till breathed with joy as they 
+            wander by;"
+
+and in these lines of Lowell:--
+
+ "What we call Nature, all outside 
+       ourselves,
+   Is but our own conceit of what we see, 
+   Our own reaction upon what we feel."
+
+ "I find my own complexion 
+       everywhere."
+
+Before either, Coleridge had said:--
+
+ "We receive but what we give,
+   And in our life alone doth Nature live;
+   Ours is the wedding-garment, ours 
+       the shroud;"
+
+and Wordsworth had spoken of
+
+ "The light that never was on sea or 
+       land,
+   The consecration and the poet's
+       dream." 
+
+That light that never was on sea or land is what the poet gives us, 
+and is what we mean by the poetic interpretation of nature. The 
+Oxford professor struggles against this view. "It is not true," he 
+says, "that nature is a blank, or an unintelligible scroll with no 
+meaning of its own but that which we put into it from the light of 
+our own transient feelings." Not a blank, certainly, to the 
+scientist, but full of definite meanings and laws, and a storehouse 
+of powers and economies; but to the poet the meaning is what he 
+pleases to make it, what it provokes in his own soul. To the man of 
+science it is thus and so, and not otherwise; but the poet touches 
+and goes, and uses nature as a garment which he puts off and on. 
+Hence the scientific reading or interpretation of nature is the 
+only real one. Says the SOOTHSAYER in "Antony and Cleopatra:"--
+
+ 'In Nature's infinite book of secrecy a
+       little do I read."
+
+This is science bowed and reverent, and speaking through a great 
+poet. The poet himself does not so much read in nature's book--
+though he does this, too--as write his own thoughts there. Nature 
+reads him, she is the page and he the type, and she takes the 
+impression he gives. Of course the poet uses the truths of nature 
+also, and he establishes his right to them by bringing them home to 
+us with a new and peculiar force,--a quickening or kindling force. 
+What science gives is melted in the fervent heat of the poet's 
+passion, and comes back to us supplemented by his quality and 
+genius. He gives more than he takes, always.
+
+
+
+V
+
+NOTES  BY  THE  WAY
+
+
+   A  NEW  NOTE  IN THE WOODS
+
+THERE is always a new page to be turned in natural history, if one 
+is sufficiently on the alert. I did not know that the eagle 
+celebrated his nuptials in the air till one early spring day I saw 
+a pair of them fall from the sky with talons hooked together. They 
+dropped a hundred feet or more, in a wild embrace, their great 
+wings fanning the air, then separated and mounted aloft, tracing 
+their great circles against the clouds. "Watch and wait" is the 
+naturalist's sign. For years I have been trying to ascertain for a 
+certainty the author of that fine plaintive piping to be heard more 
+or less frequently, according to the weather, in our summer and 
+autumn woods. It is a note that much resembles that of our small 
+marsh frog in spring,--the hyla; it is not quite so clear and 
+assured, but otherwise much the same. Of a very warm October day I 
+have heard the wood vocal with it; it seemed to proceed from every 
+stump and tree about one. Ordinarily it is heard   only   at   
+intervals  throughout  the woods. Approach never so cautiously the 
+spot from which the sound proceeds, and it instantly ceases, and 
+you may watch for an hour without again hearing it.  Is it a frog, 
+I said, the small tree-frog, the piper of the marshes, repeating 
+his spring note, but little changed, amid the trees? Doubtless it 
+is, yet I must see him in the very act.  So I watched and waited, 
+but to no purpose, till one day, while bee-hunting in the woods, I 
+heard the sound proceed from beneath the leaves at my feet.  
+Keeping  entirely quiet,  the  little  musician  presently emerged, 
+and, lifting himself up on a small stick, his throat palpitated and 
+the plaintive note again came forth.  "The queerest frog ever I 
+saw," said a youth who accompanied me, and whom I had enlisted to 
+help solve the mystery.   No; it was no frog or toad at all, but 
+the small red salamander, commonly called lizard.   The color is 
+not strictly red,  but a dull orange, variegated with minute specks 
+or spots.  This was the mysterious piper, then, heard from May till 
+November through all our woods, sometimes on trees, but usually on 
+or near the ground.  It makes more music in the woods in autumn 
+than any bird.  It is a pretty, inoffensive creature, walks as 
+awkwardly as a baby, and may often be found beneath stones and old 
+logs in the woods, where, buried in the mould, it passes the 
+winter. (I suspect there is a species of little frog--Pickering's 
+hyla [footnote:  A frequent piper in the woods throughout the 
+summer and early fall.]--that also pipes occasionally in the 
+woods.)   I have discovered, also, that we have a musical spider. 
+One sunny April day, while seated on the borders of the woods, my 
+attention was attracted by a soft, uncertain, purring sound that 
+proceeded from the dry leaves at my feet. On investigating the 
+matter, I found that it was made by a busy little spider. Several 
+of them were traveling about over the leaves, as if in quest of 
+some lost cue or secret.  Every moment or two they would pause, and 
+by some invisible means make the low, purring sound referred to.  
+Dr. J. A. Alien says the common turtle, or land tortoise, also has 
+a note,--a loud, shrill, piping sound. It may yet be discovered 
+that there is no silent creature in nature.
+
+
+   THE  SAND   HORNET
+
+I turned another (to me) new page in natural history, when, during 
+the past season, I made the acquaintance of the sand wasp or 
+hornet. From boyhood I had known the black hornet, with his large 
+paper nest, and the spiteful yellow-jacket, with his lesser 
+domicile, and had cherished proper contempt for the various 
+indolent wasps.  But the sand hornet was a new bird,--in fact, the 
+harpy eagle among insects,--and he made an impression. While 
+walking along the road about midsummer, I noticed working in the 
+towpath, where the ground was rather inclined to be dry and sandy, 
+a large yellow hornet-like insect. It made a hole the size of one's 
+little finger in the hard, gravelly path beside the roadbed. When 
+disturbed, it alighted on the dirt and sand in the middle of the 
+road.  I had noticed in my walks some small bullet-like holes in 
+the field that had piqued my curiosity, and I determined to keep an 
+eye on these insects of the roadside.  I explored their holes, and 
+found them quite shallow, and no mystery at the bottom of them. One 
+morning in the latter part of July, walking that way, I was quickly 
+attracted by the sight of a row of little mounds of fine, freshly 
+dug earth resting upon the grass beside the road, a foot or more 
+beneath the path. "What is this?" I said.  "Mice, or squirrels, or 
+snakes," said my neighbor. But I connected it at once with the 
+strange insect I had seen.  Neither mice nor squirrels work like 
+that, and snakes do not dig.  Above each mound of earth was a hole 
+the size of one's largest finger, leading into the bank.  While 
+speculating about the phenomenon, I saw one of the large yellow 
+hornets I had observed quickly enter one of the holes.  That 
+settled the query.  While spade and hoe were being brought to dig 
+him out, another hornet appeared, heavy-laden with some prey, and 
+flew humming up and down and around the place where I was standing.  
+I withdrew a little, when he quickly alighted upon one of the 
+mounds of earth, and I saw him carrying into his den no less an 
+insect than the cicada or harvest-fly. Then another came, and after 
+coursing up and down a few times, disturbed by my presence, 
+alighted upon a tree, with his quarry, to rest.  The black hornet 
+will capture a fly, or a small butterfly, and, after breaking and 
+dismembering it, will take it to his nest; but here was this hornet 
+carrying an insect much larger than himself, and flying with ease 
+and swiftness.  It was as if a hawk should carry a hen, or an eagle 
+a turkey.  I at once proceeded to dig for one of the hornets, and, 
+after following his hole about three feet under the footpath and to 
+the edge of the roadbed, succeeded in capturing him and recovering 
+the cicada.  The hornet weighed fifteen grains, and the cicada 
+nineteen; but in bulk the cicada exceeded the hornet by more than 
+half.  In color, the wings and thorax, or waist, of the hornet were 
+a rich bronze; the abdomen was black, with three irregular yellow 
+bands; the legs were large and powerful, especially the third or 
+hindmost pair, which were much larger than the others, and armed 
+with many spurs and hooks.  In digging its hole the hornet has been 
+seen at work very early in the morning.  It backed out with the 
+loosened material, like any other animal under the same 
+circumstances, holding and scraping back the dirt with its legs.  
+The preliminary prospecting upon the footpath, which I had 
+observed, seems to have been the work of the males, as it was 
+certainly of the smaller hornets, and the object was doubtless to 
+examine the ground, and ascertain if the place was suitable for 
+nesting.  By digging two or three inches through the hard, gravelly 
+surface of the road, a fine sandy loam was discovered, which seemed 
+to suit exactly, for in a few days the main shafts were all started 
+in the greensward, evidently upon the strength of the favorable 
+report which the surveyors had made.  These were dug by the larger 
+hornets or females. There was but one inhabitant in each hole, and 
+the holes were two or three feet apart.  One that we examined had 
+nine chambers or galleries at the end of it, in each of which were 
+two locusts, or eighteen in all.  The locusts of the locality had 
+suffered great slaughter. Some of them in the hole or den had been 
+eaten to a mere shell by the larvæ of the hornet.  Under the wing 
+of each insect an egg is attached; the egg soon hatches, and the 
+grub at once proceeds to devour the food its thoughtful parent has 
+provided.  As it grows, it weaves itself a sort of shell or cocoon, 
+in which, after a time, it undergoes its metamorphosis, and comes 
+out, I think, a perfect insect toward the end of summer.
+
+I understood now the meaning of that sudden cry of alarm I had so 
+often heard proceed from the locust or cicada, followed by some 
+object falling and rustling amid the leaves; the poor insect was 
+doubtless in the clutches of this arch enemy.  A number of locusts 
+usually passed the night on the under side of a large limb of a 
+mulberry-tree near by: early one morning a hornet was seen to 
+pounce suddenly upon one and drag it over on the top of the limb; a 
+struggle ensued, but the locust was soon quieted and carried off.  
+It is said that the hornet does not sting the insect in a vital 
+part,--for in that case it would not keep fresh for its young,--but 
+introduces its poison into certain nervous ganglia, the injury to 
+which has the effect of paralyzing the victim and making it 
+incapable of motion, though life remains for some time.
+
+My friend Van, who watched the hornets in my absence, saw a fierce 
+battle one day over the right of possession of one of the dens.  An 
+angry, humming sound was heard to proceed from one of the holes; 
+gradually it approached the surface, until the hornets emerged 
+locked in each other's embrace, and rolled down the little 
+embankment, where the combat was continued.  Finally, one released 
+his hold and took up his position in the mouth of his den (of 
+course I should say SHE and HER, as these were the queen hornets), 
+where she seemed to challenge her antagonist to come on.  The other 
+one manœuvred about awhile, but could not draw her enemy out of her 
+stronghold; then she clambered up the bank and began to bite and 
+tear off bits of grass, and to loosen gravel-stones and earth, and 
+roll them down into the mouth of the disputed passage.  This caused 
+the besieged hornet to withdraw farther into her hole, when the 
+other came down and thrust in her head, but hesitated to enter.  
+After more manœuvering, the aggressor withdrew, and began to bore a 
+hole about a foot from the one she had tried to possess herself of 
+by force.
+
+Besides the cicada, the sand hornet captures grasshoppers and other 
+large insects.  I have never met with it before the present summer 
+(1879), but this year I have heard of its appearance at several 
+points along the Hudson.
+
+
+   THE SOLITARY BEE
+
+If you "leave no stone unturned" in your walks through the fields, 
+you may perchance discover the abode of one of our solitary bees.  
+Indeed, I have often thought what a chapter of natural history 
+might be written on "Life under a Stone," so many of our smaller 
+creatures take refuge there,--ants, crickets, spiders, wasps, 
+bumblebees, the solitary bee, mice, toads, snakes, and newts.  What 
+do these things do in a country where there are no stones?  A stone 
+makes a good roof, a good shield; it is water-proof and fire-proof, 
+and, until the season becomes too rigorous, frost-proof too.  The 
+field mouse wants no better place to nest than beneath a large, 
+flat stone, and the bumblebee is entirely satisfied if she can get 
+possession of his old or abandoned quarters.  I have even heard of 
+a swarm of hive bees going under a stone that was elevated a little 
+from the ground.  After that, I did not marvel at Samson's bees 
+going into the carcass or skeleton of the lion.
+
+In the woods one day (it was November) I turned over a stone that 
+had a very strange-looking creature under it,--a species of 
+salamander I had never before seen, the banded salamander.  It was 
+five or six inches long, and was black and white in alternate 
+bands.  It looked like a creature of the night,--darkness dappled 
+with moonlight,--and so it proved.  I wrapped it up in some leaves 
+and took it home in my pocket.  By day it would barely move, and 
+could not be stimulated or frightened into any activity; but an 
+night it was alert and wide awake.  Of its habits I know little, 
+but it is a pretty and harmless creature.  Under another stone was 
+still another species, the violet-colored salamander, larger, of a 
+dark plum-color, with two rows of bright yellow spots down its 
+back.  It evinced more activity than its fellow of the moon-
+bespattered garb.  I have also found the little musical red newt 
+under stones, and several small dark species.
+
+But to return to the solitary bee.  When you go a-hunting of the 
+honey-bee, and are in quest of a specimen among the asters or 
+goldenrod in some remote field to start a line with, you shall see 
+how much this little native bee resembles her cousin of the social 
+hive.  There appear to be several varieties, but the one I have in 
+mind is just the size of the honey-bee, and of the same general 
+form and color, and its manner among the flowers is nearly the 
+same.  On close inspection, its color proves to be lighter, while 
+the under side of its abdomen is of a rich bronze.  The body is 
+also flatter and less tapering, and the curve inclines upward, 
+rather than downward.   You perceive it would be the easiest thing 
+in the world for the bee to sting an enemy perched upon its back.  
+One variety, with a bright buff abdomen, is called "sweat-bee" by 
+the laborers in the field, because it alights upon their hands and 
+bare arms when they are sweaty,--doubtless in quest of salt.  It 
+builds its nest in little cavities in rails and posts.  But the one 
+with the bronze or copper bottom  builds under a stone.  I 
+discovered its nest one day in this wise: I was lying on the ground 
+in a field, watching a line of honey-bees to the woods, when my 
+attention was arrested by one of these native bees flying about me 
+in a curious, inquiring way.  When it returned the third time, I 
+said, "That bee wants something of me," which proved to be the 
+case, for I was lying upon the entrance to its nest.    On my 
+getting up, it alighted and crawled quickly home.  I turned over 
+the stone, which was less than a foot across, when the nest was 
+partially exposed.  It consisted of four cells, built in succession 
+in a little tunnel that had been excavated in the ground. The 
+cells, which were about three quarters of an inch long and half as 
+far through, were made of sections cut from the leaf of the maple,--
+cut with the mandibles of the bee, which work precisely like 
+shears.  I have seen the bee at work cutting out these pieces. She 
+moves through the leaf like the hand of the tailor through a piece 
+of cloth. When the pattern is detached, she rolls it up, and, 
+embracing it with her legs, flies home with it, often appearing to 
+have a bundle disproportionately large.  Each cell is made up of a 
+dozen or more pieces: the larger ones, those that form its walls, 
+like the walls of a paper bag, are oblong, and are turned down at 
+one end, so as to form the bottom; not one thickness of leaf 
+merely, but three or four thicknesses, each fragment of leaf 
+lapping over another. When the cell is completed, it is filled 
+about two thirds full of bee-bread,--the color of that in the comb 
+in the hive, but not so dry, and having a sourish smell. Upon this 
+the egg is laid, and upon this the young feed when hatched. Is the 
+paper bag now tied up?  No, it is headed up; circular bits of 
+leaves are nicely fitted into it to the number of six or seven. 
+They are cut without pattern or compass, and yet they are all 
+alike, and all exactly fit.  Indeed, the construction of this cell 
+or receptacle shows great ingenuity and skill. The bee is, of 
+course, unable to manage a single section of a leaf large enough, 
+when rolled up, to form it, and so is obliged to construct it of 
+smaller pieces, such as she can carry, lapping them one over 
+another.
+
+A few days later I saw a smaller species carrying fragments of a 
+yellow autumn leaf under a stone in a cornfield.  On examining the 
+place about sundown to see if the bee lodged there, I found her 
+snugly ensconced in a little rude cell that adhered to the under 
+side of the stone.  There was no pollen in it, and I half suspected 
+it was merely a berth in which to pass the night.
+
+These bees do not live even in pairs, but absolutely alone.  They 
+have large baskets on their legs in which to carry pollen, an 
+article they are very industrious in collecting.
+
+Why the larger species above described should have waited till 
+October to build its nest is a mystery to me.  Perhaps this was the 
+second brood of the season, or can it be that the young were not to 
+hatch till the following spring?
+
+
+   THE WEATHERWISE  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 water-course; 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 downstream, 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 1, 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 
+1, 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 up in the ground, and 
+my apples caught in unprotected places.  When the cold wave struck 
+us, about November 20, 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 
+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 weatherwise? 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.
+
+
+   CHEATING THE  SQUIRRELS
+
+For the largest and finest chestnuts I had last fall I was indebted 
+to the gray squirrels.  Walking through the early October woods one 
+day, I came upon a place where the ground was thickly strewn with 
+very large unopened chestnut burrs.  On examination, I found that 
+every burr 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 burrs 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 burrs 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 burrs when they have matured, and a few days of 
+this dry October weather will cause every one 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 burrs, 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 burrs would 
+open if left to lie on the ground a few days.  Perhaps he did not 
+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. 
+
+
+   THE  SKYLARK  ON THE  HUDSON
+
+My note-book of the past season is enriched with the unusual 
+incident of an English skylark in full song above an Esopus meadow.  
+I was poking about a marshy place in a low field one morning in 
+early May, when, through the maze of bird-voices,--laughter of 
+robins, call of meadowlarks, song of bobolinks, ditty of sparrows, 
+whistle of orioles, twitter of swallows,--with which the air was 
+filled, my ear suddenly caught an unfamiliar strain.  I paused to 
+listen: can it be possible, I thought, that I hear a lark, or am I 
+dreaming? The song came from the air, above a wide, low meadow many 
+hundred yards away.  Withdrawing a few paces to a more elevated 
+position, I bent my eye and ear eagerly in that direction.  Yes, 
+that unstinted, jubilant, skyward, multitudinous song can be none 
+other than the lark's!  Any of our native songsters would have 
+ceased while I was listening.  Presently I was fortunate enough to 
+catch sight of the bird. He had reached his climax in the sky, and 
+was hanging with quivering wings beneath a small white cloud, 
+against which his form was clearly revealed.  I had seen and heard 
+the lark in England, else I should still have been in doubt about 
+the identity of this singer.  While I was climbing a fence I was 
+obliged to take my eye from the bird, and when I looked again the 
+song had ceased and the lark had gone.  I was soon in the meadow 
+above which I had heard him, and the first bird I flushed was the 
+lark.
+
+How strange he looked to my eye (I use the masculine gender because 
+it was a male bird, but an Irishman laboring in the field, to whom 
+I related my discovery, spoke touchingly of the bird as "she," and 
+I notice that the old poets do the same); his long, sharp wings, 
+and something in his manner of flight suggested a shore-bird.  I 
+followed him about the meadow and got several snatches of song out 
+of him, but not again the soaring, skyward flight and copious 
+musical shower.   By appearing to pass by, I several times got 
+within a few yards of him; as I drew near he would squat in the 
+stubble, and then suddenly start up, and, when fairly launched, 
+sing briefly till he alighted again fifteen or twenty rods away.  I 
+came twice the next day and twice the  next,  and each time found 
+the  lark in the meadow or heard his song from the air or the sky.  
+What was especially interesting was that the lark had "singled out 
+with affection" one of our native birds, and the one that most 
+resembled its kind, namely, the vesper sparrow, or grass finch.  To 
+this bird I saw him paying his addresses with the greatest 
+assiduity.  He would follow it about and hover above it, and by 
+many gentle indirections seek to approach it.  But the sparrow was 
+shy, and evidently did not know what to make of her distinguished 
+foreign lover.  It would sometimes take refuge in a bush, when the 
+lark, not being a percher, would alight upon the ground beneath it.  
+This sparrow looks enough like the lark to be a near relation.  Its 
+color is precisely the same, and it has the distinguishing mark of 
+the two lateral white quills in its tail.  It has the same habit of 
+skulking in the stubble or the grass as you approach; it is 
+exclusively a field-bird, and certain of its notes might have been 
+copied from the lark's song.  In size it is about a third smaller, 
+and this is the most marked difference between them.  With the 
+nobler bipeds, this would not have been any obstacle to the union, 
+and in this case the lark was evidently quite ready to ignore the 
+difference, but the sparrow persisted in saying him nay.  It was 
+doubtless this obstinacy on her part that drove the lark away, for, 
+on the fifth day, I could not find him, and have never seen nor 
+heard him since.   I hope he found a mate somewhere, but it is 
+quite improbable.  The bird had, most likely, escaped from a cage, 
+or, maybe, it was a survivor of a number liberated some years ago 
+on Long Island.  There is no reason why I  the lark should not 
+thrive in this country as well as in Europe, and, if a few hundred 
+were liberated in any of our fields in April or May, I have little 
+doubt they would soon become established.   And what an acquisition 
+it would be!   As a songster, the lark is deserving of all the 
+praise that has been bestowed upon him.  He would not add so much 
+to the harmony or melody of our bird-choir as he would add to its 
+blithesomeness, joyousness, and power. His voice is the jocund and 
+inspiring voice of a spring morning.  It is like a ceaseless and 
+hilarious clapping of hands.  I was much interested in an account a 
+friend gave me of the first skylark he heard while abroad.  He had 
+been so full of the sights and wonders of the Old World that he had 
+quite forgotten the larks, when one day, as he was walking 
+somewhere near the sea, a brown bird started up in front of him, 
+and mounting upward began to sing.  It drew his attention, and as 
+the bird went skyward, pouring out his rapid and jubilant notes, 
+like bees from a hive in swarming-time, the truth suddenly flashed 
+upon the observer.
+
+"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, "that is a skylark; there is no 
+mistaking that bird."
+
+It is this unique and unmistakable character of the lark's song, 
+and its fountain-like sparkle and copiousness, that are the main 
+sources of its charm.
+
+
+   NOCTURNAL  INSECTS
+
+How the nocturnal insects, the tree-crickets and katydids, fail as 
+the heat fails!  They are musicians that play fast or slow, strong 
+or feeble, just as the heat of the season waxes or wanes; and they 
+play as long as life lasts: when their music ceases, they are dead.  
+The katydids begin in August, and cry with great vigor and spirit, 
+"Katy-did,"  "Katydid," or "Katy-did n't." Toward the last of 
+September they have taken in sail a good deal, and cry simply, 
+"Katy," "Katy," with frequent pauses and resting-spells.  In 
+October they languidly gasp or rasp, "Kate,"  "Kate,"  "Kate," and 
+before the end of the month they become entirely inaudible, though 
+I suspect that if one's ear were sharp enough he might still hear a 
+dying whisper, "Kate,"  "Kate."  Those cousins of Katy, the little 
+green purring tree-crickets, fail in the same way and at the same 
+time.  When their chorus is fullest, the warm autumn night fairly 
+throbs with the soft lulling undertone.  I notice that the sound is 
+in waves or has a kind of rhythmic beat. What a gentle, unobtrusive 
+background it forms for the sharp, reedy notes of the katydids!  As 
+the season advances, their life ebbs and ebbs: you hear one here 
+and one there, but the air is no longer filled with that regular 
+pulse-beat of sound. One by one the musicians cease, till, perhaps 
+on some mild night late in October, you hear--just hear and that is 
+all--the last feeble note of the last of these little harpers.
+
+
+   LOVE  AND  WAR AMONG THE  BIRDS
+
+In the spring movements of the fishes up the stream, toward their 
+spawning-beds, the females are the pioneers, appearing some days in 
+advance of the males.  With the birds the reverse is the case, the 
+males coming a week or ten days before the females.  The female 
+fish is usually the larger and stronger, and perhaps better able to 
+take the lead; among most reptiles the same fact holds, and 
+throughout the insect world there is to my knowledge no exception 
+to the rule.  Among the birds, the only exception I am aware of is 
+in the case of the birds of prey.  Here the female is the larger 
+and stronger.  If you see an exceptionally large and powerful 
+eagle, rest assured the sex is feminine.  But higher in the scale 
+the male comes to the front and leads in size and strength.
+
+But the first familiar spring birds are cocks; hence the songs and 
+tilts and rivalries.  Hence also the fact that they are slightly in 
+excess of the other sex, to make up for this greater exposure; 
+apparently no courting is done in the South, and no matches are 
+prearranged.  The males leave irregularly without any hint, I 
+suspect, to the females as to when and where they will meet them.  
+In the case of the passenger pigeon, however, the two sexes travel 
+together, as they do among the migrating water-fowls.
+
+With the song-birds, love-making begins as soon as the hens are 
+here.  So far as I have observed, the robin and the bluebird win 
+their mates by gentle and fond approaches; but certain of the 
+sparrows, notably the little social sparrow or "chippie," appear to 
+carry the case by storm.  The same proceeding may be observed among 
+the English sparrows, now fairly established on our soil.  Two or 
+three males beset a female, and a regular scuffle ensues.  The poor 
+bird is pulled and jostled and cajoled amid what appears to be the 
+greatest mirth and hilarity of her audacious suitors.  Her plumage 
+is plucked and ruffled; the rivals roll over each other and over 
+her; she extricates herself as best she can, and seems to say or 
+scream "no,"  "no," to every one of them with great emphasis.  What 
+finally determines her choice would be hard to say.  Our own 
+sparrows are far less noisy and obstreperous, but the same little 
+comedy in a milder form is often enacted among them.   When two 
+males have a tilt, they rise several feet in the air, beak to beak, 
+and seek to deal each other blows as they mount.  I have seen two 
+male chewinks facing each other and wrathfully impelled upward in 
+the same manner, while the female that was the bone of contention 
+between them regarded them unconcernedly from the near bushes.
+
+The bobolink is also a precipitate and impetuous wooer.  It is a 
+trial of speed, as if the female were to say, "Catch me and I am 
+yours," and she scurries away with all her might and main, often 
+with three or four dusky knights in hot pursuit.  When she takes to 
+cover in the grass, there is generally a squabble "down among the 
+tickle-tops," or under the buttercups, and "Winterseeble" or 
+"Conquedle" is the winner.
+
+In marked contrast to this violent love-making are the social and 
+festive reunions of the goldfinches about mating time.  All the 
+birds of a neighborhood gather in a treetop, and the trial 
+apparently becomes one of voice and song.  The contest is a most 
+friendly and happy one; all is harmony and gayety.  The females 
+chirrup and twitter, and utter their confiding "PAISLEY"  
+"PAISLEY," while the more gayly dressed males squeak and warble in 
+the most delightful strain.  The matches are apparently all made 
+and published during these gatherings; everybody is in a happy 
+frame of mind; there is no jealousy, and no rivalry but to see who 
+shall be gayest.
+
+It often happens among the birds that the male has a rival after 
+the nuptials have been celebrated and the work of housekeeping 
+fairly begun.  Every season a pair of phœbe-birds have built their 
+nest on an elbow in the spouting beneath the eaves of my house.  
+The past spring a belated male made desperate efforts to supplant 
+the lawful mate and gain possession of the unfinished nest.  There 
+was a battle fought about the premises every hour in the day for at 
+least a week.  The antagonists would frequently grapple and fall to 
+the ground, and keep their hold like two dogs.  On one such 
+occasion I came near covering them with my hat.  I believe the 
+intruder was finally worsted and withdrew from the place. One 
+noticeable feature of the affair was the apparent utter 
+indifference of the female, who went on with her nest-building as 
+if all was peace and harmony.  There can be little doubt that she 
+would have applauded and accepted the other bird had he finally 
+been the victor.
+
+One of the most graceful of warriors is the robin. I know few 
+prettier sights than two males challenging and curveting about each 
+other upon the grass in early spring.  Their attentions to each 
+other are so courteous and restrained. In alternate curves and 
+graceful sallies, they pursue and circumvent each other.  First one 
+hops a few feet, then the other, each one standing erect in true 
+military style while his fellow passes him and describes the 
+segment of an ellipse about him, both uttering the while a fine 
+complacent warble in a high but suppressed key.  Are they lovers or 
+enemies? the beholder wonders, until they make a spring and are 
+beak to beak in the twinkling of an eye, and perhaps mount a few 
+feet into the air, but rarely actually delivering blows upon each 
+other.  Every thrust is parried, every movement met.  They follow 
+each other with dignified composure about the fields or lawn, into 
+trees and upon the ground, with plumage slightly spread, breasts 
+glowing, their lisping, shrill war-song just audible.  It forms on 
+the whole the most civil and high-bred tilt to be witnessed during 
+the season.
+
+When the cock-robin makes love he is the same considerate, 
+deferential, but insinuating gallant.  The warble he makes use of 
+on that occasion is the same, so far as my ear can tell, as the one 
+he pipes when facing his rival.
+
+
+   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 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 runway; the dog cried and struggled to free himself, 
+and would listen to neither 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.
+
+
+   THE TREE-TOAD
+
+We can boast a greater assortment of toads and frogs in this 
+country than can any other land.  What a chorus goes up from our 
+ponds and marshes in spring!  The like of it cannot be heard 
+anywhere else under the sun.  In Europe it would certainly have 
+made an impression upon the literature. An attentive ear will 
+detect first one variety, then another, each occupying the stage 
+from three or four days to a week.  The latter part of April, when 
+the little peeping frogs are in full chorus, one comes upon places, 
+in his drives or walks late in the day, where the air fairly 
+palpitates with sound; from every little marshy hollow and spring 
+run there rises an impenetrable maze or cloud of shrill musical 
+voices.  After the peepers, the next frog to appear is the clucking 
+frog, a rather small, dark-brown frog, with a harsh, clucking note, 
+which later in the season becomes the well-known brown wood-frog.  
+Their chorus is heard for a few days only, while their spawn is 
+being deposited. In less than a week it ceases, and I never hear 
+them again till the next April.  As the weather gets warmer, the 
+toads take to the water, and set up that long-drawn musical tr-r-r-
+r-r-r-r-ing note. The voice of the bullfrog, who calls, according 
+to the boys, "jug o' rum,"  "jug o' rum,"  "pull the plug,"  "pull 
+the plug," is not heard much before June.  The peepers, the 
+clucking frog, and the bullfrog are the only ones that call in 
+chorus.  The most interesting and the most shy and withdrawn of all 
+our frogs and toads is the tree-toad,--the creature that, from the 
+old apple or cherry tree, or red cedar, announces the approach of 
+rain, and baffles your every effort to see or discover it.  It has 
+not (as some people imagine) exactly the power of the chameleon to 
+render itself invisible by assuming the color of the object it 
+perches upon, but it sits very close and still, and its mottled 
+back, of different shades of ashen gray, blends it perfectly with 
+the bark of nearly every tree.  The only change in its color I have 
+ever noticed is that it is lighter on a light-colored tree, like 
+the beech or soft maple, and darker on the apple, or cedar, or 
+pine.  Then it is usually hidden in some cavity or hollow of the 
+tree, when its voice appears to come from the outside.
+
+Most of my observations upon the habits of this creature run 
+counter to the authorities I have been able to consult on the 
+subject. 
+
+In the first place, the tree-toad is nocturnal in its habits, like 
+the common toad.  By day it remains motionless and concealed; by 
+night it is as alert and active as an owl, feeding and moving about 
+from tree to tree.  I have never known one to change its position 
+by day, and never knew one to fail to do so by night.  Last summer 
+one was discovered sitting against a window upon a climbing 
+rosebush.  The house had not been occupied for some days, and when 
+the curtain was drawn the toad was discovered and closely observed.  
+His light gray color harmonized perfectly with the unpainted 
+woodwork of the house.   During the day he never moved a muscle, 
+but next morning he was gone.  A friend of mine caught one, and 
+placed it under a tumbler on his table at night, leaving the edge 
+of the glass raised about the eighth of an inch to admit the air.  
+During the night he was awakened by a strange sound in his room.  
+Pat, pat, pat went some object, now here, now there, among the 
+furniture, or upon the walls and doors.   On investigating the 
+matter, he found that by some means his tree-toad had escaped from 
+under the glass, and was leaping in a very lively manner about the 
+room, producing the sound he had heard when it alighted upon the 
+door, or wall, or other perpendicular surface.
+
+The home of the tree-toad, I am convinced, is usually a hollow limb 
+or other cavity in the tree; here he makes his headquarters, and 
+passes most of the day.  For two years a pair of them frequented an 
+old apple-tree near my house, occasionally sitting at the mouth of 
+a cavity that led into a large branch, but usually their voices 
+were heard from within the cavity itself.  On one occasion, while 
+walking in the woods in early May, I heard the voice of a tree-toad 
+but a few yards from me.  Cautiously following up the sound, I 
+decided, after some delay, that it proceeded from the trunk of a 
+small soft maple; the tree was hollow, the entrance to the interior 
+being a few feet from the ground.  I could not discover the toad, 
+but was so convinced that it was concealed in the tree, that I 
+stopped up the hole, determined to return with an axe, when I had 
+time, and cut the trunk open.  A week elapsed before I again went 
+to the woods, when, on cutting into the cavity of the tree, I found 
+a pair of tree-toads, male and female, and a large, shelless snail.  
+Whether the presence of the snail was accidental, or whether these 
+creatures associated together for some purpose, I do not know.  The 
+male toad was easily distinguished from the female by its large 
+head, and more thin, slender, and angular body.  The female was 
+much the more beautiful, both in form and color.  The cavity, which 
+was long and irregular, was evidently their home; it had been 
+nicely cleaned out, and was a snug, safe apartment.
+
+The finding of the two sexes together, under such circumstances and 
+at that time of the year, suggests the inquiry whether they do not 
+breed away from the water, as others of our toads are known at 
+times to do, and thus skip the tadpole state.  I have several times 
+seen the ground, after a June shower, swarming with minute toads, 
+out to wet their jackets.  Some of them were no larger than 
+crickets. They were a long distance from the water, and had 
+evidently been hatched on the land, and had never been polliwogs.  
+Whether the tree-toad breeds in trees or on the land, yet remains 
+to be determined. [FOOTNOTE: It now (1895) seems well established 
+that both common toads and tree-toads pass the first period of 
+their lives in water as tadpoles, and that both undergo their 
+metamorphosis when very small.  As soon as the change is effected, 
+the little toads leave the water and scatter themselves over the 
+country with remarkable rapidity, traveling chiefly by night, but 
+showing themselves in the daytime after showers.]
+
+Another fact in the natural history of this creature, not set down 
+in the books, is that they pass the winter in a torpid state in the 
+ground, or in stumps and hollow trees, instead of in the mud of 
+ponds and marshes, like true frogs, as we have been taught.  The 
+pair in the old apple-tree above referred to, I heard on a warm, 
+moist day late in November, and again early in April.  On the 
+latter occasion, I reached my hand down into the cavity of the tree 
+and took out one of the toads.  It was the first I had heard, and I 
+am convinced it had passed the winter in the moist, mud-like mass 
+of rotten wood that partially filled the cavity.  It had a fresh, 
+delicate tint, as if it had not before seen the light that spring.  
+The president of a Western college writes in "Science News" that 
+two of his students found one in the winter in an old stump which 
+they demolished; and a person whose veracity I have no reason to 
+doubt sends me a specimen that he dug out of the ground in December 
+while hunting for Indian relics.  The place was on the top of a 
+hill, under a pine-tree.  The ground was frozen on the surface, and 
+the toad was, of course, torpid.
+
+During the present season, I obtained additional proof of the fact 
+that the tree-toad hibernates on dry land. The 12th of November was 
+a warm, spring-like day; wind southwest, with slight rain in the 
+afternoon,--just the day to bring things out of their winter 
+retreats.  As I was about to enter my door at dusk, my eye fell 
+upon what proved to be the large tree-toad in question, sitting on 
+some low stone-work at the foot of a terrace a few feet from the 
+house.  I paused to observe his movements.  Presently he started on 
+his travels across the yard toward the lawn in front.  He leaped 
+about three feet at a time, with long pauses between each leap.  
+For fear of losing him as it grew darker, I captured him, and kept 
+him under the coal sieve till morning.  He was very active at night 
+trying to escape.  In the morning, I amused myself with him for 
+some time in the kitchen.  I found he could adhere to a window-
+pane, but could not ascend it; gradually his hold yielded, till he 
+sprang off on the casing.  I observed that, in sitting upon the 
+floor or upon the ground, he avoided bringing his toes in contact 
+with the surface, as if they were too tender or delicate for such 
+coarse uses, but sat upon the hind part of his feet.  Said toes had 
+a very bungling, awkward appearance at such times; they looked like 
+hands encased in gray woolen gloves much too large for them.  Their 
+round, flattened ends, especially when not in use, had a comically 
+helpless look.
+
+After a while I let my prisoner escape into the open air.  The 
+weather had grown much colder, and there was a hint of coming 
+frost.  The toad took the hint at once, and, after hopping a few 
+yards from the door to the edge of a grassy bank, began to prepare 
+for winter.  It was a curious proceeding.  He went into the ground 
+backward, elbowing himself through the turf with the sharp joints 
+of his hind legs, and going down in a spiral manner.  His progress 
+was very slow: at night I could still see him by lifting the grass; 
+and as the weather changed again to warm, with southerly winds 
+before morning, he stopped digging entirely.  The next day I took 
+him out, and put him into a bottomless tub sunk into the ground and 
+filled with soft earth, leaves, and leaf mould, where he passed the 
+winter safely, and came out fresh and bright in the spring.
+
+The little peeping frogs lead a sort of arboreal life, too, a part 
+of the season, but they are quite different from the true tree-
+toads above described.  They appear to leave the marshes in May, 
+and to take to the woods or bushes.  I have never seen them on 
+trees, but upon low shrubs.  They do not seem to be climbers, but 
+perchers.  I caught one in May, in some low bushes a few rods from 
+the swamp.  It perched upon the small twigs like a bird, and would 
+leap about among them, sure of its hold every time.  I was first 
+attracted by its piping. I brought it home, and it piped for one 
+twilight in a bush in my yard and then was gone.  I do not think 
+they pipe much after leaving the water.  I have found them early in 
+April upon the ground in the woods, and again late in the fall.
+
+In November, 1879, the warm, moist weather brought them out in 
+numbers. They were hopping about everywhere upon the fallen leaves.  
+Within a small space I captured six.  Some of them were the hue of 
+the tan-colored leaves, probably Pickering's hyla, and some were 
+darker, according to the locality.  Of course they do not go to the 
+marshes to winter, else they would not wait so late in the season.  
+I examined the ponds and marshes, and found bullfrogs buried in the 
+mud, but no peepers.
+
+
+   THE  SPRING  BIRDS
+
+We never know the precise time the birds leave us in the fall: they 
+do not go suddenly; their departure is like that of an army of 
+occupation in no hurry to be off; they keep going and going, and we 
+hardly know when the last straggler is gone.  Not so their return 
+in the spring: then it is like an army of invasion, and we know the 
+very day when the first scouts appear.  It is a memorable event.  
+Indeed, it is always a surprise to me, and one of the compensations 
+of our abrupt and changeable climate, this suddenness with which 
+the birds come in spring,--in fact, with which spring itself comes, 
+alighting, maybe, to tarry only a day or two, but real and genuine, 
+for all that. When March arrives, we do not know what a day may 
+bring forth.  It is like turning over a leaf, a new chapter of 
+startling incidents lying just on the other side.
+
+A few days ago, Winter had not perceptibly relaxed his hold; then 
+suddenly he began to soften a little, and a warm haze to creep up 
+from the south, but not a solitary bird, save the winter residents, 
+was to be seen or heard.  Next day the sun seemed to have drawn 
+immensely nearer; his beams were full of power; and we said, 
+"Behold the first spring morning!  And, as if to make the prophecy 
+complete, there is the note of a bluebird, and it is not yet nine 
+o'clock."  Then others, and still others, were heard.  How did they 
+know it was going to be a suitable day for them to put in an 
+appearance?  It seemed as if they must have been waiting somewhere 
+close by for the first warm day, like actors behind the scenes,--
+the moment the curtain was lifted, they were ready and rushed upon 
+the stage.  The third warm day, and, behold, all the principal 
+performers come rushing in,--song sparrows, cow blackbirds, 
+grackles, the meadowlark, cedar-birds, the phœbe-bird, and, hark! 
+what bird laughter was that? the robins, hurrah! the robins! Not 
+two or three, but a score or two of them; they are following the 
+river valley north, and they stop in the trees from time to time, 
+and give vent to their gladness.  It is like a summer picnic of 
+school-children suddenly let loose in a wood; they sing, shout, 
+whistle, squeal, call, in the most blithesome strains.  The warm 
+wave has brought the birds upon its crest; or some barrier has 
+given way, the levee of winter has broken, and spring comes like an 
+inundation.  No doubt, the snow and the frost will stop the 
+crevasse again, but only for a brief season.
+
+Between the 10th and the 15th of March, in the Middle and Eastern 
+States, we are pretty sure to have one or more of these spring 
+days.  Bright days, clear days, may have been plenty all winter; 
+but the air was a desert, the sky transparent ice; now the sky is 
+full of radiant warmth, and the air of a half-articulate murmur and 
+awakening.  How still the morning is!  It is at such times that we 
+discover what music there is in the souls of the little slate-
+colored snowbirds.  How they squeal, and chatter, and chirp, and 
+trill, always in scattered troops of fifty or a hundred, filling 
+the air with a fine sibilant chorus!  That joyous and childlike 
+"chew,"  "chew,"  "chew" is very expressive.  Through this medley 
+of finer songs and calls, there is shot, from time to time, the 
+clear, strong note of the meadowlark.  It comes from some field or 
+tree farther away, and cleaves the air like an arrow.  The reason 
+why the birds always appear first in the morning, and not in the 
+afternoon, is that in migrating they travel by night, and stop and 
+feed and disport themselves by day.  They come by the owl train, 
+and are here before we are up in the morning.
+
+
+   A  LONE  QUEEN
+
+Once, while walking in the woods, I saw quite a large nest in the 
+top of a pine-tree.  On climbing up to it, I found that it had 
+originally been a crow's nest. Then a red squirrel had appropriated 
+it; he had filled up the cavity with the fine inner bark of the red 
+cedar, and made himself a dome-shaped nest upon the crow's 
+foundation of coarse twigs.  It is probable that the flying 
+squirrel, or the white-footed mouse, had been the next tenants, for 
+the finish of the interior suggested their dainty taste.  But when 
+I found it, its sole occupant was a bumblebee,--the mother or queen 
+bee, just planting her colony.  She buzzed very loud and 
+complainingly, and stuck up her legs in protest against my rude 
+inquisitiveness, but refused to vacate the premises.  She had only 
+one sack or cell constructed, in which she had deposited her first 
+egg, and, beside that, a large loaf of bread, probably to feed the 
+young brood with, as they should be hatched.  It looked like Boston 
+brown bread, but I examined it and found it to be a mass of dark 
+brown pollen, quite soft and pasty.  In fact, it was unleavened 
+bread, and had not been got at the baker's.  A few weeks later, if 
+no accident befell her, she had a good working colony of a dozen or 
+more bees.
+
+This was not an unusual incident. Our bumblebee, so far as I have 
+observed, invariably appropriates a mouse-nest for the site of its 
+colony, never excavating a place in the ground, nor conveying 
+materials for a nest, to be lined with wax, like the European 
+species.  Many other of our wild creatures take up with the 
+leavings of their betters or strongers.  Neither the skunk nor the 
+rabbit digs his own hole, but takes up with that of a wood-chuck, 
+or else hunts out a natural den among the rocks.  In England the 
+rabbit burrows in the ground to such an extent that in places the 
+earth is honeycombed by them, and the walker steps through the 
+surface into their galleries.  Our white-footed mouse has been 
+known to take up his abode in a hornet's nest, furnishing the 
+interior to suit his taste.  A few of our birds also avail 
+themselves of the work of others, as the titmouse, the brown 
+creeper, the bluebird, and the house wren.  But in every case they 
+refurnish the tenement: the wren carries feathers into the cavity 
+excavated by the woodpeckers, the bluebird carries in fine straws, 
+and the chickadee lays down a fine wool mat upon the floors.  When 
+the high-hole occupies the same cavity another year, he deepens and 
+enlarges it; the phœbe-bird, in taking up her old nest, puts in a 
+new lining; so does the robin; but cases of reoccupancy of an old 
+nest by the last-named birds are rare.
+
+
+   A BOLD  LEAPER
+
+One reason, doubtless, why squirrels are so bold and reckless in 
+leaping through the trees is, that, if they miss their hold and 
+fall, they sustain no injury.  Every species of tree squirrel seems 
+to be capable of a sort of rudimentary flying,--at least of making 
+itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall or a leap 
+from a great height.  The so-called flying squirrel does this the 
+most perfectly.  It opens its furry vestments, leaps into the air, 
+and sails down the steep incline from the top of one tree to the 
+foot of the next as lightly as a bird.  But other squirrels know 
+the same trick, only their coat-skirts are not so broad.  One day 
+my dog treed a red squirrel in a tall hickory that stood in a 
+meadow on the side of a steep hill.  To see what the squirrel would 
+do when closely pressed, I climbed the tree.  As I drew near, he 
+took refuge in the topmost branch, and then, as I came on, he 
+boldly leaped into the air, spread himself out upon it, and, with a 
+quick, tremulous motion of his tail and legs, descended quite 
+slowly and landed upon the ground thirty feet below me, apparently 
+none the worse for the leap, for he ran with great speed and 
+escaped the dog in another tree.
+
+A recent American traveler in Mexico gives a still more striking 
+instance of this power of squirrels partially to neutralize the 
+force of gravity when leaping or falling through the air.  Some 
+boys had caught a Mexican black squirrel, nearly as large as a cat.  
+It had escaped from them once, and, when pursued, had taken a leap 
+of sixty feet, from the top of a pine-tree down upon the roof of a 
+house, without injury.  This feat had led the grandmother of one of 
+the boys to declare that the squirrel was bewitched, and the boys 
+proposed to put the matter to further test by throwing the squirrel 
+down a precipice six hundred feet high.  Our traveler interfered, 
+to see that the squirrel had fair play.  The prisoner was conveyed 
+in a pillow-slip to the edge of the cliff, and the slip opened, so 
+that he might have his choice, whether to remain a captive or to 
+take the leap.  He looked down the awful abyss, and then back and 
+sidewise,--his eyes glistening, his form crouching.  Seeing no 
+escape in any other direction, "he took a flying leap into space, 
+and fluttered rather than fell into the abyss below.   His legs 
+began to work like those of a swimming poodle-dog, but quicker and 
+quicker, while his tail, slightly elevated, spread out like a 
+feather fan.  A rabbit of the same weight would have made the trip 
+in about twelve seconds; the squirrel protracted it for more than 
+half a minute," and "landed on a ledge of limestone, where we could 
+see him plainly squat on his hind legs and smooth his ruffled fur, 
+after which he made for the creek with a flourish of his tail, took 
+a good drink, and scampered away into the willow thicket."
+
+The story at first blush seems incredible, but I have no doubt our 
+red squirrel would have made the leap safely; then why not the 
+great black squirrel, since its parachute would be proportionately 
+large?
+
+The tails of the squirrels are broad and long and flat, not short 
+and small like those of gophers, chipmunks, woodchucks, and other 
+ground rodents, and when they leap or fall through the air the tail 
+is arched and rapidly vibrates.  A squirrel's tail, therefore, is 
+something more than ornament, something more than a flag; it not 
+only aids him in flying, but it serves as a cloak, which he wraps 
+about him when he sleeps.  Thus, some animals put their tails to 
+various uses, while others seem to have no use for them whatever.  
+What use for a tail has a wood-chuck, or a weasel, or a mouse? Has 
+not the mouse yet learned that it could get in its hole sooner if 
+it had no tail?  The mole and the meadow mouse have very short 
+tails.  Rats, no doubt, put their tails to various uses.  The 
+rabbit has no use for a tail,--it would be in its way; while its 
+manner of sleeping is such that it does not need a tail to tuck 
+itself up with, as do the coon and the fox. The dog talks with his 
+tail; the tail of the possum is prehensile; the porcupine uses his 
+tail in climbing and for defense; the beaver as a tool or trowel; 
+while the tail of the skunk serves as a screen behind which it 
+masks its terrible battery.
+
+
+   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 the 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 boulder, 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 WOODchuck as a 
+FIELDchuck. 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 sideling 
+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 sidehill, 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 wood-chuck 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 wood-chuck, when first discovered, he crouched 
+down to the ground, and, resting his head on his paws, watched him.  
+The woodchuck kept working away from his 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 woodchuck was on the outlook, again 
+Cuff was motionless and hugging the ground.  As the dog neared his 
+victim he was partially hidden by a swell in the earth, but still 
+the woodchuck from his outlook reported "All right," when Cuff, 
+having not twice as far to run as the chuck, threw all stealthiness 
+aside and rushed directly for the hole.  At that moment the 
+woodchuck discovered his danger, and, seeing that it was a race for 
+life, leaped as I never saw marmot leap before. But he was two 
+seconds too late, his retreat was cut off, and the powerful jaws of 
+the old dog closed 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 sidehill. 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.
+
+
+   A  GOOD  SEASON FOR THE  BIRDS
+
+The season of 1880 seems to have been exceptionally favorable to 
+the birds.  The warm, early spring, the absence of April snows and 
+of long, cold rains in May and June,--indeed, the exceptional heat 
+and dryness of these months, and the freedom from violent storms 
+and tempests throughout the summer,--all worked together for the 
+good of the birds.  Their nests were not broken up or torn from the 
+trees, nor their young chilled and destroyed by the wet and the 
+cold.  The drenching, protracted rains that make the farmer's seed 
+rot or lie dormant in the ground in May or June, and the summer 
+tempests that uproot the trees or cause them to lash and bruise 
+their foliage, always bring disaster to the birds.  As a result of 
+our immunity from these things the past season, the small birds in 
+the fall were perhaps never more abundant.  Indeed, I never 
+remember to have seen so many of certain kinds, notably the social 
+and the bush sparrows.  The latter literally swarmed in the fields 
+and vineyards; and as it happened that for the first time a large 
+number of grapes were destroyed by birds, the little sparrow, in 
+some localities, was accused of being the depredator.  But he is 
+innocent.  He never touches fruit of any kind, but lives upon seeds 
+and insects.  What attracted this sparrow to the vineyards in such 
+numbers was mainly the covert they afforded from small hawks, and 
+probably also the seeds of various weeds that had been allowed to 
+ripen there.  The grape-destroyer was a bird of another color, 
+namely, the Baltimore oriole.  One fruit-grower on the Hudson told 
+me he lost at least a ton of grapes by the birds, and in the 
+western part of New York and in Ohio and in Canada, I hear the 
+vineyards suffered severely from the depredations of the oriole.   
+The oriole has a sharp, dagger-like bill, and he seems to be 
+learning rapidly how easily he can puncture fruit with it.   He has 
+come to be about the worst cherry bird we have.   He takes the worm 
+first, and then he takes the cherry the worm was after, or rather 
+he bleeds it; as with the grapes, he carries none away with him, 
+but wounds them all.   He is welcome to all the fruit he can eat, 
+but why should he murder every cherry on the tree, or every grape 
+in the cluster?   He is as wanton as a sheep-killing dog, that will 
+not stop with enough, but slaughters every ewe in the flock.   The 
+oriole is peculiarly exempt from the dangers that beset most of our 
+birds: its nest is all but impervious to the rain, and the 
+squirrel, or the jay, or the crow cannot rob it without great 
+difficulty.   It is a pocket which it would not be prudent for 
+either jay or squirrel to attempt to explore when the owner, with 
+his dagger-like beak, is about; and the crow cannot alight upon the 
+slender, swaying branch from which it is usually pendent.   Hence 
+the orioles are doubtless greatly on the increase.
+
+There has been an unusual number of shrikes the past fall and 
+winter; like the hawks, they follow in the wake of the little birds 
+and prey upon them.  Some seasons pass and I never see a shrike.   
+This year I have seen at least a dozen while passing along the 
+road.  One day I saw one carrying its prey in its feet,--a 
+performance which I supposed it incapable of, as it is not equipped 
+for this business like a rapacious bird, but has feet like a robin.  
+One wintry evening, near sunset, I saw one alight on the top of a 
+tree by the  roadside, with some small object in its beak.  I 
+paused to observe it.  Presently it flew down into a scrubby old 
+apple-tree, and attempted to impale the object upon a thorn or 
+twig.  It was occupied in this way some moments, no twig or knob 
+proving quite satisfactory.  A little screech owl was evidently 
+watching the proceedings from his doorway in the trunk of a decayed 
+apple-tree ten or a dozen rods distant. Twilight was just falling, 
+and the owl had come up from his snug retreat in the hollow trunk, 
+and was waiting for the darkness to deepen before venturing forth.  
+I was first advised of his presence by seeing him approaching 
+swiftly on silent, level wing.  The shrike did not see him till the 
+owl was almost within the branches.  He then dropped his game, 
+which proved to be a part of a shrew-mouse, and darted back into 
+the thick cover  uttering a loud, discordant squawk, as one would 
+say, "Scat! scat! scat!"  The owl alighted, and was, perhaps, 
+looking about him for the shrike's impaled game, when I drew near.  
+On seeing me, he reversed his movement precipitately, flew straight 
+back to the old tree, and alighted in the entrance to the cavity.  
+As I approached, he did not so much seem to move as to diminish in 
+size, like an object dwindling in the distance; he depressed his 
+plumage, and, with his eye fixed upon me, began slowly to back and 
+sidle into his retreat till he faded from my sight. The shrike 
+wiped his beak upon the branches, cast an eye down at me and at his 
+lost mouse, and then flew away.  He was a remarkably fine 
+specimen,--his breast and under parts as white as snow, and his 
+coat of black and ashen gray appearing very bright and fresh.  A 
+few nights afterward, as I passed that way, I saw the little owl 
+again sitting in his doorway, waiting for the twilight to deepen, 
+and undisturbed by the passers-by; but when I paused to observe 
+him, he saw that he was discovered, and he slunk back into his den 
+as on the former occasion.
+
+
+   SHAKESPEARE'S NATURAL HISTORY
+
+It is surprising that so profuse and prodigal a poet as 
+Shakespeare, and one so bold in his dealings with human nature, 
+should seldom or never make a mistake in his dealings with physical 
+nature, or take an unwarranted liberty with her.  True it is that 
+his allusions to nature are always incidental,--never his main 
+purpose or theme, as with many later poets; yet his accuracy and 
+closeness to fact, and his wide and various knowledge of unbookish 
+things, are seen in his light "touch and go" phrases and 
+comparisons as clearly as in his more deliberate and central work.
+
+In "Much Ado about Nothing," BENEDICK says to MARGARET:--
+
+"Thy wit is as quick as the greyhound's mouth--it catches."
+
+One marked difference between the greyhound and all other hounds 
+and dogs is, that it can pick up its game while running at full 
+speed, a feat that no other dog can do.  The foxhound, or farm dog, 
+will run over a fox or a rabbit many tunes without being able to 
+seize it.
+
+In "Twelfth Night" the clown tells VIOLA that
+
+"Fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings--the 
+husband's the bigger."
+
+The pilchard closely resembles the herring, but is thicker and 
+heavier, with larger scales.
+
+In the same play, MARIA, seeing MALVOLIO coming, says:--
+
+"Here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling."
+
+Shakespeare, then, knew that fact so well known to poachers, and 
+known also to many an American schoolboy, namely, that a trout 
+likes to be tickled, or behaves as if he did, and that by gently 
+tickling his sides and belly you can so mesmerize him, as it were, 
+that he will allow you to get your hands in position to clasp him 
+firmly.  The British poacher takes the jack by the same tactics: he 
+tickles the jack on the belly; the fish slowly rises in the water 
+till it comes near the surface, when, the poacher having insinuated 
+both hands under him, he is suddenly scooped out and thrown upon 
+the land.
+
+Indeed, Shakespeare seems to have known intimately the ways and 
+habits of most of the wild creatures of Britain. He had the kind of 
+knowledge of them that only the countryman has. In "As You Like 
+It," JAQUES tells AMIENS:--
+
+"I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs."
+
+Every gamekeeper, and every farmer for that matter, knows how 
+destructive the weasel and its kind are to birds' eggs, and to the 
+eggs of game-birds and of domestic fowls.
+
+In "Love's Labor's Lost," BIRON says of BOYET:--
+
+"This fellow picks up wit as pigeons peas."
+
+Pigeons dp not pick up peas in this country, but they do in 
+England, and are often very damaging to the farmer on that account.  
+Shakespeare knew also the peculiar manner in which they feed their 
+young,--a manner that has perhaps given rise to the expression 
+"sucking dove."  In "As You Like It" is this passage:--
+
+"CELIA.   Here comes Monsieur Le Beau.
+
+"ROSALIND.   With his mouth full of news.
+
+"CELIA.  Which he will put on us as pigeons feed their young.
+
+"ROSALIND.   Then shall we be news-crammed."
+
+When the mother pigeon feeds her young she brings the food, not in 
+her beak like other birds, but in her crop; she places her beak 
+between the open mandibles of her young, and fairly crams the food, 
+which is delivered by a peculiar pumping movement, down its throat.  
+She furnishes a capital illustration of the eager, persistent 
+newsmonger.
+
+"Out of their burrows like rabbits after rain" is a comparison that 
+occurs in "Coriolanus."  In our Northern or New England States we 
+should have to substitute woodchucks for rabbits, as our rabbits do 
+not burrow, but sit all day in their forms under a bush or amid the 
+weeds, and as they are not seen moving about after a rain, or at 
+all by day; but in England Shakespeare's line is exactly 
+descriptive.
+
+Says BOTTOM to the fairy COBWEB in "Midsummer Night's Dream:"--
+
+"Mounsieur Cobweb; good mounsieur, get you your weapons in your 
+hand, and kill me a red-hipp'd humble-bee on the top of a thistle, 
+and, good mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag."
+
+This command might be executed in this country,
+
+for we have the "red-hipp'd humble-bee;" and we have the thistle, 
+and there is no more likely place to look for the humblebee in 
+midsummer than on a thistle-blossom.
+
+But the following picture of a "wet spell" is more English than 
+American:--
+
+ "The ox hath therefore stretch'd his 
+       yoke in vain,
+   The plowman lost his sweat;  and
+       the green corn
+   Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a 
+       beard;
+   The fold stands empty in the 
+       drowned field,
+   And crows are fatted with the 
+       murrain flock."
+
+Shakespeare knew the birds and wild fowl, and knew them perhaps as 
+a hunter, as well as a poet. At least this passage would indicate 
+as much:--
+
+ "As wild geese that the creeping
+       fowler eye,
+   Or russet-pated choughs, many in 
+       sort,
+   Rising and cawing at the gun's
+       report, 
+   Sever themselves and madly sweep 
+       the sky."
+
+In calling the choughs "russet-pated" he makes the bill tinge the 
+whole head, or perhaps gives the effect of the birds' markings when 
+seen at a distance; the bill is red, the head is black. The chough 
+is a species of crow.
+
+A poet must know the birds well to make one of his characters say, 
+when he had underestimated a man, "I took this lark for a bunting," 
+as LAFEU says of PAROLLES in "All's Well that Ends Well."  The 
+English bunting is a field-bird like the lark, and much resembles 
+the latter in form and color, but is far inferior as a songster.  
+Indeed, Shakespeare shows his familiarity with nearly all the 
+British birds.
+
+ "The ousel-cock, so black of hue,
+       With orange-tawny bill,
+   The throstle with his note so true, 
+       The wren with little quill.
+
+ "The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
+       The plain-song cuckoo gray,
+   Whose note full many a man doth 
+   mark.
+       And dares not answer nay."
+
+In "Much Ado about Nothing" we get a glimpse of the lapwing:--
+
+ "For look where Beatrice, like a 
+       lapwing, runs
+   Close by the ground, to hear our 
+       conference."
+
+The lapwing is a kind of plover, and is very swift of foot.  When 
+trying to avoid being seen they run rapidly with depressed heads, 
+or "close by the ground," as the poet puts it.  In the same scene, 
+HERO says of URSULA:--
+
+ "I know her spirits are as coy and wild
+   As haggards of the rock."
+
+The haggard falcon is a species of hawk found in North Wales and in 
+Scotland.  It breeds on high shelving cliffs and precipitous rocks.  
+Had Shakespeare been an "amateur poacher" in his youth?  He had a 
+poacher's knowledge of the wild creatures.  He knew how fresh the 
+snake appears after it has cast its skin; how the hedgehog makes 
+himself up into a ball and leaves his "prickles" in whatever 
+touches him; how the butterfly comes from the grub; how the fox 
+carries the goose; where the squirrel hides his store; where the 
+martlet builds its nest, etc.
+
+ "Now is the woodcock near the gin,"
+
+says FABIAN, in "Twelfth Night," and
+
+ "Stalk on, stalk on; the fowl sits,"
+
+says CLAUDIO to LEONATO, in "Much Ado."
+
+ "Instruct thee how
+   To snare the nimble marmozet,"
+
+says CALIBAN, in The Tempest."  Sings the fool in "Lear:"--
+
+ "The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo
+       so long
+   That it had it head bit off by it 
+       young."
+
+The hedge-sparrow is one of the favorite birds upon which the 
+European cuckoo imposes the rearing of its young.  If Shakespeare 
+had made the house sparrow, or the blackbird, or the bunting, or 
+any of the granivorous, hard-billed birds, the foster-parent of the 
+cuckoo, his natural history would have been at fault.
+
+Shakespeare knew the flowers, too, and knew their times and 
+seasons:--
+
+ "When daisies pied, and violets blue, 
+       And lady smocks all silver-white, 
+   And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
+       Do paint the meadows with delight."
+
+They have, in England, the cuckoo-flower, which comes in April and 
+is lilac in color, and the cuckoo-pint, which is much like our 
+"Jack in the pulpit;" but the poet does not refer to either of 
+these (if he did, we would catch him tripping), but to buttercups, 
+which are called by rural folk in Britain "cuckoo-buds."
+
+In England the daffodil blooms in February and March; the swallow 
+comes in April usually; hence the truth of Shakespeare's lines:--
+
+ "Daffodils,
+   That come before the swallow
+       dares, and take
+   The winds of March with beauty."
+
+The only flaw I notice in Shakespeare's natural history is in his 
+treatment of the honey-bee, but this was a flaw in the knowledge of 
+the times as well.  The history of this insect was not rightly read 
+till long after Shakespeare wrote.  He pictures a colony of bees as 
+a kingdom, with
+
+ "A king and officers of sorts"
+
+(see "Henry V."), whereas a colony of bees is an absolute 
+democracy; the rulers and governors and "officers of sorts" are the 
+workers, the masses, the common people.  A strict regard to fact 
+also would spoil those fairy tapers in "Midsummer Night's Dream,"--
+
+ "The honey-bags steal from the
+       humble-bees,
+   And, for night-tapers, crop their
+       waxen thighs,
+   And light them at the fiery
+       glow-worm's eyes,"--
+
+since it is not wax that bees bear upon their thighs, but pollen, 
+the dust of the flowers, with which bees make their bread.  Wax is 
+made from honey.
+
+The science or the meaning is also a little obscure in this phrase, 
+which occurs in one of the plays:--
+
+ "One heat another heat expels,"--
+
+as one nail drives out another, or as one love cures another.
+
+In a passage in "The Tempest" he speaks of the ivy as if it were 
+parasitical, like the mistletoe:--
+
+ "Now, he was
+   The ivy which had hid my princely 
+        trunk,
+   And sucked my verdure out on't."
+
+I believe it is not a fact that the ivy sucks the juice out of the 
+trees it climbs upon, though it may much interfere with their 
+growth.  Its aerial rootlets are for support alone, as is the case 
+with all climbers that are not twiners.  But this may perhaps be 
+regarded as only a poetic license on the part of Shakespeare; the 
+human ivy he was picturing no doubt fed upon the tree that 
+supported it, whether the real ivy does or not.
+
+It is also probably untrue that
+
+ "The poor beetle that we tread 
+       upon, 
+   In corporal sufferance finds a pang
+       as great 
+   As when a giant dies,"
+
+though it has suited the purpose of other poets besides Shakespeare 
+to say so.  The higher and more complex the organization, the more 
+acute the pleasure and the pain.  A toad has been known to live for 
+days with the upper part of its head cut away by a scythe, and a 
+beetle will survive for hours upon the fisherman's hook.  It 
+perhaps causes a grasshopper less pain to detach one of its legs 
+than it does a man to remove a single hair from his beard.  Nerves 
+alone feel pain, and the nervous system of a beetle is a very 
+rudimentary affair.
+
+In "Coriolanus" there is a comparison which implies that a man can 
+tread upon his own shadow,--a difficult feat in northern countries 
+at all times except midday; Shakespeare is particular to mention 
+the time of day:--
+
+ "Such a nature,
+   Tickled with good success, disdains
+       the shadow
+   Which he treads on at noon."
+
+
+
+VI
+
+FOOTPATHS
+
+AN intelligent English woman, spending a few years in this country 
+with her family, says that one of her serious disappointments is 
+that she finds it utterly impossible to enjoy nature here as she 
+can at home--so much nature as we have and yet no way of getting at 
+it; no paths, or byways, or stiles, or foot-bridges, no provision 
+for the pedestrian outside of the public road.  One would think the 
+people had no feet and legs in this country, or else did not know 
+how to use them.  Last summer she spent the season near a small 
+rural village in the valley of the Connecticut, but it seemed as if 
+she had not been in the country: she could not come at the 
+landscape; she could not reach a wood or a hill or a pretty nook 
+anywhere without being a trespasser, or getting entangled in swamps 
+or in fields of grass and grain, or having her course blocked by a 
+high and difficult fence; no private ways, no grassy lanes; nobody 
+walking in the fields or woods, nobody walking anywhere for 
+pleasure, but everybody in carriages or wagons.
+
+She was staying a mile from the village, and every day used to walk 
+down to the post-office for her mail; but instead of a short and 
+pleasant cut across the fields, as there would have been in 
+England, she was obliged to take the highway and face the dust and 
+the mud and the staring people in their carriages.
+
+She complained, also, of the absence of bird voices,--so silent the 
+fields and groves and orchards were, compared with what she had 
+been used to at home. The most noticeable midsummer sound 
+everywhere was the shrill, brassy crescendo of the locust.
+
+All this is unquestionably true.  There is far less bird music here 
+than in England, except possibly in May and June, though, if the 
+first impressions of the Duke of Argyle are to be trusted, there is 
+much less even then. The duke says: "Although I was in the woods 
+and fields of Canada and of the States in the richest moments of 
+the spring, I heard little of that burst of song which in England 
+comes from the blackcap, and the garden warbler, and the 
+whitethroat, and the reed warbler, and the common wren, and 
+(locally) from the nightingale."   Our birds are more withdrawn 
+than the English, and their notes more plaintive and intermittent.    
+Yet there are a few days here early in May, when the house wren, 
+the oriole, the orchard starling, the kingbird, the bobolink, and 
+the wood thrush first arrive, that are so full of music, especially 
+in the morning, that one is loath to believe there is anything 
+fuller or finer even in England.  As walkers, and lovers of rural 
+scenes and pastimes, we do not approach our British cousins.  It is 
+a seven days' wonder to see anybody walking in this country except 
+on a wager or in a public hall or skating-rink, as an exhibition 
+and trial of endurance.
+
+Countrymen do not walk except from necessity, and country women 
+walk far less than their city sisters.  When city people come to 
+the country they do not walk, because that would be conceding too 
+much to the country; beside, they would soil their shoes, and would 
+lose the awe and respect which their imposing turn-outs inspire.  
+Then they find the country dull; it is like water or milk after 
+champagne; they miss the accustomed stimulus, both mind and body 
+relax, and walking is too great an effort.
+
+There are several obvious reasons why the English should be better 
+or more habitual walkers than we are.  Taken the year round, their 
+climate is much more favorable to exercise in the open air.  Their 
+roads are better, harder, and smoother, and there is a place for 
+the man and a place for the horse. Their country houses and 
+churches and villages are not strung upon the highway as ours are, 
+but are nestled here and there with reference to other things than 
+convenience in "getting out." Hence the grassy lanes and paths 
+through the fields. 
+
+Distances are not so great in that country; the population occupies 
+less space.  Again, the land has been, longer occupied and is more 
+thoroughly subdued; it is easier to get about the fields; life has 
+flowed in the same channels for centuries. The English landscape is 
+like a park, and is so thoroughly rural and mellow and bosky that 
+the temptation to walk amid its scenes is ever present to one.  In 
+comparison, nature here is rude, raw, and forbidding; has not that 
+maternal and beneficent look, is less mindful of man, runs to 
+briers and weeds or to naked sterility.
+
+Then as a people the English are a private, domestic, homely folk: 
+they dislike publicity, dislike the highway, dislike noise, and 
+love to feel the grass under their feet. They have a genius for 
+lanes and footpaths; one might almost say they invented them. The 
+charm of them is in their books; their rural poetry is modeled upon 
+them. How much of Wordsworth's poetry is the poetry of 
+pedestrianism!  A footpath is sacred in England; the king himself 
+cannot close one; the courts recognize them as something quite as 
+important and inviolable as the highway.
+
+A footpath is of slow growth, and it is a wild, shy thing that is 
+easily scared away.  The plow must respect it, and the fence or 
+hedge make way for it.  It requires a settled state of things, 
+unchanging habits among the people, and long tenure of the land; 
+the rill of life that finds its way there must have a perennial 
+source, and flow there tomorrow and the next day and the next 
+century.
+
+When I was a youth and went to school with my brothers, we had a 
+footpath a mile long.  On going from home after leaving the highway 
+there was a descent through a meadow, then through a large maple 
+and beech wood, then through a long stretch of rather barren 
+pasture land which brought us to the creek in the valley, which we 
+crossed on a slab or a couple of rails from the near fence; then 
+more meadow land with a neglected orchard, and then the little gray 
+schoolhouse itself toeing the highway.  In winter our course was a 
+hard, beaten path in the snow visible from afar, and in summer a 
+well-defined trail.  In the woods it wore the roots of the trees.  
+It steered for the gaps or low places in the fences, and avoided 
+the bogs and swamps in the meadow.  I can recall yet the very look, 
+the very physiognomy of a large birch-tree that stood beside it in 
+the midst of the woods; it sometimes tripped me up with a large 
+root it sent out like a foot.  Neither do I forget the little 
+spring run near by, where we frequently paused to drink, and to 
+gather "crinkle-root" (DENTARIA) in the early summer; nor the 
+dilapidated log fence that was the highway of the squirrels; nor 
+the ledges to one side, whence in early spring the skunk and coon 
+sallied forth and crossed our path; nor the gray, scabby rocks in 
+the pasture; nor the solitary tree, nor the old weather-worn stump; 
+no, nor the creek in which I plunged one winter morning in 
+attempting to leap its swollen current.  But the path served only 
+one generation of school-children; it faded out more than thirty 
+years ago, and the feet that made it are widely scattered, while 
+some of them have found the path that leads through the Valley of 
+the Shadow. Almost the last words of one of these schoolboys, then 
+a man grown, seemed as if he might have had this very path in mind, 
+and thought himself again returning to his father's house: "I must 
+hurry," he said; "I have a long way to go up a hill and through a 
+dark wood, and it will soon be night."
+
+We are a famous people to go  " 'cross lots," but we do not make a 
+path, or, if we do, it does not last; the scene changes, the 
+currents set in other directions, or cease entirely, and the path 
+vanishes.  In the South one would find plenty of bridle-paths, for 
+there everybody goes horseback, and there are few passable roads; 
+and the hunters and lumbermen of the North have their trails 
+through the forest following a line of blazed trees; but in all my 
+acquaintance with the country,-- the rural and agricultural 
+sections,--I do not know a pleasant, inviting path leading from 
+house to house, or from settlement to settlement, by which the 
+pedestrian could shorten or enliven a journey, or add the charm of 
+the seclusion of the fields to his walk.
+
+What a contrast England presents in this respect, according to Mr. 
+Jennings's pleasant book, "Field Paths and Green Lanes"!  The 
+pedestrian may go about quite independent of the highway.  Here is 
+a glimpse from his pages: "A path across the field, seen from the 
+station, leads into a road close by the lodge gate of Mr. Cubett's 
+house.  A little beyond this gate is another and smaller one, from 
+which a narrow path ascends straight to the top of the hill and 
+comes out just opposite the post-office on Ranmore Common.  The 
+Common at another point may be reached by a shorter cut.  After 
+entering a path close by the lodge, open the first gate you come to 
+on the right hand.  Cross the road, go through the gate opposite, 
+and either follow the road right out upon Ranmore Common, past the 
+beautiful deep dell or ravine, or take a path which you will see on 
+your left, a few yards from the gate.  This winds through a very 
+pretty wood, with glimpses of the valley here and there on the way, 
+and eventually brings you out upon the carriage-drive to the house.  
+Turn to the right and you will soon find yourself upon the Common.  
+A road or path opens out in front of the upper lodge gate.  Follow 
+that and it will take you to a small piece of water from whence a 
+green path strikes off to the right, and this will lead you all 
+across the Common in a northerly direction."  Thus we may see how 
+the country is threaded with paths.  A later writer, the author of 
+"The Gamekeeper at Home" and other books, says: "Those only know a 
+country who are acquainted with its footpaths.  By the roads, 
+indeed, the outside may be seen; but the footpaths go through the 
+heart of the land.  There are routes by which mile after mile may 
+be traveled without leaving the sward.  So you may pass from 
+village to village; now crossing green meadows, now cornfields, 
+over brooks, past woods, through farmyard and rick 'barken.' "
+
+The conditions of life in this country have not.been favorable to 
+the development of byways.  We do not take to lanes and to the 
+seclusion of the fields.  We love to be upon the road, and to plant 
+our houses there, and to appear there mounted upon a horse or 
+seated in a wagon.   It is to be distinctly stated, however, that 
+our public highways, with their  breadth  and  amplitude,  their 
+wide grassy margins, their picturesque stone or rail fences, their 
+outlooks, and their general free and easy character, are far more 
+inviting to the pedestrian than the narrow lanes and trenches that 
+English highways for the most part are.   The road in England is 
+always well kept, the roadbed is often like a rock, but the 
+traveler's view is shut in by high hedges, and very frequently he 
+seems to be passing along a deep, nicely graded ditch. The open, 
+broad landscape character of our highways is quite unknown in that 
+country.
+
+The absence of the paths and lanes is not so great a matter, but 
+the decay of the simplicity of manners, and of the habits of 
+pedestrianism which this absence implies, is what I lament.  The 
+devil is in the horse to make men proud and fast and ill-mannered; 
+only when you go afoot do you grow in the grace of gentleness and 
+humility.  But no good can come out of this walking mania that is 
+now sweeping over the country, simply because it is a mania and not 
+a natural and wholesome impulse.  It is a prostitution of the noble 
+pastime.
+
+It is not the walking merely, it is keeping yourself in tune for a 
+walk, in the spiritual and bodily condition in which you can find 
+entertainment and exhilaration in so simple and natural a pastime.  
+You are eligible to any good fortune when you are in the condition 
+to enjoy a walk.  When the air and the water taste sweet to you, 
+how much else will taste sweet!  When the exercise of your limbs 
+affords you pleasure, and the play of your senses upon the various 
+objects and shows of nature quickens and stimulates your spirit, 
+your relation to the world and to yourself is what it should be,--
+simple and direct and wholesome.  The mood in which you set out on 
+a spring or autumn ramble or a sturdy winter walk, and your greedy 
+feet have to be restrained from devouring the distances too fast, 
+is the mood in which your best thoughts and impulses come to you, 
+or in which you might embark upon any noble and heroic enterprise.  
+Life is sweet in such moods, the universe is complete, and there is 
+no failure or imperfection anywhere.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A BUNCH OF HERBS
+
+
+   FRAGRANT WILD  FLOWERS
+
+The charge that was long ago made against our wild flowers by 
+English travelers in this country, namely, that they are odorless, 
+doubtless had its origin in the fact that, whereas in England the 
+sweet-scented flowers are among the most common and conspicuous, in 
+this country they are rather shy and withdrawn, and consequently 
+not such as travelers would be likely to encounter.  Moreover, the 
+British traveler, remembering the deliciously fragrant blue violets 
+he left at home, covering every grassy slope and meadow bank in 
+spring, and the wild clematis, or traveler's joy, overrunning 
+hedges and old walls with its white, sweet-scented blossoms, and 
+finding the corresponding species here equally abundant but 
+entirely scentless, very naturally infers that our wild flowers are 
+all deficient in this respect.  He would be confirmed in this 
+opinion when, on turning to some of our most beautiful and striking 
+native flowers, like the laurel, the rhododendron, the columbine, 
+the inimitable fringed gentian, the burning cardinal-flower, or our 
+asters and goldenrod, dashing the roadsides with tints of purple 
+and gold,  he found them scentless also.  "Where are your fragrant 
+flowers?" he might well say; "I can find none."   Let him look 
+closer and penetrate our forests, and visit our ponds and lakes.  
+Let him compare our matchless, rosy-lipped, honey-hearted trailing 
+arbutus with his own ugly ground-ivy; let him compare our 
+sumptuous, fragrant pond-lily with his own odorless NYMPHÆ ALBA.   
+In our Northern woods he will find the floors carpeted with the 
+delicate linnæa, its twin rose-colored, nodding flowers filling the 
+air with fragrance.  (I am aware that the linnæa is found in some 
+parts of Northern Europe.)  The fact is, we perhaps have as many 
+sweet-scented wild flowers as Europe has, only they are not quite 
+so prominent in our flora, nor so well known to our people or to 
+our poets.
+
+Think of Wordsworth's "Golden Daffodils:"--
+
+ "I wandered lonely as a cloud
+       That floats on high o'er vales and 
+            hills,
+   When, all at once, I saw a crowd,
+       A host of golden daffodils,
+   Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
+   Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
+
+ "Continuous as the stars that shine 
+       And twinkle on the milky way,
+   They stretched in never-ending line
+       Along the margin of a bay.
+   Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
+   Tossing their heads in sprightly 
+            dance."
+
+No such sight could greet the poet's eye here.  He might see ten 
+thousand marsh marigolds, or ten times ten thousand houstonias, but 
+they would not toss in the breeze, and they would not be sweet-
+scented like the daffodils.
+
+It is to be remembered, too, that in the moister atmosphere of 
+England the same amount of fragrance would be much more noticeable 
+than with us. Think how our sweet bay, or our pink azalea, or our 
+white alder, to which they have nothing that corresponds, would 
+perfume that heavy, vapor-laden air!
+
+In the woods and groves in England, the wild hyacinth grows very 
+abundantly in spring, and in places the air is loaded with its 
+fragrance.  In our woods a species of dicentra, commonly called 
+squirrel corn, has nearly the same perfume, and its racemes of 
+nodding whitish flowers, tinged with pink, are quite as pleasing to 
+the eye, but it is a shyer, less abundant plant.  When our children 
+go to the fields in April and May, they can bring home no wild 
+flowers as pleasing as the sweet English violet, and cowslip, and 
+yellow daffodil, and wallflower; and when British children go to 
+the woods at the same season, they can load their hands and baskets 
+with nothing that compares with our trailing arbutus, or, later in 
+the season, with our azaleas; and, when their boys go fishing or 
+boating in summer, they can wreathe themselves with nothing that 
+approaches our pond-lily.
+
+There are upward of thirty species of fragrant native wild flowers 
+and flowering shrubs and trees in New England and New York, and, no 
+doubt, many more in the South and West.  My list is as follows:--
+
+White violet (VIOLA BLANDA).
+Canada violet (VIOLA CANADENSIS).
+Hepatica (occasionally fragrant).
+Trailing arbutus (EPIGÆA REPENS).
+Mandrake (PODOPHYLLUM
+      PELTATUM).
+Yellow lady's-slipper (CYPRIPEDIUM
+       PARVIFLORUM).
+Purple lady's-slipper (CYPRIPEDIUM
+       ACAULE).
+Squirrel corn (DICENTRA CANADENSIS).
+Showy orchis (ORCHIS SPECTABILIS).
+Purple fringed-orchis (HABENARIA
+       PSYCODES).
+Arethusa (ARETHUSA BULBOSA).
+Calopogon (CALOPOGON 
+       PULCHELLUS).
+Lady's-tresses (SPIRANTHES CERNUA).
+Pond-lily (NYMPHÆA ODORATA).
+Wild rose (ROSA NITIDA).
+Twin-flower (LINNÆA BOREALIS).
+Sugar maple (ACER SACCHARINUM)
+Linden (TILIA AMERICANA).
+Locust-tree (ROBINIA PSEUDACACIA).
+White alder (CLETHRA ALNIFOLIA).
+Smooth azalea (RHODODENDRON
+       ARBORESCENS).
+White azalea (RHODODENDRON
+       VISCOSUM).
+Pinxter-flower (RHODODENDRON
+       NUDIFLORUM).
+Yellow azalea (RHODODENDRON
+       CALENDULACEUM),
+Sweet bay (MAGNOLIA GLAUCA).
+Mitchella vine (MITCHELLA REPENS).
+Sweet coltsfoot (PETASITES PALMATA).
+Pasture thistle (CNICUS PUMILUS).
+False wintergreen (PYROLA 
+       ROTUNDIFOLIA).
+Spotted wintergreen (CHIMAPHILIA 
+       MACULATA).
+Prince's pine (CHIMAPHILIA
+       UMBELLATA).
+Evening primrose (ŒNOTHERA
+       BIENNIS).
+Hairy loosestrife (STEIRONEMA
+       CILIATUM).
+Dogbane (APOCYNUM).
+Ground-nut (APIOS TUBEROSA).
+Adder's-tongue pogonia (POGONIA
+       OPHIOGLOSSOIDES).
+Wild grape (VITIS CORDOFOLIA).
+Horned bladderwort (UTRICULARIA
+       CORNUTA).
+
+The last-named, horned bladderwort, is perhaps the most fragrant 
+flower we have.  In a warm, moist atmosphere, its odor is almost 
+too strong.  It is a plant with a slender, leafless stalk or scape 
+less than a foot high, with two or more large yellow hood or helmet 
+shaped flowers.  It is not common, and belongs pretty well north, 
+growing in sandy swamps and along the marshy margins of lakes and 
+ponds.  Its perfume is sweet and spicy in an eminent degree.  I 
+have placed in the above list several flowers that are 
+intermittently fragrant, like the hepatica, or liver-leaf.  This 
+flower is the earliest, as it is certainly one of the most 
+beautiful, to be found in our woods, and occasionally it is 
+fragrant.  Group after group may  be  inspected, ranging through 
+all shades of purple and blue, with some perfectly white, and no 
+odor be detected, when presently you will happen upon a little 
+brood of them that have a most delicate and delicious fragrance.  
+The same is true of a species of loosestrife growing along streams 
+and on other wet places, with tall bushy stalks, dark green leaves, 
+and pale axillary yellow flowers (probably European).  A handful of 
+these flowers will sometimes exhale a  sweet fragrance;  at other 
+times, or from another locality, they are scentless.   Our evening 
+primrose is thought to be uniformly sweet-scented, but the past 
+season I examined many specimens, and failed to find one that was 
+so.  Some seasons the sugar maple yields much sweeter sap than in 
+others; and even individual trees, owing to the soil, moisture, and 
+other conditions where they stand, show a great difference in this 
+respect.    The same is doubtless true of the sweet-scented 
+flowers.  I had always supposed that our Canada violet--the tall, 
+leafy-stemmed white violet of our Northern woods--was odorless, 
+till a correspondent called my attention to the contrary fact.  On 
+examination I found that, while the first ones that bloomed about 
+May 25 had very sweet-scented foliage, especially when crushed in 
+the hand, the flowers were practically without fragrance.  But as 
+the season advanced the fragrance developed, till a single flower 
+had a well-marked perfume, and a handful of them was sweet indeed.  
+A single specimen, plucked about August 1, was quite as fragrant as 
+the English violet, though the perfume is not what is known as 
+violet, but, like that of the hepatica, comes nearer to the odor of 
+certain fruit trees.
+
+It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of our sugar maple 
+are sweet-scented; the perfume seems to become stale after a few 
+days: but pass under this tree just at the right moment, say at 
+nightfall on the first or second day of its perfect inflorescence, 
+and the air is laden with its sweetness; its perfumed breath falls 
+upon you as its cool shadow does a few weeks later.
+
+After the linnæa and the arbutus, the prettiest sweet-scented 
+flowering vine our woods hold is the common mitchella vine, called 
+squaw-berry and partridge-berry.  It blooms in June, and its twin 
+flowers, light cream-color, velvety, tubular, exhale a most 
+agreeable fragrance.
+
+Our flora is much more rich in orchids than the European, and many 
+of ours are fragrant.  The first to bloom in the spring is the 
+showy orchis, though it is far less showy than several others.  I 
+find it in May, not on hills, where Gray says it grows, but in low, 
+damp places in the woods.   It has two oblong shining leaves, with 
+a scape four or five inches high strung with sweet-scented, pink-
+purple flowers.  I usually find it and the fringed polygala in 
+bloom at the same time; the lady's-slipper is a little later.   The 
+purple fringed-orchis, one of the most showy and striking of all 
+our orchids, blooms in midsummer in swampy meadows and in marshy, 
+grassy openings in the woods, shooting up a tapering column or 
+cylinder of pink-purple fringed flowers, that one may see at quite 
+a distance, and the perfume of which is too rank for a close room.  
+This flower is, perhaps, like the English fragrant orchis, found in 
+pastures.
+
+Few fragrant flowers in the shape of weeds have come to us from the 
+Old World, and this leads me to remark that plants with sweet-
+scented flowers are, for the most part, more intensely local, more 
+fastidious and idiosyncratic, than those without perfume.  Our 
+native thistle--the pasture thistle--has a marked fragrance, and it 
+is much more shy and limited in its range than the common Old World 
+thistle that grows everywhere.  Our little, sweet white violet 
+grows only in wet places, and the Canada violet only in high, cool 
+woods, while the common blue violet is much more general in its 
+distribution.  How fastidious and exclusive is the cypripedium!  
+You will find it in one locality in the woods, usually on high, dry 
+ground, and will look in vain for it elsewhere.  It does not go in 
+herds like the commoner plants, but affects privacy and solitude.  
+When I come upon it in my walks, I seem to be intruding upon some 
+very private and exclusive company.  The large yellow cypripedium 
+has a peculiar, heavy, oily odor.
+
+In like manner one learns where to look for arbutus, for 
+pipsissewa, for the early orchis; they have their particular 
+haunts, and their surroundings are nearly always the same.  The 
+yellow pond-lily is found in every sluggish stream and pond, but 
+NYMPHÆA ODORATA requires a nicer adjustment of conditions, and 
+consequently is more restricted in its range.  If the mullein were 
+fragrant, or toadflax, or the daisy, or blue-weed, or goldenrod, 
+they would doubtless be far less troublesome to the agriculturist.  
+There are, of course, exceptions to the rule I have here indicated, 
+but it holds in most cases.  Genius is a specialty: it does not 
+grow in every soil; it skips the many and touches the few; and the 
+gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like 
+beauty, and never becomes common or cheap.
+
+"Do honey and fragrance always go together in the flowers? "Not 
+uniformly.  Of the list of fragrant wild flowers I have given, the 
+only ones that the bees procure nectar from, so far as I have 
+observed, are arbutus, dicentra, sugar maple, locust, and linden.  
+Non-fragrant flowers that yield honey are those of the raspberry, 
+clematis, sumac, white oak, bugloss, ailanthus, goldenrod, aster, 
+fleabane.  A large number of odorless plants yield pollen to the 
+bee.  There is nectar in the columbine, and the bumblebee sometimes 
+gets it by piercing the spur from the outside as she does with 
+dicentra.  There ought to be honey in the honeysuckle, but I have 
+never seen the hive-bee make any attempt to get it.
+
+
+   WEEDS
+
+One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are 
+the weeds. How they cling to man and follow him around the world, 
+and spring up wherever he sets his foot!  How they crowd around his 
+barns and dwellings, and throng his garden and jostle and override 
+each other in their strife to be near him!  Some of them are so 
+domestic and familiar, and so harmless withal, that one comes to 
+regard them with positive affection.  Motherwort, catnip, plantain, 
+tansy, wild mustard,--what a homely human look they have! they are 
+an integral part of every old homestead.  Your smart new place will 
+wait long before they draw near it.  Or knot-grass, that carpets 
+every old dooryard, and fringes every walk, and softens every path 
+that knows the feet of children, or that leads to the spring, or to 
+the garden, or to the barn, how kindly one comes to look upon it! 
+Examine it with a pocket glass and see how wonderfully beautiful 
+and exquisite are its tiny blossoms. It loves the human foot, and 
+when the path or the place is long disused, other plants usurp the 
+ground.
+
+The gardener and the farmer are ostensibly the greatest enemies of 
+the weeds, but they are in reality their best friends.  Weeds, like 
+rats and mice, increase and spread enormously in a cultivated 
+country.  They have better food, more sunshine, and more aids in 
+getting themselves disseminated.  They are sent from one end of the 
+land to the other in seed grain of various kinds, and they take 
+their share, and more too, if they can get it, of the phosphates 
+and stable manures.  How sure, also, they are to survive any war of 
+extermination that is waged against them!  In yonder field are ten 
+thousand and one Canada thistles.  The farmer goes resolutely to 
+work and destroys ten thousand and thinks the work is finished, but 
+he has done nothing till he has destroyed the ten thousand and one. 
+This one will keep up the stock and again cover his field with 
+thistles.
+
+Weeds are Nature's makeshift.  She rejoices in the grass and the 
+grain, but when these fail to cover her nakedness she resorts to 
+weeds.  It is in her plan or a part of her economy to keep the 
+ground constantly covered with vegetation of some sort, and she has 
+layer upon layer of seeds in the soil for this purpose, and the 
+wonder is that each kind lies dormant until it is wanted.  If I 
+uncover the earth in any of my fields, ragweed and pigweed spring 
+up; if these are destroyed, harvest grass, or quack grass, or 
+purslane, appears.  The spade or the plow that turns these under is 
+sure to turn up some other variety, as chickweed, sheep-sorrel, or 
+goose-foot.   The soil is a storehouse of seeds.
+
+The old farmers say that wood-ashes will bring in the white clover, 
+and they will; the germs are in the soil wrapped in a profound 
+slumber, but this stimulus tickles them until they awake.  
+Stramonium has been known to start up on the site of an old farm 
+building, when it had not been seen in that locality for thirty 
+years.  I have been told that a farmer, somewhere in New England, 
+in digging a well came at a great depth upon sand like that of the 
+seashore; it was thrown out, and in due time there sprang from it a 
+marine plant.  I have never seen earth taken from so great a depth 
+that it would not before the end of the season be clothed with a 
+crop of weeds.  Weeds are so full of expedients, and the one 
+engrossing purpose with them is to multiply.  The wild onion 
+multiplies at both ends,--at the top by seed, and at the bottom by 
+offshoots.  Toad-flax travels under ground and above ground. Never 
+allow a seed to ripen, and yet it will cover your field.  Cut off 
+the head of the wild carrot, and in a week or two there are five 
+heads in place of this one; cut off these, and by fall there are 
+ten looking defiance at, you from the same root.  Plant corn in 
+August, and it will go forward with its preparations as if it had 
+the whole season before it.  Not so with the weeds; they have 
+learned better.  If amaranth, or abutilon, or burdock gets a late 
+start, it makes great haste to develop its seed; it foregoes its 
+tall stalk and wide flaunting growth, and turns all its energies 
+into keeping up the succession of the species.  Certain fields 
+under the plow are always infested with "blind nettles," others 
+with wild buckwheat, black bindweed, or cockle. The seed lies 
+dormant under the sward, the warmth and the moisture affect it not 
+until other conditions are fulfilled.
+
+The way in which one plant thus keeps another down is a great 
+mystery. Germs lie there in the soil and resist the stimulating 
+effect of the sun and the rains for years, and show no sign. 
+Presently something whispers to them, "Arise, your chance has come; 
+the coast is clear;" and they are up and doing in a twinkling.
+
+Weeds are great travelers; they are, indeed, the tramps of the 
+vegetable world.  They are going east, west, north, south; they 
+walk; they fly; they swim; they steal a ride; they travel by rail, 
+by flood, by wind; they go under ground, and they go above, across 
+lots, and by the highway.  But, like other tramps, they find it 
+safest by the highway: in the fields they are intercepted and cut 
+off; but on the public road, every boy, every passing herd of sheep 
+or cows, gives them a lift.  Hence the incursion of a new weed is 
+generally first noticed along the highway or the railroad.  In 
+Orange County I saw from the car window a field overrun with what I 
+took to be the branching white mullein.  Gray says it is found in 
+Pennsylvania and at the head of Oneida Lake.  Doubtless it had come 
+by rail from one place or the other.  Our botanist says of the 
+bladder campion, a species of pink, that it has been naturalized 
+around Boston; but it is now much farther west, and I know fields 
+along the Hudson overrun with it.  Streams and water-courses are 
+the natural highway of the weeds.  Some years ago, and by some 
+means or other, the viper's bugloss, or blue-weed, which is said to 
+be a troublesome weed in Virginia, effected a lodgment near the 
+head of the Esopus Creek, a tributary of the Hudson.  From this 
+point it has made its way down the stream, overrunning its  banks  
+and invading meadows and cultivated fields, and proving a serious 
+obstacle to the farmer.  All the gravelly, sandy margins and 
+islands of the Esopus, sometimes acres in extent, are in June and 
+July blue with it, and rye and oats and grass in the near fields 
+find it a serious competitor for possession of the soil.  It has 
+gone down the Hudson, and is appearing in the fields along its 
+shores.  The tides carry it up the mouths of the streams where it 
+takes root; the winds, or the birds, or other agencies, in time 
+give it another lift, so that it is slowly but surely making its 
+way inland.  The bugloss belongs to what may be called beautiful 
+weeds, despite its rough and bristly stalk.  Its flowers are deep 
+violet-blue, the stamens exserted, as the botanists say, that is, 
+projected beyond the mouth of the corolla, with showy red anthers.  
+This bit of red, mingling with the blue of the corolla, gives a 
+very rich, warm purple hue to the flower, that is especially 
+pleasing at a little distance.  The best thing I know about this 
+weed besides its good looks is that it yields honey or pollen to 
+the bee.
+
+Another foreign plant that the Esopus Creek has distributed along 
+its shores and carried to the Hudson is saponaria, known as 
+"Bouncing Bet."   It is a common and in places troublesome weed in 
+this valley.  Bouncing Bet is, perhaps, its English name, as the 
+pink-white complexion of its flowers with their perfume and the 
+coarse, robust character of the plant really give it a kind of 
+English feminine comeliness and bounce.  It looks like a Yorkshire 
+housemaid.  Still another plant in my section, which I notice has 
+been widely distributed by the agency of water, is the spiked 
+loosestrife.  It first appeared many years ago along the Wallkill; 
+now it may be seen upon many of its tributaries and all along its 
+banks; and in many of the marshy bays and coves along the Hudson, 
+its great masses of purple-red bloom in middle and late summer 
+affording a welcome relief to the traveler's eye.  It also belongs 
+to the class of beautiful weeds.  It grows rank and tall, in dense 
+communities, and always presents to the eye a generous mass of 
+color.  In places, the marshes and creek banks are all aglow with 
+it, its wand-like spikes of flowers shooting up and uniting in 
+volumes or pyramids of still flame.  Its petals, when examined 
+closely, present a curious wrinkled or crumpled appearance, like 
+newly washed linen; but when massed, the effect is eminently 
+pleasing.  It also came from abroad, probably first brought to this 
+country as a garden or ornamental plant.
+
+As a curious illustration of how weeds are carried from one end of 
+the earth to the other, Sir Joseph Hooker relates this 
+circumstance: "On one occasion," he says, "landing on a small 
+uninhabited island nearly at the Antipodes, the first evidence I 
+met with of its having been previously visited by man was the 
+English chickweed; and this I traced to a mound that marked the 
+grave of a British sailor, and that was covered with the plant, 
+doubtless the offspring of seed that had adhered to the spade or 
+mattock with which the grave had been dug."
+
+Ours is a weedy country because it is a roomy country.  Weeds love 
+a wide margin, and they find it here.  You shall see more weeds in 
+one day's-travel in this country than in a week's journey in 
+Europe.  Our culture of the soil is not so close and thorough, our 
+occupancy not so entire and exclusive.  The weeds take up with the 
+farmers' leavings, and find good fare.  One may see a large slice 
+taken from a field by elecampane, or by teasel or milkweed; whole 
+acres given up to whiteweed, golden-rod, wild carrots, or the ox-
+eye daisy; meadows overrun with bear-weed, and sheep pastures 
+nearly ruined by St. John's-wort or the Canada thistle.  Our farms 
+are so large and our husbandry so loose that we do not mind these 
+things.  By and by we shall clean them out.  When Sir Joseph Hooker 
+landed in New England a few years ago, he was surprised to find how 
+the European plants flourished there.  He found the wild chicory 
+growing far more luxuriantly than he had ever seen it elsewhere, 
+"forming a tangled mass of stems and branches, studded with 
+turquoise-blue blossoms, and covering acres of ground."  This is 
+one of the many weeds that Emerson binds into a bouquet in his 
+"Humble-Bee:"--
+
+ "Succory to match the sky,
+   Columbine with horn of honey,
+   Scented fern and agrimony,
+   Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue,
+   And brier-roses, dwelt among."
+
+A less accurate poet than Emerson would probably have let his 
+reader infer that the bumblebee gathered honey from all these 
+plants, but Emerson is careful to say only that she dwelt among 
+them.  Succory is one of Virgil's weeds also,--
+
+ "And spreading succ'ry chokes the
+   rising field."
+
+Is there not something in our soil and climate exceptionally 
+favorable to weeds,--something harsh, ungenial, sharp-toothed, that 
+is akin to them? How woody and rank and fibrous many varieties 
+become, lasting the whole season, and standing up stark and stiff 
+through the deep winter snows,--desiccated, preserved by our dry 
+air! Do nettles and thistles bite so sharply in any other country?  
+Let the farmer tell you how they bite of a dry midsummer day when 
+he encounters them in his wheat or oat harvest.
+
+Yet it is a fact that all our more pernicious weeds, like our 
+vermin, are of Old World origin.  They hold up their heads and 
+assert themselves here, and take their fill of riot and license; 
+they are avenged for their long years of repression by the stern 
+hand of European agriculture.  We have hardly a weed we can call 
+our own.  I recall but three that are at all noxious or 
+troublesome, namely, milkweed, ragweed, and goldenrod; but who 
+would miss the last from our fields and highways?
+
+ "Along the roadside, like the flowers
+       of gold
+   That tawny Incas for their gardens 
+       wrought,
+   Heavy with sunshine droops the 
+       goldenrod,"
+
+sings Whittier. In Europe our goldenrod is cultivated in the flower 
+gardens, as well it may be.  The native species is found mainly in 
+woods, and is much less showy than ours.
+
+Our milkweed is tenacious of life; its roots lie deep, as if to get 
+away from the plow, but it seldom infests cultivated crops.  Then 
+its stalk is so full of milk and its pod so full of silk that one 
+cannot but ascribe good intentions to it, if it does sometimes 
+overrun the meadow.
+
+ "In dusty pods the milkweed
+   Its hidden silk has spun,"
+
+sings "H. H." in her "September."
+
+Of our ragweed not much can be set down that is complimentary, 
+except that its name in the botany is AMBROSIA, food of the gods.  
+It must be the food of the gods if anything, for, so far as I have 
+observed, nothing terrestrial eats it, not even billy-goats.  (Yet 
+a correspondent writes me that in Kentucky the cattle eat it when 
+hard-pressed, and that a certain old farmer there, one season when 
+the hay crop failed, cut and harvested tons of it for his stock in 
+winter.  It is said that the milk and butter made from such hay are 
+not at all suggestive of the traditional Ambrosia!)  It is the bane 
+of asthmatic patients, but the gardener makes short work of it.  It 
+is about the only one of our weeds that follows the plow and the 
+harrow, and, except that it is easily destroyed, I should suspect 
+it to be an immigrant from the Old World.  Our fleabane is a 
+troublesome weed at times, but good husbandry has little to dread 
+from it.
+
+But all the other outlaws of the farm and garden come to us from 
+over seas; and what a long list it is:--
+
+Common thistle,
+Canada thistle,
+Burdock,
+Yellow dock,
+Wild carrot,
+Ox-eye daisy,
+Chamomile,
+Mullein,
+Dead-nettle (LAMIUM),
+Hemp nettle (GALEOPSIS),
+Elecampane,
+Plantain,
+Motherwort,
+Stramonium,
+Catnip,
+Blue-weed,
+Stick-seed,
+Hound 's-tongue,
+Henbane,
+Pigweed,
+Quitch grass,
+Gill,
+Nightshade,
+Buttercup,
+Dandelion,
+Wild mustard,
+Shepherd's purse,
+St. John's-wort
+Chickweed,
+Purslane,
+Mallow,
+Darnel,
+Poison hemlock,
+Hop-clover,
+Yarrow,
+Wild radish,
+Wild parsnip,
+Chicory,
+Live-forever,
+Toad-flax,
+Sheep-sorrel,
+Mayweed,
+
+and others less noxious.  To offset this list we have given Europe 
+the vilest of all weeds, a parasite that sucks up human blood, 
+tobacco.  Now if they catch the Colorado beetle of us, it will go 
+far toward paying them off for the rats and the mice, and for other 
+pests in our houses.
+
+The more attractive and pretty of the British weeds--as the common 
+daisy, of which the poets have made so much, the larkspur, which is 
+a pretty cornfield weed, and the scarlet field-poppy, which flowers 
+all summer, and is so taking amid the ripening grain--have not 
+immigrated to our shores.  Like a certain sweet rusticity and charm 
+of European rural life, they do not thrive readily under our skies.  
+Our fleabane has become a common roadside weed in England, and a 
+few other of our native less known plants have gained a foothold in 
+the Old World.  Our beautiful jewel-weed has recently appeared 
+along certain of the English rivers.
+
+Pokeweed is a native American, and what a lusty, royal plant it is!  
+It never invades cultivated fields, but hovers about the borders 
+and looks over the fences like a painted Indian sachem.  Thoreau 
+coveted its strong purple stalk for a cane, and the robins eat its 
+dark crimson-juiced berries.
+
+It is commonly believed that the mullein is indigenous to this 
+country, for have we not heard that it is cultivated in European 
+gardens, and christened the American velvet plant? Yet it, too, 
+seems to have come over with the Pilgrims, and is most abundant in  
+the older parts of the country.  It abounds throughout Europe and 
+Asia, and had its economic uses with the ancients.  The Greeks made 
+lamp-wicks of its dried leaves, and the Romans dipped its dried 
+stalk in tallow for funeral torches.  It affects dry uplands in 
+this country, and, as it takes two years to mature, it is not a 
+troublesome weed in cultivated crops.  The first year it sits low 
+upon the ground in its coarse flannel leaves, and makes ready; if 
+the plow comes along now, its career is ended.  The second season 
+it starts upward its tall stalk, which in late summer is thickly 
+set with small yellow flowers, and in fall is charged with myriads 
+of fine black seeds.  "As full as a dry mullein stalk of seeds" is 
+almost equivalent to saying, "as numerous as the sands upon the 
+seashore."
+
+Perhaps the most notable thing about the weeds that have come to us 
+from the Old World, when compared with our native species, is their 
+persistence, not to say pugnacity.  They fight for the soil; they 
+plant colonies here and there, and will not be rooted out.  Our 
+native weeds are for the most part shy and harmless, and retreat 
+before cultivation, but the European outlaws follow man like 
+vermin; they hang to his coat-skirts, his sheep transport them in 
+their wool, his cow and horse in tail and mane.  As I have before 
+said, it is as with the rats and mice.  The American rat is in the 
+woods and is rarely seen even by woodmen, and the native mouse 
+barely hovers upon the outskirts of civilization; while the Old 
+World species defy our traps and our poison, and have usurped the 
+land.  So with the weeds.  Take the thistle for instance: the 
+common and abundant one everywhere, in fields and along highways, 
+is the European species; while the native thistles, swamp thistle, 
+pasture thistle, etc., are much more shy, and are not at all 
+troublesome.  The Canada thistle, too, which came to us by way of 
+Canada,--what a pest, what a usurper, what a defier of the plow and 
+the harrow!  I know of but one effectual way to treat it,--put on a 
+pair of buckskin gloves, and pull up every plant that shows itself; 
+this will effect a radical cure in two summers. Of course the plow 
+or the scythe, if not allowed to rest more than a month at a time, 
+will finally conquer it.
+
+Or take the common St. John's-wort,--how it has established itself 
+in our fields and become a most pernicious weed, very difficult to 
+extirpate; while the native species are quite rare, and seldom or 
+never invade cultivated fields, being found mostly in wet and rocky 
+waste places.  Of Old World origin, too, is the curled-leaf dock 
+that is so annoying about one's garden and home meadows, its long 
+tapering root clinging to the soil with such tenacity that I have 
+pulled upon it till I could see stars without budging it; it has 
+more lives than a cat, making a shift to live when pulled up and 
+laid on top of the ground in the burning summer sun. Our native 
+docks are mostly found in swamps, or near them, and are harmless.
+
+Purslane--commonly called "pusley," and which has given rise to the 
+saying, "as mean as pusley"--of course is not American.  A good 
+sample of our native purslane is the claytonia, or spring beauty, a 
+shy, delicate plant that opens its rose-colored flowers in the 
+moist, sunny places in the woods or along their borders so early in 
+the season.
+
+There are few more obnoxious weeds in cultivated ground than sheep-
+sorrel, also an Old World plant; while our native wood-sorrel, with 
+its white, delicately veined flowers, or the variety with yellow 
+flowers, is quite harmless.  The same is true of the mallow, the 
+vetch, the tare, and other plants.  We have no native plant so 
+indestructible as garden orpine,  or live-forever, which our 
+grandmothers nursed, and for which they are cursed by many a 
+farmer.  The fat, tender, succulent dooryard stripling turned out 
+to be a monster that would devour the earth.  I have seen acres of 
+meadow land destroyed by it.  The way to drown an amphibious animal 
+is never to allow it to come to the surface to breathe, and this is 
+the way to kill live-forever.  It lives by its stalk and leaf, more 
+than by its root, and, if cropped or bruised as soon as it comes to 
+the surface, it will in time perish.  It laughs the plow, the hoe, 
+the cultivator to scorn, but grazing herds will eventually scotch 
+it.  Our two species of native orpine, SEDUM TERNATUM and S. 
+TELEPHIOIDES, are never troublesome as weeds.
+
+The European weeds are sophisticated, domesticated, civilized; they 
+have been to school to man for many hundred years, and they have 
+learned to thrive upon him: their struggle for existence has been 
+sharp and protracted; it has made them hardy and prolific; they 
+will thrive in a lean soil, or they will wax strong in a rich one; 
+in all cases they follow man and profit by him.  Our native weeds, 
+on the other hand, are furtive and retiring; they flee before the 
+plow and the scythe, and hide in corners and remote waste places.  
+Will they, too, in time, change their habits in this respect?
+
+"Idle weeds are fast in growth," says Shakespeare, but that depends 
+upon whether the competition is sharp and close.  If the weed finds 
+itself distanced, or pitted against great odds, it grows more 
+slowly and is of diminished stature, but let it once get the upper 
+hand, and what strides it makes!  Red-root will grow four or five 
+feet high if it has a chance, or it will content itself with a few 
+inches and mature its seed almost upon the ground.
+
+Many of our worst weeds are plants that have-escaped from 
+cultivation, as the wild radish, which is troublesome in parts of 
+New England; the wild carrot, which infests the fields in eastern 
+New York; and the live-forever, which thrives and multiplies under 
+the plow and harrow.  In my section an annoying weed is abutilon, 
+or velvet-leaf, also called "old maid," which has fallen from the 
+grace of the garden and followed the plow afield.  It will manage 
+to mature its seeds if not allowed to start till midsummer.
+
+Of beautiful weeds quite a long list might be made without 
+including any of the so-called wild flowers.  A favorite of mine is 
+the little moth mullein that blooms along the highway, and about 
+the fields, and maybe upon the edge of the lawn, from midsummer 
+till frost comes.  In winter its slender stalk rises above the 
+snow, bearing its round seed-pods on its pin-like stems, and is 
+pleasing even then.   Its flowers are yellow or white, large, 
+wheel-shaped,  and  are borne vertically with filaments loaded with 
+little tufts of violet wool.  The plant has none of the coarse, 
+hairy character of the common mullein.  Our cone-flower, which one 
+of our poets has called the "brown-eyed daisy," has a pleasing 
+effect when in vast numbers they invade a meadow (if it is not your 
+meadow), their dark brown centres or disks and their golden rays 
+showing conspicuously.
+
+Bidens, two-teeth, or "pitchforks," as the boys call them, are 
+welcomed by the eye when in late summer they make the swamps and 
+wet, waste places yellow with their blossoms.
+
+Vervain is a beautiful weed, especially the blue or purple variety. 
+Its drooping knotted threads also make a pretty etching upon the 
+winter snow.
+
+Iron-weed, which looks like an overgrown aster, has the same 
+intense purple-blue color, and a royal profusion of flowers.  There 
+are giants among the weeds, as well as dwarfs and pigmies.  One of 
+the giants is purple eupatorium, which sometimes carries its 
+corymbs of flesh-colored flowers ten and twelve feet high.  A 
+pretty and curious little weed, sometimes found growing in the edge 
+of the garden, is the clasping specularia, a relative of the 
+harebell and of the European Venus's looking-glass.  Its leaves are 
+shell-shaped, and clasp the stalk so as to form little shallow 
+cups.  In the bottom of each cup three buds appear that never 
+expand into flowers; but when the top of the stalk is reached, one 
+and sometimes two buds open a large, delicate purple-blue corolla.  
+All the first-born of this plant are still-born, as it were; only 
+the latest, which spring from its summit, attain to perfect bloom.  
+A weed which one ruthlessly demolishes when he finds it hiding from 
+the plow amid the strawberries, or under the currant-bushes and 
+grapevines, is the dandelion; yet who would banish it from the 
+meadows or the lawns, where it copies in gold upon the green 
+expanse the stars of the midnight sky?  After its first blooming 
+comes its second and finer and more spiritual inflorescence, when 
+its stalk, dropping its more earthly and carnal flower, shoots 
+upward, and is presently crowned by a globe of the most delicate 
+and aerial texture.  It is like the poet's dream, which succeeds 
+his rank and golden youth.  This globe is a fleet of a hundred 
+fairy balloons, each one of which bears a seed which it is destined 
+to drop far from the parent source.
+
+Most weeds have their uses; they are not wholly malevolent.  
+Emerson says a weed is a plant whose virtues we have not yet 
+discovered; but the wild creatures discover their virtues if we do 
+not.  The bumblebee has discovered that the hateful toadflax, which 
+nothing will eat, and which in some soils will run out the grass, 
+has honey at its heart.  Narrow-leaved plantain is readily eaten by 
+cattle, and the honey-bee gathers much pollen from it.  The ox-eye 
+daisy makes a fair quality of hay if cut before it gets ripe.  The 
+cows will eat the leaves of the burdock and the stinging nettles of 
+the woods.  But what cannot a cow's tongue stand? She will crop the 
+poison ivy with impunity, and I think would eat thistles if she 
+found them growing in the garden.  Leeks and garlics are readily 
+eaten by cattle in the spring, and are said to be medicinal to 
+them.  Weeds that yield neither pasturage for bee nor herd yet 
+afford seeds to the fall and winter birds.  This is true of most of 
+the obnoxious weeds of the garden, and of thistles.  The wild 
+lettuce yields down for the hummingbird's nest, and the flowers of 
+whiteweed are used by the kingbird and cedar-bird.
+
+Yet it is pleasant to remember that, in our climate, there are no 
+weeds so persistent and lasting and universal as grass.  Grass is 
+the natural covering of the fields.  There are but four weeds that 
+I know of--milkweed, live-forever, Canada thistle, and toad-flax--
+that it will not run out in a good soil.  We crop it and mow it 
+year after year; and yet, if the season favors, it is sure to come 
+again.  Fields that have never known the plow, and never been 
+seeded by man, are yet covered with grass.  And in human nature, 
+too, weeds are by no means  in the ascendant, troublesome as they 
+are.  The good green grass of love and truthfulness and common 
+sense is more universal, and crowds the idle weeds to the wall.
+
+But weeds have this virtue; they are not easily discouraged; they 
+never lose heart entirely; they die game.  If they cannot have the 
+best, they will take up with the poorest; if fortune is unkind to 
+them to-day, they hope for better luck to-morrow; if they cannot 
+lord it over a corn-hill, they will sit humbly at its foot and 
+accept what comes; in all cases they make the most of their 
+opportunities.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+WINTER PICTURES
+
+
+   A WHITE  DAY  AND  A RED  FOX
+
+The day was indeed white, as white as three  feet of snow and a 
+cloudless St. Valentine's sun could make it.  The eye could not 
+look forth without blinking, or veiling itself with tears.  The 
+patch of plowed ground on the top of the hill, where the wind had 
+blown the snow away, was as welcome to it as water to a parched 
+tongue.  It was the one refreshing oasis in this desert of dazzling 
+light.  I sat down upon it to let the eye bathe and revel in it.  
+It took away the smart like a poultice.  For so gentle and on the 
+whole so beneficent an element, the snow asserts itself very 
+proudly.  It takes the world quickly and entirely to itself.  It 
+makes no concessions or compromises, but rules despotically.  It 
+baffles and bewilders the eye, and it returns the sun glare for 
+glare.  Its coming in our winter climate is the hand of mercy to 
+the earth and to everything in its bosom, but it is a barrier and 
+an embargo to everything that moves above.
+
+We toiled up the long steep hill, where only an occasional mullein-
+stalk or other tall weed stood above the snow.  Near the top the 
+hill was girded with a bank of snow that blotted out the stone wall 
+and every vestige of the earth beneath.  These hills wear this belt 
+till May, and sometimes the plow pauses beside them.  From the top 
+of the ridge an immense landscape in immaculate white stretches 
+before us.  Miles upon miles of farms, smoothed and padded by the 
+stainless element, hang upon the sides of the mountains, or repose 
+across the long sloping hills.    The fences or stone walls show 
+like half-obliterated black lines.   I turn my back to the sun, or 
+shade my eyes with my hand.  Every  object  or movement  in the 
+landscape is sharply revealed; one could see a fox half a league.  
+The farmer foddering his cattle, or drawing manure afield, or 
+leading his horse to water; the pedestrian crossing the hill below; 
+the children wending their way  toward  the  distant  schoolhouse,--
+the  eye cannot help but note them: they are black specks upon 
+square miles of luminous white.  What a multitude of sins this 
+unstinted charity of the snow covers!  How it flatters the ground!- 
+Yonder sterile field might be a garden, and you would never suspect 
+that that gentle slope with its pretty dimples and curves was not 
+the smoothest of meadows, yet it is paved with rocks and stone.
+
+But what is that black speck creeping across that cleared field 
+near the top of the mountain at the head of the valley, three 
+quarters of a mile away?  It is like a fly moving across an 
+illuminated surface.  A distant mellow bay floats to us, and we 
+know it is the hound.  He picked up the trail of the fox half an 
+hour since, where he had crossed the ridge early in the morning, 
+and now he has routed him and Reynard is steering for the Big 
+Mountain.  We press on and attain the shoulder of the range, where 
+we strike a trail two or three days old of some former hunters, 
+which leads us into the woods along the side of the mountain.    We 
+are on the first plateau before the summit; the snow partly 
+supports us, but when it gives way and we sound it with our legs, 
+we find it up to our hips.    Here we enter a white world indeed.    
+It is like some conjurer's trick.    The very trees have turned to 
+snow.  The smallest branch is like a cluster of great white 
+antlers.  The eye is bewildered by the soft fleecy labyrinth before 
+it.  On the lower ranges the forests were entirely bare, but now we 
+perceive the summit of every mountain about us runs up into a kind 
+of arctic region where the trees are loaded with snow.  The 
+beginning of this colder zone is sharply marked all around the 
+horizon; the line runs as level as the shore line of a lake or sea; 
+indeed, a warmer aerial sea fills all the valleys, submerging the 
+lower peaks, and making white islands of all the higher ones.  The 
+branches bend with the rime.  The winds have not shaken it down.  
+It adheres to them like a growth. On examination I find the 
+branches coated with ice, from which shoot slender spikes and 
+needles that penetrate and hold the cord of snow.  It is a new kind 
+of foliage wrought by the frost and the clouds, and it obscures the 
+sky, and fills the vistas of the woods nearly as much as the myriad 
+leaves of summer.  The sun blazes, the sky is without a cloud or a 
+film, yet we walk in a soft white shade.  A gentle breeze was 
+blowing on the open crest of the mountain, but one could carry a 
+lighted candle through these snow-curtained and snow-canopied 
+chambers.  How shall we see the fox if the hound drives him through 
+this white obscurity?  But we listen in vain for the voice of the 
+dog and press on.  Hares' tracks were numerous.  Their great soft 
+pads had left their imprint everywhere, sometimes showing a clear 
+leap of ten feet.  They had regular circuits which we crossed at 
+intervals.  The woods were well suited to them, low and dense, and, 
+as we saw, liable at times to wear a livery whiter than their own.
+
+The mice, too, how thick their tracks were, that of the white-
+footed mouse being most abundant; but occasionally there was a much 
+finer track, with strides or leaps scarcely more than an inch 
+apart.  This is perhaps the little shrew-mouse of the woods, the 
+body not more than an inch and a half long, the smallest mole or 
+mouse kind known to me.  Once, while encamping in the woods, one of 
+these tiny shrews got into an empty pail standing in camp, and died 
+before morning, either from the cold, or in despair of ever getting 
+out of the pail.
+
+At one point, around a small sugar maple, the mice-tracks  are 
+unusually thick.  It is doubtless their granary; they have beech-
+nuts stored there, I'll warrant.  There are two entrances to the 
+cavity of the tree,--one at the base, and one seven or eight feet 
+up. At the upper one, which is only just the size of a mouse, a 
+squirrel has been trying to break in.  He has cut and chiseled the 
+solid wood to the depth of nearly an inch, and his chips strew the 
+snow all about.  He knows what is in there, and the mice know that 
+he knows;  hence their apparent consternation.  They have rushed 
+wildly about over the snow, and, I doubt not, have given the 
+piratical red squirrel a piece of their minds.  A few yards away 
+the mice have a hole down into the snow, which perhaps leads to 
+some snug den under the ground.   Hither they may have been slyly 
+removing their stores while the squirrel was at work with his back 
+turned.  One more night and he will effect an entrance: what a good 
+joke upon him if he finds the cavity empty!   These native mice are 
+very provident, and, I imagine, have to take many precautions to 
+prevent their winter stores being plundered by the squirrels, who 
+live, as it were, from hand to mouth.
+
+We see several fresh fox-tracks, and wish for the hound, but there 
+are no tidings of him.  After half an hour's floundering and 
+cautiously picking our way through the woods, we emerge into a 
+cleared field that stretches up from the valley below, and just 
+laps over the back of the mountain.  It is a broad belt of white 
+that drops down and down till it joins other fields that sweep 
+along the base of the mountain, a mile away.  To the east, through 
+a deep defile in the mountains, a landscape in an adjoining county 
+lifts itself up, like a bank of white and gray clouds.
+
+When the experienced fox-hunter comes out upon such an eminence as 
+this, he always scrutinizes the fields closely that lie beneath 
+him, and it many times happens that his sharp eye detects Reynard 
+asleep upon a rock or a stone wall, in which case, if he be armed 
+with a rifle and his dog be not near, the poor creature never 
+wakens from his slumber.  The fox nearly always takes his nap in 
+the open fields, along the sides of the ridges, or under the 
+mountain, where he can look down upon the busy farms beneath and 
+hear their many sounds, the barking of dogs, the lowing of cattle, 
+the cackling of hens, the voices of men and boys, or the sound of 
+travel upon the highway.  It is on that side, too, that he keeps 
+the sharpest lookout, and the appearance  of the hunter above and 
+behind him is always a surprise.  We  pause  here,   and, with  
+alert  ears  turned toward the Big Mountain in front of us, listen 
+for the dog.  But not a sound is heard.  A flock of snow buntings 
+pass high above us, uttering their contented twitter, and their 
+white forms seen against the intense blue give the impression of 
+large snowflakes drifting across the sky.  I hear a purple finch, 
+too, and the feeble lisp of the redpoll.  A shrike (the first I 
+have seen this season) finds occasion to come this way also.  He 
+alights on the tip of a dry limb, and from his perch can see into 
+the valley on both sides of the mountain.  He is prowling about for 
+chickadees, no doubt, a troop of which I saw coming through the 
+wood.  When pursued by the shrike, the chickadee has been seen to 
+take refuge in a squirrel-hole in a tree.  Hark!  Is that the 
+hound, or doth expectation mock the eager ear?  With open mouths 
+and bated breaths we listen.  Yes, it is old "Singer;" he is 
+bringing the fox over the top of the range toward Butt End, the 
+ULTIMA THULE of the hunters' tramps in this section.  In a moment 
+or two the dog is lost to hearing again.  We wait for his second 
+turn; then for his third.
+
+"He is playing about the summit," says my companion.
+
+"Let us go there," say I, and we are off.
+
+More dense snow-hung woods beyond the clearing where we begin our 
+ascent of the Big Mountain,--a chief that carries the range up 
+several hundred feet higher than the part we have thus far 
+traversed.  We are occasionally to our hips in the snow, but for 
+the most part the older stratum, a foot or so down, bears us;  up 
+and up we go into the dim, muffled solitudes, our hats and coats 
+powdered like millers'.  A half-hour's heavy tramping brings us to 
+the broad, level summit, and to where the fox and hound have 
+crossed and recrossed many times.  As we are walking along 
+discussing the matter, we suddenly hear the dog coming straight on 
+to us.  The woods are so choked with snow that we do not hear him 
+till he breaks up from under the mountain within a hundred yards of 
+us.
+
+"We have turned the fox!" we both exclaim, much put out.
+
+Sure enough, we have.  The dog appears in sight, is puzzled a 
+moment, then turns sharply to the left, and is lost to eye and to 
+ear as quickly as if he had plunged into a cave.  The woods are, 
+indeed, a kind of cave,--a cave of alabaster, with the sun shining 
+upon it.  We take up positions and wait.  These old hunters know 
+exactly where to stand.
+
+"If the fox comes back," said my companion, "he will cross up there 
+or down here," indicating two points not twenty rods asunder.
+
+We stood so that each commanded one of the runways indicated.  How 
+light it was, though the sun was hidden!  Every branch and twig 
+beamed in the sun like a lamp.  A downy woodpecker below me kept up 
+a great fuss and clatter,--all for my benefit, I suspected.  All 
+about me were great, soft mounds, where the rocks lay buried.  It 
+was a cemetery of drift boulders.  There! that is the hound.  Does 
+his voice come across the valley from the spur off against us, or 
+is it on our side down under the mountain?  After an interval, just 
+as I am thinking the dog is going away from us along the opposite 
+range, his voice comes up astonishingly near.  A mass of snow falls 
+from a branch, and makes one start; but it is not the fox.  Then 
+through the white vista below me I catch a glimpse of something red 
+or yellow, yellowish red or reddish yellow; it emerges from the 
+lower ground, and, with an easy, jaunty air, draws near.   I am 
+ready and just in the mood to make a good shot.  The fox stops just 
+out of range and listens for the hound.  He looks as bright as an 
+autumn leaf upon the spotless surface.  Then he starts on, but he 
+is not coming to me, he is going to the other man.  Oh, foolish 
+fox, you are going straight into the jaws of death!  My comrade 
+stands just there beside that tree.  I would gladly have given 
+Reynard the wink, or signaled to him, if I could.  It did seem a 
+pity to shoot him, now he was out of my reach.  I cringe for him, 
+when crack goes the gun!  The fox squalls, picks himself up, and 
+plunges over the brink of the mountain.  The hunter has not missed 
+his aim, but the oil in his gun, he says, has weakened the strength 
+of his powder.  The hound, hearing the report, comes like a 
+whirlwind and is off in hot pursuit.  Both fox and dog now bleed,--
+the dog at his heels, the fox from his wounds.
+
+In a few minutes there came up from under the mountain that long, 
+peculiar bark which the hound always makes when he has run the fox 
+in, or when something new and extraordinary has happened.  In this 
+instance he said plainly enough, "The race is up, the coward has 
+taken to his hole, ho-o-o-le."  Plunging down in the direction of 
+the sound, the snow literally to our waists, we were soon at the 
+spot, a great ledge thatched over with three or four feet of snow.  
+The dog was alternately licking his heels and whining and berating 
+the fox.  The opening into which the latter had fled was partially 
+closed, and, as I scraped out and cleared away the snow, I thought 
+of the familiar saying, that so far as the sun shines in, the snow 
+will blow in.  The fox, I suspect, has always his house of refuge, 
+or knows at once where to flee to if hard pressed.  This place 
+proved to be a large vertical seam in the rock, into which the dog, 
+on a little encouragement from his master, made his way.  I thrust 
+my head into the ledge's mouth, and in the dim light watched the 
+dog.  He progressed slowly and cautiously till only his bleeding 
+heels were visible.  Here some obstacle impeded him a few moments, 
+when he entirely disappeared and was presently face to face with 
+the fox and engaged in mortal combat with him.  It  is a fierce 
+encounter there  beneath the rocks, the fox silent, the dog very 
+vociferous.  But after a time the superior weight and strength of 
+the latter prevails and the fox is brought to light nearly dead.  
+Reynard winks and eyes me suspiciously, as I stroke his head and 
+praise his heroic defense; but the hunter quickly and mercifully 
+puts an end to his fast-ebbing life.  His canine teeth seem 
+unusually large and formidable, and the dog bears the marks of them 
+in many deep gashes upon his face and nose.  His pelt is quickly 
+stripped off, revealing his lean, sinewy form.
+
+The fox was not as poor in flesh as I expected to see him, though 
+I'll warrant he had tasted very little food for days, perhaps for 
+weeks.  How his great activity and endurance can be kept up, on the 
+spare diet he must of necessity be confined to, is a mystery.  
+Snow, snow everywhere, for weeks and for months, and intense cold, 
+and no henroost accessible, and no carcass of sheep or pig in the 
+neighborhood!  The hunter, tramping miles and leagues through his 
+haunts, rarely sees any sign of his having caught anything.  
+Rarely, though, in the course of many winters, he may have seen 
+evidence of his having surprised a rabbit or a partridge in the 
+woods.  He no doubt at this season lives largely upon the memory 
+(or the fat) of the many good dinners he had in the plentiful 
+summer and fall.
+
+As we crossed the mountain on our return, we saw at one point 
+blood-stains upon the snow, and, as the fox-tracks were very thick 
+on and about it, we concluded that a couple of males had had an 
+encounter there, and a pretty sharp one.  Reynard goes a-wooing in 
+February, and it is to be presumed that, like other dogs, he is a 
+jealous lover.  A crow had alighted and examined the blood-stains, 
+and now, if he will look a little farther along, upon a flat rock 
+he will find the flesh he was looking for.  Our hound's nose was so 
+blunted now, speaking without metaphor, that he would not look at 
+another trail, but hurried home to rest upon his laurels.
+
+
+A POTOMAC  SKETCH
+
+While on a visit to Washington in January, 1878, I went on an 
+expedition down the Potomac with a couple of friends to shoot 
+ducks.  We left on the morning boat that makes daily trips to and 
+from Mount Vernon.  The weather was chilly and the sky threatening.  
+The clouds had a singular appearance; they were boat-shaped, with 
+well-defined keels.  I have seldom known such clouds to bring rain; 
+they are simply the fleet of Æolus, and so it proved on this 
+occasion, for they gradually dispersed or faded out and before noon 
+the sun was shining.
+
+We saw numerous flocks of ducks on the passage down, and saw a gun 
+(the man was concealed) shoot some from a "blind" near Fort 
+Washington.  Opposite Mount Vernon, on the flats, there was a large 
+"bed" of ducks.  I thought the word a good one to describe a long 
+strip of water thickly planted with them.  One of my friends was a 
+member of the Washington and Mount Vernon Ducking Club, which has 
+its camp and fixtures just below the Mount Vernon landing; he was 
+an old ducker.  For my part, I had never killed a duck,--except 
+with an axe,--nor have I yet.
+
+We made our way along the beach from the landing, over piles of 
+driftwood, and soon reached the quarters, a substantial building, 
+fitted up with a stove, bunks, chairs, a table, culinary utensils, 
+crockery, etc., with one corner piled full of decoys.  There were 
+boats to row in and boxes to shoot from, and I felt sure we should 
+have a pleasant time, whether we got any ducks or not.  The weather 
+improved hourly, till in the afternoon a well-defined installment 
+of the Indian summer, that had been delayed somewhere, settled down 
+upon the scene; this lasted during our stay of two days.  The river 
+was placid, even glassy, the air richly and deeply toned with haze, 
+and the sun that of the mellowest October.  "The fairer the 
+weather, the fewer the ducks," said one of my companions.  "But 
+this is better than ducks," I thought, and prayed that it might 
+last.
+
+Then there was something pleasing to the fancy in being so near to 
+Mount Vernon.  It formed a-sort of rich, historic background to our 
+flitting and trivial experiences.  Just where the eye of the great 
+Captain would perhaps first strike the water as he came out in the 
+morning to take a turn up and down his long piazza, the Club had 
+formerly had a "blind," but the ice of a few weeks before our visit 
+had carried it away. A little lower down, and in full view from his 
+bedroom window, was the place where the shooting from the boxes was 
+usually done.
+
+The duck is an early bird, and not much given to wandering about in 
+the afternoon; hence it was thought not worth while to put out the 
+decoys till the next morning.  We would spend the afternoon roaming 
+inland in quest of quail, or rabbits, or turkeys (for a brood of 
+the last were known to lurk about the woods back there).  It was a 
+delightful afternoon's tramp through oak woods, pine barrens, and 
+half-wild fields.  We flushed several quail that the dog should 
+have pointed, and put a rabbit to rout by a well-directed 
+broadside, but brought no game to camp.  We kicked about an old 
+bushy clearing, where my friends had shot a wild turkey 
+Thanksgiving Day, but the turkey could not be started again.  One 
+shooting had sufficed for it.  We crossed or penetrated extensive 
+pine woods that had once (perhaps in Washington's time) been 
+cultivated fields; the mark of the plow was still clearly visible.  
+The land had been thrown into ridges, after the manner of English 
+fields, eight or ten feet wide, with a deep dead furrow between 
+them for purposes of drainage.  The pines were scrubby,--what are 
+known as the loblolly pines,--and from ten to twelve inches through 
+at the butt.  In a low bottom, among some red cedars, I saw robins 
+and several hermit thrushes, besides the yellow-rumped warbler.
+
+That night, as the sun went down on the one hand, the full moon 
+rose up on the other, like the opposite side of an enormous scale.  
+The river, too, was presently brimming with the flood tide.    It 
+was so still one could have carried a lighted candle from shore to 
+shore.  In a little skiff, we floated and paddled up under the 
+shadow of Mount Vernon and into the mouth of a large creek that 
+flanks it on the left.  In the profound hush of things, every sound 
+on either shore was distinctly heard.  A large bed of ducks were 
+feeding over on the Maryland side, a mile or more away, and the 
+multitudinous sputtering and shuffling of their bills in the water 
+sounded deceptively near.  Silently we paddled in that direction.  
+When about half a mile from them, all sound of feeding suddenly 
+ceased; then, after a time, as we kept on, there was a great clamor 
+of wings, and the whole bed appeared to take flight.  We paused and 
+listened, and presently heard them take to the water again, far 
+below and beyond us.  We loaded a boat with the decoys that night, 
+and in the morning, on the first sign of day, towed a box out in 
+position, and anchored it, and disposed the decoys about it.  Two 
+hundred painted wooden ducks, each anchored by a small weight that 
+was attached by a cord to the breast, bowed and sidled and rode the 
+water, and did everything but feed, in a bed many yards long.  The 
+shooting-box is a kind of coffin, in which the gunner is interred 
+amid the decoys,--buried below the surface of the water, and 
+invisible, except from a point above him.  The box has broad canvas 
+wings, that unfold and spread out upon the surface of the water, 
+four or five feet each way.  These steady it, and keep the ripples 
+from running in when there is a breeze.  Iron decoys sit upon these 
+wings and upon the edge of the box, and sink it to the required 
+level, so that, when everything is completed and the gunner is in 
+position, from a distance or from the shore one sees only a large 
+bed of ducks, with the line a little more pronounced in the centre, 
+where the sportsman lies entombed, to be quickly resurrected when 
+the game appears.  He lies there stark and stiff upon his back, 
+like a marble effigy upon a tomb, his gun by his side, with barely 
+room to straighten himself in, and nothing to look at but the sky 
+above him. His companions on shore keep a lookout,  and, when ducks 
+are seen on the wing, cry out, "Mark, coming up," or "Mark, coming 
+down," or, "Mark, coming in," as the case may be.  If they decoy, 
+the gunner presently hears the whistle of their wings, or maybe he 
+catches a glimpse of them over the rim of the box as they circle 
+about.  Just as they let down their feet to alight, he is expected 
+to spring up and pour his broadside into them.  A boat from shore 
+comes and picks up the game, if there is any to pick up.
+
+The club-man, by common consent, was the first in the box that 
+morning;   but only a few ducks were moving, and he had lain there 
+an hour before we marked a solitary bird approaching, and, after 
+circling over the decoys, alighting a little beyond them.  The 
+sportsman sprang up as from the bed of the river, and the duck 
+sprang up at the same time, and got away under fire.  After a while 
+my other companion went out; but the ducks passed by on the other 
+side, and he had no shots.  In the afternoon, remembering the 
+robins, and that robins are game when one's larder is low, I set 
+out alone for the pine bottoms, a mile or more distant.  When one 
+is loaded for robins, he may expect to see turkeys, and VICE VERSA.  
+As I was walking carelessly on the borders of an old brambly field 
+that stretched a long distance beside the pine woods, I heard a 
+noise in front of me, and, on looking in that direction, saw a 
+veritable turkey, with a spread tail, leaping along at a rapid 
+rate.  She was so completely the image of the barnyard fowl that I 
+was slow to realize that here was the most notable game of that 
+part of Virginia, for the sight of which sportsmen's eyes do water.  
+As she was fairly on the wing, I sent my robin-shot after her;  but 
+they made no impression, and I stood and watched with great 
+interest her long, level flight.  As she neared the end of the 
+clearing, she set her wings and sailed straight into the corner of 
+the woods.  I found no robins, but went back satisfied with having 
+seen the turkey, and having had an experience that I knew would 
+stir up the envy and the disgust of my companions.  They listened 
+with ill-concealed impatience, stamped the ground a few times, 
+uttered a vehement protest against the caprice of fortune that 
+always puts the game in the wrong place or the gun in the wrong 
+hands, and rushed off in quest of that turkey.  She was not where 
+they looked, of course;   and, on their return about sundown, when 
+they had ceased to think about their game, she flew out of the top 
+of a pine-tree not thirty rods from camp, and in full view of them, 
+but too far off for a shot.
+
+In my wanderings that afternoon, I came upon two negro shanties in 
+a small triangular clearing in the woods; no road but only a 
+footpath led to them.  Three or four children, the eldest a girl of 
+twelve, were about the door of one of them.  I approached and asked 
+for a drink of water. The girl got a glass and showed me to the 
+spring near by.
+
+"We's  grandmover's  daughter's   chilern,"   she said, in reply to 
+my inquiry.  Their mother worked in Washington for "eighteen cents 
+a month," and their grandmother took care of them.
+
+Then I thought I would pump her about the natural history of the 
+place.
+
+"What was there in these woods,--what kind of animals,--any? "
+
+"Oh, yes, sah, when we first come here to live in dese bottoms de 
+possums and foxes and things were so thick you could hardly go out-
+o'-doors."  A fox had come along one day right where her mother was 
+washing, and they used to catch the chickens "dreadful."
+
+"Were there any snakes?"
+
+"Yes, sah; black snakes, moccasins, and doctors."
+
+The doctor, she said, was a powerful ugly customer; it would get 
+right hold of your leg as you were passing along, and whip and 
+sting you to death.  I hoped I should not meet any "doctors."
+
+I asked her if they caught any rabbits.
+
+"Oh, yes, we catches dem in 'gums.' "
+
+"What are gums?" I asked.
+
+"See dat down dare?  Dat's a 'gum.' "
+
+I saw a rude box-trap made of rough boards.  It seems these traps, 
+and many other things, such as beehives, and tubs, etc., are 
+frequently made in the South from a hollow gum-tree; hence the name 
+gum has come to have a wide application.
+
+The ducks flew quite briskly that night; I could hear the whistle 
+of their wings as I stood upon the shore indulging myself in 
+listening.  The ear loves a good field as well as the eye, and the 
+night is the best time to listen, to put your ear to Nature's 
+keyhole and see what the whisperings and the preparations mean.
+
+ "Dark night, that from the eye his 
+       function takes,
+   The ear more quick of apprehension 
+       makes,"
+
+says Shakespeare.  I overheard some muskrats engaged in a very 
+gentle and affectionate jabber beneath a rude pier of brush and 
+earth upon which I was standing.  The old, old story was evidently 
+being rehearsed under there, but the occasional splashing of the 
+ice-cold water made it seem like very chilling business; still we 
+all know it is not.  Our decoys had not been brought in, and I 
+distinctly heard some ducks splash in among them.  The sound of 
+oar-locks in the distance next caught my ears.  They were so far 
+away that it took some time to decide whether or not they were 
+approaching.    But they finally grew more distinct,--the steady, 
+measured beat of an oar in a wooden lock, a very pleasing sound 
+coming over still, moonlit waters.  It was an hour before the boat 
+emerged into view and passed my post.  A white, misty obscurity 
+began to gather over the waters, and in the morning this had grown 
+to be a dense fog.  By early dawn one of my friends was again in 
+the box, and presently his gun went bang! bang! then bang! came 
+again from the second gun he had taken with him, and we imagined 
+the water strewn with ducks.  But he reported only one.  It floated 
+to him and was picked up, so we need not go out.  In the dimness 
+and silence we rowed up and down the shore in hopes of starting up 
+a stray duck that might possibly decoy.  We saw many objects that 
+simulated ducks pretty well through the obscurity, but they failed 
+to take wing on our approach.  The most pleasing thing we saw was a 
+large, rude boat, propelled by four colored oarsmen.  It looked as 
+if it might have come out of some old picture.  Two oarsmen were 
+seated in the bows, pulling, and two stood up in the stern, facing 
+their companions, each working a long oar, bending and recovering 
+and uttering a low, wild chant.  The spectacle emerged from the fog 
+on the one hand and plunged into it on the other.
+
+Later in the morning, we were attracted by another craft. We heard 
+it coming down upon us long before it emerged into view.  It made a 
+sound as of some unwieldy creature slowly pawing the water, and 
+when it became visible through the fog the sight did not belie the 
+ear.  We beheld an awkward black hulk that looked as if it might 
+have been made out of the bones of the first steamboat, or was it 
+some Virginia colored man's study of that craft?  Its wheels 
+consisted each of two timbers crossing each other at right angles. 
+As the shaft slowly turned, these timbers pawed and pawed the 
+water.  It hove to on the flats near our quarters, and a colored 
+man came off in a boat.  To our inquiry, he said with a grin that 
+his craft was a "floating saw-mill."
+
+After a while I took my turn in the box, and, with a life-preserver 
+for a pillow, lay there on my back, pressed down between the narrow 
+sides, the muzzle of my gun resting upon my toe and its stock upon 
+my stomach, waiting for the silly ducks to come.  I was rather in 
+hopes they would not come, for I felt pretty certain that I could 
+not get up promptly in such narrow quarters and deliver my shot 
+with any precision.  As nothing could be seen, and as it was very 
+still, it was a good time to listen again.  I was virtually under 
+water, and in a good medium for the transmission of sounds.  The 
+barking of dogs on the Maryland shore was quite audible, and I 
+heard with great distinctness a Maryland lass call some one to 
+breakfast.  They were astir up at Mount Vernon, too, though the fog 
+hid them from view.  I heard the mocking or Carolina wren 
+alongshore calling quite plainly the words a Georgetown poet has 
+put in his mouth,--"Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet!"   Presently I 
+heard the whistle of approaching wings, and a solitary duck 
+alighted back of me over my right shoulder,--just the most awkward 
+position for me she could have assumed.  I raised my head a little, 
+and skimmed the water with my eye.  The duck was swimming about 
+just beyond the decoys, apparently apprehensive that she was 
+intruding upon the society of her betters.  She would approach a 
+little, and then, as the stiff, aristocratic decoys made no sign of 
+welcome or recognition, she would sidle off again.  "Who are they, 
+that they should hold themselves so loftily and never condescend to 
+notice a forlorn duck?" I imagined her saying.  Should I spring up 
+and show my hand and demand her surrender?  It was clearly my duty 
+to do so. I wondered if the boys were looking from shore, for the 
+fog had lifted a little. But I must act, or the duck would be off.  
+I began to turn slowly in my sepulchre and to gather up my benumbed 
+limbs; I then made a rush and got up, and had a fairly good shot as 
+the duck flew across my bows, but I failed to stop her.  A man in 
+the woods in the line of my shot cried out angrily, "Stop shooting 
+this way!"
+
+I lay down again and faced the sun, that had now burned its way 
+through the fog, till I was nearly blind, but no more ducks 
+decoyed, and I called out to be relieved.
+
+With our one duck, but with many pleasant remembrances, we returned 
+to Washington that afternoon.
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+ABUTILON, or velvet-leaf.
+
+Ailanthus.
+
+Alder, white.
+
+Amaranth, 215.
+
+Arbutus, trailing, or mayflower.
+
+Arethusa.
+
+Arkville.
+
+Arnold, George.
+
+Ash.
+
+Asters.
+
+Azalea, pink, or pinxter-flower.
+
+Azalea, smooth.
+
+Azalea, white.
+
+Azalea, yellow.
+
+Ball, an inexpensive.
+
+Bark-a-boom.
+
+Baxter's Brook.
+
+Bay, sweet.
+
+Bear, black, attacked with a club.
+
+Bear-weed.
+
+Beattie, James, quotation from.
+
+Beaver, 173.
+
+Bee.  See Bumblebee, Honey-bee, and Sweat-bee.
+
+Bee, solitary.
+
+Beech.
+
+Berries.
+
+Bidens, or two-teeth, or pitchforks.
+
+Big Beaver Kill.
+
+Big Mountain.
+
+Bindweed, black.
+
+Birch, yellow.
+
+Birds, singing at night; morning awakening of; individuality in the 
+songs of; in poetry; process of hatching; leaving the nest; arrival 
+in spring; love-making among; war among; their departure in the 
+fall; a good season for; songs of, in America and in England.
+
+Birds of prey, their flight when laden.
+
+Blackbird, cow, or cowbird (MOLOTHRUS ATER).
+
+Blackbird, crow, or purple grackle (QUISCALUS QUISCULA).
+
+Blackbird, European, in poetry; his resemblance to the American 
+robin; notes of.
+
+Blackbird, red-winged.  See Starling, red-shouldered. 
+
+Blackbird, rusty.  See Grackle, rusty.
+
+Bladderwort, horned.
+
+Bluebird (SIALIA SIALIS), in poetry; notes of; nest of.
+
+Blue-weed, or viper's bugloss; travels of; description of.
+
+Boat, a picturesque.
+
+Bobolink (DOLICHONYX ORYZIVORUS; as a wooer; notes of.
+
+Bob-white.  See Quail.
+
+Bouncing Bet, or saponaria.
+
+Boys.
+
+Bryant, William Cullen; as a poet of nature; quotations from.
+
+Buckwheat, wild.
+
+Bugloss.
+
+Bugloss, viper's.  See Blue-weed. 
+
+Bullfrog.
+
+Bumblebee; nest of.
+
+Bunting, English.
+
+Bunting, indigo.  See Indigo-bird. 
+
+Bunting, snow, or snowflake (PASSERINA NIVALIS).
+
+Burdock.
+
+Burns, Robert, quotation from. 
+
+Butt End.
+
+Buttercup.
+
+Caledonia springs.
+
+Calopogon.
+
+Camping; in the rain.
+
+Campion, bladder.
+
+Cardinal (CARDINALIS CARDINALIS); notes of.
+
+Cardinal flower.  See Lobelia, scarlet.
+
+Carrot, wild.
+
+Catbird (GALEOSCOPTES CAROLINENSIS), in poetry; notes of.
+
+Catnip.
+
+Catskill Mountains.
+
+Cattle, crossing a river; as eaters of weeds.
+
+Cedar-bird, or cedar waxwing (AMPELIS CEDRORUM.
+
+Chamomile.
+
+Chewink, or towhee (PIPILO ERYTHROPHTHALMUS).
+
+Chickadee (PARUS ATRICAPILLUS); nest of.
+
+Chickweed; at the antipodes.
+
+Chicory, or succory; in poetry.
+
+Chipmunk.
+
+Chippie.  See Sparrow.
+
+Chough.
+
+Cicada, or harvest-fly. 
+
+Claytonia, or spring beauty.
+
+Clematis, wild.
+
+Clouds, boat-shaped.
+
+Clover.
+
+Clover, white.
+
+Cochecton Falls.
+
+Cockle.
+
+Colchester.
+
+Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, quotation from.
+
+Coltsfoot.
+
+Coltsfoot, sweet.
+
+Columbine.
+
+Companions, outdoor.
+
+Cone-flower.
+
+Coon.  See Raccoon.
+
+Cormorant.
+
+Corn, Indian.
+
+Cowbird.  See Blackbird, cow.
+
+Cows.  See Cattle.
+
+Cowslip.  See Marigold, marsh.
+
+Cowslip, English.
+
+Creeper, brown (CERTHIA FAMILIARIS AMERICANA), nest of.
+
+Crickets.  See Tree-crickets.
+
+Crow American (CORVUS BRACHYRHYNCHOS), gait of; notes of.
+
+Cuckoo (COCCYZUS sp.), heard at night; habits of; in poetry; notes 
+of.
+
+Cuckoo, European.
+
+Cuckoo-buds.
+
+Cuckoo-flower.
+
+Cuckoo-pint.
+
+Cypripedium. See Lady's-slipper.
+
+Daffodil.
+
+Daisy, English.
+
+Daisy, ox-eye.
+
+Dandelion.
+
+Darnel.
+
+Day, a white.
+
+Dead-nettle.
+
+Delaware River, Pepacton branch of.  See Pepacton River.
+
+Dentaria.
+
+Deposit.
+
+Dicentra, or squirrel corn.
+
+Dock, curled-leaf.
+
+Dock, yellow.
+
+Doctor, the (a snake).
+
+Dog, Cuff and the woodchucks.  See Greyhound and Hound.
+
+Dog, farm, hound and. 
+
+Dogbane.
+
+Dove, mourning (ZENAIDURA MACROURA).
+
+Doves.
+
+Downsville.
+
+Dry Brook.
+
+Ducks, feeding.
+
+Duck-shooting on the Potomac.
+
+Eagle, chased by a kingbird; flight of an.
+
+East Branch.
+
+Elecampane.
+
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quotations from; his knowledge of nature.
+
+England, bird-songs in; pedestrianism in; the footpaths of; the 
+highways of.
+
+Esopus.
+
+Eupatorium, purple.
+
+Falcon, haggard.
+
+Finch, purple (CARPODACUS PURPUREUS; notes of.
+
+Fisherman, an ancient.
+
+Fishes, spring movements of.
+
+Fleabane, or whiteweed.
+
+Flicker.  See High-hole.
+
+Flowers, wild, in poetry; fragrant.
+
+Footpaths, lack of, in America; English; a schoolboy's footpath.
+
+Forenoon, as distinguished from morning.
+
+Fort Washington.
+
+Fox, red, and hound,; hunting a; favorite sleeping places of; hard 
+fare in winter; an encounter between rivals.
+
+Fringed-orchis, purple.
+
+Frog.  See Bullfrog.
+
+Frog, clucking.  See Wood-frog.
+
+Frog, peeping. See Hyla, Pickering's.
+
+Garlic.
+
+Gentian, closed.
+
+Gentian,  fringed, 63; Bryant's poem on.
+
+Gill.
+
+Girls.
+
+Goethe.
+
+Goldenrod.
+
+Goldfinch, American (ASTRAGALINUS TRISTIS; pairing habits of; notes 
+of.
+
+Goose-foot.
+
+Grackle, purple.  See Blackbird, crow.
+
+Grackle, rusty, or rusty blackbird (EUPHAGUS CAROLINUS), notes of.
+
+Grass, the natural covering of the fields.
+
+Grass, harvest.
+
+Grass, quack.
+
+Grass, quitch.
+
+Green Cove Spring.
+
+Greyhound.
+
+Ground-nut.
+
+Grouse, ruffed, or partridge (BONASA UMBELLUS), in poetry; drumming 
+of.
+
+"Gums,".
+
+Gum-tree.
+
+Haggard.
+
+Hancock.
+
+Hare, northern.
+
+Hares.
+
+Harrisonburg, Va.
+
+Harvard.
+
+Harvest-fly.  See Cicada.
+
+Hawk, in poetry, 116.  See Hen-hawk.
+
+Hawkfish.  See Osprey, American.
+
+Hawk's Point.
+
+Hedgehog.
+
+Hedge-sparrow.
+
+Hemlock, poison.
+
+Henbane.
+
+Hen-hawk.
+
+Hepatica, or liver-leaf; the first spring flower; an intermittently 
+fragrant flower.
+
+Hercules.
+
+Heron.
+
+Heron, great  blue (ARDEA HERODIAS; notes of, 24, 28.
+
+High-hole, or golden-winged woodpecker, or flicker (COLAPTES 
+AURATUS LUTEUS; notes of; nest of.
+
+Highlands of the Hudson, the.
+
+Holywell.
+
+Honey, flowers which yield.
+
+Honey-bee, a product of civilization; wandering habits of; hunting 
+wild bees; method of handling; as robbers; enemies of; Virgil on.
+
+Honeysuckle.
+
+Hooker, Sir Joseph.
+
+Hop-clover.
+
+Hornet, black.
+
+Hornet, sand.
+
+Hound, fox and.
+
+Hound's-tongue.
+
+Housatonic River.
+
+Houstonia, or innocence.
+
+Humble-bee.  See Bumblebee.
+
+Humming-bird, ruby-throated (TROCHILUS COLUBRIS), in poetry; nest 
+of.
+
+Hunt, Helen, quotation from.
+
+Hyacinth, wild.
+
+Hyla, Pickering's, or peeping frog; arboreal life of.
+
+Hylas, the story of.
+
+Indigo-bird or indigo bunting (CYANOSPIZA CYANEA; notes of.
+
+Innocence. See Houstonia.
+
+Insects, nocturnal.
+
+Iron-weed.
+
+Ivy.
+
+Ivy, poison.
+
+Jack, catching.
+
+Jay, blue (CYANOCITTA CRISTATA; notes of.
+
+Jewel-weed.
+
+Junco, slate-colored.  See Snowbird.
+
+Katydids.
+
+Kingbird (TYRANNUS TYRANNUS), chasing an eagle; as a bee-eater; 
+notes of.
+
+Kingfisher, belted (CERYLE ALCYON.
+
+Knapp, Hon. Charles.
+
+Knot-grass.
+
+Lady's-slipper, large yellow.
+
+Lady's-slipper, purple.
+
+Lady's-slipper, small yellow. 
+
+Lady's tresses.
+
+Lake Oquaga.
+
+Lamprey.
+
+Lapwing.
+
+Lark.  See Skylark. 
+
+Lark, shore or horned (OTOCORIS ALPESTRIS and O. A. PRATICOLA) and 
+note.
+
+Larkspur.
+
+Laurel, mountain.
+
+Leeks.
+
+Lettuce, wild, 230, inden.
+
+Linnæa.
+
+Live-forever.
+
+Liver-leaf.  See Hepatica.
+
+Lobelia, great blue.
+
+Lobelia, scarlet, or cardinal flower.
+
+Locust-tree.
+
+Longfellow,  Henry  Wadsworth, his inaccuracy in dealing with 
+nature; quotations from.
+
+Loosestrife.
+
+Loosestrife, hairy.
+
+Loosestrife, spiked, travels of; description of.
+
+Lowell, James Russell, quotations from; his fidelity to nature.
+
+Mallow.
+
+Mandrake.
+
+Maple, sugar; fragrance of its blossoms.
+
+Marigold, marsh.
+
+Martin, purple (PROGNE SUBIS).
+
+Masque of the Poets, A, quotation from.
+
+Mayflower.  See Arbutus, trailing.
+
+Mayweed.
+
+Meadowlark (STURNELLA MAGNA); notes of.
+
+Merganser, hooded (LOPHODYTES CUCULLATUS), with a brood of young.
+
+Mice.
+
+Milkweed.
+
+Mink.
+
+Mitchella vine, or squaw-berry, or partridge-berry.
+
+Moccasin.
+
+Mockingbird (MIMUS POLYGLOTTOS), in poetry.
+
+Morning and forenoon, distinction between.
+
+Motherwort.
+
+Mount Vernon.
+
+Mouse, field.
+
+Mouse, white-footed, 169; tracks of.
+
+Mullein; habits of.
+
+Mullein, moth.
+
+Mullein, white.
+
+Musconetcong Creek.
+
+Muskrat; a weatherwise animal; active in winter; nests of.
+
+Mustard, wild.
+
+Nature, the poets' intuitive knowledge of; Emerson's knowledge of; 
+Bryant's knowledge of; Longfellow's inaccuracy in dealing with; 
+Whittier's treatment of; Lowell's fidelity to Tennyson's accurate 
+observations of; Walt Whitman a close student of; the poetic 
+interpretation of; the scientific interpretation of.
+
+Negro girl, a conversation with a.
+
+Nettle.
+
+Nettle, blind.
+
+Nettle, hemp.
+
+Nighthawk (CHORDEILES VIRGINIANUS.
+
+Nightshade.
+
+Note in the woods, a new.
+
+Oak, white.
+
+Onion, wild.
+
+Opossum.
+
+Orchids, American flora rich in.
+
+Orchis, fringed.  See Fringed-orchis.
+
+Orchis, showy.
+
+Oriole, Baltimore (ICTERUS GALBULA); as a fruit-destroyer; notes 
+of; nest of.
+
+Orpine, garden. See Live-forever.
+
+Orpines, native.
+
+Osprey, American, or fish hawk (PANDION HALIAËTUS CAROLINENSIS), 
+feeding on the wing.
+
+Otter.
+
+Oven-bird (SEIURUS AUROCAPILLUS); song of.
+
+Owl, screech (MEGASCOPS ASIO), and shrike.
+
+Oxlip.
+
+Pain, in relation to the nervous system.
+
+Parsnip, wild.
+
+Partridge.  See Grouse, ruffed. 
+
+Partridge-berry.  See Mitchella vine.
+
+Partridge Island.
+
+Pepacton River; a voyage down.
+
+Pewee, wood (CONTOPUS VIRENS), Trowbridge's poem on.
+
+Phœbe-bird (SAYORNIS PHŒBE); notes of; nest of.
+
+Pigeon, passenger (ECTOPISTES MIGRATORIUS).
+
+Pigeons.
+
+Pigweed.
+
+Pine, loblolly, 247.
+
+Pinxter-flower.  See Azalea, pink.
+
+Pipit, American.  See Titlark.
+
+Pitchforks.  See Biclens.
+
+Plantain.
+
+Plantain, narrow-leaved.
+
+Pliny, his account of an intermittent spring.
+
+Poets, their intuitive knowledge of nature; inaccuracies and 
+felicities in matters of natural history; their interpretation of 
+nature.
+
+Pogonia, adder's-tongue.
+
+Pokeweed.
+
+Polygala, fringed.
+
+Pond-lily, or sweet-scented water lily.
+
+Pond-lily, yellow.
+
+Poppy, scarlet field.
+
+Porcupine, Canadian.
+
+Potomac River, duck-shooting on.
+
+Primrose, in poetry.
+
+Primrose, evening.
+
+Prince's pine.
+
+Purslane.
+
+Pyrola.  See Wintergreen, false.
+
+Quail, or bob-white (COLINUS VIRGINIANUS.
+
+Rabbit, gray.
+
+Rabbits.
+
+Raccoon, or coon.
+
+Radish, wild.
+
+Rafting on the Delaware.
+
+Ragweed; a troublesome weed.
+
+Rain, arboreal; summer.
+
+Raspberry.
+
+Rat, wood.
+
+Redbird.  See Cardinal.
+
+Redpoll (ACANTHIS LINARIA), notes; of.
+
+Red-root.
+
+Rhododendron.
+
+River, a voyage down a; loneliness of the.
+
+Roads, in England and America.
+
+Robin, American (MERULA MIGRATORIA); in poetry; in love and war; 
+notes of; nest of.
+
+Rondout Creek.
+
+Roots, like molten metal.
+
+St. John's-wort. 
+
+Salamander, banded.
+
+Salamander, red. 
+
+Salamander, violet-colored or spotted.
+
+San Antonio, Texas.
+
+Saponaria.  See Bouncing Bet. 
+
+Sapsucker, yellow-bellied.  See-Woodpecker, yellow-bellied.
+
+Sawmill, a floating.
+
+Scott, Sir Walter.
+
+SEDUM TELEPHIOIDES.
+
+SEDUM TERNATUM.
+
+Shagbark.
+
+Shairp, John Campbell, his POETIC INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.
+
+Shakespeare, quotations from; his accuracy in observation.
+
+Shavertown.
+
+Shawangunk Mountains.
+
+Shepherd's purse.
+
+Shrew. 
+
+Shrike.
+
+Skunk.
+
+Skunk-cabbage.
+
+Skylark; on the Hudson; song of.
+
+Snail.
+
+Snake.
+
+Snake, black.
+
+Snow, a landscape  of; in the woods.
+
+Snowbird, slate-colored, or slate-colored junco (JUNCO HYEMALIS), 
+in poetry; notes of.
+
+Snowflake.  See Bunting, snow.
+
+Sodom.
+
+Sorrel, sheep.
+
+Sparrow, bush or Held (SPIZELLA PUSILLA.
+
+Sparrow, English (PASSER DOMESTICUS), manner of courtship.
+
+Sparrow, social or chipping, or "chippie" (SPIZELLA SOCIALIS).
+
+Sparrow, song (MELOSPIZA CINEREA MELODIA); notes of.
+
+Sparrow, vesper (POŒCETES GRAMINEUS), rejecting the attentions of a 
+skylark.
+
+Specularia, clasping.
+
+Spider, killing a bee; a musical.
+
+Spring, sudden coming of,  160-168.
+
+Spring beauty.  See Claytonia.
+
+Springs, paths leading to; their universal  attractiveness; centres 
+of greenness; symbolism of; locations of;  fondness of trout for; 
+physiology of; their mineral elements; large; as refrigerators; 
+countries poor in; on mountains; places of worship; various kinds 
+of; marvelous; intermittent; in the Idyls of Theocritus.
+
+Squaw-berry.  See Mitchella vine.
+
+Squirrel, flying.
+
+Squirrel, gray.
+
+Squirrel, Mexican black.
+
+Squirrel, red.
+
+Squirrel corn.  See Dicentra.
+
+Squirrels, as parachutes.
+
+Star, shooting.
+
+Starling, red-shouldered, or red winged blackbird, notes of.
+
+Stedman, Edmund Clarence, his SEEKING THE MAYFLOWER.
+
+Stevenson, Robert Louis, his TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY.
+
+Stick-seed.
+
+Stones, life under.
+
+Stramonium.
+
+Strawberries, wild.
+
+Succory.  See Chicory. 
+
+Sumac.
+
+Swallow, bank (RIPARIA RIPARIA).
+
+Swallow, barn (HIRUNDO ERYTHROGASTRA); nest of.
+
+Swallow, chimney, or chimney swift (CHÆTURA PELAGICA), nest of.
+
+Swallow, cliff (PETROCHELIDON LUNIFRONS), in poetry; nest of.
+
+Swallow, European.
+
+Swallows, in poetry.
+
+Sweat-bee.
+
+Tails, uses of.
+
+Tansy.
+
+Tare.  See Vetch.
+
+Teasle.
+
+Tennyson, Alfred, quotations from; a good observer.
+
+Theocritus, quotation from.
+
+Thistle, Canada.
+
+Thistle, common.
+
+Thistle, pasture.
+
+Thistle, swamp.
+
+Thomson, James, quotation from. 
+
+Thrasher, brown (TOXOSTOMA RUFUM), song of.
+
+Thrush, hermit (HYLOCICHLA GUTTATA PALLASII), in poetry; notes of.
+
+Thrush, wood (HYLOCICHLA MUSTELINA), notes of.
+
+Titlark, or American pipit (ANTHUS PENSILVANICUS).
+
+Toad.  See Tree-toad.
+
+Toad-flax.
+
+Tobacco.
+
+Tortoise.
+
+Towhee.  See Chewink.
+
+Tree-crickets.
+
+Tree-toad.
+
+Trout, brook, their fondness for springs; caught with tickling. 
+
+Trout-fishing. 
+
+Trowbridge, John T., his natural history; quotations from. 
+
+Turkey, wild (MELEAGRIS GALLOPAVO SILVESTRIS).
+
+Turtle.
+
+Turtle-head.
+
+Twin-flower.  See Linnæa.
+
+Two-teeth.  See Bidens.
+
+Velvet-leaf.  See Abutilon.
+
+Venus's looking-glass.
+
+Vervain.
+
+Vetch, or tare.
+
+Violet, in poetry.
+
+Violet, Canada; its fragrance.
+
+Violet, common blue.
+
+Violet, English.
+
+Violet, white.
+
+Violet, yellow.
+
+Vireo, in poetry.
+
+Virgil, on honey-bees; quotations from.
+
+Walking, in England; a simple and natural pastime.
+
+Warbler, yellow-rumped, or myrtle (DENDROICA CORONATA).
+
+Wasp, sand.  See Hornet, sand.
+
+Water-lily.  See Pond-lily.
+
+Waxwing, cedar.  See Cedar-bird.
+
+Weasel.
+
+Weebutook River.
+
+Weeds; their devotion to man; the gardener and the farmer the best 
+friends of; Nature's makeshift; great travelers; their abundance in 
+America; native and foreign; the growth of; escaped from 
+cultivation; beautiful; uses of various; less persistent and 
+universal than grass; virtues of.
+
+Well of St. Winifred.
+
+Wheat, winter.
+
+Whip-poor-will (ANTROSTOMUS VOCIFERUS), song of.
+
+Whiteweed.  See Fleabane.
+
+Whitman, Walt, a close student of American nature; quotations from.
+
+Whittier, John Greenleaf, as a poet of nature; quotations from.
+
+Winchester, Va.
+
+Wintergreen, false, or pyrola.
+
+Wintergreen, spotted.
+
+Witch-hazel, 101.
+
+Woodchuck.
+
+Wood-frog.
+
+Woodpecker, in poetry.
+
+Woodpecker, downy (DRYOBATES PUBESCENS MEDIANUS).
+
+Woodpecker, golden-winged.  See High-hole.
+
+Woodpecker, yellow-bellied, or yellow-bellied sapsucker 
+(SPHYRAPICIUS VARIUS), drumming of.
+
+Wood-pigeons.
+
+Wood-sorrel, common.
+
+Wood-sorrel, yellow.
+
+Wordsworth, William, quotations from.
+
+Wren, Carolina (THRYOTHORUS LUDOVICIANUS), notes of.
+
+Wren, house (TROGLODYTES AËDON), notes of; nest of.
+
+Yarrow.
+
+Yellow-jacket.
+
+Yew, American.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS ***
+
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