Chapter II: Other Comrades of the Road (2)

Mike had begun to show signs of feathers and once he tried to crow. He had become less dependent on me for intimate society, his attention being much taken up with thwarting Pat's designs on the tidbits, but he could by no means dispense with me as general protector. If I were in the room, or close beside them in a steamer chair out of doors, he was willing to ramble a bit with Pat and Cluxley, always taking the lead, but I could not slip away and leave them, even in Mary's charge, without immediate consternation, protest and pursuit on Microbe's part. He was such a humanized chicken, coming at the call of his name, loving to eat from the finger, cocking his little head so sagely when he was addressed and politely cheeping a response, that he became perilously attractive to the children of the neighborhood. Sturdy schoolboys would kiss his yellow softness on the sly and we often had to rescue him from the unskillful clutch of loving childish hands.

When a luncheon was brought to me out of doors, all three chickens would come winging and scrabbling up the rug that wrapped the sorceress of the steamer-chair and dispose themselves about the edge of the tray, chirping continuous amens to the grace steeped in ancient witchcraft:

"Spread, table, spread.
Meat, drink and bread.
Ever may I have
What I ever crave,
When I am spread.
Meat for my black cock,
And meat for my red."

Now that I was to be seen outside the house with my little brood, kindly neighbors came from all sides with offers of more chickens, but my family cares were already heavy for a convalescent, and experience had taught me that

"true happiness
Consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice."

Occasional misgivings as to the future crossed my mind. I had often seen reposing sheep blocking up the doorways of Andalusian homes,--Easter lambs given, all gay with ribbons, to the children the year before and still withheld by family affection from their natural destiny of mutton. The Dryad looked forward with glee to my appearance on the academic platform with three full-grown fowls roosting on the back of my chair or stalking up and down the desk, picking up bits of chalk and pencil whittlings, but such embarrassments were not to be.

Mike was the first to sicken. His name may have been against him or the long confinement in the basket may have injured him. The table-scarf may have been too heavy to admit of his standing and moving during the night as a chicken should. He suddenly became crippled, as with paralysis. One morning, although he breakfasted with abundant relish, he insisted on hiding in my hand immediately after. I wanted him to run about for exercise, and twenty times put him back into his box, but he returned to me twenty-one and had his own way for a while, until Mary played the kidnapper. Coming down stairs half an hour later I heard her remonstrating with Mike, who was cheeping wildly.

"Faith, Mike, ye're that onraysonable I can't plaze yez any how. There's Pat and Cluxley as good as clover in the kitchen, but I let yez into the dining-room, and still ye're discontinted, and now I've let yez into the parlor, Mike, and not the parlor is good enough. Whativer is it that ye can be wanting?"

Poor Chicken Little! He heard my voice and started to meet me, but with such hobbling, staggering, bewildered steps that, at last, the threshold overthrew him. We did for him what we knew--and we knew nothing--that day and the next, and he sang his tuneful tweety-tweet on Monday night; but on Tuesday morning, a fortnight from his coming, when I asked for my chicken, they brought me a ghastly little form lying among primroses.

I might say that I met the loss of my tiny comrade with adult dignity and composure, but

"Syr, for lying, though I can do it,
Yet am I loth for to goo to it."

The core of my grief is the sense that my blundering devotion cut short, on the very edge of spring, that gallant little life which brought help to me in my heavy hour, and which had in it all the promise of a Chaucer chanticleer.

In deep humiliation, we forthwith gave Pat and Cluxley over to higher intelligence than ours, to a neighbor's hen who had no narrow parental prejudices, but amply gathered them in with her own brood. Pat was the beauty of the coop, but in a day or so his legs began to waver and sink under him, and he, too, never knew a Maytime. Cluxley was always the belated one and outlived him some three days, but on the fourth morning she went staggering into the undiscovered realm.

People say, "But you did well to keep your Easter chicken alive fourteen days. If the truth were known, you would find that very few of those candy-sale chickens hold out so long as that. We bought one for the children, but it was dead before Sunday. It is next to impossible to raise chickens by hand, even with experience. As to the ducklings that are coming into fashion for Easter gifts, they die sooner than chickens."

Then to our moral, for Mike's small story surely has a moral, though it does not matter in the least to Mike. I have no delusions there.

"All men are
Philosophers to their inches,"

but chickens' inches are so very few that there is no room for altruism in their philosophy. Yet the thought of how much these wee innocents may suffer from the incompetence of those who so lightly assume their fostering urges a protest against keeping Easter, the Festival of Life, by such wanton sacrifice of life. How can we reproach the Spaniards, who celebrate their Easter by the merciless bullfight, while we permit this cruelty to tender chickenhood?

A chicken's death is not more trivial than a sparrow's fall. St. Francis of Assisi would have cared.

But beneath it all lies the old, dark problem of creature existence. They are so ready to trust and love us, these feathered and furred companions of ours on the strange, bright star that whirls us all through the vast of ether to an unknown rhythm, and we, with a lordly selfishness that scoffs at question, slaughter them for our food and clothing, hunt them for our sport, make them our drudges in peace and our victims in war. I can never forget the eyes of a calf that ran to me from his butcher in Norway,--of a kid that I saw struggling away from the knife on Passover eve in Palestine. Yet such is the order of the earth. All carnivorous creatures prey upon the weaker. Water and wood and field and air are but varying scenes of the unpausing tragedy. Why, if it must be so, were these doomed animals endowed with the awful gift of suffering? And what recompense, even in the far reaches of eternity, can their Creator make to these myriad martyrs for their griefs and tortures? Is He the God of Hardy's _The Dynasts_, careless of mortal agonies? There dwelt a truer God in Shelley's heart, the _cor cordium_ of him who wrote:

"I wish no living thing to suffer pain."

HOW BIRDS WERE MADE

Above his forests bowed the Spirit, dreaming
Of maize and wigwams and a tawny folk
Who should rejoice with him when autumn broke
Upon the woods in many-colored flame.
Pale birches, maples gleaming
In splendor of all gold and crimson tints,
And dark-green balsams with their purple hints
Of cones erect upon the stem, awoke
In his deep heart,
Though thought had yet no words,
Beauty no name,
Creative longing for a voice, a song
Blither than winds or brooklet's tinkling flow,
His own joy's counterpart.
He breathed upon the throng
Of wondering trees, and lo!
Their leaves were birds.

The birds do not forget, but love to fellow
The trees whose shining colonies they were;
Else wherefore should the scarlet tanager
Fling from the oak his proud, exultant flush
Of music? Why mid yellow
Sprays of the willow by her empty nest
Lingers the golden warbler? Softly drest
In autumn buffs and russets, chorister
Sweetest of all,
Angel of lonely eves,
The hermit thrush
Haunts the November woodland. In them bides
Memory of that far time, ere eyes of men
Had seen the tender fall
Of shadow or the tides
Of silver sunrise, when
The birds were leaves.

TAKA AND KOMA

"What madness is it to take upon us to know a thing by that it is
not? Shall we perswade our selves that wee know what thing a Camell
is, because wee know it is not a Frogge?"

--Barckley's _Felicitie of Man_. 1603.

To console me for the loss of the chicks, Joy-of-Life went into a Boston bird-store one day and, in defiance of all her principles and mine, bought me a Japanese robin. When she presented him, the daintiest little fellow, mouse-color, with touches of red and gold on wings and throat and the prettiest pink bill, I met her guilty look with one of sheer astonishment.

"A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage,"

I quoted.

"But he was in a cage already," she weakly apologized, "and we'll be very good to him."

"Good jailers!"

"But liberty here would be his undoing, and I can't take him over to Japan. Come! It's time that you said thank-you."

But Taka, named after a Japanese boy of Joy-of-Life's earlier acquaintance, proved a dubious blessing. He was in angry temper from the first, and a brilliant new cage, fitted up with all the modern conveniences and latest luxuries, failed to appease him in the least. He would thrust his head between the gilded bars so violently that he could not draw it back, and while we were doing our clumsy best to extricate him he would peck our fingers with furious ingratitude. He upset his porcelain dishes, declined to use his swing and, as a rule, rejected all the attractions of his criss-cross perches, fluttering back and forth and madly beating against the bars or huddling in an unhappy little bundle on the floor. It was a matter of weeks before we could coax him into conversation, and then his abrupt, metallic chirps were so sharp that Mary, who scorned and disliked him as a foreigner, was scandalized.

"Don't ye talk with him. It's all sauce that Jap is giving yez."

Even Robin Hood, social little fellow that he was, tried in vain, later on, to make friends with this ungracious stranger. The East and the West could not meet. In response to Robin's cheery chatter, Taka would bristle, turn away and maintain a stubborn silence.

I used to carry his cage out of doors with me and set it up on the bank, where crocuses followed snowdrops, and tulips followed crocuses, beside the steamer-chair, hoping that he would feel more at home amid the blossoms and bird music of the spring. But there little Lord Sulks would sit, bunched into a corner of his palace, deigning no response whatever to the soft greetings of the bluebirds, those "violets of song," nor to the ecstatic trills of the fox sparrows, nor even to the ringing challenge of Lieutenant Redwing, as he flashed by overhead on his way to Tupelo swamp.

A calling ornithologist examined Taka carefully and concluded that he was an old bird, although the dealer had glibly represented him as being in the very pink of youth. So our poor prisoner was perhaps not born in captivity and may have had more than ancestral memories of spreading rice fields, tea plantations and holy bamboo groves. Our brave blue squills, our sunny forsythias, our coral-tinted laurels could not break his dream of flushing lotus and flaming azalea. What was our far-off glimpse of silvery Wachusett to the radiant glories of sea-girt Fujiyama? I hinted that a pet monkey might solace his nostalgia, but to such suggestion Joy-of-Life remained persistently deaf.

The children of the neighborhood found him, sullen though he was, a center of fascination, and would crowd about his cage, pointing out to one another the jewel tints in his plumage.

"Cutest bird I ever seed 'cept the flicker," pronounced Snippet, whose straw-colored hair stood out like a halo.

"Chickadees are nicer'n flickers," protested wise little Goody Four-Eyes. "A chickadee eats three hundred cankerworms in a day and over five thousand eggs--when he can get 'em."

The boys gave a choral snort.

"Who does the countin'?" demanded Punch.

"Wish _I'd_ been born with all the learnin' in me," scoffed Snippet.

But Goody, who had gathered many a pinecone for our feeding-boxes and, her snub nose pressed snubbier yet against the window pane, had watched the black-capped rolypolies twitch out the winged seeds, stood her ground.

"Does, too," she averred stoutly. "Boys don't know about birds. They stone 'em."

"And girls wear feathers in their hats."

"I don't, but Snippet's mamma does."

"Doesn't neither. She jes' wears regrets on Sunday."

"You don't say it right, but you're nothin' but a small boy."

"I'm seven," blustered Snippet, "and I think I'd be eight by now, if I hadn't had the measles."

"Where's Taka?" I exclaimed.

In the jostling of the children about the cage, the door, accidentally or not, had been slipped ajar, and Taka, taking advantage of the heat of the discussion, had escaped.

The youngsters raised a whoop that might well have scared him to the Pacific, but not the stir of a bird-wing could be perceived anywhere about.

Cats!

"Run to the house, Punch, please, and call out everybody to help us find Taka."

I had selected Punch as the boy of longest legs, forgetting his partiality for Mary's doughnut jar. He chose the route through the pantry with the result that when, after a suspiciously long interval, the rescue party arrived, Mary was dancing with wrath.

"Shure," she panted, "that gossoon would be a good missenger to sind for Death, for he wouldn't be after gitting him here in a hurry at all at all."

We hunted and we hunted and we hunted. We hunted high in the trees, which the boys and Goody, too, climbed with an activity that surprised the woodpeckers; we hunted low in the grass, interrupting a circle of squirrels gathered around a toadstool, as around a birthday cake; but no sign of Taka. We searched hedges and shrubbery, but no Taka. We chirped and we whistled, though well aware that even if Taka heard us he would not answer.

The western sky was a brighter red than Goody's hair-ribbon before we sat ourselves down, discouraged, on the piazza steps to wait for Joy-of-Life.

One by one the children had been summoned home, all but Wallace. He had by telephone directed his parents, who used to be older than he but whom he now watched over with solicitude, to eat their supper without him and go to bed as usual in case he should be detained.

"I don't like to think of that little goldy head out in the big dark all night," I said.

"Maybe a star will suppose it's another star and come down and stay with it," suggested Wallace, trying to buttress my sagging courage.

"His winglets are so wild and so weak."

"I believe the other birds know where he is. Please tell us," entreated Wallace, addressing a solemn crow that had just flapped over from the wood to a neighboring fence-post.

"Now it's no use to be asking of His Riverence," put in Mary. "All the crows were prastes once and they talk only the Latin."

It was one of Joy-of-Life's miracles. It was almost dark when, tired and hungry, she came home from Boston,--from a committee meeting of philanthropists who had been quarreling as only philanthropists can. She looked into Taka's empty cage, stayed but for a glass of milk and a few inquiries as to our field of search, and then, taking an electric torch, slipped softly into Giant Bluff's cherished tangle of luxuriant rosebushes, where the rest of us had not dared to venture. In a few minutes she emerged, scores of irate briars catching at her clothes and hair. She was crooning as she came out and in her safe clasp nestled a sleepy little bird.

Soon after this episode, Joy-of-Life went west for her summer sojourn among the birds at a Wisconsin lake, leaving to Mary, Robin Hood and myself the guardianship of that forlorn mite. He was as obstinate as ever in his lonesomeness, always pettishly rebuffing the friendly advances of Robin and, though I would take his cage to the vicinity of bird after bird, hoping that in some one of these he might recognize a kindred spirit, he found nothing of his feather. The white-breasted nuthatch, after nearly two months of absence, presumably for the rearing of a brood in leafy seclusion, returned for a call at the feeding-box, looking as genteel as ever in his tailor-made gray suit, but so preoccupied with domestic memories that at first he would say nothing but "Spank! spank! spank!" I brought Taka to the window and he looked on disdainfully while I tried to win Nuthatch back to his winter phrase of "Thank! thank! thank!" Only once did he revert to bachelor freedom of expression. That was when he fluttered up to the nutmeat bag and found it dangling empty:

"What a prank, prank, prank, to rob my bank, bank, bank! oh, the offense is rank, rank, rank!"

At this explosion of resentment Taka gave an involuntary chirp, and Nuthatch, the most inquisitive and alert of all our bird visitors, looked the stranger over keenly before he retorted with shocking rudeness, "You're a crank, crank, crank," and flew off to see what the brown creeper, zigzagging wrong side up about the rough-barked trunk of an old oak, was finding good to eat.

Once I carried Taka well out into the wildwood, but he was not interested in any of its busy tenants,--not in little Chippy, who all but pushed his russet crown between the bars of the cage, nor in Yellow-Hammer, stabbing the ground for ants, nor in

"yonder thrush,
Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush
About the dewy forest."

At last, one afternoon, after Taka had been moping for hours in deeper gloom than usual, I impulsively held up a hand-glass before him. As soon as the solitary caught sight of that other Japanese robin he broke out into excited chirps and twitters, and suddenly, to my astonishment, caroled forth a ravishing song. I hastily put the glass away, but he began calling, calling, calling with a wistful eagerness that could not be endured. He kept it up till dark and began it again at dawn, so hopefully, so yearningly, that, principles or no principles, there was only one thing to do.

I went into Boston that morning and, stopping at a Japanese store, asked their word for robin.

"Koma-dori, or Little Bird, usually called Koma, the Little One."

So on I fared to the bird-dealer's and bought Koma for Joy-of-Life. He was the only Japanese robin they had left, and the dealer swore that he was Taka's brother, but I suspected that the relationship was nearer that of great-great-grandson, for Koma, smaller than Taka, of brighter gold and more vivid ruby, was the quintessence of vital energy, a very spark of fire. He fought like a mimic Hector while the dealer was catching and boxing him, and all the gay-hued parrots jumped up and down on their perches and screamed with the fun of having something going on.

The dealer declared that the two birds would thrive best in the same cage; so I introduced Koma into Taka's commodious abode that afternoon and listened in high content to their jubilant bursts of song. They went to sleep on the highest perch with their tiny bodies cuddled close together, but during the following week their love lyric was punctuated by several fights. Taka, hitherto so contemptuous of the comforts of his cage, now wanted to swing whenever he saw Koma swinging and insisted on shoving his guest away and eating from the very seed-cup that Koma had selected, whereupon Koma, a glistening ruffle of wrath, would fling himself in furious attack upon his honorable ancestor.

Mary, whose partiality for Koma, little beauty that he was, attempted no disguise, maintained that Taka always began the combats and was always worsted; but I was not so sure. Koma, a restless gleam of chirp and song, was such a violent character that twice he rammed his head between the upper wires of his cage and nearly hanged himself. Some heathen deity had given him, for his protection, a tremendous voice, and his shrieks soon brought me running to his rescue. Both times, as soon as I had parted the wire and released the lustrous little head, Taka, wildly agitated through the minutes of Koma's peril, turned fiercely upon me and accused me of the trap.

"_You_ did it! Ugly thing! _You_ did it! You nearly killed my Koma."

And poor little Koma, gasping in the gravel, would chime in faintly but with no less resentment, "_She_ did it."

Yet within an hour they might be fighting again, and I would find them spent and panting, glaring at one another from opposite sides of their limited arena, with deep cuts about the little warrior faces.

"Taka," I would remonstrate, "aren't you ashamed to treat your own clansman like this, when you wanted him so much?"

But Taka and penitence were far asunder. "It's my last tail-feather--chir-r-r! Koma, he hasn't any tail at all--chir-r-r! No more have I now. Don't care a grub. I pulled _his_ out. Catch me that fly, can't you? Who-oo-oo-oop!"

Koma, whose song had an entrancing gypsy note, was so much the wilder of the two that Taka seemed comparatively tame. Koma's terror of human monsters was unconquerable, and his panics, whenever one of us neared the cage, soon destroyed the frail confidence that our long patience had been building up in Taka. Presently we had two out-and-out rebels on our hands, and even Dame Gentle, who "had a way" with birds, could not cajole them into a League of Lovers.

When the cage door was opened for putting in or taking out the small glass bathtub, it was a ticklish matter to prevent their escape, for they could dart like mice through the least crack and, sly atoms of conspiracy, were always on the lookout for a chance. Warned by bitter experience, we saw to it that the windows were closed before that perilous task was undertaken, but too often a victorious squeal from Koma would announce his exit, and Taka, hopping in sympathetic exultation from perch to perch, would urge him on with ancient Japanese war-cries while he soared from mantel to chandelier, vanished in the folds of a portiere or flashed from fern to rubber-plant. If he succeeded in reaching the entry, he would prolong the game by hiding in overshoes and umbrellas, while Taka, now that Koma was away, would at once set up his pleading, poignant call and never cease until the truant, snapping his pink bill and kicking fiercely with scratchy little claws, was thrust back into the cage. Much as Taka might play the tyrant, he could not bear having Koma out of his sight and reach. Once, after an especially savage duel in which Koma had been badly trampled and pecked, we put the wounded hero into a cage of his own and hung it in the adjoining room. Forthwith both those scamplings raised such a prodigious outcry and lament, taking on as if their naughty specks of hearts were broken, that we brought back Koma's cage and hung it in the window beside Taka's. But even so they scolded and protested and, as the shadows fell, established themselves each on the extreme end of a perch, as near one another as they could get, but with the cruel wires and a few inches of space between them. Still they fumed and fretted until we returned Koma, mauled as he was, to Taka's cage, when instantly they nestled their plumy sides close together and blissfully went to sleep.

Yet we kept both cages in use, separating our tiny incorrigibles when their battles waxed dangerous. They loved to talk them all over afterwards, gabbling like schoolboys, but if one of us chanced to approach the window--"Sshh! Don't tell the ogre," and in an instant they were dumb as toy idols. When we had time, we would occasionally, after taking all due precautions, throw wide their cage doors and invite them to enjoy the freedom of the room; but liberty so given they despised. Only stolen fruit is sweet. After much deliberation and consultation, they would stealthily steal out and skurry about the floor like rats for a while, hunting for bugs and worms. When it became evident that our rugs did not furnish such refreshment, they would cuddle up together in Taka's cage and spoon. Koma would tuck his shining wee head down on Taka's shoulder, and Taka would gently peck him all over from the tip of his bill to his claws. Then, more often than not, they would bristle and square for the fun of a fight. At this point we would try to catch Koma and put him back into his own safe cage, but even when his little coxcomb was so bloody that I had to wash it off under the faucet, he was the top of ingratitude, gasping and clattering with fury. All the while Taka, who had cut that poor pate open, would be trilling abuse. A pugnacious pair of fairy Japanese pirates they were!

We kept those midgets, a daily trouble and amusement, through the winter. They sang like angels when it pleased them and in the intervals conversed exclusively with each other in a harsh, metallic chatter that filled the house. But one sad June morning we found Taka in the bottom of the cage, on his back, the uplifted claws pathetically curled, the wee body stiff and cold.

"The bird is dead
That we have made so much on."

Koma knew what had happened and bewailed his loss in such a shrill, incessant keening that when, a few days later, an east wind gave him a swiftly fatal chill, we could only be glad to have that pitiful piping hushed.

Little aliens! We had never known them.

WARBLER WEATHER

The oak-leaves yet are doubting
Between the pink and green;
Half smiling and half pouting
Our shy New England May
Touches each happy spray,
And at her call the runaway
Warbler tribes convene.

The gold-flecked Myrtle flitters,
The Redstart dives and spins,
The gay Magnolia glitters,
The little Rubycrown
Twinkles up and down;
The fairy folk have come to town
With all their violins.

Our garden party sparkles
With varied warbler wear,
The olive suit that darkles
To umber, russet crest,
Blue tippet, crocus vest;
New fashions come with every guest,
Winged jewels of the air.

Their treetop conversation
Is sweetest of the sweet,
With flashes of flirtation
As gallants bow and dip.
"Witch-e-wee!" "Cher!" "Chip-chip!"
Too elfin fine for human lip
Their dainty: "Tzeet! tzeet! tzeet!"

When we shall walk together
In Paradise, Most Dear,
May it be warbler weather,
Divine with flutterings
Of exquisite wee wings,
Our own familiar angelings
That piped God's praises here.

SUMMER RESIDENTS AT A WISCONSIN LAKE

BY KATHARINE COMAN

"Another beautiful day of sunshine and shimmering leaves and
bird-notes and human love."

--Katharine Coman: _Letter_.

The summer resort in question is only one of the numberless lakelets that dot the hill country of Wisconsin; a mere dimple in the sunny landscape, filled with limpid water. The banks are overhung by beautiful lindens and mammoth oaks and by hoar cedars of a thousand years' growth.

So sloping are the shores that reeds and rushes run far out into the lake, carrying the green life of the earth into the blue heaven of the water. Creeks and bayous stretch in turn far back into the land, and the reeds and rushes follow after. Knee-deep in the swamps stand the tamarack trees. Their cool shades cherish the mystery of the primeval forest that held undisputed sway in this region only fifty years ago. Back on the hills lie rich grain fields and comfortable farmhouses, each defined against the sky by its windmill and cluster of barns and haystacks.

This is an ideal summer residence for birds who have a mind for domestic joys. Nothing, for example, could be better adapted for nesting purposes than these cedar trees; not so much the centuried veterans, as the young things of ten or twenty years' growth. Their dense and prickly foliage promises security from invasion, while the close-set branches offer most attractive building-sites. Here the robins place their substantial structures; a masonry of sticks and mud, hollowed out within into a chamber as round and smooth as if molded on a croquet ball, and lined with fine, soft grasses. The catbirds build more loosely, weaving strips of cedar bark into a rough basket. The interior is softened for the tender bodies of the anticipated nestlings by coils of horse hair. The mourning dove lays her eggs on a frail scaffolding of cedar twigs, with the merest suggestion of padding. How the eggs are kept in place on windy days is a mystery to the uninitiated. As for brooding the young, the mother bird soon gives over the attempt to do more than sit alongside her twin fledglings. The cedar birds, despite their name, are oftenest found in the linden trees. Rowing along the water side one may see the slender bodies tilting on the top-most branches, flitting to and fro among the pendant yellow bracts, peering shyly this way and that, whispering to each other sage words of caution as to the queerness of all the world "save thee and me, Dorothy." Gentle little Quakers they seem in the daintiest of dove-color plumage. They are connoisseurs in the matter of foods, as well as of dress. Nothing pleases their palate so well as the wild cherries that ripen by the roadside. The sweet kernels of the linden fruit are not bad eating, however, if one may judge by the quantities of split shells to be found beneath the trees. The lake is sought out by birds as well as humans for the pleasure of bathing in the cool, fresh water. Sit quietly by some pebbly bank for a half hour or so, and you cannot fail to see robin or bluejay or turtledove come down to take his daily plunge.

The reedy marshes are beloved by the redwings. The thick-set tufts of the cat-o'-nine-tails afford ideal sites for summer cottages, with building material close at hand. Here, too, the marsh wrens weave their oven-shaped nests and hang them among the banners of the iris. The water-lily pools are alive with summer folk. Quaint, unwieldy bitterns flap their slow way to nests well hidden in the reeds. Coots steal in and out _en route_ to their lake dwellings. The broad green pads offer the Virginia rail a secluded perch, where he may consider which quarter of the shining mud flats will prove the best feeding ground for the day. A trim little figure in gray and tan, he gathers no soil from the black ooze through which he wades. Another dainty person who haunts these same shallows is the spotted sandpiper, the much loved "teeter-tail." He runs tipping along the water's edge, with an occasional short flight, as much at home among these placid ripples as by the booming sea. The kill-deer plover vibrates between the grassy meadow and the beach, but he, as well as the sandpiper, prefers to stake his domestic happiness on dry ground. Among the birds of the shore, the kingfisher is most in evidence. Conspicuous in blue coat, gray waistcoat and broad, white collar, he flies along the beach seeking for the dead branches of oak or cedar that shall serve him as a lookout station from which to spy upon the finny folk swimming in the water beneath. A flash in the air, a splash in the water, and the "expert angler" dashes triumphantly home, his watchman's rattle announcing victory and fresh supplies to the awkward squad of baby kingfishers deep in the clay bank awaiting his arrival.

Back in the meadows where thistles and wild lettuce are going to seed, the hard-bills spend their holidays. Goldfinches cling to the thistle tops, merry little clowns in yellow and black, antic tumblers no less agile and versatile than the chickadee. Dickcissels search the purple ironweeds for provender, and song sparrows flit along the blossoming fence rows. Kingbirds perch at a point of vantage and watch their chance for a dash at a grasshopper. Fine fighters these fellows, fully equal to defending their well-feathered nests against all comers, and therefore disdaining concealment. Bluebirds carol high in the air their song of peace on earth and goodwill to man. Humming birds hover over the milkweeds, bent on extracting not honey only, but toothsome insects from the rosy blooms.

The tall oaks are sought out by the orioles, tanagers and grosbeaks,--a brilliant and tuneful company. Here, too, the vireos, warbling, red-eyed, white-eyed and yellow-throated, spy out invisible insects under the growing leaves. Warblers throng the woods in May and June, reveling in the bursting buds; but most of them have pushed on to Canada for the summer season. Only the black and white creeper remains to nest in Wisconsin. The resounding tattoo of the high-hole rings from the hole of a blasted tree. The wood looks as if riddled with bullets. The red-headed woodpecker follows close on his yellow-winged cousin. Both find an abundant supply of ants in the decaying forest. High in a fork of the branches the red-tailed hawk pitches his tent, a ragged, black wigwam, rivaling that of the crow for size and inaccessibility.

The haunts of men are not wholly eschewed by our little brothers of the air. The peewee loves to place his nest under the eaves of a sheltering porch, and the phoebe is no less sociable. The presence of human beings does not at all disconcert their housekeeping arrangements. I have seen a young brood fed and fondled, and finally piloted forth for their first journey in the world, within ten feet of a hammock full of children.

To see the water birds at home one should take a boat in the early morning or toward nightfall, and float silently on the open bosom of the lake. Then you may watch the black terns wheeling and turning in the blue sky, like beautiful great swallows. They are easily distinguished even at a considerable height by their white wing bars. A loon paddles slowly across the bay with tantalizing unconcern. It is of no use to follow him, however, even with muffled oars. He knows a trick worth any two of yours. Huge fellow as he is, he dives beneath the surface, leaving not a ripple behind him. After five minutes of puzzled waiting you may see him--or is it his double?--pop up from the water many rods away, as serene and still as if he had not just executed a submarine maneuver hardly to be excelled by the latest torpedo boat. Quite as expert a performer is the pied-billed grebe, who swims long distances with body submerged and only the tip of the bill out of the water. Unobserving gunners conclude that he has gone to the bottom of the lake, and call him the hell-diver. The grebe spends half of his life in or on the water. His nest is a raft buoyed upon a clump of decaying vegetation, and looks like a floating island moored to a reed. Birds of the lake, too, seem the swallows--tree swallows, rough-winged and barn swallows. They skim the water hither and yon in mad pursuit of prey. No degree of familiarity with their mud nests avails to deprive these winged atoms of their halo of spring and romance.

Birds of high degree occasionally visit our humble lakelet. A bald eagle has been seen on the lightning-scarred branch of its tallest oak. Blue herons flap their majestic way from shore to shore. If you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth you may even be so lucky as to see a snowy heron passing through to some heronry in the wilds of Canada. The night herons come every spring to their ancient rookery in a swamp hard by. As the shadows fall the birds may be heard calling, "squawk, squawk," while they make their way down the creek to their fishing grounds in the lake.

For the better part of our bird neighbors the summer sojourn is no _dolce far niente_. They come north that their babies may have wholesome air and suitable food. A gay young husband, like the ruby-throated humming bird, shirks domestic responsibilities, but he expects only two wee nestlings. A brood of five or six requires the assiduous attention of both parents. Baby blue jays, for example, seem to have an unlimited appetite. Their scolding, snarling cries begin with the early dawn and only cease with nightfall. Even after the rascals are flown one may find an anxious mother vainly striving to satisfy her clamoring darlings, as she hurries from one to another with some choice tidbit. A great hulking fellow, as big as his parents and as gayly feathered, will stand crying like an infant, with wings a-tremble and mouth a-gape, waiting for the food to be thrust down his throat. Young robins are hardly less rapacious but far more tractable. I was one day watching the debut of a family that lived in a neighboring cedar tree. The mother bird was having an anxious time, for each young one, as he spread his wings, made but a flap or two and fell sprawling into the network of branches beneath the nest. One young hopeful essayed a more ambitious flight and came down to the ground. He had no thought of fear and, being of an inquiring turn of mind, came hopping through the grass to see what I was like. Such a dear little man, in polka dot pinafore and white ruffles! But "chuck, chuck," mother robin called a warning note, and like a flash he turned tail and bolted into the bushes. I found him later perched on a branch within easy grasp of my hand. He gazed at me for some minutes with eyes full of baby wonder; then, remembering the maternal admonitions, he fled to a higher branch. Of all feathered mothers the catbird is the noisiest. She flits restlessly about, eying from every point of vantage the intruder who dares to show an interest in her housekeeping. I determined to sit it out one morning, pitting my patience against her sympathy for the hungry young ones. After two hours of flutter and meow the mother heart could no longer resist the appeal of the gaping yellow mouths. With sudden resolution she dashed straight to Farmer Black's gooseberry patch, seized a berry and returned in a flash. The luscious morsel once divided among the small fry, however, she flew back to her post of observation.

The turtledoves seem a sentimental lot. During the courting season an enamored swain will sit for hours in silent contemplation of his own graceful pose, or chanting softly, "I am alone--alone--alone." The nest once built and the young ones hatched, he hovers about in tender constancy, bringing food to the mother as well as to the babies, and perching alongside of the nest as close as circumstances will allow. The little people are carefully tended until they are well-nigh grown, though they look most uninteresting objects. A young dove will sit silent and motionless for hours at a stretch, the only sign of life the glitter in his bright, bead-like eyes. Decide that he has gone daft, however, and venture a step too near,--presto! With flutter and whirr he takes to wings, and is off as if flying was as simple a feat as the traditional "falling off a log." The jaunty kingfisher, too, makes a devoted parent. One day we saw a fledgling fly straight out over the lake. The mother bird followed close, uttering cries of alarm. But, alas! she could not lend him wings. His young muscles were unequal to his ambition, and the little body dropped into the water. Both parents dashed madly back and forth over the still, shining surface, and then wandered disconsolately from tree to tree along the shore, voicing their grief in wild, rattling cries.

Bird families hold together long after the nest is abandoned. They may be seen toward nightfall making their way by twos and threes to the tamarack swamp across the lake. The close-set, symmetrical branches provide the best of perches for inexperienced feet. "Birds of a feather flock together" when it comes to a question of lodging houses. One evening I counted one hundred and fifteen kingbirds roosting in the tapering spires of the tamarack trees.

September days are heralded by the return of the birds who have summered in Canada. Fox sparrows stop with us a week or so on their southward journey. The evening grosbeaks have come down from far Saskatchewan, and are thinking of spending the winter here. Wild geese wake one o' nights, with their hoarse "honk, honk." They have stopped for a taste of our tender frogs, but will soon re-form their triangular caravans and push on to the South. Ducks, mallards and canvasbacks, feed and fatten in the shallow water among the reeds. The gunners arrive as soon as they, however, and will soon frighten them away. Everybody is getting ready for the great migration. Troops of young birds flutter through the trees, like autumn leaves blown by a gust of wind. They are taking their first lessons in migration and in food supply.

The natives look on at these preparations with cynical unconcern. Blue jays chatter and scream with a daily extension of their marvelous vocabulary. Crows come proudly out from the deep woods, leading black, ungainly broods, and direct their flight to the ripening cornfields. Nuthatches, the white-bellied and the Canadian, bustle about the tree trunks, bent on making the most of their time while Jack Frost spares the insect life. The chickadees, nature's acrobats, turn somersaults among the branches in sheer defiance of the law of gravitation. The cares of summer are over and done with. The woes of winter do not terrify this morsel of india rubber and compressed air. The English sparrow pursues his ubiquitous search for food with insular disdain of everything he does not understand. He has penetrated our sylvan retreats and secured a foothold here by the most impudent of squatter claims. He lives and multiplies by dint of a systematic disregard of everybody's rights. The manners and the morals of the great city cling to him. He will have nothing in common with our country ways. He brings with him the blight of civilization.

THE JESTER

Myths from earth's childhood tell
Of Godhood visible,--
Indra, the azure-skied,
Four-handed, thousand-eyed;
Far-wandering Isis, chief
Lady of Love and Grief;
Zeus, on each rash revolt
Hurling the thunderbolt;
Woden of warrior form
Gray-mantled with the storm;
Lir of the foam-white hair,
Mad with the sea's despair.

But of those Splendors who
Conceived the kangaroo,
With gesture humorous
Shaped hippopotamus,
Intoned the donkey's bray
And, in an hour of play,
Taught peacocks how to strut?
Holy is Allah, but
Is holiness expressed
In hedgehogs? Whence the jest?
Even in creation's dawn
Was Puck with Oberon?

EMILIUS

"O, I could beat my infinite blockhead."

--Jonson's _The Devil is an Ass_.

Professor Emily has the kindest heart in the world and is always doing good. Her charities would make a rosary more fragrant than sandal-buds. And yet, perhaps, one time out of a thousand, her intention and her action trip each other up.

One day in early June she met on our village sidewalk, half a mile from the nearest pond or brook, a snapping turtle of formidable proportions, easily weighing his twenty or twenty-five pounds. In characteristic fashion she stopped to consider what she could do for him. Though he was, for his own part, neither cordial nor communicative, she decided that he must have lost his way, since the water, his natural habitat, lay behind him, and by a dexterous application of boot and stick she turned him about, quite against his will, so that his snout pointed toward home. But the turtle, a surly, obstinate fellow, with no respect whatever for academic authority, refused to progress in the appointed path, and for some five minutes they argued it out together, with no manifest result except a distinct access of temper, rather evenly divided.

Your true philanthropist is not easily balked, and Professor Emily, returning the scrutiny of those small, keen, sinister eyes that watched her every movement, skillfully dodged that dark, vicious head which kept lurching forward from the olive-mottled shell in lightning-swift motions, seeking to strike this determined benefactor whom only muddled wits could mistake for an enemy.

"No, you don't," she answered him sternly, retreating before a sudden forward scramble of the broad webbed feet. Regardless of the terrified protests of a group of freshmen, who had gathered on the outskirts of the fray, she executed a rapid rear movement and seized the reptile firmly toward the end of its long, rough tail. Swinging this furious Caliban clear of the ground and holding it well out from her body, she considered what to do next.

The noon had suddenly turned hot. She found herself panting a little. That turtle was surprisingly heavy. He was awkward to handle, too, twisting his neck back over his shell and darting it out left and right to a disconcerting distance. Soothing tones had no effect whatever and there seemed to be no suitable surface to pat. Even if he could and would have told her the exact location of his native creek, it might prove an irksome task to carry him so far, with those powerful jaws snapping most suggestively, only biding their time to get in an effective argument. Our house was close at hand. Why not accomplish two good deeds in one and give this self-willed waif to us for a pet? He would have a happy home and we another of God's creatures to love.

Dear Emily!

A shriek from Mary brought us to the kitchen. There was our household staff and stay mounted on a chair, clasping her skirts tight about her and apparently addressing the ceiling. There was our generous-hearted friend, flushed and weary, but, by a miracle, unbitten. There was our neighbor, Young Audubon, a budding naturalist, who had come to her aid _en route_ and shared the honors of the delivery. And there was an indignant snapping turtle, lying on its back in the middle of the kitchen floor. Notwithstanding the pale yellows of its under-side, shell and legs and tail, its expression was profane.

Joy-of-Life told Mary to be quiet. I poured the philanthropist a glass of water. Then, exchanging eloquent glances, we learned of the new pleasure in store for us.

"They make very nice pets," declared the donor, beaming with benevolence. "Large specimens live for hundreds of years. They are not at all exacting about their food and can be trained to eat from the hand."

"Not from mine," screamed Mary, bouncing up and down on her chair.

"Wasn't it Pierre Loti who had a pet tortoise?" continued Emily. "Its name was Suleima and it used to play with his white kitten. You might name the turtle Suleima, after its literary cousin."

"No. We'll name it Emilius, after you, if it must be named at all."

"But we haven't even a black kitten," protested Joy-of-Life, "and so little time for playing ourselves, that I am really afraid----"

"The dear might be dull. Wouldn't you better take him back to where you found him?"

"And leave him on the road? Lost? For motors to run over? How could he get out of their way? What does he know about motors?"

We admitted that he did not look modern.

"Besides, I must run to catch that next train. I've just remembered that I am due at the Melting Pot conference in town."

"Isn't there room for Emilius in the pot?" I called after her, but she was gone without waiting to be thanked.

"If ye'll put the baste in a suitcase," proposed Mary, "it's mesilf will take it over to her rooms an' lave it there."

But Young Audubon, who had been lying on the floor, examining Emilius from the tip of his tail to the snub of his snout, was enraptured,--so enraptured that the chelonian, as he called it, was pressed upon him as a free gift, regretfully declined because of certain prejudices on the part of a devoted but unscientific mother.

"I can study him almost as well over here," cheerily said Young Audubon. "Now the first thing to do is to drill a hole in his carapace."

"Carry what?"

"Upper shell, you know."

The boy, a blond, blushed pink at our ignorance and managed, in an offhand way, to touch the lower shell when he lightly referred to it as the plastron.

"The drilling won't hurt him. He won't even know it's happening."

Whatever the darkened spirit, inaccessible in its armor, thought of the subsequent proceedings, it registered no objection. Defenseless in his undignified position, Emilius suffered our well-meant attentions in bitter silence. The hole was drilled, the turtle tipped over, grasped again by his peculiarly unattractive tail and borne triumphantly to the grassy bank behind the house, where, like any domestic animal, he was tethered to a tree.

"What next?" asked Joy-of-Life, who was already losing her heart to the unresponsive monster.

"Water," pronounced Sir Oracle. "Turtles won't feed except under water. They can't swallow if their heads aren't completely immersed. It will take your largest dishpan----"

"It's mesilf that is going home to-morrow--to stay," announced Mary.

"Wouldn't a washtub do?" compromised Joy-of-Life. "There's that old one, you know, Mary, that you never use."

"First-rate. Show me where to find it, Mary. I'll give you a start to that wild cherry."

With a craft beyond the semblance of his open countenance, Young Audubon raced Mary to the cellar, where she arrived panting too hard for protests. They soon returned in amicable companionship, carrying a battered blue tub between them.

Jerking up Emilius by the cord, we plumped him into the tub, poured in abundant water and left him to be happy. Then our troubles began.

In the first place, Emilius absolutely refused to eat, in water or out. Understanding from our one authority that he needed a carnivorous diet, we tempted him, day after day, with every variety of meat brought to our door in the butcher's white-hooded cart with its retinue of hungry dogs, but nothing whatever would our boarder touch. And in the second place, he was, unlike Diogenes, forever scrambling out of his tub and digging himself in at one point or another on the bank. Several times a day one or the other of us might be seen tugging up Emilius by his cord from the bowels of the earth and solicitously dumping him down again into his tub of water, which a shovelful of mud, shreds of meat and other attractions still failed to render homelike. His one object in life was to get out of it.

"If Emilius would only take a nap!" I sighed one warm afternoon, when I had just rescued him from a deep pit of his frenzied digging for the third time that day.

"Read him poetry," advised Joy-of-Life. Magical snatches of Bliss Carman's deep-sea songs ran through my head:--

"When sheering down to the Line
Come polar tides from the North,
Thy silver folk of the brine
Must glimmer and forth;"

* * * * *

"The myriad fins are moving,
The marvelous flanges play."

Chesterton, who chuckled over another grotesque denizen of the deep, would have felt the charm of Emilius:

"Dark the sea was, but I saw him,
One great head with goggle eyes,
Like a diabolic cherub
Flying in those fallen skies.

* * * * *

"For I saw that finny goblin
Hidden in the abyss untrod;
And I knew there can be laughter
On the secret face of God."

But it was almost too early for Chesterton, and quite too early for the fascinating fish poems of Rupert Brooke or for Chauncey Hickox's feeling apostrophe to a tortoise:

"Paludal, glum, with misdirected legs,
You hide your history as you do your eggs,
And offer us an osseous nut to crack
Much harder than the shell upon your back.
No evolutionist has ever guessed
Why your cold shoulder is within your chest--
Why you were discontented with a plan
The vertebrates accept, from fish to man.
For what environment did you provide
By pushing your internal frame outside?
How came your ribs in this abnormal place?
Inside your rubber neck you hide your face
And answer not."

Besides, I had no ground for hope that Emilius would be pleased by my reading of poetry or by anything else that I could do for him. He impressed me as intensely preoccupied, a turtle of a fixed idea.