Chapter X: To the Teacher

Perhaps you are in a crowded school-room in the heart of a great
city. What can you do for your pupils there? But what _can’t_
you do? You have a bit of sky, a window surely, an old tin can
for earth, a sprig of something to plant--and surely you have
English sparrows behind the rain pipe or shutter! You may have
the harbor too, and water-front with its gulls and fish, and the
fish stores with their windows full of the sea. You have the
gardens and parks, burial-grounds and housetops, bird stores,
museums--why, bless you, you have the hand-organ man and his
monkey; you have--but I have mentioned enough. It is a hungry
little flock that you have to feed, too, and no teacher can ask
more.

FOR THE PUPIL

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_An English sparrow_: Make a long and careful study of the
sparrows that nest about you. If you live in the country try to
drive them away from the bluebird house and the martin-boxes.
The author does not advise boys and girls to do any killing, but
carefully pulling down a sparrow’s nest with eggs in it--if you
are _sure_ it is a sparrow’s nest--is kindness, he believes, to
the other, more useful birds. Yet only yesterday, August 17th,
he saw a male sparrow bring moth after moth to its young in a
hole in one of the timbers of a bridge from which the author was
fishing. It is not easy to say just what our duty is in this
matter.

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_clack of a guinea going to roost_: The guinea-fowl as it goes
to roost frequently sets up a clacking that can be heard half a
mile away.

_an ancient cemetery in the very heart of Boston_: The cemetery
was the historic King’s Chapel on Tremont Street, Boston. Some
of the elm trees have since been cut down.

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_Cubby Hollow_: a small pond near the author’s boyhood home,
running, after a half-mile course through the woods, into
Lupton’s Pond, which falls over a dam into the meadows of
Cohansey Creek.

_on the water_: What water is it that surrounds so large a part
of the City of Boston?

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_the shuttered buildings_: Along some of the streets, especially
in the wholesale district, the heavy iron shutters, closed
against the high walls of the buildings, give the deserted
streets a solemn, almost a forbidding aspect.

_facing the wind_: like an anchored boat, offering the least
possible resistance to the storm.

_out of doors lies very close about you, as you hurry down a
crowded city street_: Opportunities for watching the wild
things, for seeing and hearing the things of nature, cannot be
denied you even in the heart of the city, if you have an eye
for such things. Read Bradford Torrey’s “Birds on Boston
Common,” or the author’s “Birds from a City Roof” in the
volume called “Roof and Meadow.”