Chapter I: HAD made a nice piece of dissection, a pretty demonstration—for a

junior.

“You didn’t know a dog was put together so beautifully, did you?” said the professor, frankly enjoying the sight of the marvelous system of nerves laid bare by the knife. “Now, see here,” he went on, eyeing me keenly, “doesn’t a revelation like that take all the moonshine about the ‘beauties of nature’ clean out of you?”

I looked at the lifeless lump upon my table, and answered very deliberately: “No, it doesn’t. That’s a fearful piece of mechanism. I appreciate that. But what is any system of nerves or muscles—mere dead dog—compared with the love and affection of the dog alive?”

The professor was trying to make a biologist out of me. He had worked faithfully, but I had persisted in a very unscientific love for live dog. Not that I didn’t enjoy comparative anatomy, for I did. The problem of concrescence or differentiation in the cod’s egg also was intensely interesting to me. And so was the sight and the suggestion of the herring as they crowded up the run on their way to the spawning pond. The professor had lost patience. I don’t blame him.

“Well,” he said, turning abruptly, “you had better quit. You’ll be only a biological fifth wheel.”

I quit. Here on my table lies the scalpel. Since that day it has only sharpened lead pencils.

Now a somewhat extensive acquaintance with scientific folk leads me to believe that the attitude of my professor toward the out-of-doors is not exceptional. The love for nature is all moonshine, all maudlin sentiment. Even those like my professor, who have to do with out-of-door life and conditions,—zoölogists, botanists, geologists,—look upon naturalists, and others who love birds and fields, as of a kind with those harmless but useless inanities who collect tobacco tags, postage stamps, and picture postal cards. Sentiment is not scientific.

I have a biological friend, a professor of zoölogy, who never saw a woodchuck in the flesh. He would not know a woodchuck with the fur on from a mongoose. Not until he had skinned it and set up the skeleton could he pronounce it _Arctomys monax_ with certainty. Yes, he could tell by the teeth. Dentition is a great thing. He could tell a white pine (_strobus_) from a pitch pine (_rigida_) by just a cone and a bundle of needles,—one has five, the other three, to the bundle. But he wouldn’t recognize a columned aisle of the one from a Jersey barren of the other. That is not the worst of it: he would not see even the aisle or the barren,—only trees.

As we jogged along recently, on a soft midwinter day that followed a day of freezing, my little three-year-old threw his nose into the air and cried: “Oh, fader, I smell de pitch pines, de scraggly pines,—’ou calls ’em Joisey pines!” And sure enough, around a double curve in the road we came upon a single clump of the scraggly pitch pines. Our drive had taken us through miles of the common white species.

Did you ever smell the pitch pines when they are thawing out? It is quite as healthful, if not as scientific, to recognize them by their resinous breath as by their needles per bundle.

I want this small boy some time to know the difference between these needle bundles. But I want him to learn now, and to remember always, that the hard days are sure to soften, and that then there oozes from the scraggly pitch pines a balm, a piny, penetrating, purifying balm,—a tonic to the lungs, a healing to the soul.

All foolishness? sentiment? moonshine?—this love for woods and fields, this need I have for companionship with birds and trees, this longing for the feel of grass and the smell of earth? When I told my biological friend that these longings were real and vital, as vital as the highest problems of the stars and the deepest questions of life, he pitied me, but made no reply.

He sees clearly a difference between live and dead men, a difference between the pleasure he gets from the society of his friends, and the knowledge, interesting as it may be, which he obtains in a dissecting-room. But he sees no such difference between live and dead nature, nature in the fields and in the laboratory. Nature is all a biological problem to him, not a quick thing,—a shape, a million shapes, informed with spirit,—a voice of gladness, a mild and healing sympathy, a companionable soul.

“But there you go!” he exclaims, “talking poetry again. Why don’t you deal with facts? What do you mean by nature-study, love for the out-of-doors, anyway!”

I do not mean a sixteen weeks’ course in zoölogy, or botany, or in Wordsworth. I mean, rather, a gentle life course in getting acquainted with the toads and stars that sing together, for most of us, just within and above our own dooryards. It is a long life course in the deep and beautiful things of living nature,—the nature we know so well as a corpse. It is of necessity a somewhat unsystematized, incidental, vacation-time course,—the more’s the pity. The results do not often come as scientific discoveries. They are personal, rather; more after the manner of revelations,—data that the professors have little faith in. For the scientist cannot put an April dawn into a bottle, cannot cabin a Hockomock marsh, nor cage a December storm in a laboratory. And when, in such a place, did a scientist ever overturn a “wee bit heap o’ weeds an’ stibble”? Yet it is out of dawns and marshes and storms that the revelations come; yes, and out of mice nests, too, if you love all the out-of-doors, and chance to be ploughing late in the fall.

But there is the trouble with my professor. He never ploughs at all. How can he understand and believe? And isn’t this the trouble with many of our preacher poets, also? Some of them spend their summers in the garden; but the true poet—and the naturalist—must stay later, and they must plough, plough the very edge of winter, if they would turn up what Burns did that November day in the field at Mossgiel.

How amazingly fortunate were the conditions of Burns’s life! What if he had been professor of English literature at Edinburgh University? He might have written a life of Milton in six volumes,—a monumental work, but how unimportant compared with the lines “To a Mouse”!

We are going to live real life and write real poetry again,—when all who want to live, who want to write, draw directly upon life’s first sources. To live simply, and out of the soil! To live by one’s own ploughing, and to write!

Instead, how do we live? How do I live? Nine months in the year by talking bravely about books that I have not written. Between times I live on the farm, hoe, and think, and write,—whenever the hoeing is done. And where is my poem to a mouse?

Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!

With a whole farm o’ foggage green, and all the year before me, I am not sure that I could build a single line of genuine poetry. But I am certain that, in living close to the fields, we are close to the source of true and great poetry, where each of us, at times, hears lines that Burns and Wordsworth left unmeasured,—lines that we at least may _live_ into song.

Now, I have done just what my biological friend knew I would do,—made over my course of nature-study into a pleasant but idle waiting for inspiration. I have frankly turned poet! No, not unless Gilbert White and Jefferies, Thoreau, Burroughs, Gibson, Torrey, and Rowland Robinson are poets. But they are poets. We all are,—even the biologist, with half a chance,—and in some form we are all waiting for inspiration. The nature-lover who lives with his fields and skies simply puts himself in the way of the most and gentlest of such inspirations.

He may be ploughing when the spirit comes, or wandering, a mere boy, along the silent shores of a lake, and hooting at the owls. You remember the boy along the waters of Winander, how he would hoot at the owls in the twilight, and they would call back to him across the echoing lake? And when there would come a pause of baffling silence,

Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery.

That is an inspiration, the kind of experience one has in living with the out-of-doors. It doesn’t come from books, from laboratories, not even from an occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship with nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any one, nor only to poets who write. I have had such experiences, such moments of quiet insight and uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of the woods.

It was in the latter end of December, upon a gloomy day that was heavy with the oppression of a coming storm. In the heart of the maple swamp all was still and cold and dead. Suddenly, as out of a tomb, I heard the small, thin cry of a tiny tree frog. And how small and thin it sounded in the vast silences of that winter swamp! And yet how clear and ringing! A thrill of life tingling out through the numb, nerveless body of the woods that has ever since made a dead day for me impossible.

That was an inspiration. I learned something, something deep and beautiful. Had I been Burns or Wordsworth I should have written a poem to Hyla. All prose as I am, I was, nevertheless, so quickened by that brave little voice as to write:—

The fields are bleak, the forests bare,
The swirling snowflakes fall
About the trees a winding-sheet,
Across the fields a pall.

A wide, dead waste, and leaden sky,
Wild winds, and dark and cold!
The river’s tongue is frozen thick,
With life’s sweet tale half told.

Dead! Ah, no! the white fields sleep,
The frozen rivers flow;
And summer’s myriad seed-hearts beat
Within this breast of snow.

With spring’s first green the holly glows
And flame of autumn late,—
The embers of the summer warm
In winter’s roaring grate.

The thrush’s song is silent now,
The rill no longer sings,
But loud and long the strong winds strike
Ten million singing strings.

O’er mountains high, o’er prairies far,
Hark! the wild pæan’s roll!
The lyre is strung ’twixt ocean shores
And swept from pole to pole!

My meeting with that frog in the dead of winter was no trifling experience, nor one that the biologist ought to fail to understand. Had I been a poet, that meeting would have been of consequence to all the world; as I was, however, it meant something only to me,—a new point of view, an inspiration,—a beautiful poem that I cannot write.

This attitude of the nature-lover, because it is contemplative and poetical, is not therefore mystical or purely sentimental. Hooting at the owls and hearing things in baffling silences may not be scientific. Neither is it unscientific. The attitude of the boy beside the starlit lake is not that of Charlie, the man who helps me occasionally on the farm.

We were clearing up a bit of mucky meadow recently when we found a stone just above the surface that was too large for the horse to haul out. We decided to bury it.

Charlie took the shovel and mined away under the rock until he struck a layer of rather hard sandstone. He picked a while at this, then stopped a while; picked again, rather feebly, then stopped and began to think about it. It was hard work,—the thinking, I mean, harder than the picking,—but Charlie, however unscientific, is an honest workman, so he thought it through.

“Well,” he said finally, “‘t ain’t no use, nohow. You can’t keep it down. You bury the darned thing, and it’ll come right up. I suppose it grows. Of course it does. It must. Everything grows.”

Now that is an unscientific attitude. But that is not the mind of the nature-lover, of the boy with the baffling silences along the starlit lake. He is sentimental, certainly, yet not ignorant, nor merely vapid. He does not always wander along the lake by night. He is a nature-student, as well as a nature-lover, and he does a great deal more than hoot at the owls. This, though, is as near as he comes to anything scientific, and so worth while, according to the professor.

II

And it is as near as he ought to come to reality and facts—according to the philosopher.

“We want only the facts of nature,” says the scientist. “Nothing in nature is worth while,” says the philosopher, “but mood, background, atmosphere.”

“Nor can I recollect that my mind,” says one of our philosophers, “in these walks, was much called away from contemplation by the petty curiosities of the herbalist or birdlorist, for I am not one zealously addicted to scrutinizing into the minuter secrets of nature. It never seemed to me that a flower was made sweeter by knowing the construction of its ovaries.... The wood thrush and the veery sing as melodiously to the uninformed as to the subtly curious. Indeed, I sometimes think a little ignorance is wholesome in our communion with nature.”

So it is. Certainly if ignorance, a great deal of ignorance, were unwholesome, then nature-study would be a very unhealthy course, indeed. For, when the most curious of the herbalists and birdlorists (Mr. Burroughs, say) has made his last prying peep into the private life of a ten-acre woodlot, he will still be wholesomely ignorant of the ways of nature. Is the horizon just back of the brook that marks the terminus of our philosopher’s path? Let him leap across, walk on, on, out of his woods to the grassy knoll in the next pasture, and there look! Lo! far yonder the horizon! beyond a vaster forest than he has known, behind a range of higher rolling hills, within a shroud of wider, deeper mystery.

There isn’t the slightest danger of walking off the earth; nor of unlearning our modicum of wholesome ignorance concerning the universe. The nature-lover may turn nature-student and have no fear of losing nature. The vision will not fade.

Let him go softly through the May twilight and wait at the edge of the swamp. A voice serene and pure, a hymn, a prayer, fills all the dusk with peace. Let him watch and see the singer, a brown-winged wood thrush, with full, spotted breast. Let him be glad that it is not a white-winged spirit, or a disembodied voice. And let him wonder the more that so plain a singer knows so divine a song.

Our philosopher mistakes his own dominant mood for the constant mood of nature. But nature has no constant mood. No more have we. Dawn and dusk are different moods. The roll of the prairie is unlike the temper of a winding cowpath in a New England pasture. Nature is not always sublime, awful, and mysterious; and no one but a philosopher is persistently contemplative. Indeed, at four o’clock on a June morning in some old apple orchard, even the philosopher would shout,—

“Hence, loathèd melancholy!”

He is in no mind for meditation; and it is just possible, before the day is done, that the capture of a drifting seed of the dandelion and the study of its fairy wings might so add to the wonder, if not to the sweetness, of the flower, as to give him thought for a sermon.

There are times when the companionship of your library is enough; there are other times when you want a single book, a chapter, a particular poem. It is good at times just to know that you are turning with the earth under the blue of the sky; and just as good again to puzzle over the size of the spots in the breasts of our several thrushes. For I believe you can hear more in the song when you know it is the veery and not the wood thrush singing. Indeed, I am acquainted with persons who had lived neighbors to the veery since childhood, and never had heard its song until the bird was pointed out to them. Then they could not help but hear.

No amount of familiarity will breed contempt for your fields. Is the summer’s longest, brightest day long enough and bright enough, to dispel the brooding mystery of the briefest of its nights? And tell me, what of the vastness and terror of the sea will the deep dredges ever bring to the surface, or all the circumnavigating drive to shore? The nature-lover is a man in a particular mood; the nature-student is the same man in another mood, as the fading shadows of the morning are the same that lengthen and deepen in the afternoon. There are times when he will go apart into the desert places to pray. Most of the time, however, he will live contentedly within sound of the dinner horn, glad of the companionship of his bluebirds, chipmunks, and pine trees.

This is best. And the question most frequently asked me is, How can I come by a real love for my pine trees, chipmunks, and bluebirds? How can I know real companionship with nature?

How did the boy along the starlit lake come by it,—a companionship so real and intimate that the very cliffs knew him, that the owls answered him, that even the silences spoke to him, and the imagery of his rocks and skies became a part of the inner world in which he dwelt? Simply by living along Winander and hallooing so often to the owls that they learned to halloo in reply. You may need to be born again before you can talk the language of the owls; but if there is in you any hankering for the soil, then all you need for companionship with nature is a Winander of your own, a range, a haunt, that you can visit, walk around, and get home from in a day’s time. If this region can be the pastures, woodlots, and meadows that make your own door-yard, then that is good; especially if you buy the land and live on it, for then Nature knows that you are not making believe. She will accept you as she does the peas you plant, and she will cherish you as she does them. This farm, or haunt, or range, you will come to know intimately: its flowers, birds, walls, streams, trees,—its features large and small, as they appear in June, and as they look in July and in January.

For the first you will need the how-to-know books,—these while you are getting acquainted; but soon acquaintance grows into friendship. You are done naming things. The meanings of things now begin to come home to you. Nature is taking you slowly back to herself. Companionship has begun.

Many persons of the right mind never know this friendship, because they never realize the necessity of being friendly. They walk through a field as they walk through a crowded street; they go into the country as they go abroad. And the result is that all this talk of the herbalist and birdlorist, to quote the philosopher again, seems “little better than cant and self-deception.”

But let the philosopher cease philosophizing (he was also a hermit), and leave off hermiting; let him live at home with his wife and children, like the rest of us; let him work in the city for his living, hoe in his garden for his recreation; and then (I don’t care by what prompting) let him study the lay of his neighbor fields, woods, and orchards until he knows every bird and beast, every tree-hole, earth-hole, even the times and places of the things that grow in the ground; let him do this through the seasons of the year,—for two or three years,—and he will know how to enjoy a woodchuck; he will understand many of the family affairs of his chipmunks; he will recognize and welcome back his bluebirds; he will love and often listen to the solemn talk of his pines.

All of this may be petty prying, not communion at all; it may be all moonshine and sentiment, not science. But it is not cant and self-deception,—in the hearts of thousands of simple, sufficient folk, who know a wood thrush when they hear him, and whose woodpaths are of their own wearing. And if it is not communion with nature, I know that it is at least real pleasure, and rest, peace, contentment, red blood, sound sleep, and, at times, it seems to me, something close akin to religion.

V

Chickadee

ONCE (it was a good while ago, when I was a boy), I tried to write a poem. The first stanza ran:—

I heard him when the reeds were young
Along a clover sea;
Above the purple waves he hung,
And o’er the fragrant waters flung
His storm of ecstasy;

and the last stanza ran:—

He’s left the meadows burnt and hot,
He’s left me lone and drear;
But still within the white-birch lot
Cheeps Chickadee—whom I forgot
While Bobolink was here;

which means in plainer prose that chickadee does not sing a while in June and then fly away and leave us. He stays the year around; he is constant and faithful in his friendship, though I sometimes forget.

He cannot sing with bobolink. But suppose I could have only one of the birds? As it is, I get along for more than half the year without bobolink, but what would my out-of-doors be without chickadee? There is not a single day in the year that I cannot find him, no matter how hot, or cold, how hard it rains or snows. Often he is the only voice in all the silent woods, the only spark of life aglow in all my frozen winter world.

I was crunching along through the January dusk toward home. The cold was bitter. A half-starved partridge had just risen from the road and fluttered off among the naked bushes,—a moment of sound, a bit of life vanishing in the winter night of the woods. I knew the very hemlock in which he would roost; but what were the thick, snow-bent boughs of his hemlock, and what were all his winter feathers in such a night as this?—this vast of sweeping winds and frozen snow!

The road dipped from the woods into a meadow, where the winds were free. The cold was driving, numbing here with a power for death that the thermometer could not mark. I backed into the wind and hastened on toward the double line of elms that arched the road in front of the house. Already I could hear them creak and rattle like things of glass. It was not the sound of life. Nothing was alive; for what could live in this long darkness and fearful cold?

Could live? The question was hardly thought, when an answer was whirled past me into the nearest of the naked elms. A chickadee! He caught for an instant on a dead limb over the road, scrambled along to its broken tip, and whisked over into a hole that ran straight down the centre of the stub, down, for I don’t know how far.

I stopped. The stub lay out upon the wind, with only an eddy of the gale sucking at the little round hole in the broken end, while far down in its hollow heart, huddling himself into a downy, dozy ball for the night, was the chickadee. I know by the very way he struck the limb and turned in that he had been there before. He knew whither, across the sweeping meadows, he was being blown. He had even helped the winds as they whirled him, for he had tarried along the roads till late. But he was safe for the night now, in the very bed, it may be, where he was hatched last summer, and where at this moment, who knows, were half a dozen other chickadees, the rest of that last summer’s brood, unscathed still, and still sharing the old home hollow, as snug and warm this bitter night as in the soft May days when they were nestlings here together.

The cold drove me on; but the chickadee had warmed me and all my naked world of night and death. And so he ever does. The winter has yet to be that drives him seeking shelter to the south. I never knew it colder than in January and February of 1904. During both of those months, morning and evening, I drove through a long mile of empty, snow-buried woods. For days at a time I would not see even a crow, but morning and evening, at a certain dip in the road, two chickadees would fly from bush to bush across the hollow and cheer me on the way. They came out to the road, really, to pick up whatever scanty crumbs were to be found in my wake. They came also to hear me, to see me pass,—to escape for a moment, I think, the silence, desertion, and death of the woods. They helped me to escape, too.

Four other chickadees, all winter long, ate with us, sharing, as far as the double windows would allow, the cheer of our dining-room. We served them on the lilac bush outside the window, tying their suet on so that they could see us and we them during meal time. Perhaps it was mere suet, no feast of soul at all, that they got; but constantly, when our pie was opened, the birds began to sing,—a dainty dish indeed, savory, wholesome, and good for our souls.

There are states in the far Northwest where the porcupine is protected by law, as a last food resource for men lost and starving in the forests. Perhaps the porcupine was not designed by nature for any such purpose. Perhaps chickadee was not left behind by summer to feed our lost and starving hope through the cheerless months. But that is the use I make of him. He is summer’s pledge to me. The woods are hollow, the winds chill, the earth cold and stiff, but there flits chickadee, and—I cannot lose faith, nor feel that this procession of bleak white days is all a funeral!

He is the only bird in my little world that I can find without fail three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. From December to the end of March he comes daily to my lilac bush for suet; from April to early July he is busy with domestic cares in the gray birches of the woodlot; from August to December he and his family come hunting quietly and sociably as a little flock among the trees and bushes of the farm; and from then on he is back for his winter meals at “The Lilac.”

Is it any wonder that he was the first bird I ever felt personally acquainted with, and the first bird my children knew? That early acquaintance, however, was not due to his abundance and intrusion, as it might be with the English sparrow, but rather due to the cheerful, confiding, sociable spirit of the little bird. He drops down and peeps under your hat-brim to see what manner of boy you are, and if you are really fit to be abroad in this world, so altogether good—for chickadees.

He has a mission to perform besides the eating of eggs and grubs of the pestiferous insects. This destruction he does that the balance of things may be maintained out of doors. He has quite another work to do, which is not economic, and which, in nowise, is a matter of fine feathers or sweet voice, but simply a matter of sweet nature, vigor, and concentrated cheerfulness.

I said he is summer’s pledge, the token of hope to me. He is a lesson also. I don’t often find sermons in stones, because, no doubt, I look so little for the sermons, so little for the very stones. But I cannot help seeing chickadee,—and chickadee is all sermon. I hear him on a joyous May morning calling _Chick-a-dee! dee! Chick-a-dee! dee!_—brisk, bright, and cheery; or, soft and gentle as a caress, he whistles, _Phœ-ee-bee! Phœ-ee-bee!_ I meet him again on the edge of a bleak, midwinter night. He is hungry and cold, and he calls, as I hasten along, _Chick-a-dee! dee! Chick-a-dee! dee!_—brisk, bright, and cheery; or, soft and gentle as a caress, he whistles, _Phœ-ee-bee! Phœ-ee-bee!_

Will you lend me your wings, chickadee, those invisible wings on which you ride the winds of life so evenly? For I would hang my ill-balanced soul between them, as your bird soul hangs, and fly as you fly.

The abundant summer, the lean and wolfish winter, find chickadee cheerful and gentle. He is busier at some seasons than at others, with fewer chances for friendship. He almost disappears in the early summer. But this is because of family cares; and because the bigger, louder birds have come back, and the big leaves have come out and hidden him. A little searching, and you will discover him, in one of your old decayed fence posts, maybe, or else deep in the swamp, foraging for a family so numerous that they spill over at the door of their home.

Here about the farm, this is sure to be a gray birch home. Other trees will do—on a pinch. I have found chickadee nesting in live white oaks, maples, upturned roots, and tumbling fence posts. These were shifts, however, mere houses, not real homes. The only good homelike trees are old gray birches dead these many years and gone to punk,—mere shells of tough circular bark walls.

Why has chickadee this very decided preference? Is it a case of protective coloration,—the little gray and black bird choosing to nest in this little gray and black tree because bird and tree so exactly match each other in size and color? Or (and there are many instances in nature) is there a subtle strain of poetry in chickadee’s soul, something æsthetic, that leads him into this exquisite harmony,—into this little gray house for his little gray self?

Explain it as you may, it is a fact that this little bird shows a marked preference, makes deliberate choice, and in his choice is protection, and poetry, too. Doubtless he follows the guidance of a sure and watchful instinct (whatever instinct be), but who shall deny to him a share of the higher, finer things of the imagination? a share of real æsthetic taste?

His life inside the birch is of a piece with the artistic exterior. It is all gentle and sweet and idyllic. There is no happier spot in the summer woods than that about the birch of the chickadees; and none whose happiness you will be so little liable to disturb.

Before the woods were in leaf one spring I found a pair of chickadees building in a birch along the edge of the swamp. They had just begun, having dug out only an inch of cavity. It was very interesting to discover them doing the work themselves, for usually they refit some abandoned chamber or adapt a ready-made hole.

The birch was a long, limbless cylinder of bark, broken off about fourteen feet up, and utterly rotten, the mere skin of a tree stuffed with dust. I could push my finger into it at any point. It was so weak that every time the birds lighted upon the top the whole stub wobbled and reeled. Surely they were building their house upon the sand. Any creature without wings would have known that. Birds, however, seem to have lost the sense of such insecurity, often placing their nests as if they expected them also to take wings and fly to safety when the rains descend and the winds come.

This shaking stub of the chickadees was standing directly beneath a great overshadowing pine, where, if no partridge bumped into it, if two squirrels did not scamper up it together, if the crows nesting overhead did not discover it, if no strong wind bore down upon it from the meadow side, it might totter out the nesting season. But it didn’t. The birds were leaving too much to luck. I knew it, and should have pushed their card house down, then and there, and saved the greater ruin later. Perhaps so, but I was too interested in their labor.

Both birds were working when I discovered them, and so busily that my coming up did not delay them for a single billful. It was not hard digging, but it was very slow, for chickadee is neither carpenter nor mason. He has difficulty in killing a hard-backed beetle. So, whenever you find him occupying a clean-walled cavity, with a neat, freshly clipped doorway, you may be sure that some woodpecker built the house, not this short-billed, soft-tailed little tit. He lacks both the bill-chisel and the tail-brace. Perhaps the explanation of his fondness for birch trees lies here: they die young and soon decay.

The birds were going down through the top, not by a hole in the leathery rind of the sides, for the bark would have been too tough for their beaks. They would drop into the top of the stub, pick up a wad of decayed wood, and fly off to the dead limb of the pine. Here, with a jerk and a snap of their bills, they would scatter the stuff in a shower so thin and far around that I could neither hear it fall nor find a trace of it upon the dead leaves of the ground. This nest would never be betrayed by the workmen’s chips.

Between the pair there averaged three beakfuls of excavating every two minutes, one of the birds regularly shoveling twice to the other’s once. They looked so exactly alike that I could not tell which bird was pushing the enterprise; but I have my suspicions.

There is nothing so superior about his voice or appearance that he should thus shirk. He was doing part of his duty, apparently, but it was half-hearted work. Hers was the real interest, the real anxiety; and hers the initiative. To be a male and show off! That’s the thing. To be a male and let your wife carry the baby! The final distinctive difference between a truly humanized, civilized man and all other males of every order, is a willingness to push the baby carriage.

The finer the feathers or the song among male birds the less use they are in practical, domestic ways. Fine beaux, captivating lovers, they become little else than a nuisance as husbands. One of my friends has been watching a pair of bluebirds building. The male sat around for a week without bringing in a feather. Then one day he was seen to enter the hole, after his busy mate had just left it, and carry out a beakful of grass which he scattered to the winds in pure perversity, criticising her bungling work, maybe! More likely he was jealous.

Chickadee was no such precious fool as that. He was doing something; trying to drown his regret for the departing honeymoon in hard labor, not, however, to the danger of his health.

I sat a long time watching the work. It went on in perfect silence, not a chirp, not the sound of a fluttering wing. The swamp along whose margin the birds were building had not a joyous atmosphere. Damp, dim-shadowed, and secret, it seemed to have laid its spell upon the birds. Their very gray and black was as if mixed of the dusk, and of the gray, half-light of the swamp; their noiseless coming and going was like the slipping to and fro of shadows. They were a part of it all, and that sharing was their defense, the best defense they knew.

It didn’t save their nest, however. They felt and obeyed the spirit of the swamp in their own conduct, but the swamp did not tell them where to build. It was about three weeks later that I stopped again under the pine and found the birch stub in pieces upon the ground. Some robber had been after the eggs and had brought the whole house tumbling down. This is not the fate of all such birch-bark houses. Now and again they escape; but it is always a matter for wonder.

I was following an old disused wood road once when I scared a robin from her nest. Her mate joined her, and together they raised a great hubbub. Immediately a chewink, a pair of vireos, and two black and white warblers joined the robins in their din. Then a chickadee appeared. He (I say “he” knowingly; and here he quite redeems himself) had a worm in his beak. His anxiety seemed so real that I began to watch him, when, looking down among the stones for a place to step, what should I see but his mate emerging from the end of a birch stump at my very feet. She had heard the din and had come out to see what it was all about. At sight of her, he hastened with his worm, brushing my face, almost, as he darted to her side. She took it sweetly, for she knew he had intended it for her. But how do I know that? Perhaps he meant it for the young! There were no young in the nest, only eight eggs. Even after the young came (there were eight of them!), and when life, from daylight to dark, was one ceaseless, hurried hunt for worms, I saw him over and over again fly to her side caressingly and tempt her to eat.

The house of this pair did not fall. How could it when it stood precisely two and a half feet from the ground! But that it wasn’t looted is due to the sheer audacity of its situation. It stood alone, against the road, so close that the hub of a low wheel in passing might have knocked it down. Perhaps a hundred persons had brushed it in going by. How many dogs and cats had overlooked it no one can say, nor how many skunks and snakes and squirrels. The accident that discovered it to me happened apparently to no one else, and I was friendly.

Cutting a tiny window in the bark just above the eggs, I looked in upon the little people every day. I watched them grow and fill the cavity and hang over at the top. I was there the day they forced my window open, the day when there was no more room at the top, and when, at the call of their parents, one after another of this largest and sweetest of bird families found his wings and flew away through the woods.

VI

The Missing Tooth

THE snow had melted from the river meadows, leaving them flattened, faded, and stained with mud,—a dull, dreary waste in the gray February. I had stopped beside a tiny bundle of bones that lay in the matted grass a dozen feet from a ditch. Here, still showing, was the narrow path along which the bones had dragged themselves; there the hole by which they had left the burrow in the bank of the ditch. They had crawled out in this old runway, then turned off a little into the heavy autumn grass and laid them down. The rains had come and the winter snows. The spring was breaking now, and the small bundle, gently loosened and uncovered, was whitening on the wide, bare meadow.

I had recognized the bones at once as the skeleton of a muskrat. It was something peculiar in the way they lay that had caused me to pause. They seemed outstretched, as if composed by gentle hands, the hands of Sleep. They had not been flung down. The delicate ribs had fallen in, but not a bone was broken or displaced, not one showed the splinter of shot, or the crack that might have been made by a steel trap. No violence had been done them. They had been touched by nothing rougher than the snow. Out into the hidden runway they had crept. Death had passed them here; but no one else in all the winter months.

The creature had died—a “natural” death. It had starved, while a hundred acres of plenty lay round about. Picking up the skull, I found the jaws locked together as if they were a single solid bone. One of the two incisor teeth of the upper jaw was missing, and apparently had never developed. The opposite tooth on the lower jaw, thus unopposed and so unworn, had grown beyond its normal height up into the empty socket above, then on, turning outward and piercing the cheek-bone in front of the eye, whence, curving like a boar’s tusk, it had slowly closed the jaws and locked them, rigid, set, as fixed as jaws of stone.

Death had lingered cruelly. At first the animal had been able to gnaw; but as the tooth curved through the bones of the face and gradually tightened the jaws, the creature got less and less to eat, until, one day, creeping out of the burrow for food, the poor wretch was unable to get back.

One seldom comes upon the like of this. It is commoner than we think; but it is usually hidden away and quickly over. How often do we see a wild thing sick,—a bird or animal suffering from an accident, or dying, like this muskrat, because of some physical defect? The struggle between two lives for life—the falling of the weak as prey to the strong—is ever before us; but this single-handed fight between the creature and Nature is a far rarer, silenter tragedy. Nature is too swift, too merciless to allow us time for sympathy. It was she who taught the old Roman to take away his weak and malformed offspring and expose it on the hills.

There is, at best, scarcely a fighting chance in the meadow. Only strength and craft may win. The muskrat with the missing tooth never enters the race at all. He slinks from some abandoned burrow, and, if the owl and mink are not watching, dies alone in the grass, and we rarely know.

I shall never forget the impression made upon me by those quiet bones. It was like that made by my first visit to a great city hospital,—out of the busy, cheerful street into a surgical ward, where the sick and injured lay in long white lines. We tramp the woods and meadows and never step from the sweet air and the pure sunlight of health into a hospital. But that is not because no sick, ill-formed, or injured are there. The proportion is smaller than among us humans, and for very good reasons, yet there is much real suffering, and to come upon it, as we will, now and then, must certainly quicken our understanding and deepen our sympathy with the life out of doors.

No sensible person could for a moment believe the animals capable of suffering as a human being can suffer, or that there is any such call for our sympathy from them as from our human neighbors. But an unselfish sharing of the life of the fields demands that we take part in all of it,—and all of it is but little short of tragedy. Nature wears a brave face. Her smile is ever in the open, her laughter quick and contagious. This brave front is no mask. It is real. Sunlight, song, color, form, and fragrance are real. And so our love and joy in Nature is real. Real, also, should be our love and sorrow with Nature. For do I share fully in as much of her life as even the crow lives as long as I think of the creature only with admiration for his cunning or with wrath for his destruction of my melons and corn?

A crow has his solemn moments. He frequently knows fear, pain, hunger, accident, and disease; he knows something very like affection and love. For all that, he is a mere crow. But a mere crow is no mean thing. Few of us, indeed, are ourselves, and as much besides as a mere crow. A real love, however, will give us part in all of his existence. We will forage and fight with him; we will parley and play; and when the keen north winds find him in the frozen pines, we will suffer, too.

With Nature as mere waters, fields, and skies, it is, perhaps, impossible for us to sorrow. She is too self-sufficient, too impersonal. She asks, or compels, everything except tears. But when she becomes birds and beasts,—a little world of individuals among whom you are only one of a different kind,—then all the others, no matter their kind, are earth-born companions and fellow mortals.

Here are the meadow voles. I know that my hay crop is shorter every year for them,—a very little shorter. And I can look with satisfaction at a cat carrying a big bobtailed vole out of my mowing. The voles are rated, along with other mice, as injurious to man. I have an impulse to plant both of my precious feet upon every one that stirs in its runway.

If that feeling was habitual once, it is so no longer; for now it is only when the instincts of the farmer get the better of me that I spring at this quiet stir in the grass. Perhaps, long ago, my forbears wore claws, like pussy; and, perhaps (there isn’t the slightest doubt), I should develop claws if I continued to jump at every mouse in the grass because he is a mouse, and because I have a little patch of mucky land in hay.

One day I came upon two of my voles struggling in the water. They were exhausted and well-nigh dead. I helped them out as I should have helped out any other creature, and having saved them, why, what could I do but let them go—even into my own meadow? This has happened several times.

When the drought dries the meadow, the voles come to the deep, walled spring at the upper end, apparently to drink. The water usually trickles over the curb, but in a long dry spell it shrinks a foot or more below the edge, and the voles, once within for their drink, cannot get out. Time and time again I had fished them up, until I thought to leave a board slanting down to the water, so that they could climb back to the top.

It is stupid and careless to drown thus. The voles are blunderers. White-footed mice and house mice are abundant in the stumps and grass of the vicinity, but they never tumble into the spring. Still, I am partly responsible for the voles, for I walled up the spring and changed it into this trap. I owe them the drink and the plank, for certainly there are rights of mice, as well as of men, in this meadow of mine, where I do little but mow. But even if they have no rights, surely

A daimen icker in a thrave
’S a sma’ request

for such of them as the foxes, cats, skunks, snakes, hawks, and owls leave! Rights or no, hay or no, I don’t jump at _my_ meadow mice any more, for fear of killing one who has taken a cup of cold water from me off the plank, or has had my helping hand out of the depths of the spring.

It is wholesome to be the good Samaritan to a meadow mouse, to pour out, even waste, a little of the oil and wine of sympathy on the humblest of our needy neighbors.

Here are the chimney swallows. One can look with complacency, with gratitude, indeed, upon the swallows of other chimneys, as they hawk in the sky; yet, when the little creatures, so useful, but so uncombed and unfumigated, set up their establishments in _your_ chimney, to the jeopardy of the whole house, then you need an experience like mine.

I had had a like experience years before, when the house did not belong to me. Now, however, the house was mine, and if it became infested because of the swallows, I could not move away; so I felt like burning them in the chimney, bag and baggage. There were four nests, as nearly as I could make out, and, from the frequent squeakings, I knew they were all filled with young. Then one day, when the birds were feathered and nearly ready to fly, there came a rain that ran wet far down the sooty chimney, loosened the mortar of the nests, and sent them crashing into the fireplace.

Some of the young birds were killed outright; the others were at my mercy, flung upon me,—helpless, wailing infants! Of course I made it comfortable for them on the back-log, and let their mothers flutter down unhindered to feed them. Had I understood the trick, I would have hawked for them and helped feed them myself.

They made a great thunder in the chimney; they rattled down into the living-room a little soot; but nothing further came of it. We were not quarantined. On the contrary, we had our reward, according to promise; for it was an extremely interesting event to us all. It dispelled some silly qualms, it gave us intimate part in a strange small life, so foreign, yet so closely linked to our own, and it made us pause with wonder that even our empty, sooty chimney could be made use of by Nature to our great benefit.

I wonder if the nests of the chimney swallows came tumbling down when the birds used to build in caves and hollow trees? It is a most extraordinary change, this change from the trees to the chimneys, and it does not seem to have been accompanied by an increase of architectural wisdom necessary to meet all the contingencies of the new hollow. The mortar or glue, which, I imagine, held firmly in the empty trees, will not mix with the chimney soot, so that the nest, especially when crowded with young, is easily loosened by the rain, and is sometimes even broken away by the slight wing-stroke of a descending swallow, or by the added weight of a parent bird as it settles with food.

We little realize how frequent fear is among the birds and animals, nor how often it proves fatal. A situation which would have caused no trouble ordinarily, becomes through sudden fright a tangle or a trap. I have known many a quail to bolt into a fast express train and fall dead. Last winter I left the large door of the barn open, so that my flock of juncos could feed inside upon the floor. They found their way into the hayloft, and went up and down freely. On two or three occasions I happened in so suddenly that they were thoroughly frightened, and flew madly into the cupola to escape through the windows. They beat against the glass until utterly dazed, and would have perished there, had I not climbed up later and brought them down. So thousands of the migrating birds perish yearly by flying wildly against the dazzling lanterns of the lighthouses, and thousands more lose their way in the thick darkness of the stormy nights, or are blown out of their course, and drift away to sea.

Hasty, careless, miscalculated movements are not as frequent among the careful wild folk as among us, perhaps; but there is abundant evidence of their occasional occurrence and of their sometimes fatal results.

Several instances are recorded of birds that have been tangled in the threads of their nests; and one case of a bluebird that was caught in the flying meshes of an oriole’s nest into which it had been spying.

I once found the mummied body of a chippy twisting and swinging in the leafless branches of a peach tree. The little creature was suspended in a web of horsehair about two inches below the nest. It looked as if she had brought a snarled bunch of the hair and left it loose in the twigs. Later on, a careless step and her foot was fast, when every frantic effort for freedom only tangled her the worse. In the nest above were four other tiny mummies,—a double tragedy that might with care have been averted.

A similar fate befell a song sparrow that I discovered hanging dead upon a barbed-wire fence. By some chance it had slipped a foot through an open place between the two twisted strands, and then, fluttering along, had wedged the leg and broken it in the struggle to escape.

We have all held our breath at the hazardous traveling of the squirrels in the treetops. What other animals take such risks,—leaping at dizzy heights from bending limbs to catch the tips of limbs still smaller, saving themselves again and again by the merest chance.

But luck sometimes fails. My brother, a careful watcher in the woods, was hunting on one occasion, when he saw a gray squirrel miss its footing in a tree and fall, breaking its neck upon a log beneath.

I have frequently known them to fall short distances, and once I saw a red squirrel come to grief like the gray squirrel above. He was scurrying through the tops of some lofty pitch pines, a little hurried and flustered at sight of me, and nearing the end of a high branch was in the act of springing, when the dead tip cracked under him and he came tumbling headlong. The height must have been forty feet, so that before he reached the ground he had righted himself,—his tail out and legs spread,—but the fall was too great. He hit the earth with a dull thud, and before I could reach him lay dead upon the needles, with blood oozing from his eyes and nostrils.

Unhoused and often unsheltered, the wild things suffer as we hardly yet understand. No one can estimate the deaths of a year from severe cold, heavy storms, high winds and tides. I have known the nests of a whole colony of gulls and terns to be swept away in a great storm; and I have seen the tides, over and over, flood the inlet marshes, and drown out the nests in the grass,—those of the clapper-rails by thousands.

I remember a late spring storm that came with the returning redstarts and, in my neighborhood, killed many of them. Toward evening of that day one of the little black and orange voyageurs fluttered against the window and we let him in, wet, chilled, and so exhausted that for a moment he lay on his back in my open palm. Soon after there was another soft tapping at the window,—and two little redstarts were sharing our cheer and drying their butterfly wings in our warmth.

During the summer of 1903 one of the commonest of the bird calls about the farm was the whistle of the quails. A covey roosted down the hillside within fifty yards of the house. Then came the winter,—such a winter as the birds had never known. Since then, just once have we heard the whistle of a quail, and that, perhaps, was the call of one which a game protective association had liberated in the woods about two miles away.

The birds and animals are not as weather-wise as we; they cannot foretell as far ahead nor provide as certainly against need, despite the popular notion to the contrary.

We point to the migrating birds, to the muskrat houses, and the hoards of the squirrels, and say, “How wise and far-sighted these nature-taught children are!” True, they are, but only for conditions that are normal. Their wisdom does not cover the exceptional. The gray squirrels did not provide for the unusually hard weather of the winter of 1904. Three of them from the woodlot came begging of me, and lived on my wisdom, not on their own.

Consider the ravens, that neither sow nor reap, that have neither storehouse nor barn, yet they are fed,—but not always. Indeed, there are few of our winter birds that go hungry so often, and that die in so great numbers for lack of food and shelter, as the crows.

After severe and protracted cold, with a snow-covered ground, a crow-roost looks like a battlefield, so thick lie the dead and wounded. Morning after morning the flock goes over to forage in the frozen fields, and night after night returns hungrier, weaker, and less able to resist the cold. Now, as the darkness falls, a bitter wind breaks loose and sweeps down upon the pines.

List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle,
I thought me on the owrie cattle,

and how often I have thought me on the crows biding the night yonder in the moaning pines! So often, as a boy, and with so real an awe, have I watched them returning at night, that the crows will never cease flying through my wintry sky,—an endless line of wavering black figures, weary, retreating figures, beating over in the early dusk.

To-night another wild storm sweeps across the January fields. All the afternoon the crows have been going over, and at five o’clock are still passing though the darkness settles rapidly. Now it is eight, and the long night is but just begun. The storm is increasing. The wind shrieks about the house, whirling the fine snow in hissing eddies past the corners and driving it on into long, curling crests across the fields. I can hear the roar as the wind strikes the shoal of pines where the fields roll into the woods,—a vast surf sound, but softer and higher, with a wail like the wail of some vast heart in pain.

I can see the tall trees rock and sway with their burden of dark forms. As close together as they can crowd on the bending limbs cling the crows, their breasts turned all to the storm. With crops empty and bodies weak, they rise and fall in the cutting, ice-filled wind for thirteen hours of night!

Is it a wonder that the life fires burn low? that the small flames flicker and go out?

VII

The Sign of the Shad-bush

THE shad-bush is open! My bees have seen the sign. They are dropping down upon the alighting-boards of their hives and running with little bags of gold into the still half-closed entrances. During the sunny hours of the last three weeks there has been a quiet buzzing about the hives: the bees have been visiting the early alders, the soft maples, and the dusty-catkined willows; but not before to-day, the first day of the blowing shad-bush, have things been busy at the hives,—have they hummed.

Off along the meadows I can see large patches of garnet against the purple of the sky,—the bloom of the red maples. As I approach, a soft murmur around and through the misty garnet fills the air, like the murmur of a million tiny tongues. Nearer still, and I can see the bees. Here is where they are getting their gold. But not all of it. Some of it to-day is coming from the marsh marigolds.

Early in April, before the shad-bush had opened, or a bee had ventured to the meadows, I picked the first hardy blossom of the marigolds out of icy water, out of mud that had barely thawed. A token this, a promise; but not the sure sign of spring. The bees did not see it; they were waiting, like me, for the shad-bush. So were the marigolds, for to-day the low, wet edge of the meadow ditch is all aglow with the shining of their gold, which the bees are pocketing by the thighful. Among the “flowers,” the marigolds are the first here to offer a harvest for the hives.

The procession is under way. The assembling began weeks ago, with the March hepatica, the stray April arbutus, windflower, spice-bush, and bloodroot. There were saxifrage and everlasting out, too; but they all came singly and timidly. There was no movement of the flowers until the shad-bush opened. Now the marigolds appear in companies, the windflowers drift together, and the hepaticas, leading the line, make a show. The procession of the flowers has started; spring is here.

_My_ spring, I should have said. Your spring came long ago, perhaps, or still delays. “The dandelion tells me when to look for the swallow, the dog-tooth violet when to expect the wood thrush, and when I have found the wake-robin in bloom I know the season is fairly inaugurated. With me this flower is associated, not merely with the awakening of Robin, for he has been awake some weeks, but with the universal awakening and rehabilitation of Nature.”

I watch for the sign of the shad-bush. Spring! There is the smell of spring in the yellow spice-bush; the sound of spring in the trills of the hylas; the color of spring in the blue of the hepatica. A February rain spatters your face with spring; the wild geese trumpet spring in the gray skies as they pass; the bluebird brings spring in spite of your fears and the weather:—

All white and still lie stream and hill—
The winter cold and drear!
When from the skies, a bluebird flies
And—spring is here!

True enough. But then suddenly the bluebird disappears; a heavy snowstorm sets in (as happened not many springs ago), and thousands of the birds perish. Spring was here. It has gone again. And so it will come and go until the shad-bush blooms—for me.

You will not miss one of the returning birds, not even the wild geese; not one of the early flowers, either, by waiting for the shad-bush. The skunk-cabbage and pussy-willow are still in blossom; and still in the woods and fields is the smell of the soil,—that fragrance, that essence which is the breath of the wakening earth. You can yet taste it on the lips of the hepatica, the arbutus, and bloodroot. It still lingers on the early catkins, too,—a strangely rare and delicate odor, that is not of the flowers at all, but of the earth, and sweeter than any perfume that the summer can distill.

It has been a slow, unwilling season until to-day, so slow that the green still shows richest in the sheltered meadows, and the lively color on the rocky slope that runs up from my tiny river is largely the color of mosses and Christmas ferns. Here is a stretch of southern exposure, however, and here are spots where springtime came weeks ago. Already the dog-tooth violets are out in a sunny saucer between the rocks; just above them, on an unshaded shelf, is a patch of saxifrage, and close at hand among the clefts, their “honey pitcher upside down,” swing the first of my columbines.

Yet Spring does not come thus by spots; she does not crawl out and sun herself like a lizard. The columbine seeks the sun, but the hepaticas came up and opened their exquisite eyes in the deepest, dampest shadows of the woods. I have seen them and the lingering snowdrifts together. Many of them are never touched with a sunbeam, their warmth and life coming from within, from a store saved through the winter, rather than from without. Here under the mat of fallen leaves and winter snow they have kept enough of the summer to make a spring.

The fires of summer are never out. They are only banked in the winter, smouldering always under the snow, and quick to brighten and burst into blaze. There came a warm day in January, and across my thawing path crawled a woolly bear caterpillar, a vanessa butterfly flitted through the woods, and the juncos sang. That night a howling snowstorm swept out of the north. The coals were covered again. So they kindled and darkened, until to-day they leap from the ashes of winter, a pure, thin blaze in the shad-bush, to burn higher and hotter across the summer, to flicker and die away, a line of yellow embers in the weird witch-hazel of the autumn.

At the sign of the shad-bush the doors of my springtime swing wide open. My birds are back, my turtles are out, my squirrels and woodchucks show themselves, my garden is ready to plough and plant. There is not a stretch of woodland or meadow now that shows a trace of winter. Over the pasture the bluets are beginning to drift, as if the haze, on the distant hills, floating down in the night, had been caught in the dew-wet grass. They wash the field to its borders in their delicate azure hue.

Along with the bluets (“innocence” we should always call them), under the open sky, there unroll in the wet shaded bottoms of the maple swamps the pointed arum leaves of the Jacks, or Indian turnips. How they fight for room! There are patches where all the pews are pulpits, with some of the preachers standing three deep.

Now why should there be such a scramble for place among the Jacks, while just above them in the dry woods the large showy lady’s-slipper opens in isolated splendor? Here is one, yonder another, with room between for a thousand. Occasionally you will see a dozen together, though not in a crowd; but more often the solitary blossom opens alone and far removed from any of its kind.

The lady’s-slippers, however, are really social compared with the arbutus. Here is a flower that is naturally tribal,—bound together by common root-stalks, trailing shrubby plants that seem free to possess the earth. They were doubtless here in the soil before the Pilgrim came. The angels planted them, I am sure, for they smell of a celestial garden. The paths of heaven are carpeted with them, not paved with gold. But something is the matter with this earthly soil. They grow just where they were originally planted and nowhere else. There was a patch set in the woods three quarters of a mile, as the crow flies, from my front door. That was several millenniums ago. It is there still, a patch as big as my hat. There are other scattered bits of it beyond, but none any nearer to me, yet the soil seems the same, and there are woods all the way between.

Were it as common as the violet, perhaps some of its sweetness would be lost upon us. After all, the heavenly streets may be paved with gold, and instead of a carpet of arbutus, we shall find patches of it only, hidden away under the fallen leaves of the Elysian groves. For we shall need to get out of even the celestial city into the open fields and woods, and I can think of nothing so likely to draw us away from our mansions and beyond the pearly gates as the chance to go “May-flowering.”

And, even here below, among the unransomed souls of Boston, when Mayflower-time arrives, you may see young men and maidens, children and grandfathers, trooping out to the woods for a handful of the flowers. And up from the Cape, to those who cannot go into the woods, the flowers, themselves, come,—tight, naked bunches, stripped of all but the pink of their faces and the sweet of their souls. They possess every quarter of the city. Jew and Gentile sell them, Greek and Barbarian buy them, as they buy and sell no other wild flower.

Why, then, is it not the arbutus, instead of the shad-bush, that spells for me the spring? I don’t know; unless it is because the shad-bush takes deeper hold upon my imagination. It certainly is not its form, or color, or fragrance,—though it has grace,—an airy, misty, half-substantial shape, a wraith in the leafless woods; it has odor, too, and color. But it is something more than all of these that the soft blowing shad-bush means to me. Perhaps the something is in its name,—because it links my inland round with the round of the sea; and because it links this present narrowing round with the wide-winging round of the past.

At the sign of the shad-bush I know the fish are running,—the sturgeon up the Delaware; the shad into Cohansey Creek; and through Five-Forks Sluice, these soft, stirring nights, I know the catfish are slipping. Is there any boy now in Lupton’s Meadows to watch them come? to listen in the moonlit quiet for the _splash_, _splash_, as the fish pass up through the main ditch toward the dam?

At the sign of the shad-bush how swiftly the tides of life rise! how mysteriously their currents run! drifting, flying, flowing, creeping—colors, perfumes, forms, and voices—across the heavens, over the earth, and down the deep, dim aisles of the sea! and down the deep, dim aisles of our memories.

VIII

The Nature Movement