Chapter I: WAS hurrying across Boston Common. Two or three hundred others were (1)

hurrying with me. But ahead, at the union of several paths, was a crowd, standing still. I kept hurrying on, not to join the crowd, but simply to keep up the hurry. The crowd was not standing still, it was a-hurrying, too, scattering as fast as it gathered, and as it scattered I noticed that it wore a smile. I hastened up, pushed in, as I had done a score of times on the Common, and got my glimpse of the show. It was not a Mormon preaching, not a single-taxer, not a dog fight. It was Billy, a gray squirrel, taking peanuts out of a bootblack’s pocket. And every age, sex, sort, and condition of Bostonian came around to watch the little beast shuck the nuts and bury them singly in the grass of the Common.

“Ain’t he a cute little cuss, mister?” said the boy of the brush, feeling the bottom of his empty pocket, and looking up into the prosperous face of Calumet and Hecla at his side. C. and H. smiled, slipped something into the boy’s hand with which to buy another pocketful of peanuts for Billy, and hurried down to State Street.

This crowd on the Common is nothing exceptional. It happens every day, and everywhere, the wide country over. We are all stopping to watch, to feed, and—to smile. The longest, most far-reaching pause in our hurrying American life to-day is this halt to look at the out-of-doors, this attempt to share its life; and nothing more significant is being added to our American character than the resulting thoughtfulness, sympathy, and simplicity,—the smile on the faces of the crowd hurrying over the Common.

Whether one will or not, he is caught up by this nature movement and set adrift in the fields. It may, indeed, be “adrift” for him until he gets thankfully back to the city. “It was a raw November day,” wrote one of these new nature students, who happened also to be a college student, “and we went for our usual Saturday’s birding into the woods. The chestnuts were ripe, and we gathered a peck between us. On our way home, we discovered a small bird perched upon a cedar tree with a worm in its beak. It was a hummingbird, and after a little searching we found its tiny nest close up against the trunk of the cedar, full of tiny nestlings just ready to fly.”

This is what they find, many of these who are caught up by the movement toward the fields; but not all of them. A little five-year-old from the village came out to see me recently, and while playing in the orchard she brought me five flowers, called them by their right names, and told me how they grew. Down in the loneliest marshes of Delaware Bay I know a lighthouse keeper and his solitary neighbor, a farmer: both have been touched by this nature spirit; both are interested, informed, and observant. The farmer there, on the old Zane’s Place, is no man of books, like the rector of Selborne, but he is a man of birds and beasts, of limitless marsh and bay and sky, of everlasting silence and wideness and largeness and eternal solitude. He could write a Natural History of the Maurice River Marshes.

These are not rare cases. The nature books, the nature magazines, the nature teachers, are directing us all to the out-of-doors. I subscribe to a farm journal (club rates, twenty-five cents a year!) in which an entire page is devoted to “nature studies,” while the whole paper is remarkably fresh and odorous of the real fields. In the city, on my way to and from the station, I pass three large bookstores, and from March until July each of these shops has a big window given over almost continuously to “nature books.” I have before me from one of these shops a little catalogue of nature books—“a select list”—for 1907, containing 233 titles, varying in kind all the way from “The Tramp’s Handbook” to one (to a dozen) on the very stable subject of “The Farmstead.” These are all distinctively “nature books,” books with an appeal to sentiment as well as to sense, and very unlike the earlier desiccated, unimaginative treatises.

There are a multitude of other signs that show as clearly as the nature books how full and strong is this tide that sets toward the open fields and woods. There are as many and as good evidences, too, of the genuineness of this interest in the out-of-doors. It may be a fad just now to adopt abandoned farms, to attend parlor lectures on birds, and to possess a how-to-know library. It is pathetic to see “nature study” taught by schoolma’ams who never did and who never will climb a rail fence; it is sad, to speak softly, to have the makers of certain animal books preface the stories with a declaration of their absolute truth; it is passing sad that the unnatural natural history, the impossible out-of-doors, of some of the recent nature books, should have been created. But fibs and failures and impossibilities aside, there still remains the thing itself,—the widespread turning to nature, and the deep, vital need to turn.

The note of sincerity is clear, however, in most of our nature writers; the faith is real in most of our nature teachers; and the love,—who can doubt the love of the tens of thousands of those whose feet feel the earth nowadays, whose lives share in the existence of some pond or wood or field? And who can doubt the rest, the health, the sanity, and the satisfaction that these get from the companionship of their field or wood or pond?

There is no way of accounting for the movement that reflects in the least upon its reality and genuineness. It may be only the appropriation by the common people of the world that the scientists have discovered to us; it may be a popular reaction against the conventionality of the eighteenth century; or the result of our growing wealth and leisure; or a fashion set by Thoreau and Burroughs,—one or all of these may account for its origin; but nothing can explain the movement away, or hinder us from being borne by it out, at least a little way, under the open of heaven, to the great good of body and soul.

Among the cultural influences of our times that have developed the proportions of a movement, this so-called nature movement is peculiarly American. No such general, widespread turning to the out-of-doors is seen anywhere else; no other such body of nature literature as ours; no other people so close to nature in sympathy and understanding, because there is no other people of the same degree of culture living so close to the real, wild out-of-doors.

The extraordinary interest in the out-of-doors is not altogether a recent acquirement. We inherited it. Nature study is an American habit. What else had the pioneers and colonists to study but the out-of-doors? and what else was half as wonderful? They came from an old urban world into this new country world, where all was strange, unnamed, and unexplored. Their chief business was observing nature, not as dull savages, nor as children born to a dead familiarity with their surroundings, but as interested men and women, with a need and a desire to know. Their coming was the real beginning of our nature movement; their observing has developed into our nature study habit.

Our nature literature also began with them. There is scarcely a journal, a diary, or a set of letters of this early time in which we do not find that careful seeing, and often that imaginative interpretation, so characteristic of the present day. Even the modern animal romancer is represented among these early writers in John Josselyn and his delicious book, “New England’s Rarities Discovered.”

It was not until the time of Emerson and Bryant and Thoreau, however, that our interest in nature became general and grew into something deeper than mere curiosity. There had been naturalists such as Audubon (he was a poet, also), but they went off into the deep woods alone. They were after new facts, new species. Emerson and Bryant and Thoreau went into the woods, too, but not for facts, nor did they go far, and they invited us to go along. We went, because they got no farther than the back-pasture fence. It was not to the woods they took us, but to nature; not a-hunting after new species in the name of science, but for new inspirations, new estimates of life, new health for mind and spirit.

But we were slow to get as far even as their back-pasture fence, slow to find nature in the fields and woods. It was fifty years ago that Emerson tried to take us to nature; but fifty years ago, how few there were who could make sense out of his invitation, to say nothing of accepting it! And of Thoreau’s first nature book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” there were sold, in four years after publication, two hundred and twenty copies. But two hundred and twenty of such books at work in the mind of the country could leaven, in time, a big lump of it. And they did. The out-of-doors, our attitude toward it, and our literature about it have never been the same since.

Even yet, however, it is the few only who respond to Thoreau, Emerson, and Burroughs, who can find nature, as well as birds and trees, who can think and feel as well as wonder and look. Before we can think and feel we must get over our wondering, and we must get entirely used to looking. This we are slowly doing,—slowly, I say, for it is the monstrous, the marvelous, the unreal that most of us still go out into the wilderness for to see,—bears and wolves, foxes, eagles, orioles, salmon, mustangs, porcupines of extraordinary parts and powers.

There came to my desk, tied up with the same string, not long since, three nature books of a sort to make Thoreau turn over in his grave,—accounts of beasts and birds such as old Thetbaldus gave us in his “Physiologus,” that pious and marvelous bestiary of the dark ages. These three volumes that I refer to are modern and about American animals, but they, too, might have been written during the dark ages. All three have the same solemn preface, declaring the absolute truth of the observations that follow (as if we might doubt?), and piously pointing out their high moral purpose; all three likewise start out with the same wonderful story,—an animal biography: one, of a slum cat, born in a cracker box. Among the kittens of the cracker box was an extraordinary kitten of “pronounced color,” who survives and comes to glory. The next book tells the biography of a fox, born in a hole among the Canadian hills. Among the pups born in this hole was one extraordinary pup “more finely colored” than the others, who survives and comes to glory. The third book tells the biography of a wolf, born in a cave among the rocks, still farther north. Among the cubs born in this cave was one extraordinary cub, “larger than the others,” who survives and, as is to be expected of a wolf, comes to more glory than the cracker-box kitten or the fox pup of the hills.

Such are the stories that are made into texts and readers for our public schools; such are the animals that go roaming through the woods of the American child’s imagination. But no such kittens or cubs or pups lurk in my eight-acre woodlot. I have seen several (six, to be exact) fox pups, but never did I see this overworked, extraordinary, _cum laude_ pup of the recent nature books.

So long as we continue to read and believe such accounts, just so long shall we find it impossible to go with Audubon and Thoreau and Burroughs, for they have no place to take us, nothing to show us when we arrive. Their real world does not exist.

But we know that a real, ordinary, yet a marvelous world does exist, and right at hand. The present great nature movement is an outgoing to discover it,—its trees, birds, flowers, its myriad forms. This is the meaning of the countless manuals, the “how-to-know” books, and the nature study of the public schools. And this desire to know Nature is the reasonable, natural preparation for the deeper insight that leads to communion with her,—a desire to be traced more directly to Agassiz, and the hosts of teachers he inspired, perhaps, than to the poet-essayists like Emerson and Thoreau and Burroughs.

Let us learn to see and name first. The inexperienced, the unknowing, the unthinking, cannot love. One must live until tired, and think until baffled, before he can know his need of Nature; and then he will not know how to approach her unless already acquainted. To expect anything more than curiosity and animal delight in a child is foolish, and the attempt to teach him anything more at first than to know the out-of-doors is equally foolish. Poets are born, but not until they are old.

But if one got no farther than his how-to-know book would lead him, he still would get into the fields,—the best place for him this side of heaven,—he would get ozone for his lungs, red blood, sound sleep, and health. As a nation, we had just begun to get away from the farm and out of touch with the soil. The nature movement is sending us back in time. A new wave of physical soundness is to roll in upon us as the result, accompanied with a newness of mind and of morals.

For, next to bodily health, the influence of the fields makes for the health of the spirit. It is easier to be good in a good body and an environment of largeness, beauty, and peace,—easier here than anywhere else to be sane, sincere, and “in little thyng have suffisaunce.” If it means anything to think upon whatsoever things are good and lovely, then it means much to own a how-to-know book and to make use of it.

This is hardly more than a beginning, however, merely satisfying an instinct of the mind. It is good if done afield, even though such classifying of the out-of-doors is only scraping an acquaintance with nature. The best good, the deep healing, come when one, no longer a stranger, breaks away from his getting and spending, from his thinking with men, and camps under the open sky, where he knows without thinking, and worships without priest or chant or prayer.

The world’s work must be done, and only a small part of it can be done in the woods and fields. The merchants may not all turn ploughmen and wood-choppers. Nor is it necessary. What we need to do, and are learning to do, is to go to nature for our rest and health and recreation.

IX

June

A REFERENCE to one of my notebooks shows that in June, 1895, there were thirty-six species of birds nesting within singing distance of my study windows; in 1907 there were thirty-two, the most distant nest being less than five minutes’ walk from my door.

This is not a modern natural history story,—an extraordinary discovery that only I am capable of making. Start your own June list, and I warrant you will find as many. For there is nothing peculiarly birdy about my small farm. Any place as uncongenial to English sparrows and one that offers a fair chance to the native birds will keep you busy counting nests in June.

In the chimney built the swifts (three or four families of them); in the barn loft a small colony of barn swallows; and under the roof of the pig-pen a pair of phœbes, my earliest spring birds and often the latest with a brood.

A bushy hillside drops from the porch to the old orchard, and along this steep southern slope nested a pair of indigo buntings and a pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks (my rarest neighbors); also, here in the thick underbrush were found chewinks, thrashers, black and white warblers, song sparrows, and a pair of partridges.

In the orchard there were half a dozen chippies’ nests, even more robins’, two nests of bluebirds, and one each of the tree swallow, flicker, yellow warbler, chebec, downy woodpecker, kingbird, great crested flycatcher, redstart, and screech owl.

Baltimore orioles nested in the elms along the road; close to the little river were the nests of catbirds and red-winged blackbirds; a nest of swamp sparrows and of Maryland yellow-throats in the meadow, and in the woodlot a pewee’s nest, a crow’s nest, and three nests of ovenbirds.

All these I found; but besides these I know that a pair of yellow-billed cuckoos built somewhere near the house, as did a pair of blue jays, wood thrushes, and chestnut-sided warblers. These I am still waiting for. I need another June.

Not one of all these birds is rare or even shy, unless it be the swamp sparrow; none of them that the veriest beginner should not come to know in the course of one June. For these are almost domesticated, our near neighbors and friends, who desire and who will return our friendly, neighborly calls.

There are other birds, like the hawks, the owls, the herons, the rarer thrushes, sparrows, warblers, and marsh birds, that require time and tramping for their discovery. I know the very log in which I could find young turkey buzzards in June; the clump of dog-roses where a least bittern will build; the old gum that for years has harbored a pair of barred owls; the little cove where, spring after spring, a black duck nests. But I should need a vacation to visit these.

I watch the others between times,—between five o’clock in the morning and breakfast, between breakfast and train time and church time, and on Saturdays to and from the garden. If you are your own gardener, you can carry not only a hoe, but along with it a pair of field glasses. I even combine the care of my pig and the study of the phœbes that share his pen. Occasionally I drop everything and hunt for a nest, as if life depended upon my finding it. But life doesn’t, the more’s the pity, for me. Life depends on the finding of things that are very different from birds’ nests, things that require a deal of hunting the whole year around. Yet I take the time to hunt birds’ nests, too, for life is more than meat (I raise a good many vegetables), and, after all, _my_ life does depend, in no small measure, upon my finding a few birds’ nests in June.

I remember a June when I tried to get life out of a grocery store, and the sickness of it comes over me even yet at times. I sold kerosene oil, brown sugar, coffee, salt mackerel, and plug tobacco. I breathed the mingled breath of kerosene oil, brown sugar, coffee, salt mackerel, and plug tobacco,—the odor of mere money,—when I knew the fox grapes were in blossom, the magnolias and the azaleas; when I knew the fields were green and the birds were in song! I have longed for many things, but never as I longed that June for the farm, for the long, long day, yes, and for the long, long row. It was that kerosened, salt-mackereled, plug-tobaccoed—moneyed—June that took me back to sweet poverty and the farm.

I do not wish to think of living where the birds and wild flowers do not live with me. A city flat is convenient, and city life is exciting; but convenience and excitement plus meat and raiment are not the sum of life; neither, on the other hand, are pure air, sunshine, birds, flowers, a garden, quiet, and time to think, the whole of life. No; but when you consider the matter, there appears very little still needing to make life whole that you cannot have along with your birds, thoughts, and garden.

Whether you love the country or not, whether you know the difference between a kingbird and a kingcrab or not, you owe it to your body and your soul to get out into the open fields in June,—not to collect bird skins or birds’ eggs or to make a herbarium or a nature diary, but to live a while where the birds and flowers live. The city may be heaven enough for you all the rest of the year; but God didn’t make the city. There are seasons—March and February, usually—when it seems as if some one else has a hand in making the country. In June, however, the country is all and more than the poets say,—if it is poetry that you come out into the country for to feel.

Take my meadow, for instance, all aglow in June with buttercups, as if spread with a sheet of beaten gold! But now, if it is only hay that I am after (alas, too often it is), then my gold turns all to brass, and worse than brass, for buttercups, as my dairyman neighbor tells me, make the poorest kind of hay. I should keep no cow, perhaps. She gives nice milk, to be sure, but she eats up my beaten gold, she kills my buttercup poetry. Maybe I am too rich, I own too much: one cow, one horse, two pigs, thirty hens, fourteen acres of hills and trees. For it is the truth that I do not enjoy the foxes now as I did before I kept hens, nor the buttercups as I did before I got the cow. Suppose, now, besides all of this, I had money,—a lot of it!—several thousand dollars! You never get money along with a farm, and that is one reason why a farm is such a safe and sure investment for the soul. It is not the cow nor the chores, but money in or out of the bank, that robs life of its June.

Nor is owning _one_ cow like having a dairy farm. The average man had better keep his money in the bank than invest in more than one cow. A single cow cannot eat all the gold out of one’s meadow. I am still glad for the buttercups; and where the meadow passes into the upland, where the buttercups give place to the daisies, my gold runs into silver; which means certainly that I am not making the farm pay, for on a paying farm a daisy—weed that it is, and not a native weed at that—is more like a spot of leprosy than of silver. Our daisies are not even those sung by the poets, I understand. What of it? A ten-acre field of them lies snow-white in my memory, fresh with the freshness of early June and the sweeter freshness of boyhood. And as for poetry, I have my own for them,—the poetry of boyhood, of Commencement days at the Institute, and of girls in white frocks.

There is no particular flower that means June to me as the hepatica means March, the arbutus April, the shad-bush May, and the red wood-lily July. I cannot think of single blossoms, or of here and there a spot of rare flowers, in June, but only of pastures drifted white, meadows purple-misted, and rolling hillsides billowy pink,—of laurel, forget-me-nots, daisies, viburnums, and buttercups. This is no time to botanize. Leave the collecting can at home, for one day at least, and wander forth, not to hunt, but to drift and float, or, if you run aground, to wade knee-deep in June. A botanist who is never poet misses as much in the out-of-doors as the poet who is never botanist.

If there were no other flower in the month but the white water-lily, June would still be June. “Who can contemplate it,” exclaims Mr. Burroughs, “as it opens in the morning sun, and distills such perfume, such purity, such snow of petal, and such gold of anther, from the dark water and still darker ooze! How feminine it seems beside its coarser and more robust congeners, how shy, how pliant, how fine in texture and starlike in form!”

How the water-lily and spatter-dock can grow from the same mud is past understanding. One has every grace, the other none. But the dock can live in stagnant water, which perhaps is a sort of compensation.

And these two, for me, are always associated with magnolias,—_Magnolia glauca_,—and magnolias are associated with “old, forgotten, far-off things.” Their absence from my swamps here is part of the price I pay for my transplanting to these New England fields.

If that were all, it were price enough. But think of June in New Jersey, with buzzards soaring, cardinals whistling, and turtle doves cooing; with swamps magnolia-scented, and woods astir with box-turtles, pine snakes, pine-tree lizards, and ’possums! Then think of June in Massachusetts with none of these,—at least in my neighborhood!

What then? I could scarcely strain the magnolia’s breath from the mingling odors if it were here, for the common air I breathe is the breath of blossoming clover, wild grape, elder, blackberry, rose, and azalea. I must almost smell them by _families_. For here are six wild roses perfuming my air, five viburnums, six dogwoods (these last quite lacking in perfume, be it said), and wild blackberries that I have never dared to number. Who wants to number them? to spend his June with a “plant analysis,” dissecting and keeping tally? It is enough now to be alive and out of doors among the flowers. Nor is it all of June to find thirty-six species of birds nesting within a radius of five hundred and fifty-five and one half feet from your _front_ door. I do not cite these figures in order to startle, but to suggest, if I might, the joyous medley of life in June, its variety and abundance. You may not be able to name all the warblers; you have never yet made out which is which among the dogwoods and viburnums; the dogwood flowers are all four-pointed stars, while the viburnums are all five-pointed. But what of it,—four or five, dogwood or viburnum! Here they are, banked in soft, snowy fragrance along the margin of the pond. A tiny nest swings from a fork among them, a tiny bird with a white ring around her eye broods and watches you drift past. You have a fish-pole, and all about you and within you is the June.

X

A Broken Feather

ONE of the pair of crows that nest in my woodlot has been flying over all winter long with a gap in his right wing. Three at least of the large wing feathers are missing, and the result is a perceptible limp. The bird moves through the air with the list of a boat that has shifted or lost its ballast. Were he set upon in the air by a hawk, as might happen if he were smaller, the race would be short. He is plainly disabled by the loss of these three feathers, and has been for months. Just how and when the loss occurred I don’t know. It is likely, however, that the feathers were shot away in June,—in corn-stealing time. Now for nearly a year he has been hobbling about on one whole and one half wing, trusting to luck to escape his enemies, until he can get three new feathers to take the places of these that are missing.

Well, why, in all this time, if these three feathers are so necessary, has he not gotten them? He might reply, “Which of you by taking thought can add as much as one cubit to your stature, to say nothing of three hairs to the top of your head?” By taking time (which is a fine human phrase for giving Nature time), and with the right conditions, you may add the cubit. So the crow may get his feathers. It is not an affair between the crow and his feathers, nor between the crow and Nature. It is wholly Nature’s affair with the crow’s feathers, and so seriously does Nature take it, so careful is she, so systematic, so almost arbitrary about it, that the feathers of crows, like the hairs of our heads, can truly be said to be numbered.

Nothing could look more haphazard, certainly, than the way a hen’s feathers seem to drop off at moulting time. The most forlorn, undone, abject creature about the farm is the half-moulted hen. There is one in the chicken yard now, so nearly naked that she really is ashamed of herself, and so miserably helpless that she squats in a corner all night, unable to reach the low poles of the roost. It is a critical experience with the hen, this moulting of her feathers, and were it not for the protection of the yard it might be a fatal experience. Nature seems to have no hand in the business at all; if she has, then what a mess she is making of it!

But pick up the hen, study the falling of the feathers carefully, and lo! here is law and order, system and sequence, as if every feather were a star, every quill a planet, and the old white hen the round sphere of the universe. You will put her down reverently, awfully, this hen that you took up with such compassion, and you will say, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.”

So it is, for the moult means a great deal more than the mere renewal of feathers, just how much more no one seems to know. This much is plain, that once a year, usually after the nesting season, it seems a physical necessity for most birds to renew their plumage.

We get a new suit (some of us) because our old one wears out. That is the most apparent cause for the new annual suit of the birds. Yet with them, as with some of the favored of us humans, the feathers go out of fashion, and the change, the moult, is a mere matter of style.

But the annual moult, first of all, is Nature’s wise provision for the safety and warmth of the bird. Feathers are not only covering, as our clothes, but also means of locomotion, and, hence, the bird’s very means of life. A year of use leaves many of the feathers worn and broken, some of them through accident entirely lost (as with my crow), and while they might last for two years, or even longer, Nature has found it necessary to provide a new plumage as often as once a year, in order to keep the race of birds at its best.

But there are other reasons, at least there are advantages taken of the moult for other ends: such as the adaptation of the feathers to the varying temperatures of the seasons,—heavier in winter and lighter in summer; also the adaptation of the color of the plumage to the changing colors of the environment,—as the change from the dark summer color of the ptarmigan to its snow-white winter plumage to match the snows of its far northern home; then, and perhaps most interesting of all, is the advantage taken of the moult, for the adorning of the bird for the mating season. Indeed, Nature goes so far, in some cases, as to cause a special moult to meet the exigencies of the wedding,—as if fine feathers _do_ make a fine bird. All this to meet the fancy of the bride! so, at least, the scientists tell us. Whether or not her fancy is the cause, it is a fact that among the birds it is the bridegroom who is adorned for his wife, and sometimes the fine feathers come by a special moult.

Not far from my house is a nest of black-crowned night herons, or “quawks.” Preparatory to the mating of the pair there started from the crown of the male (and female, also, in this case,) two or three white, rounded plumes, which now hang eight inches in length, waving gracefully to his shoulders. They are the special glory of the wedding time; but soon after the nesting season is over they will drop out, not to come again until he goes a-wooing Mrs. Quawk once more. In the white American egret, and in the snowy egret, the plumes number about fifty, and occur upon the back close to the tail. They are straight in the American, recurved in the snowy, and make the famous “aigrette” plumes of the milliner. The birds are shot in their nuptial dress, and so great has been the heartless demand that both species, once very abundant, are now almost extinct.

Bobolink is another special case. He has two complete moults a year. Now, as I write, I hear him singing over the meadow,—a jet black, white, and cream-buff lover, most strikingly adorned. His wife, down in the grass, looks as little like him as a sparrow looks like a blackbird. After the breeding season he moults, changing color so completely that he and his wife and children all look alike, all like sparrows. They even lose their name now, flying south under the assumed name of “reedbirds.”

Bobolink passes the winter in Brazil, and at the coming of spring, just before the long northward journey begins, he moults again; but you would hardly know it to look at him, for, strangely enough, he is not black and white, but still colored like a sparrow as he was in the fall. _Apparently_ he is. Look at him more closely, however, and you will find the brownish yellow color is all caused by a veil of fine fringes hanging from the edges of the feathers. Underneath are the black and white and cream-buff. He starts northward, and by the time he reaches Massachusetts the fringe veil is worn off and the black and white bobolink appears. Specimens taken after their arrival here still show traces of the yellow veil.

Many birds do not have this spring moult at all, and with most of those that do, the great wing feathers are not then renewed as are bobolink’s, but only at the annual moult after the nesting is done. In fact, the moulting of the remiges, or wing feathers, seems to be a _family_ affair, the process differing with different families; for these are the bird’s most important feathers, and their loss is so serious a matter that Nature has come to make the change according to the habits and needs of the birds.

With all birds the order is for the body feathers to begin to go first, then the wings, and last the tail. But the shedding of the wing feathers is a very slow and carefully regulated process. In the wild geese and other water birds the wing feathers drop out with the feathers of the body, and all go so simultaneously that the birds cannot fly. On land you could catch them with your hands, but they keep near or on the water and thus escape, though times have been when it was necessary to protect them from their human enemies at this season by special laws.

The necessity for the moult entails many risks, for it exposes the bird to peculiar dangers; yet no single bird is abandoned during this period, none left without a way of escape. The geese, as we have seen, moult most rapidly and hence are most helpless, but there are few of their enemies that they cannot avoid by keeping to the water and grassy marshes; the hawks, that hunt by wing, moult so slowly that they do not feel a loss of power; while such birds as the quail and grouse, that always depend in part for protection upon the blending of their colors with the colors of their environment, seem especially so protected during the moulting season. A grouse blotched with light patches, where the dark-tipped feathers have fallen away, may so melt into the mottled color scheme of its background as to escape the sharpest eye.

Such a rapid, wholesale moult as in the case of the geese would be fatal to land birds. Instead, their primaries, or large wing feathers, drop out one or two at a time and symmetrically from the two wings. Oftentimes it is the two inner primaries that go first, then the others following one at a time, the outermost last. This order varies, as in the kingfisher. In the snow bunting all but two of the old primaries are gone before any new ones have grown as large as the secondaries. In the hawks, again, birds that must use their wings and must have them always at their best, the moulting of the wing feathers is very slow, lasting nearly the whole year. The homing pigeon, another great flier, but not of the same kind as the hawks, begins about May to moult his wing feathers, losing the tenth primary first, a month later the ninth, then the others at intervals of from eight to fifteen days.

It is quite enough to make one pause, to make one even wonder, when he finds that this seemingly insignificant matter is taken so seriously by nature, and that even here there is that perfect adaptation of means to end. The gosling, to cite another instance, goes six weeks in down, then gets its first feathers, which it sheds in the fall. The young quail, on the other hand, is born with quills so far advanced that it is able to fly almost as soon as it is hatched. These are mature feathers; but the bird is still young and growing, and soon outgrows these first flight feathers, so that they are quickly lost and new ones come. This goes on till fall, several moults occurring the first summer to meet the increasing weight of the growing body.

Where there are peculiar uses made of the tail, as with the chimney swifts and woodpeckers, there is a peculiar order of moulting. In most birds the tail is a kind of balance or steering-gear, and not of equal importance with the wings. Nature, consequently, seems to have attached less importance to the feathers of the tail. They are not so firmly set, and they are hardly of the same quality or kind; for if a wing feather is once broken or lost, after the moult, it must go unmended until the annual moulting time comes round again; whereas, if a tail feather is lost through accident, it is made good, no matter when. How do you explain that? I know that old theory of the birds roosting with their tails out, and so, through generations of lost tails, those feathers now grow, expecting to be plucked by some enemy, and so have only a temporary hold. Perhaps.

The normal, natural way, of course, is to replace a lost feather with a new one as soon as possible; but in order to give extra strength to the wing feathers nature has found it necessary to check their frequent change, and so complete is the check that the annual moult is required to replace one of them. The Japanese have discovered the secret of this check, and are able by it to keep certain feathers in the tails of their cocks growing until they reach the enormous length of ten to twelve feet.

My crow, it seems, lost his three feathers just after his annual moult; the three broken shafts he carries still in his wing, and must continue to carry, as the stars must continue their courses. These three feathers must round out their cycle to the annual moult. The universe of worlds and feathers is a universe of law, of order, and of reason.

XI

High Noon

LAZILY sailing clouds, and between them, far away, the illimitable blue! And how blue! how cool! how far away! Never does the sky seem of so real azure, so fresh and new, but so mysteriously distant, as upon such a July day as this; and never does the earth seem so warm and near. I lie outstretched upon it as close as I ever lay upon my mother’s breast. I feel the crisp moss beneath me, the creeping of the beetle under my shoulder, the heat of the gray stone against my side. I throw out my hands, push my fingers into the hot soil and feel them take root. Mother earth! The clouds sail on; the bending blue recedes; and—heaven? It matters not. Here are my brothers,—the beetle, the moss, the gray stone; and here I lie in the arms of the mother who bore me.

I have questions to ask—to-morrow; dreams to dream—to-morrow; things to do—to-morrow. To-day I am free in the fields; to-day I am brother to the beetle and the stone; I am neighbor to this ancient white oak in whose shade I lie; I am child to the earth. It is enough to be to-day.

How warm is this mother breast, even here, under the tree! The sun is overhead. The summer is at its height. The flood-tide of life has come. It is high noon of the year.

The drowsy silence of the full, hot noon lies deep across the field. Stream and cattle and pasture-slope are quiet in repose. The eyes of the earth are heavy. The air is asleep. Yet the round shadow of my oak begins to shift. The cattle do not move; the pasture still sleeps under the wide, white glare. But already the noon is passing.

Of the four seasons summer is the shortest, and the one we are least acquainted with. Summer is only a pause between spring and autumn, only the hour of the year’s noon. But the hour is long enough were we able to stop, to lie down under a tree for the hour, unwearied, wide-awake, and still.

We can be glad with the spring, sad with the autumn, eager with the winter; but it is hard for us to go softly, to pause, to be still, complete, sufficient, full with the full, sufficient summer; to hang poised and expanded like the broad-winged hawk yonder far up in the wide sky.

But the hawk is not still. The shadow of my oak begins to lengthen. The hour is gone even while it comes, for wavering softly down the languid air falls a yellow leaf from a slender gray birch near by. I remember, too, that on my way through the woodlot I frightened a small flock of robins from a pine; and more than a week ago the swallows were gathering upon the telegraph wires. It was springtime even yesterday; to-day there are signs of autumn everywhere. Perhaps, after all, there is no such time as summer,—no pause, no rest, no quiet in the fields, no hour of noon.

Yet I get something out of the fields, these slumberous July days, that is neither of springtime nor of autumn, a ripening, mellowing, quieting something, that falls only when the leaves hang limp, when the earth warms in the shadows, when the wood-lily opens in the sun, and the whir of the cicada times the throbbing of the heat. And when that something falls, then I know it is summer.

This is a late July day, but its dawn was still of the springtime. At daybreak the birds were singing, fresh and full-throated as in May; then the sun burned through the mist and the chorus ceased. Now I do not hear even the chewink and the talkative vireo. Only the fiery notes of the scarlet tanager come to me through the dry white heat of the noon, and the resonant, reverberated song of the indigo bunting, a hot, metallic, quivering song, as out of a hot and copper sky.

There are nestlings still in the woods. This indigo bunting has eggs or young in the bushes up the hillside; the scarlet tanager but lately finished his nest in the tall oaks; I looked in upon some half-fledged cuckoos along the fence. But all of these are late. The year’s young are upon the wing. A few of the spring’s flowers are still opening. I noticed the bees upon some tardy raspberry blossoms; and yonder, amid the fixed shining colors of the wooded ridge, I see the top of a chestnut tree, misty and tender, with foamy white bloom. These are the last of the season. The July flowering of the chestnut always seems delayed and accidental. The season’s fruit has set, is already ripening. Spring is gone; the sun is overhead; the red wood-lily is open. To-day is summer,—noon of the year.

High noon! and the hour strikes in the red wood-lily aflame in the old fields and in the low thick tangles of sweet-fern and blackberry that border the upland woods.

This is a flower of fire, the worshiper of the sun, the very heart of the summer. How impossible it would be to kindle a wood-lily on the cold, damp soil of April! It can be lighted only on this kiln-dried soil of July. This old hilly pasture is baking in the sun; the mouldy moss that creeps over its thin breast crackles and crumbles under my feet; the patches of sweet-fern that blotch it here and there crisp in the heat and fill the smothered air with a spicy breath; but the wood-lily opens wide and full, lifting its spotted lips to the Sun, for it loves his scorching kiss. See it glow! Should the withered thicket burst suddenly into a blaze it would be no wonder, so little would it take to fan these glowing petals into flame.

The marsh marigolds of May spread the meadows with a glow of warmth, yet that was but a gilded fire beside the wilting, withering heat of this midsummer lily. That early flush has gone. There is hardly a fleck of spring’s freshness and delicacy on the fields, none of the tenderness of the bluets that touched everything in May, none even of the softness of the hardwood greens that lasted far into June. The colors are set now, dry and glistening, as if varnished over. The odors, too, have changed. They were moist and faint then,—the fragrance of the breath of things. Now they are strong, pungent, heavy,—the tried out smells of the sweat of things.

Life has grown lusty and lazy and rank. It stood no higher than the heads of the violets along my little river at the coming of June; to-day I cannot catch a glimpse of the water without breaking through a hedge of swamp milkweed, boneset, and peppermint. Here are turtle-head, joe-pye-weed, jewel-weed, the budding goldenrods, and the spreading, choking, rasping smartweed. The year is full grown. It is strong, rich, luxuriant.

And how erect and unblushing! The pointed spireas, the sumacs, the thistles, this crowd along the river, this red wood-lily, even the tall swaying spray of meadow-rue! Slender, dainty, airy, the meadow-rue falls just short of grace and delicacy. It feels the season’s pride of life. It is angled, rigid, rank. Were there the slightest bend to its branches, the merest suggestion of soul to the plant, then, from root to spreading panicles, there had been more grace, more misty, penciled delicacy wrought into the tall meadow-rue than into any flower-form of my summer.

But the suggestion of soul in the meadow-rue, as in the whole face of nature, is lost in flesh. It is the body, not the spirit, that is now present. She is well fed, well clothed, opulent, mature. She is conventional,—as conventional as a single, stiff spire of the steeple-bush,—turned to such a pointed nicety as to seem done by machine.

And yet the steeple-bush rarely grows as single spires, but by the meadow-full. We rarely see a single spire. We never gather summer flowers one by one, as we gather the arbutus and hepatica of spring. Life has lost its individuality. It is all massed, crowded, communal. The odors mingle now and drift wide on the winds, and as wide on the hillsides spread the colors, gold and green and white, and, where the rocky pasture runs down to the woods, the pink of the steeple-bush, like a flush of dawn.

Across my neighbor’s pasture lies this soft glory of the spireas all through July. It runs in irregular streams down to the brook, rising there into a low-hanging bank of mist where the clustering spires of pink are interspersed with the taller, whiter meadow-sweet,—the “willow-leaved spirea.”

There are shadowy rooms in the deep woods where the spring lingers until the leaves of autumn begin to fall. Here, in July, I can find the little twin flowers Linnea and Mitchella, blossoms that should have opened with the bloodroot and anemone. But Life has largely fled the woods and left them empty and still. She is out in the open, along the roadsides, rioting in the sun. The time of her maidenhood is gone. She is entirely maternal now, bent on replenishing the earth, on reseeding it against all possibility of death. She covers the ground with seed, and fills the very air with seed that the winds may sow. She has grown lusty, bold, almost defiant, no longer asking leave, but claiming for her own the pastures, gardens, waysides, even the dumps and waste places.

Yonder where the cattle feed stands the barbed purple thistle, arrogant, royal, unapproachable by man or beast. “Stand back,” it says, by every one of its thousand nettles; “this field is mine.” How savage and how splendid it is! After the royal purple fades, the goldfinches will dare to come and eat the plumed seeds and scatter them by the million, but even the goldfinch has been known to perish upon the poisoned spikes with which the plant is armed.

As persistent and successful as the thistle, though not as arrogant and savage, grows the wild white carrot in the mowing fields. The courts have called it names and set a price upon its life. It has been pulled out, cut off and burned,—exterminated again and again by statute.

Life snaps her fingers at us in July; lays hold of us, even, as we pass, and makes us carry her burs and beggar’s-ticks for a wider planting. I am as useful as the tail of my cow. Neither the cow nor I ever come home from the July fields without an abundant sowing of stick-tights, tick-seeds, and burdock burs.

There is little beauty, fragrance, or even economic value in this wild, overrunning host of thistles, docks, daisies, plantains, yarrows, carrots, that now possess the earth; but when they crowd out along the dusty roadsides and cover the sterile, neglected, and unsightly places, we can sing, like the good gray poet, “the leaves and flowers of the commonest weeds” in our “Song of Joys.”

There is certainly some praise due the chicory, or blue corn-flower, for it is a waste transformer, a “slummer” among flowers, if ever there was one. Like the daisy, it is a foreigner; but unlike the daisy, its coming is wholly benevolent. It asks only the roadsides, and for these along only the choked, deserted stretches; and where the summer dust lies deepest. Coarse, common, weedy, it doubtless is; but it never droops in the heat, and its blue shines through the smother like azure through the mists of the sky.

The winds and the birds are the sowers of the wayside, and to them I am indebted for this touch of midsummer color. But they miss certain spots along the roads, or else these are the patches that have no deepness of earth, where the seed of the winds’ sowing can get no hold, for I have had to sow these myself. As I go up and down I carry a pocketful of sweet clover seed,—melilotus,—and over every waste and sandy place I scatter a few of the tiny seeds, when, lo! not two blades of grass where one grew before, but a patch of tall white flowers, breathing the sweetness of heaven into all the air, and humming in the July sun with the joyous sound of my honey bees. All this, and for season after season, where nothing grew before!

Along with melilotus in the gravelly cuts and burnt woodlands grows the fireweed, a tall showy annual that waves its pink, plumed head throughout July. Farther north and west, this striking flower, like the melilotus, yields a heavy flow of delicious honey, but it does not attract the bees in this locality. Neither do my bees get any nectar from the fat little indigo-bush that takes possession of the unfarmed, sandy fields in July, though the wild bumblebees are busy upon it as long as it remains in bloom.

But this is not the native land of the honey bee, and it is sheer luck that the white clover, the basswood, the goldenrod, and here in July, the sumac, give down to these immigrant bees their honey-sweets.

High noon of the year! The laggard breeze comes to me now from the maple swamp, slow and sleepy with the odor of the white azaleas; a flock of chickadees stop and quiz me; the quivering click-clack of a distant mowing-machine fills the air with a drowsy hum.