Chapter II (1)

Nature's prodigality and parsimony are extremes farther apart than her east and west. Why should she be so lavish of interstellar space, and crowd a drop of stagnant water so? Why give the wide sea surface to the petrels, and screw the sea-urchins into the rocks on Grand Manan? Why scatter in Delaware Bay a million sturgeon eggs for every one hatched, while each mite of a paramecium is cut in two, and wholes made of the halves? Why leave an entire forest of green, live pines for a lonesome crow hermitage, and convert the rottenest old stump into a submerged-tenth tenement?

Part of the answer, at least, is found in nature's hatred and horror of death. She fiercely refuses to have any dead. An empty heaven, a lifeless sea, an uninhabited rock, a dead drop of water, a dying paramecium, are intolerable and impossible. She hastens always to give them life. The succession of strange dwellers to the decaying trees is an instance of her universal and endless effort at making matter live.

Such vigilance over the ever-dying is very comforting--and marvelous too. Let any indifferent apple-tree begin to have holes, and the tree-toads, the bluebirds, and the red squirrels move in, to fill the empty trunk with new life and the sapless limbs with fresh fruit. Let any tall, stray oak along the river start to die at the top, and straightway a pair of fish-hawks will load new life upon it. And these other, engrafted lives, like the graft of a greening upon wild wood, yield crops more valuable often, and always more interesting, than come from the native stock.

Perhaps there is no more useless fruit or timber grown than that of the swamp-gums (_Nyssa uniflora_) of the Jersey bottoms. But if we value trees according to their capacity for cavities,--the naturalist has a right to such a scale of valuation,--then these gums rank first. The deliberate purpose of a swamp-gum, through its hundred years of life, is to grow as big as possible, that it may hollow out accordingly. They are the natural home-makers of the swamps that border the rivers and creeks in southern New Jersey. What would the coons, the turkey-buzzards, and the owls do without them? The wild bees believe the gums are especially built for them. No white-painted hive, with its disappearing squares, offers half as much safety to these free-booters of the summer seas as the gums, open-hearted, thick-walled, and impregnable.

When these trees alone make up the swamp, there is a roomy, empty, echo-y effect among the great gray boles, with their high, horizontal limbs spanned like rafters above, produced by no other trees I know. It is worth a trip across the continent to listen, under a clear autumn moon, to the cry of a coon-dog far away in the empty halls of such a swamp. To get the true effect of a barred owl's hooting, one wants to find the home of a pair in an ancient gum-swamp. I know such a home, along Cohansey Creek, where, the neighboring farmer tells me, he has heard the owls hoot in spring and autumn since he remembers hearing anything.

I cannot reach around the butt of the tree that holds the nest. Tapering just a trifle and a little on the lean, it runs up smooth and round for twenty feet, where a big bulge occurs, just above which is the capacious opening to the owls' cave. There was design in the bulge, or foresight in the owls' choice; for that excrescence is the hardest thing to get beyond I ever climbed up to. But it must be mounted, or the queerest pair of little dragons ever hatched will go unseen.

The owls themselves first guided me to the spot. I was picking my way through this piece of woods, one April day, when a shadowy something swung from one high limb to another overhead, following me. It was the female owl. Every time she lighted she turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me, silent, somber, and watchful. As I pushed deeper among the gums, she began to snap her beak and drop closer. Her excitement grew every moment. I looked about for the likely tree. The instant I spied the hole above the bulge, the owl caught the direction of my eyes, and made a swoop at me that I thought meant total blindness.

I began to climb. With this the bird lapsed into the quiet of despair, perched almost in reach of me, and began to hoot mournfully: _Woo-hoo, woo-hoo, woo-hoo, oo-oo-a!_ And faint and far away came back a timid _Woo-hoo, woo-a!_ from her mate, safely hid across the creek.

The weird, uncanny cry rolled round under the roof of limbs, and seemed to wake a ghost-owl in every hollow bole, echoing and reëchoing as it called from tree to tree, to die away down the dim, deep vistas of the swamp. The silent wings, the snapping beaks, the eery hoots in the soft gloom of the great trees, needed the help of but little imagination to carry one back to the threshold of an unhacked world, and embolden its nymphs and satyrs, that these centuries of science have hunted into hiding.

I wiggled above the bulge at the risk of life, and was greeted at the mouth of the cavern with hisses and beak-snappings from within. It was a raw spring day; snow still lingered in shady spots. But here, backed against the farther wall of the cavity, were two young owls, scarcely a week old, wrapped up like little Eskimos--tiny bundles of down that the whitest-toothed frost could never bite through.

Very green babies of all kinds are queer, uncertain, indescribable creations-faith generators. But the greenest, homeliest, unlikeliest, babiest babes I ever encountered were these two in the hole. I wish Walt Whitman had seen them. He would have written a poem. They defy my powers of portrayal, for they challenge the whole mob of my normal instincts.

But quite as astonishing as the appearance of the young owls was the presence beneath their feet of the head of a half-grown muskrat, the hind quarters of two frogs, one large meadow-vole, and parts of four mice, with many other pieces too small to identify. These all were fresh--the _crumbs_ of one night's dinner, the leavings of _one_ night's catch. If these were the fragments only, what would be a conservative estimate of the night's entire catch?

Gilbert White tells of a pair of owls that built under the eaves of Selborne Church, that he "minuted" with his "watch for an hour together," and found that they returned to the nest, the one or the other, "about once in every five minutes" with a mouse or some little beast for the young. Twelve mice an hour! Suppose they hunted only two evening hours a day? The record at the summer's end is almost beyond belief.

Not counting what the two old owls ate, and leaving out of the count the two frogs, it is within limits to reckon not less than six small animals brought to the hollow gum every night of the three weeks that these young owls were dependent for food--a riddance in this short time of not less than one hundred and twenty-five muskrats, mice, and voles. What four boys in the same time could clear the meadows of half that number? And these animals are all harmful, the muskrats exceedingly so, where the meadows are made by dikes and embankments.

Not a tree in South Jersey that spring bore a more profitable crop. When fruit-growing in Jersey is done for pleasure, the altruistic farmer with a love for natural history will find large reward in his orchards of gums, that now are only swamps.

Just as useful as the crop of owls, and beyond all calculation in its sweetening effects upon our village life, is the annual yield of swallows by the piles in the river. Years ago a high spring tide carried away the south wing of the old bridge, but left the piles, green and grown over with moss, standing with their heads just above flood-tide mark. In the tops of the piles are holes, bored to pass lines through, or left by rusted bolts, and eaten wide by waves and wind. Besides these there are a few genuine excavations made by erratic woodpeckers. This whole clump of water-logged piles has been colonized by blue-backed tree-swallows, every crack and cranny wide enough and deep enough to hold a nest being appropriated for domestic uses by a pair of the dainty people. It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps; it is a swallow-Venice. And no gayer gondoliers ever glided over wave-paved streets than these swallows on the river. When the days are longest the village does its whittling on the new bridge in the midst of this twittering bird life, watching the swallows in the sunset skim and flash among the rotting timbers over the golden-flowing tide.

If I turn from the river toward the woods again, I find that the fences all the way are green with vines and a-hum with bumblebees. Even the finger-board at the cross-roads is a living pillar of ivy. All is life. There are no dead, no graveyards anywhere. A nature-made cemetery does not exist in my locality. Yonder, where the forest-fire came down and drank of the river, is a stretch of charred stumps; but every one is alive with some sort of a tenant. Not one of these stumps is a tombstone. We have graves and slabs and names in our burial-place, and nothing more. But there is not so much as a slab in the fields and woods. When the telegraph-poles and the piles are cut, the stumps are immediately prepared for new life, and soon begin blossoming into successive beds of mosses and mushrooms, while the birds are directed to follow the bare poles and make them live again.

A double line of these pole-specters stretches along the road in front of my door, holding hands around the world. I have grown accustomed to the hum of the wires, and no longer notice the sound. But one May morning recently there was a new note in the pole just outside the yard. I laid my ear to the wood. _Pick--pick--pick_; then all was still. Again, after a moment's pause, I heard _pick--pick--pick_ on the inside. At my feet was a scattering of tiny yellow chips. Backing off a little, I discovered the hole, about the size of my fist, away up near the cross-bars. It was not the first time I had found High-hole laying claim to the property of the telegraph companies. I stole back and thumped. Instantly a dangerous bill and a flashing eye appeared, and High-hole, with his miner's lamp burning red in the top of his cap lunged off across the fields in some ill humor, no doubt.

Throughout the summer there was telegraphing with and without wires on that dry, resonant pole. And meantime, if there was anything unintelligible in the ciphers at Glasgow or Washington, it was high-hole talk. For there was reared inside that pole as large, as noisy, and as red-headed a family of flickers as ever hatched. What a brood they were! They must have snarled the wires and Babelized their talk terribly.

While this robust and uncultured family of flickers were growing up, only three doors away (counting by poles) a modest and soft-voiced pair of bluebirds, with a decently numbered family of four, were living in a hole so near the ground that I could look in upon the meek but brave little mother.

There is still another dead-tree crop that the average bird-lover and summer naturalist rarely gathers--I mean the white-footed mice. They are the jolliest little beasts in all the tree hollows. It is when the woods are bare and deep with snow, when the cold, dead winter makes outside living impossible, that one really appreciates the coziness and protection of the life in these deep rooms, sunk like wells into the hearts of the trees. With what unconcern the mice await nightfall and the coming of the storms! They can know nothing of the anxiety and dread of the crows; they can share little of the crows' suffering in the bitter nights of winter. A warm, safe bed is a large item in out-of-doors living when it is cold; and I have seen where these mice tuck themselves away from the dark and storm in beds so snug and warm that I wished to be an elf myself, with white feet and a long tail, to creep in with them.

I had some wood-choppers near the house on the lookout for mice, but, though they often marked the stumps where they had cut into nests, the winter nearly passed before I secured a single white-foot. Coming up from the pond one day with a clerical friend, after a vain attempt to skate, we lost our way in the knee-deep snow, and while floundering about happened upon a large dead pine that was new to me. It was as stark, as naked, and as dead a tree, apparently, as ever went to dust. The limbs were broken off a foot or more from the trunk, and stuck out like stumps of arms; the top had been drilled through and through by woodpeckers, and now lay several feet away, buried in the snow; and the bole, like the limbs, was without a shred of bark, but covered instead with a thin coating of slime. This slime was marked with fine scratches, as would be made by the nails of very small animals. I almost rudely interrupted my learned friend's discussion of the documentary hypothesis with the irreverent exclamation that there were mice in the old corpse. The Hebrew scholar stared at the tree. Then he stared at me. Had I gone daft so suddenly? But I was dropping off my overcoat and ordering him away to borrow the ax of a man we heard chopping. He looked utterly undone, but thought it best to humor me, though I know he dreaded putting an ax in my hands just then, and would infinitely rather have substituted his skates. I insisted, however, and he disappeared for the ax.

The snow was deep, the pine was punky and would easily fall; and now was the chance to get my mice. They were in there, I knew, for those fine, fresh scratches told of scramblers gone up to the woodpecker holes since the last storm.

The preacher appeared with the ax. Off came his coat. He was as eager now as though this tottering pine were an altar of Baal. He was anxious, also, to know if I had an extra sense--a kind of X-ray organ that saw mice at the centers of trees. And, priest though he was (shame on the human animal!), he had grown excited at the prospect of the chase of--mice!

I tramped away the snow about the tree. The ax was swinging swiftly through the air; the preacher was repeating between strokes: "_I'm--truly--sorry--man's--dominion--has--_" when suddenly there was a crunch, a crash, and the axman leaped aside with the yell of a fiend; for, as the tree struck, three tiny, brown-backed, white-footed creatures were dashed into the soft snow. "The prettiest thing I ever saw," he declared enthusiastically, as I put into his hand the only mouse captured.

We traced the chambers up and down the tree as they wound, stairway-like, just inside the hard outer shell. Here and there we came upon garners of acorns and bunches of bird feathers and shredded bark--a complete fortress against the siege of winter.

That pine had not borne a green needle for a decade. It was too long dead and too much decayed to have even a fat knot left. Yet there was not a livelier, more interesting tree in the region that winter, nor one half so full of goings on, as this same old shell of a pine, with scarcely heart enough to stand.

WOOD-PUSSIES

WOOD-PUSSIES

One real source of the joy in out-of-door study lies in its off-time character. A serious, bread-winning study of birds must be a lamentable vocation; it comes to measuring egg-shells merely, and stuffing skins. To get its real tonic, nature study must not be carried on with Walden Pond laboriousness, nor with the unrelieved persistence of a five years aboard a _Beagle_. Darwin staggered under the burden of his observations; and Thoreau says: "I would not have any one adopt _my_ mode of living; for before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself"--and so he did.

No; the joy in wild things is the joy of being wild with them--vacation joy. Think of being forced to gather ants and watch spiders for a living! It would be quite as bad as making poetry or prophecy one's profession. From the day Mohammed formally adopts Koran-making as a business, he begins to lose his spontaneity and originality, and grows prosy and artificial, even plagiaristic. Nature shuns the professional. She makes her happiest visits as short surprises, delightful interruptions and diversions in the thick of our earnest business.

You can take no vacation in the mountains? Then snatch a few minutes before the seven-o'clock whistle blows, or while you hoe, or between office-hours, to look and listen. The glimpses of wild life caught at such times will be flashes of revelation. It may be the instant picture of a gray fox leaping at a buzzard from behind a bush as the train drives across the wide, blank prairies of southern Kansas; or a warm time with wasps while mowing in New Jersey; or the chirp of sparrows in passing King's Chapel Burial-ground when a cold winter twilight is settling over Boston; or the chance meeting of a wood-pussy on your way home from singing-school in Maine. Whatever the picture, and wherever obtained, coming in this unexpected way, it is sure to be more lasting, meaningful, and happy than volumes of the kind gathered after long days of tramping with gun and glass.

Any one can acquaint himself with the out-of-doors, if he keeps his eyes and ears open and lives a little while, should his lines happen to fall even in a city. Most cities have parks, or a river, or a zoölogical garden. A zoölogical garden is not to be despised by the naturalist. About ninety-nine hundredths of every wild animal remains wild in spite of iron bars and peanuts and visitors.

There is one little creature, however, that you must live at least on the edge of the country to know, for I never saw a zoölogical garden that had a pit or cage for him. Yet he is not a blood-thirsty nor a venomous beast; in fact, he is as harmless as a rabbit and every whit as interesting as a prairie-dog. Nevertheless it is of no use to look for him in the city. You must go out to the outskirts, to the farms and pastures, if you would meet the wood-pussy. And even here you must not look for _him_, but go to church or visit the neighbors after dark and let the wood-pussy look for you. It will be altogether a rare and interesting experience, an encounter to remember.

But what is a wood-pussy? That is the question I asked myself the first night I spent in Maine. I had occasion to go down the road that night, and as my hostess handed me the lantern she said warningly, "Look out for the wood-pussies on the way." From what I was able to put together that night I was sure that "wood-pussy" was a very pretty down-east name for what, in New Jersey, I had always called a skunk.

I have had about a dozen unsought meetings with this greatly dreaded, seldom-named, but much-talked-of creature. Most of them are moonlight scenes--pictures of dimly lighted, shadow-flecked paths, with a something larger than a cat in them, standing stock-still or moving leisurely toward me, silvered now with pale light, now uncertain and monstrous where the shadows lie deepest. With these memories always come certain strange sensations of scalp-risings, chill feelings of danger, of wild adventure, and of hair-breadth escape.

I have never met a skunk at night that did not demand (and receive) the whole path, even when that path was the State highway. Dispute the authority of a skunk? No more than I should the best-known ranger's in Texas when requested to hold up my hands. The skunk is the only animal left in the East that you will not parley with. Try to stare the Great Stone Face out of countenance if you wish, but when a skunk begins to sidle toward you, do not try to stare him out of the path; just sidle in the direction he sidles, and sidle as fast as you can.

Late one afternoon I was reading by the side of a little ravine on one of the islands in Casco Bay. The sharp, rocky walls of the cut were shaded by scrub-pines and draped with dewberry-vines. Presently the monotonous slop of the surf along the shore, growing fainter as the tide ebbed, was broken by a stir in the dry leaves at the bottom of the ravine. I listened. Something was moving below me. Creeping cautiously to the edge, I looked down, and there, in a narrow yard between two boulders, not ten feet beneath me, was a family of seven young skunks.

They were about three weeks old,--"kittens," the natives called them,--and seemed to be playing some kind of a rough-and-tumble game together. Funny little bunches of black and white they were, with pointed noses, beady black eyes, and very grand tails. They were jet-black, except for white tips to their tails and a pure white mark beginning on the top of their heads and dividing down their sides like the letter V.

My presence was unsuspected and their play went on. It was a sight worth the rest of the vacation. When you find wild animals so far off their guard as to play, do as Captain Cuttle suggests--"make a note of it." It is a red-letter experience.

I doubt if there is another set of children in all the out-of-doors so apparently incapable of playing as a set of young skunks. You have watched lambs stub and wabble about in their gambols, clumsy and unsafe upon their legs because there was so little body to hold down so much legs. These young skunks were clumsier than the wabbliest-legged lambkin that you ever saw, and for just the opposite reason--there was so little legs to hold up so much body. Such humpty-dumpty babies! They fell over each other, over the stones, and over their paws as if paws were made only to be tumbled over. Their surest, quickest way of getting anywhere was to upset and roll to it.

It was a silent playground, as all animal playgrounds are. The stir of the dead leaves and now and then a faint hiss was all I could hear. Who has ever heard any noise from untamed animals at play? One day I came softly upon two white-footed mice playing in the leaves along a wood-road and squeaking joyously; but as a rule the children of the wilds, no matter how exciting their games, rarely utter a word. Silence is the first lesson they are taught. Or is it now instinctive? Have not generations of bitter life-struggle made the animals so timid and wary that the young are born with a dread of discovery so strong that they never shout in their play? This softness and silence was the only striking difference to be seen in the play of these young skunks here in the falling twilight, safely hidden among the rocks of the wild ravine, and that of school-children upon a village green.

The child is much the same, whether the particular species is four-footed or whether it goes on two feet. Here below me one of the little toddlers got a bump that hurt him, and it made him just as mad as a bump ever did me. There was a fuss in a twinkling. He stamped with both fore feet, showed his teeth, humped his back, and turned both ends of his tiny body, like a pinched wasp, toward every one that came near him. The others knew what that particular twist meant and kept their distance. I knew the import of that movement, too. These young things had already learned their lesson of self-defense. I believe that a three-weeks-old skunk could hold his own against the world.

The dusk was deepening rapidly in the ravine; and I was just about to shout to see how they would take it, when a long black snout was thrust slowly out from beneath a piece of the ledge, and the mother of the young skunks appeared. Without giving them a look, she crawled off around a rock. The family followed; and here they all fell to eating something--what, I could not see. I tried to scare them away, but at my commands they only switched their tails and doubled into defensive attitudes. Finally with some stones I drove them, like so many huge crabs, into the den, and--horrors! they were eating one of their own kin, a full-grown skunk, the father of their family, for all they knew or cared, that had been killed the night before in one of the islander's chicken-coops.

The skunk is no epicure. The matter of eating one's husband or wife, one's father or mother, has never struck the skunk as out of the ordinary. As far as my observation goes, the supreme question with him is, Can this thing be swallowed? Such thoughts as, What is it? How does it taste? Will it digest? Is it good form?--no skunk since the line began ever allowed to interfere with his dinner. An enviable disregard, this of dietetics! To eat everything with a relish! If the testimony of Maine farmers can be credited, this animal is absolutely omnivorous. During the winter the skunks burrow and sleep, several of them in the same hole. When they go in they are as fat as September woodchucks; but long before spring, the farmers tell me, the skunks grow so lean and hungry that, turning cannibal, they fall upon their weaker comrades and devour them, only the strongest surviving until the spring.

In August, along the Kennebec, I found the skunks attacking the sugar corn. They strip the ears that hang close to the ground, and gnaw the milky grain. But they do most damage among the chickens. For downright destructiveness, a knowing old skunk, with a nice taste for pullets and a thorough acquaintance with the barn-yard, discounts even Reynard. Reynard is the reputed arch-enemy of poultry, yet there is a good deal of the sportsman about him; he has some sort of honor, a sense of the decency of the game. The skunk, on the contrary, is a poacher, a slaughterer for the mere sake of it. My host, in a single night, had fourteen hens killed by a skunk that dug under the coop and deliberately bit them through the neck. He is not so cunning nor so swift as the fox, but the skunk is no stupid. He is cool and calm and bold. He will advance upon and capture a hen-house, and be off to his den, while a fox is still studying his map of the farm.

Yet, like every other predatory creature, the skunk more than balances his debt for corn and chickens by his credit for the destruction of obnoxious vermin. He feeds upon insects and mice, destroying great numbers of the latter by digging out the nests and eating the young. But we forget our debt when the chickens disappear, no matter how few we lose. Shall we ever learn to say, when the redtail swoops among the pigeons, when the rabbits get into the cabbage, when the robins rifle the cherry-trees, and when a skunk helps himself to a hen for his Thanksgiving dinner--shall we ever learn to love and understand the fitness of things out of doors enough to say,

But then, poor beastie, thou maun live?

The skunk is a famous digger. There are gigantic stories in Maine, telling how he has been seen to escape the hound by digging himself out of sight in the middle of an open field. I have never tried to run down a skunk, and so never gave one the opportunity of showing me all he is capable of as a lightning excavator; but, unless all my experience is wrong, a skunk would rather fight or run or even die than exert himself to the extent of digging a home. In the majority of cases their lairs are made by other paws than their own.

One of the skunk's common tricks is to take up his abode with a woodchuck. As woodchucks, without exception, are decent sort of folk, they naturally object; but the unwelcome visitor, like Tar Baby, says nothing; simply gives his host the privilege of remaining in his own house if he chooses. He chooses to go, of course, and the easy-minded interloper settles down comfortably at home. But it is not long before a second wanderer chances upon this hole, and, without thanks or leave, shares the burrow with the first. This often goes on until the den is crowded--until some farmer's boy digs out a round half-dozen.

From such a lair as headquarters the skunks forage at night, each making off alone to a favorite haunt, and returning before daybreak for safety and sleep. But a peculiar thing about these lodges, as about the family den in the ravine, is their freedom from the hateful musk. One rarely detects any odor about a skunk's burrow. I had been within twenty feet of this one on the island most of the afternoon and had not known it. How are a number of skunks living in a single burrow for weeks able to keep it sweet, when one of them, by simply passing through a ten-acre field of blossoming clover, will make it unendurable? It certainly speaks well for the creature's personal cleanliness, or else is proof of his extreme caution against discovery.

The odor will easily carry with the wind three miles. On the spot where the animal has been shot, you will remember it a twelvemonth after whenever it rains. "Do you want to know how to shoot a skunk on your kitchen steps and never know it twenty-four hours after?" queried my Kennebec authority on these beasts. I did, of course, though I never expected a skunk to take up his stand on my kitchen steps and compel me to despatch him.

"Well, shoot him dead, of course; then let him lie there three days. All that smell will come back to him, no matter how far off it's gone. It'll all come up out of the boards, too, and go into him, and you can carry him away by the tail and never know a skunk's been on the farm. It's curious how a skunk can make a smell, but never have any; and it's curious how it all returns to him when he dies. Most things are curious, ain't they?" I agreed that they were.

But to return to my family in the ravine. The next morning I went back to the glen and caught three of these young ones. They made no resistance,--merely warned me to be careful,--and I took them to the house. For several days I fed them fish and fruit until they became so tame that I could handle them without caution. But they were hopelessly dull and uninteresting pets, never showing the least intelligence, curiosity, or affection. I finally turned them loose among their native rocks, and they strayed off as unconcerned as if they had not spent two weeks away from home, shut up in a soap-box.

There seems to be little excuse, in this broad land of opportunity, for any one's going into skunk-farming for a business; but these animals have a good market value, and so, in spite of a big country and rich resources, our hands are so eager for gold that every summer we hear of new skunk farms. Still, why not raise skunks? They are more easily kept than pigs or pigeons; they multiply rapidly; their pelts make good (?) marten-skins; and I see no reason why any one having a piece of woodland with a stream in it, and a prairie or an ocean on each side of it, could not fence it in, stock it with skunks, and do a profitable and withal an interesting business.

FROM RIVER-OOZE TO TREE-TOP

FROM RIVER-OOZE TO TREE-TOP

There are many lovers of the out-of-doors who court her in her robes of roses and in her blithe and happy hours of bird-song only. Now a lover that never sees her barefoot in the meadow, that never hears her commonplace chatter at the frog-pond, that never finds her in her lowly, humdrum life among the toads and snakes, has little genuine love for his mistress.

To know the pixy when one sees it, to call the long Latin name of the ragweed, to exclaim over the bobolink's song, to go into ecstasies at a glorious sunset, is not, necessarily, to love nature at all. One who does all this sincerely, but who stuffs his ears to the din of the spring frogs, is in love with nature's pretty clothes, her dainty airs and fine ways. Her warm, true heart lies deeper down. When one has gone down to that, then a March without peepers will be as lonesome as a crowd without friends; then an orchard without the weather-wise hyla can never make good his place with mere apples; and the front door without a solemn, philosophic toad beneath its step will lack something quite as needful to its evening peace and homeness as it lacks when the old-fashioned roses and the honeysuckle are gone.

We are not humble nor thoughtful out of doors. There is too much sentiment in our passion for nature. We make colored plates and poems to her. All honor to the poets! especially to those who look carefully and see deeply, like Wordsworth and Emerson and Whitman. But what the common run of us needs, when we go a-wooing nature, is not more poetry, but a scientific course in biology. How a little study in comparative anatomy, for instance, would reveal to us the fearful and wonderful in the make-up of all animal forms! And the fearful and wonderful have a meaning and a beauty which we ought to realize.

We all respond to the flowers and birds, for they demand no mental effort. What about the snakes and frogs? Do we shiver at them? Do we more than barely endure them? No one can help feeling the comfort and sympathy of the bluebird. The very drifts soften as he appears. He comes some March morning in a flurry of snow, or drops down out of a cheerless, soaking sky, and assures us that he has just left the South and has hurried ahead at considerable hazard to tell us that spring is on the way. Yet, here is another voice, earlier than the bluebird's often, with the bluebird's message, and with even more than the bluebird's authority; but who will listen to a frog? A prophet is not without honor save in his own country. One must needs have wings and come from a foreign land to be received among us as a prophet of the spring. Suppose a little frog noses his way up through the stiff, cold mud, bumps against the ice, and pipes, _Spring! spring! spring!_ Has he not as much claim upon our faith as a bird that drops down from no one knows where, with the same message? The bluebird comes because he has seen the spring; Hyla comes because he has the spring in his heart. He that receives Hyla in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward.

For me there is no clearer call in all the year than that of the hylas' in the break-up days of March. The sap begins to start in my roots at the first peep. There is something in their brave little summons, as there is in the silvery light on the pussy-willows, that takes hold on my hope and courage, and makes the March mud good to tramp through. And this despite the fact that these early hylas so aggravated my first attack of homesickness that I thought it was to be fatal. The second night I ever spent away from home and my mother was passed with old Mrs. Tribbet, who had a large orchard, behind which was a frog-pond. In vain did she stay me with raisins and comfort me with apples. I was sick for home. And those frogs! When the guineas got quiet, how dreadful they made the long May twilight with their shrieking, strangling, homesick cries! After all these years I cannot listen to them in the evenings of early spring without catching an echo from the back of that orchard, without just a throb of that pain so near to breaking my heart.

Close by, in a corner lot between the two cross-roads of the village, lies a wretched little puddle, the home of countless hylas until the June suns dry it up. Among the hundred or more people who live in the vicinity and who pass the pond almost daily, I think that I am the only one who, until recently, was sure he had ever seen a peeper, and knew that they were neither tadpoles, salamanders, nor turtles. As I was standing by the puddle, one May day, a good neighbor came along and stopped with me. The chorus was in full blast--cricket-frogs, Pickering's frogs, spring frogs, and, leading them all, the melancholy quaver of Bufo, the "hop-toad."

"What is it that makes the _dreadful_ noise?" my neighbor asked, meaning, I knew, by "dreadful noise," the song of the toad. I handed her my opera-glass, pointed out the minstrel with the doleful bagpipe sprawling at the surface of the water, and, after sixty years of wondering, she saw with immense satisfaction that one part in this familiar spring medley was taken by the common toad.

Sixty springs are a good many springs to be finding out the author of so well-known a sound as this woeful strain of the serenading toad; but more than half a century might be spent in catching a cricket-frog at his song. I tried to make my neighbor see one that was clinging to a stick in the middle of the puddle; but her eyes were dim. Deft hands have dressed these peepers. We have heard them by the meadowful every spring of our life, and yet the fingers of one hand number more than the peepers we have seen. One day I bent over three lily-pads till nearly blind, trying to make out a cricket-frog that was piping all the while somewhere near or upon them. At last, in despair, I made a dash at the pads, only to see the wake as the peeper sank to the bottom an instant before my net struck the surface.

The entire frog family is as protectively colored as this least member, the cricket-frog. They all carry fern-seed in their pockets and go invisible. Notice the wood-frog with his tan suit and black cheeks. He is a mere sound as he hops about over the brown leaves. I have had him jump out of the way of my feet and vanish while I stared hard at him. He lands with legs extended, purposely simulating the shape of the ragged, broken leaves, and offers, as the only clue for one's baffled eyes, the moist glisten as his body dissolves against the dead brown of the leaf-carpet. The tree-toad, _Hyla versicolor_, still more strikingly blends with his surroundings, for, to a certain extent, he can change color to match the bark upon which he sits. More than once, in climbing apple-trees, I have put my hand upon a tree-toad, not distinguishing it from the patches of gray-green lichen upon the limbs. But there is less of wonder in the tree-toad's ability to change his colors than in the way he has of changing his clothes. He is never troubled with the getting of a new suit; his labor comes in caring for his old ones. It is curious how he disposes of his cast-off clothes.

One day late in autumn I picked up a tree-toad that was stiff and nearly dead with cold. I put him in a wide-mouthed bottle to thaw, and found by evening that he was quite alive, sitting with his toes turned in, looking much surprised at his new quarters. He made himself at home, however, and settled down comfortably, ready for what might happen next.

The following day he climbed up the side of the bottle and slept several hours, his tiny disked toes holding him as easily and restfully as if he were stretched upon a feather-bed. I turned him upside down; but he knew nothing of it until later when he awoke; then he deliberately turned round with his head up and went to sleep again. At night he was wide awake, winking and blinking at the lamp, and watching me through his window of green glass.

A few nights after his rescue Hyla sat upon the bottom of his bottle in a very queer attitude. His eyes were drawn in, his head was bent down, his feet rolled up--his whole body huddled into a ball less than half its normal size. After a time he began to kick and gasp as if in pain, rolling and unrolling himself desperately. I thought he was dying. He would double up into a bunch, then kick out suddenly and stand up on his hind legs with his mouth wide open as if trying to swallow something. He _was_ trying to swallow something, and the thing had stuck on the way. It was a kind of cord, and ran out of each corner of his mouth, passing over his front legs, thinning and disappearing most strangely along his sides.

With the next gulp I saw the cord slip down a little, and, as it did so, the skin along his sides rolled up. It was his old suit! He was taking it off for a new one; and, instead of giving it to the poor, he was trying to economize by eating it. What a meal! What a way to undress! What curious economy!

Long ago the naturalists told us that the toads ate their skins--after shedding them; but it was never made plain to me that they ate them _while_ changing them--indeed, _swallowed_ them off! Three great gulps more and the suit--shirt, shoes, stockings, and all--disappeared. Then Hyla winked, drew his clean sleeve across his mouth, and settled back with the very air of one who has magnificently sent away the waiter with the change.

Four days later Hyla ate up this new suit. I saw the entire operation this time. It was almost a case of surgery. He pulled the skin over his head and neck with his fore feet as if it were a shirt, then crammed it into his mouth; kicked it over his back next; worked out his feet and legs; then ate it off as before. The act was accomplished with difficulty, and would have been quite impossible had not Hyla found the most extraordinary of tongues in his head. Next to the ability to speak Russian with the tongue comes the power to skin one's self with it. The tree-toad cannot quite croak Russian, but he can skin himself with his tongue. Unlike ours, his tongue is hung at the front end, with the free end forked and pointing toward his stomach. When my little captive had crammed his mouth full of skin, he stuck this fork of a tongue into it and forced it down his throat and held it down while he kicked and squirmed out of it.

Though less beautifully clothed than Hyla, our common toad, Bufo, is just as carefully clothed. Where the rain drips from the eaves, clean, narrow lines of pebbles have been washed out of the lawn. On one side of the house the shade lies all day long and the grass is cool and damp. Here, in the shade, a large toad has lived for two summers. I rarely pass that way without seeing him, well hidden in the grass. For several days lately he had been missing, when, searching more closely one morning, I found him sunk to the level of his back in the line of pebbles, his spots and the glands upon his neck so mingling with the varied collection of gravel about him that only a practised eye, and that sharp with expectation, could have made him out.

In a newly plowed field, with some of the fresh soil sticking to him, what thing could look more like a clod than this brown, shapeless lump of a toad? But there is a beauty even in this unlovely form; for here is perfect adaptability.

Our canons of the beautiful are false if they do not in some way include the toad. Shall we measure all the out-of-doors by the linnet's song, the cardinal-flower's flame, and the hay-field's odor? Deeper, wider, more fundamental and abiding than these standards, lie the intellectual principles of plan and purpose and the intellectual quality of perfect execution. We shall love not alone with all our heart, but with all our mind as well. If we judge the world beautiful by the superficial standard of what happens to please our eye, we shall see no more of the world than we do of the new moon. Whole classes of animals and wide regions of the earth's surface must, by this test, be excluded. The only way the batrachians could possibly come in would be by rolling the frogs in bread-crumbs and frying them. Treated thus, they look good and taste good, but this is all that can be said for the entire family. Studied, however, from the single view-point of protective coloring, or again, as illustrating the ease with which the clumsiest forms can be fitted to the widest variety of conditions, the toads do not suffer by any comparison. In the light of such study, Bufo loses his repulsiveness and comes to have a place quite as unique as the duckbill's, and a personality not less fascinating than the swallow's or the gray squirrel's.

However, the toad to the most of us is anything but a poem. What, indeed, looks less lovely, less nimble and buoyant, more chained to the earth, than a toad? But stretch the least web between his toes, lengthen his hind legs, and--over he goes, the leopard-frog, champion high diver of the marsh! Or, instead of the web, tip his toes with the tiniest disks, and--there he swings, Pickering's little hyla, clinging as easily to the under surface of that oak-leaf high in the tree as a fly clings to the kitchen ceiling.

When a boy I climbed to the top of the flagpole on one of the State geological survey stations. The pole rose far above the surrounding pines--the highest point for miles around. As I clinched the top of the staff, gripping my fingers into the socket for the flag-stick, I felt something cold, and drawing myself up, found a tree-toad asleep in the hole. Under him was a second toad, and under the second a third--all dozing up here on the very topmost tip of all the region.

From the river-ooze to the tree-top, nature carries this toad-form simply by a thin web between the toes, or by tiny disks at their tips. And mixing her greens and browns with just a dash of yellow, she paints them all so skilfully that, upon a lily-pad, beside a lump of clay, or against the lichened limb of an old apple-tree, each sits as securely as Perseus in the charmed helmet that made him invisible.

The frogs have innumerable enemies among the water-birds, the fish, the snakes, and such animals as the fisher, coon, possum, and mink. The toads fortunately are supplied with glands behind their heads whose secretion is hateful to most of their foes, though it seems to be no offense whatever to the snakes. A toad's only chance, when a snake is after him, lies in hiding. I once saw a race between a toad and an adder snake, however, in which the hopper won.

One bright May morning I was listening to the music of the church bells, as it floated out from the city and called softly over the fields, when my reverie was interrupted by a sharp squeak and a thud beside the log on which I sat; something dashed over my foot; and I turned to catch sight of a toad bouncing past the log, making hard for the brush along the fence. He scarcely seemed to touch the ground, but skimmed over the grass as if transformed into a midget jack-rabbit. His case was urgent; and little wonder! At the opposite end of the log, raised four or five inches from the grass, her eyes hard glittering, her nose tilted in the air, and astonishment all over her face, swayed the flat, ugly head of a hognose-adder. Evidently she, too, had never seen a toad get away in any such time before; and after staring a moment, she turned under the log and withdrew from the race, beaten.

Hungry snakes and hot, dusty days are death to the toads. Bufo would almost as soon find himself at the bottom of a well as upon a dusty road in blazing sunshine. His day is the night. He is not particular about the moon. All he asks is that the night be warm, that the dew lay the dust and dampen the grass, and that the insects be out in numbers. At night the snakes are asleep, and so are most of those ugly, creaking beasts with rolling iron feet that come crushing along their paths. There is no foe abroad at night, and life, during these dark, quiet hours, has even for a toad something like a dash of gaiety.

In one of the large pastures not far away stands a pump. It is shaded by an ancient apple-tree, under which, when the days are hottest, the cattle gather to doze and dream. They have worn away the grass about the mossy trough, and the water, slopping over, keeps the spot cool and muddy the summer through. Here the toads congregate from every quarter of the great field. I stretched myself out flat on the grass one night and watched them in the moonlight. There must have been fifty here that night, hopping about over the wet place--as grotesque a band as ever met by woods or waters.

We need no "second sight," no pipe of Pan, no hills of Latmos with a flock to feed, to find ourselves back in that enchanted world of the kelpies and satyrs. All we need to do is to use the eyes and ears we have, and haunt our hills by morning and by moonlight. Here in the moonlight around the old pump I saw goblins, if ever goblins were seen in the light of our moon.

There was not a croak, not a squeak, not the slightest sound, save the small _pit-pat_, _pit-pat_, made by their hopping. There may have been some kind of toad talk among them, but listen never so closely, I could not catch a syllable of it.

Where did they all come from? How did they find their way to this wet spot over the hills and across the acres of this wide pasture? You could walk over the field in the daytime and have difficulty in finding a single toad; but here at night, as I lay watching, every few minutes one would hop past me in the grass; or coming down the narrow cow-paths in the faint light I could see a wee black bunch bobbing leisurely along with a hop and a stop, moving slowly toward the pump to join the band of his silent friends under the trough.

Not because there was more food at the pump, nor for the joy of gossip, did the toads meet here. The one thing necessary to their existence is water, and doubtless many of these toads had crossed this pasture of fifteen acres simply to get a drink. I have known a toad to live a year without food, and another to die in three days for lack of water. And yet this thirsty little beast never knows the pleasure of a real drink, because he does not know how to drink.

I have kept toads confined in cages for weeks at a time, never allowing them water when I could not watch them closely, and I never saw one drink. Instead, they would sprawl out in the saucer on their big, expansive bellies, and _soak_ themselves full, as they did here on the damp sand about the pump.