It is an anxious moment for all birds when their young leave the nest. One noontime by the unusual mewing of a parent catbird I felt sure that the critical time had come. Sure enough, there sat one of the young on a twig a few inches above the nest, motionless and hushed. No lusty response to the agitated cry of the mother, as is usually the case with the robin. "No publicity" is the watchword of the young catbirds as well as of the old. An hour or two later another young one was perched on a branch, and before night, when no one was looking, they both disappeared, leaving two motionless birds in the nest. The next morning early, without any signs of alarm or agitation on the part of the old birds, they took the important step. It could hardly have been much of a flight with any of them, as their wing-quills were only partially developed, and their tails were mere stubs. For several days afterward no sign or sound of old or young was seen or heard. They were probably keeping well concealed in the near-by trees or in the vines and currant-bushes in the vineyard. In about a week the whole family appeared briefly in upper branches of the maples near the house. The young were distinguishable from the old only by their shorter tails. A few days later the parent birds were seen moving stealthily through the vines and bushes about the house, or perching on the near-by stakes that supported the wire netting. Are they coming back for a second brood? was the question in our minds.

Soon we began to hear snatches of song from the male, then one morning a regular old-time burst of joy from him in the vine that held the old nest. Then he sang in a syringa-bush near the window on the south side of the cottage, and both birds were soon seen paying frequent visits to the bush. We felt sure another brood was in the air. Whether or not the first brood were now shifting for themselves, we did not know; they never again appeared upon the scene. Finally, on the morning of the Fourth of July, the foundation of a new nest was started in the syringa-bush three feet from the ground, and barely four feet from the window!

We had a view of the proceedings that the first site did not afford us. The old nest appeared to be in perfect condition, but there was evidently no thought with the birds of using it again, as the robins sometimes do, and as bluebirds and cliff swallows always do. A new nest, built of material almost identical with that of the old, and in a more exposed position, was decided upon. It progressed rapidly, and I was delighted to find that the male assisted in the building. Indeed, he was fully as active as the female. Very often they were both in the nest with material at the same moment. They seemed to agree perfectly. At first I got the impression that the male was not quite as decided as the female, and hesitated more, once or twice bringing material that he finally rejected. But he soon warmed up to the work and certainly did his share.

With most species of our birds the nest is entirely built by the female. With the robin, the wood thrush, the phoebe, the oriole, the hummingbird, the pewee, and many others, the male is only an interested spectator of the proceeding. He usually attends his mate in her quest for material, but does not lend a hand, or a bill. I think the cock wren assists in nest-building. I know the male cedar-bird does, and probably the male woodpeckers do also. The male rose-breasted grosbeak assists in incubation, and has been seen to sing upon the nest. It seems fair to infer that he assists in the nest-building also, but I am not certain that he does, and I have heard another observer state that in a nest which he watched the female apparently did it all.

My catbirds both worked overtime one afternoon at least, being on their job as late as seven o'clock. In three days the nest was done, all but touching up the interior. During the construction I laid out pieces of twine and bits of white paper on the bushes and wire netting, also some loose material from the outside of the old nest; all was quickly used. How much labor the birds would have saved themselves had they pulled the old nest to pieces and used the material a second time! I have known the oriole to start a nest, then change her mind, and then detach some of her strings and fibers and carry them to the new site; and I once saw a "chebec" whose eggs had been destroyed pull the old nest to pieces and rebuild it in a tree a hundred feet away.

The male catbird is slightly brighter and fresher-looking than his mate, but we could easily tell her by her often simulating the actions of a young bird when she came with material in her beak; she would alight on a near-by post and slightly spread and quiver her wings in a tender, beseeching kind of way. She would do this also when bringing food to her first brood. When one of the parent birds of any species simulates by voice or manner the young birds, it is always the female; her heart would naturally be more a-quiver with anticipation than that of the male.

On the fifth day the nest was completed and received its first egg. There was considerable delay with the second egg, but it appeared on the second or third day, and the third egg the following day. Then incubation began. In twenty days from the day the nest was begun, the birds were hatched, and in eleven days more they had quietly left the nest.

A friend of mine who has a summer home on one of the trout-streams of the Catskills discovered that the catbird was fond of butter, and she soon had one of the birds coming every day to the dining-room window for its lump of fresh butter, and finally entering the dining-room, perching on the back of the chair, and receiving its morsel of butter from a fork held in the mistress's hand. I think the butter was unsalted. My friend was convinced after three years that the same pair of birds returned to her each year, because each season the male came promptly for his butter.

The furtive and stealthy manners of the catbird contrast strongly with the frank, open manners of the thrushes. Its cousin the brown thrasher goes skulking about in much the same way, flirting from bush to bush like a culprit escaping from justice. But he does love to sing from the April tree-tops where all the world may see and hear, if said world does not come too near. In the South and West the thrasher also nests in the vicinity of houses, but in New York and New England we must look for him in remote, bushy fields. I do not know of any bad traits that go with the thrasher's air of suspicion and secrecy, but I do know of one that goes with the catbird's—I have seen her perch on the rim of another bird's nest and deliberately devour the eggs. But only once. Whether or not she frequently does this, I have no evidence. If she does, she is doubtless so sly about it that she escapes observation.

I welcomed the catbird, though she is not so attractive a neighbor as the wood thrush. She has none of the wood thrush's dignity and grace. She skulks and slinks away like a culprit, while the wood thrush stands up before you or perches upon a limb, and turns his spotted waistcoat toward you in the most open and trusting manner. In fact, few birds have such good manners as the wood thrush, and few have so much the manner of a Paul Pry and eavesdropper as the catbird. The flight of the wood thrush across the lawn is such a picture of grace and harmony, it is music to the eye. The catbird seems saying, "There, there! I told you so, pretty figure, pretty figure you make!" But the courteous thrush (just here I heard the excited calls of robins and the hoarse, angry caw of a crow, and rushed out hatless to see a fish crow fly away from the maple in front of the Study, pursued by a mob of screeching robins. He took refuge in the spruces above the house where the collected robins abused him from surrounding branches. On my appearance he flew away, and the robins dispersed)—but the courteous thrush, I say, invites the good-breeding in you which he himself shows. The thrush never has the air of a culprit, while the catbird seldom has any other air. But I welcome them both. One shall stand for the harmony and repose of bird life, and the other for its restlessness and curiosity. The songs and the manners of birds correspond. The catbird, the brown thrasher, and the mockingbird are all theatrical in their manners—full of gestures of tail and wings, and their songs all imply an audience, while the serene melody of the thrushes is in keeping with the grace and poise of their behavior.



V

A MIDSUMMER IDYL

As I sit here of a midsummer day, in front of the wide-open doors of a big hay-barn, busy with my pen, and look out upon broad meadows where my farmer neighbor is busy with his haymaking, I idly contrast his harvest with mine. I have to admit that he succeeds with his better than I do with mine, though he can make hay only while the sun shines, while I can reap and cure my light fancies nearly as well in the shade as in the sun. Yet his crop is the surer and of more certain value to mankind. But I have this advantage over him—I might make literature out of his haymaking, or might reap his fields after him, and gather a harvest he never dreamed of. What does Emerson say?

One harvest from the field Homeward bring the oxen strong; A second crop thine acres yield, Which I gather in a song.

But the poet, like the farmer, can reap only where he has sown, and if Emerson had not scattered his own heart in the fields his Muse would not reap much there. Song is not one of the instruments with which I gather my harvest, but long ago, as a farm boy, in haymaking, and in driving the cows to and from the pasture, I planted myself there, and whatever comes back to me now from that source is honestly my own. The second crop which I gather is not much more tangible than that which the poet gathers, but the farmer as little suspects its existence as he does that of the poet. I can use what he would gladly reject. His daisies, his buttercups, his orange hawkweed, his yarrow, his meadow-rue, serve my purpose better than they do his. They look better on the printed page than they do in the haymow. Yes, and his timothy and clover have their literary uses, and his new-mown hay may perfume a line in poetry. When one of our poets writes, "wild carrot blooms nod round his quiet bed," he makes better use of this weed than the farmers can.

Certainly a midsummer day in the country, with all its sights and sounds, its singing birds, its skimming swallows, its grazing or ruminating cattle, its drifting cloud-shadows, its grassy perfumes from the meadows and the hillsides, and the farmer with his men and teams busy with the harvest, has material for the literary artist. A good hay day is a good day for the writer and the poet, because it has a certain crispness and pureness; it is positive; it is rich in sunshine; there is a potency in the blue sky which you feel; the high barometer raises your spirits; your thoughts ripen as the hay cures. You can sit in a circle of shade beneath a tree in the fields, or in front of the open hay-barn doors, as I do, and feel the fruition and satisfaction of nature all about you. The brimming meadows seem fairly to purr as the breezes stroke them; the trees rustle their myriad leaves as if in gladness; the many-colored butterflies dance by; the steel blue of the swallows' backs glistens in the sun as they skim the fields; and the mellow boom of the passing bumble-bee but enhances the sense of repose and contentment that pervades the air. The hay cures; the oats and corn deepen their hue; the delicious fragrance of the last wild strawberries is on the breeze; your mental skies are lucid, and life has the midsummer fullness and charm.

As I linger here I note the oft-repeated song of the scarlet tanager in the maple woods that crown a hill above me, and in the loft overhead two broods of swallows are chattering and lining up their light-colored breasts on the rims of their nests, or trying their newly fledged wings while clinging to its sides. The only ominous and unwelcome sound is the call of the cuckoo, which I hear and have heard at nearly all hours for many days, and which surely bodes rain. The countryman who first named this bird the "rain crow" hit the mark. The cuckoo is a devourer of worms and caterpillars, and why he should be interested in rain is hard to see. The tree-toad calls before and during a shower, mainly, I think, because he likes to have his back wet, but why a well-dressed bird like the cuckoo should become a prophet of the rain is a mystery, unless the rain and the shadows are congenial to the gloomy mood in which he usually seems to be. He is the least sprightly and cheery of our birds, and the part of doleful prophet in our bird drama suits him well.

A high barometer is best for the haymakers and it is best for the human spirits. When the smoke goes straight up, one's thoughts are more likely to soar also, and revel in the higher air. The persons who do not like to get up in the morning till the day has been well sunned and aired evidently thrive best on a high barometer. Such days do seem better ventilated, and our lungs take in fuller draughts of air. How curious it is that the air should seem heavy to us when it is light, and light when it is heavy! On those sultry, muggy days when it is an effort to move, and the grasshopper is a burden, the air is light, and we are in the trough of the vast atmospheric wave; while we are on its crest, and are buoyed up both in mind and in body, on the crisp, bright days when the air seems to offer us no resistance. We know that the heavier salt sea-water buoys us up more than the fresh river or pond water, but we do not feel in the same way the lift of the high barometric wave. Even the rough, tough-coated maple-trees in spring are quickly susceptible to these atmospheric changes. The farmer knows that he needs sunshine and crisp air to make maple-sugar as well as to make hay. Let the high blue-domed day with its dry northwest breezes change to a warmer, overcast, humid day from the south, and the flow of sap lessens at once. It would seem as if the trees had nerves on the outside of their dry bark, they respond to the change so quickly. There is no sap without warmth, and yet warmth, without any memory of the frost, stops the flow.

The more the air presses upon us the lighter we feel, and the less it presses upon us the more "logy" we feel. Climb to the top of a mountain ten thousand feet high, and you breathe and move with an effort. The air is light, water boils at a low temperature, and our lungs and muscles seem inadequate to perform their usual functions. There is a kind of pressure that exhilarates us, and an absence of pressure that depresses us.

The pressure of congenial tasks, of worthy work, sets one up, while the idle, the unemployed, has a deficiency of haemoglobin in his blood. The Lord pity the unemployed man, and pity the man so over-employed that the pressure upon him is like that upon one who works in a tunnel filled with compressed air.

Haying in this pastoral region is the first act in the drama of the harvest, and one likes to see it well staged, as it is to-day—the high blue dome, the rank, dark foliage of the trees, the daisies still white in the sun, the buttercups gilding the pastures and hill-slopes, the clover shedding its perfume, the timothy shaking out its little clouds of pollen as the sickle-bar strikes it, most of the song-birds still vocal, and the tide of summer standing poised at its full. Very soon it will begin to ebb, the stalks of the meadow grasses will become dry and harsh, the clover will fade, the girlish daisies will become coarse and matronly, the birds will sing fitfully or cease altogether, the pastures will turn brown, and the haymakers will find the hay half cured as it stands waiting for them in the meadows.

What a wonderful thing is the grass, so common, so abundant, so various, a green summer snow that softens the outlines of the landscape, that makes a carpet for the foot, that brings a hush to the fields, and that furnishes food to so many and such various creatures! More than the grazing animals live upon the grass. All our cereals—wheat, barley, rye, rice, oats, corn—belong to the great family of the grasses.

Grass is the nap of the fields; it is the undergarment of the hills. It gives us the meadow, a feature in the northern landscape so common that we cease to remark it, but which we miss at once when we enter a tropical or semi-tropical country. In Cuba and Jamaica and Hawaii I saw no meadows and no pastures, no grazing cattle, none of the genial, mellow look which our landscape presents. Harshness, rawness, aridity, are the prevailing notes.

From my barn-door outlook I behold meadows with their boundary line of stone fences that are like lakes and reservoirs of timothy and clover. They are full to the brim, they ripple and rock in the breeze, the green inundation seems about to overwhelm its boundaries, all the surface inequalities of the land are wiped out, the small rocks and stones are hidden, the woodchucks make their roads through it, immersed like dolphins in the sea. What a picture of the plenty and the flowing beneficence of our temperate zone it all presents! Nature in her kinder, gentler moods, dreaming of the tranquil herds and the bursting barns. Surely the vast army of the grass hath its victories, for the most part noiseless, peace-yielding victories that gladden the eye and tranquillize the heart.

The meadow presents a pleasing picture before it is invaded by the haymakers, and a varied and animated one after it is thus invaded; the mowing-machine sending a shudder ahead of it through the grass, the hay-tedder kicking up the green locks like a giant, many-legged grasshopper, the horserake gathering the cured hay into windrows, the white-sleeved men with their forks pitching it into cocks, and, lastly, the huge, soft-cheeked loads of hay, towering above the teams that draw them, brushing against the bar-ways and the lower branches of the trees along their course, slowly winding their way toward the barn. Then the great mows of hay, or the shapely stacks in the fields, and the battle is won. Milk and cream are stored up in well-cured hay, and when the snow of winter fills the meadows as grass fills them in summer, the tranquil cow can still rest and ruminate in contentment.

As the swallows sweep out and in near my head they give out an angry "Sleet, sleet," as if my presence had suddenly become offensive to them. I know what makes the change in their temper. The young are leaving their nests, and at such eventful times the parent birds are always nervous and anxious. When any of our birds launch a family into the world they would rather not have spectators, and you are pretty sure to be abused if you intrude upon the scene. The swallow can put a good deal of sharp emphasis into that "Sleet, sleet," though she is not armed to make any of her threats good. Who knows that all will go well with them when they first make the plunge into space with their untried wings? A careful parent should keep the coast clear.

They have been testing their wings for several days, clinging to the sides of the nest and beating the wings rapidly. And now comes the crucial moment of letting go and attempting actual flight. Several of them have already done it, and I see them resting on the dead limbs of a plum-tree across the road. But more are to follow, and parental anxiety is still rife. I shall be sorry when the spacious hayloft becomes silent. That affectionate "Wit, wit" and that contented and caressing squeaking and chattering give me a sense of winged companionship. The old barn is the abode of friendly and delicate spirits, and the sight of them and the sound of them surely bring a suggestion of poetry and romance to these familiar scenes.

Is not the swallow one of the oldest and dearest of birds? Known to the poets and sages and prophets of all peoples! So infantile, so helpless and awkward upon the earth, so graceful and masterful on the wing, the child and darling of the summer air, reaping its invisible harvest in the fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching no earthly food, drinking and bathing and mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelessly coursing the long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in the shape of a bird! Only in the free fields of the summer air could it have got that steel-blue of the wings and that warm tan of the breast. Of course I refer to the barn swallow. The cliff swallow seems less a child of the sky and sun, probably because its sheen and glow are less, and its shape and motions less arrowy. More varied in color, its hues yet lack the intensity, and its flight the swiftness, of those of its brother of the haylofts. The tree swallows and the bank swallows are pleasing, but they are much more local and restricted in their ranges than the barn-frequenters. As a farm boy I did not know them at all, but the barn swallows the summer always brought.

After all, there is but one swallow; the others are particular kinds that we specify. How curious that men should ever have got the notion that this airy, fairy creature, this playmate of the sunbeams, spends the winter hibernating in the mud of ponds and marshes, the bedfellow of newts and frogs and turtles! It is an Old-World legend, born of the blindness and superstition of earlier times. One knows that the rain of the rainbow may be gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but the fleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life. Yet one would as soon think of digging up a rainbow in the mud as a swallow. The swallow follows the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial regions, where it hibernates on the wing, buried in tropical sunshine.

Well, this brilliant day is a good day for the swallows, a good day for the haymakers, and a good day for him who sits before his open barn door and weaves his facts and midsummer fancies into this slight literary fabric.



VI

NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE

The wild life around us is usually so unobtrusive and goes its own way so quietly and furtively that we miss much of it unless we cultivate an interest in it. A person must be interested in it, to paraphrase a line of Wordsworth's, ere to him it will seem worthy of his interest. One thing is linked to another or gives a clue to another. There is no surer way to find birds' nests than to go berrying or fishing. In the blackberry or raspberry bushes you may find the bush sparrow's nest or the indigobird's nest. Once while fishing a trout-stream I missed my fish, and my hook caught on a branch over my head. When I pulled the branch down, there, deftly saddled upon it, was a hummingbird's nest. I unwittingly caught more than I missed. On another occasion I stumbled upon the nest of the water accentor which I had never before found; on still another, upon the nest of the winter wren, a marvel of mossy softness and delicacy hidden under a mossy log.

Along trout-streams with overhanging or shelving ledges the fisherman often sees the nest of the phoebe-bird, which does not cease to please for the hundredth time, because of its fitness and exquisite artistry. On the newly sawn timbers of your porch or woodshed it is far less pleasing, because the bird's art, born of rocky ledges, only serves in the new environment to make its nest conspicuous.

Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper sparrow fly up and alight on the telephone wire with nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye upon her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy and weedy bank of the roadside in front of me and disappears. A few moments later I have her secret—a nest in a little recess in the bank. That straw gave the finishing touch. She kept her place on the nest until she had deposited her first egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this season. Some young vespers flitting about farther up the road are presumably her first brood. Each day thereafter for four consecutive days she added an egg. Incubation soon began and on the 10th of July the young were out, the little sprawling, skinny things looking, as a city girl said when she first beheld newly-hatched birds in a nest, as if they were mildewed.

These ground-builders among the birds, taking their chances in the great common of the open fields, at the mercy of all their enemies every hour—the hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes, weasels, coons by night, and crows and hawks by day—what bird-lover does not experience a little thrill when in his walk he comes upon one of their nests? He has found a thing of art among the unkempt and the disorderly; he has found a thing of life and love amid the cold and the insensate. Yet all so artless and natural! Every shred and straw of it serves a purpose; it fairly warms and vivifies the little niche in which it is placed. What a center of solicitude and forethought.

Not many yards below the vesper's nest, on the other side of the road, is a junco's nest. You may know the junco's nest from that of any other ground-builder by its being more elaborate and more perfectly hidden. The nest is tucked far under the mossy and weedy bank, and only a nest-hunter passing along the road, with "eye practiced like a blind man's touch" and with juncos in mind, would have seen it. A little screen of leaves of the hawkweed permits only the rim of one edge of the nest to be seen. Not till I stooped down and reached forth my hand did the mother bird come fluttering out and go down the road with drooping wings and spread tail, the white quills of the latter fairly lighting up the whole performance.

A very shy and artful bird is the junco. I had had brief glimpses of the male many times about the place. The morning I found the nest I had seen one male spitefully pursuing another male along the top of the stone wall opposite, which fact, paralleled in a human case, would afford a hint for detectives to work on. The junco is evidently a very successful bird. The swarms of them that one sees in the late fall and in the early winter going south is good evidence of this. They usually precede the white-throats north in the spring, but a few linger and breed in the high altitude of the Catskills.

When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of my door makes herself into a sunshade to protect her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and her young pant too; they would probably perish were not the direct rays of the sun kept from them. Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in the hill pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk, might be considered in danger from a large herd of dairy cows, but it is wisely placed in view of such a contingency. It is at the foot of a stalk of Canada thistle about a foot and a half high, and where, for a few square yards, the grazing is very poor. I do not think that the chances are one in fifty that the hoof of a cow will find it. I do not suppose that the problem presented itself to the bird as it does to me, but her instinct was as sure a guide as my reason is to me—or a surer one.

The vesper sparrow was thus happily named by a New England bird-lover, Wilson Flagg, an old-fashioned writer on our birds, fifty or more years ago. I believe the bird was called the grass finch by our earlier writers. It haunts the hilly pastures and roadsides in the Catskill region. It is often called the road-runner, from its habit of running along the road ahead when one is driving or walking—a very different bird, however, from the road-runner of the Western States. The vesper is larger than the song sparrow, of a lighter gray and russet, and does not frequent our gardens and orchards as does the latter. In color it suggests the European skylark; the two lateral white quills in its tail enhance this impression. One season a stray skylark, probably from Long Island or some other place where larks had been liberated, appeared in a broad, low meadow near me, and not finding his own kind paid court to a female vesper sparrow. He pursued her diligently and no doubt pestered her dreadfully. She fled from him precipitately and seemed much embarrassed by the attentions of the distinguished-looking foreigner.

When the young of any species appear, the solicitude and watchfulness of the mother bird are greatly increased. Although my near neighbor the vesper sparrow in front of my door has had proof of my harmless character now for several weeks and, one would think, must know that her precious secret is safe with me, yet, when she comes with food in her beak while I am at my desk ten or eleven yards away, she maneuvers around for a minute or two, flying up to the telephone wire or a few yards up or down the road, and finally approaches the nest with much hesitation and suspicion, lest I see her in the act. When she comes again and again and again, she is filled with the same apprehension.

After a night of heavy but warm rain two of the half-fledged young were lying on the ground in front of the nest, dead. There were no murderous marks upon them, and the secret of the tragedy I could not divine.

What automatons these wild creatures are, apparently so wise on some occasions and so absurd on others! This vesper sparrow in bringing food to her young, going through the same tactics over and over, learns no more than a machine would. But, of course, the bird does not think; hence the folly of her behavior to a being that does. The wisdom of nature, which is so unerring under certain conditions, becomes to us sheer folly under changed conditions.

When the mother bird's suspicion gets the better of her, she often devours the food she has in her beak, so fearful is she of betraying her precious secret. But the next time she comes she may only maneuver briefly before approaching the nest, and then again hesitate and parley with her fears and make false moves and keep her eye on me, as if I had only just appeared upon the scene.

One of the best things a bird-lover can have in front of his house or cabin is a small dead tree with numerous leafless branches. Many kinds of birds love to perch briefly where they can look around them. I would not exchange the old dead plum-tree that stands across the road in front of my lodge for the finest living plum-tree in the world. It bears a perpetual crop of birds. Of course the strictly sylvan birds, such as the warblers, the vireos, the oven-bird, the veery and hermit thrushes, do not come, but many kinds of other birds pause there during the day and seem to enjoy the unobstructed view.

All the field and orchard and grove birds come. In early summer the bobolink perches there, then tiptoes, or tip-wings, away to the meadows below, pouring out his ecstatic song. The rose-breasted grosbeak comes and shows his brilliant front. The purple finch, the goldfinch, the indigo bunting, the bluebird, the kingbird, the phoebe-bird, the great crested flycatcher, the robin, the oriole, the chickadee, the high-hole, the downy woodpecker, the vesper sparrow, the social sparrow, or chippy, pause there in the course of the day, and some of them several times during the day. Occasionally the scarlet tanager lights it up with his vivid color.

But more than all it is the favorite perch of a song sparrow whose mate has a nest not far off. Here he perches and goes through his repertoire of three or four different songs from dawn till nightfall, pausing only long enough now and then to visit his mate or to refresh himself with a little food. He repeats his strain six times a minute, often preening his plumage in the intervals. He sings several hundred times a day and has been doing so for many weeks. The house wren during the breeding-season repeats his song thousands of times a day, while the red-eyed vireo sings continuously from morning till night for several months. How a conscious effort like that would weary our human singers and their hearers! But the birds are quite unconscious, in our sense, of what they are doing.

When we pause to think of it, what a spectacle this singing sparrow presents! A little wild bird sitting on a dead branch and lifting up its voice in song hour after hour, day after day, week after week.

In terms of science we say it is a secondary sexual characteristic, but viewed in the light of the spirit of the whole, what is it except a song of praise and thanksgiving—joy in life, joy in the day, joy in the mate and brood, joy in the paternal and maternal instincts and solicitudes, a voice from the heart of nature that the world is good, thanksgiving for the universal beneficence without which you and I and the little bird would not be here? In foul weather as in fair, the bird sings. The rain and the cold do not silence him.

There are few or no pessimists among the birds. One might think the call of the turtle-dove, which sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe," a wail of despair; but it is not. It really means "love, love, love." The plaint of the wood pewee, pensive and like a human sigh, is far from pessimistic, although in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest to being a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the catbird and the jay, with their peevish and complaining notes, might well be placed in that category, were it not for their songs when the love passion makes optimists even of them. The strain of the hermit thrush which floats down to me from the wooded heights above day after day at all hours, but more as the shades of night are falling—what does this pure, serene, exalted strain mean but that, in Browning's familiar words,

God's in his heaven— All's right with the world!

The bird may sing for his mate and his brood alone, but what puts it into his heart to do that? Certainly it is good to have a mate and a brood!

A new season brings new experiences with the same old familiar birds, or new thoughts about them. This season I have had new impressions of our cuckoos, which are oftener heard than seen. Of the two species, the black-billed and the yellow-billed, the former prevails in the latitude of New England, and the latter farther south. We cannot hail our black-billed as "blithe newcomer," as Wordsworth does his cuckoo. "Doleful newcomer" would be a fitter title. There is nothing cheery or animated in his note, and he is about as much a "wandering voice" as is the European bird. He does not babble of sunshine and of flowers. He is a prophet of the rain, and the country people call him the rain crow. All his notes are harsh and verge on the weird. His nesting-instincts seem to lead him, or rather her, to the thorn-bushes as inevitably as the grass finch's lead her to the grass.

The cuckoo seems such an unpractical and inefficient bird that it is interesting to see it doing things. One of our young poets has a verse in which he sings of

The solemn priestly bumble-bee That marries rose to rose.

He might apply the same or similar adjectives to the cuckoo. Solemn and priestly, or at least monkish, it certainly is. It is a real recluse and suggests the druidical. If it ever frolics or fights, or is gay and cheerful like our other birds, I have yet to witness it.

During the last summer, day after day I saw one of the birds going by my door toward the clump of thorn-trees with a big green worm in its bill. One afternoon I followed it. I found the bird sitting on a branch very still and straight, with the worm still in its beak. I sat down on the tentlike thicket and watched him. Presently he uttered that harsh, guttural note of alarm or displeasure. Then after a minute or two he began to shake and bruise the worm. I waited to see him disclose the nest, but he would not, and finally devoured the worm. Then he hopped or flitted about amid the branches above me, uttering his harsh note every minute or two.

After a half-hour or more I gave it up and parted the curtain of thorny branches which separated the thicket from the meadow and stepped outside. I had moved along only a few paces when I discovered the nest on an outer branch almost in the sunshine. The mother bird was covering her half-grown young. As I put up my hand toward her, she slipped off, withdrew a few feet into the branches, and uttered her guttural calls.

In the nest were four young, one of them nearly ready to leave it, while another barely had its eyes open; the eldest one looked frightened, while the youngest lifted up its head with open mouth for food. The most mature one pointed its bill straight up and sat as still as if petrified. The whole impression one got from the nest and its contents was of something inept and fortuitous. But the cares of a family woke the parents up and they got down to real work in caring for their charge.

The young had a curious, unbirdlike aspect with threadlike yellow stripes, and looked as if they were wet or just out of the shell.

That strain of parasitism in the blood of the cuckoo—how long in the history of its race since it mastered it and became its own nest-builder? But a crude and barbarous nest-builder it certainly is. Its "procreant cradle" is built entirely of the twigs of the thorn-tree, with all their sharp needle-like spines upon them, some of the twigs a foot long, bristling with spines, certainly the most forbidding-looking nest and nursery I ever beheld—a mere platform of twigs about four inches across, carpeted with a little shredded brown fibrous material, looking as if made from the inner bark of some tree, perhaps this very thorn.

In the total absence of the tent caterpillar or apple-tree worm, which is their favorite food, cuckoos seem to succeed in finding a large green worm here in the orchard. In the beech woods they can find a forest worm that is riddling the leaves of the beeches. The robins are there in force and I hope the cuckoos will join them in the destruction of the worms. It is interesting to see the cuckoo fly by several times a day with a big green worm in its beak. Inefficient as it seems, here it is doing things. It is like seeing a monk at the plough-handle. It is a solemn creature; its note is almost funereal.

Our indigo bunting is as artful and secretive about its nesting-habits as any of the sparrows. The male bird seems to know that his brilliant color makes him a shining mark, and he keeps far away from the nest, singing at all hours of the day in a circle around it, the radius of which must be more than fifty yards. In one instance the nest was near the house, almost under the clothes-line, in a low blackberry-bush, partly masked by tall-growing daisies and timothy. I chanced to pass near it, when off went the little brown bird with her sharp, chiding manners. She is a very emphatic creature. It is yea and nay with her every time.

The male seems like a bit of the tropics. He is not a very pleasing singer, but an all-day one and an all-summer one. He is one of our rarer birds. In a neighborhood where you see scores of sparrows and goldfinches you will see only one pair of indigobirds. Their range of food is probably very limited. I have never chanced to see them taking food of any kind.

How crowded with life every square rod of the fields and woods is, if we look closely enough! Beneath my leafy canopy on the edge of the beech woods where I now and then seek refuge from a hot wave, reclining on a cushion of dry leaves or sitting with my back against a cool, smooth exposure of the outcropping place rock, I am in a mood to give myself up to a day of little things. And the little things soon come trooping or looping along.

I see a green measuring-worm taking the dimensions of the rim of my straw hat which lies on the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and rearing up on its hind legs and feeling the vacant space around it as a blind man might hunt for a lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its travels looking for a place in which to go through that wonderful transformation of creeping worm into a winged creature. In its higher stage of being it is a little silvery moth, barely an inch across, and, like other moths, has a brief season of life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some suitable place and then dying or falling a victim to the wood pewee or some other bird. After some minutes of groping and humping about on my hat and on dry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight.

A little later a large black worm comes along. It is an inch and a quarter long, and is engaged in the same quest as its lesser brother of the green, transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say, many thousand times, and what a terrible-looking monster we should have—a traveling arch of contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher than your head, and measuring off the ground a rod or more at a time, or standing twenty feet or more high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is a puny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead would quickly dispose.

With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by and watch it go looping up the trunk. Evidently it doesn't know just where it wants to go, but it finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up that. By chance it strikes one of the branches six feet from the ground and goes looping up that. Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits one of three small branches and climbs that a foot or more, and a dry twig, six or eight inches long, is seized and explored. At the end of it the creature tarries a minute or more, reaching out in the empty space, then turns back and hits a smaller twig on this twig about an inch long. This it explores over and over and sounds the depths that surround it, then loops back again to the end of the main twig it has just explored, profiting nothing by experience; then retraces its steps and measures off another small branch, and is finally lost to sight amid the leaves.

Has the course of life up through geologic time been in any way like this? There has been the push of life, the effort to get somewhere, but has there been no more guiding principle than in the case of this worm? The singular thing about the worm is its incessant reachings forth into surrounding space, searching, searching, sounding, sounding, as if to be sure that no chance to make a new connection is missed.

Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging by its hind feet, lets itself down and simulates a small dry twig, in which disguise it would deceive the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed the night posing as a twig.

Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon the stage were a hummingbird, a little red newt, and a wood frog. The hummer makes short work of everything: with a flash and a hum it is gone. This one seemed to be exploring the dry twigs for nesting-material, either spiders' webs or bits of lichen. For a brief moment it perched on a twig a few yards from me. My ardent wish could not hold it any longer. Truly a fairy bird, appearing and vanishing like a thought, familiar with the heart of all the flowers and taking no food grosser than their nectar, the winged jewel of the poets, the surprise and delight of all beholders—it came like a burnished meteor into my leafy alcove and was gone as quickly.

All sylvan things have a charm and delicacy of their own, all except the woodchuck; wherever he is, he is of the earth earthy. The wood frog is known only to woodsmen and farm boys. He is a real sylvan frog, as pretty as a bird, the color of the dry leaves, slender and elegant in form and quick and furtive in movement. My feet disturbed one in the bed of dry leaves. Slowly I moved my hand toward him and stroked his back with a twig. If you can tickle a frog's back in any way you put a spell upon him. He becomes quite hypnotized. He was instantly responsive to my passes. He began to swell and foreshorten, and when I used my finger instead of the twig, he puffed up very rapidly, rose up more upon his feet, and bowed his head. As I continued the titillation he began to give forth broken, subdued croaks, and I wondered if he were going to break out in song. He did not, but he seemed loath to go his way. How different he looked from the dark-colored frogs which in large numbers make a multitudinous croaking and clucking in the little wild pools in spring! He wakes up from his winter nap very early and is in the pools celebrating his nuptials as soon as the ice is off them, and then in two or three days he takes to the open woods and assumes the assimilative coloring of the dry leaves.

The little orange-colored salamander, a most delicate and highly colored little creature, is as harmless as a baby, and about as slow and undecided in its movements. Its cold body seems to like the warmth of your hand. Yet in color it is as rich an orange as the petal of the cardinal flower is a rich scarlet. It seems more than an outside color; it is a glow, and renders the creature almost transparent, an effect as uniform as the radiance of a precious stone. Its little, innocent-looking, three-toed foot, or three and a half toed—how unreptilian it looks through my pocket glass! A baby's hand is not more so. Its throbbing throat, its close-shut mouth, its jet-black eyes with a glint of gold above them—only a close view of these satisfies one.

Here is another remarkable transformation among the small wild folk. In the spring he is a dark, slimy, rather forbidding lizard in the pools; now he is more beautiful than the jewel-weed in the woods. This is said to be an immature form, which returns to the ponds and matures the next season; but whether it is the male or the female that assumes this bright hue, or both, I do not know. The coat seems to be its midsummer holiday uniform which is laid aside when it goes back to the marshes to hibernate in the fall.

Wild creatures so unafraid are sure to have means of protection that do not at once appear. In the case of the newt it is evidently an acrid or other disagreeable secretion, which would cause any animal to repent that took it in its mouth. It is even less concerned at being caught than is the skunk, or porcupine, or stink-bug.

In my retreat I was unwittingly intruding upon the domain of another sylvan denizen, the chipmunk. One afternoon one suddenly came up from the open field below me with his pockets full of provender of some sort; just what sort I wondered, as there was no grain or seeds or any dry food that it would be safe to store underground for the winter.

Beholding me sitting there within two yards of his den was a great surprise to him. He eyed me a long time—squirrel time—making little, spasmodic movements on the flat stone above his den. At a motion of my arm he darted into his hole with an exultant chip. He was soon out with empty pockets, and he then proceeded to sound his little tocsin of distrust or alarm so that all the sylvan folk might hear. As I made no sign, he soon ceased and went about his affairs.

All this time, behind and above me, concealed by a vase fern, reposed that lovely creature of the twilight, the luna moth, just out of her chrysalis, drying and inflating her wings. I chanced to lift the fern screen, and there was this marvel! Her body was as white and spotless as the snow, and her wings, with their Nile-green hue, as fair and delicate as—well, as only those of a luna moth can be. It is as immaculate as an angel. With a twig I carefully lifted her to the trunk of a maple sapling, where she clung and where I soon left her for the night.

While I was loitering there on the threshold of the woods, observing the small sylvan folk, about a hundred yards above me, near the highway, was a bird's nest of a kind I had not seen for more than a score of years, the nest of the veery, or Wilson's thrush. Some friends were camping there with their touring-car outfit in a fringe of the beech woods, and passed and repassed hourly within a few yards of the nest, and, although they each had sharp eyes and sharp ears, they had neither seen nor heard the birds during the two days they had been there.

While calling upon them I chanced to see the hurried movements of a thrush in the low trees six or seven yards away. The bird had food in its beak, which caused me to keep my eye upon it. It quickly flew down to a small clump of ferns that crowned a small knoll in the open, about ten feet from the border of the woods. As it did so, another thrush flew out of the ferns and disappeared in the woods. Their stealthy movements sent a little thrill through me, and I said, Here is a treasure. I parted the ferny screen, and there on the top of the small knoll was the nest with two half-fledged young.

A mowing-machine in a meadow in front of my door gave an unkind cut to a sparrow that had a nest in the clover near the wall. The mower chanced to see the nest before the sickle-bar had swept over it. It contained four young ones just out of the shell. At my suggestion the mower carefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The parent birds were not seen, but we naturally reasoned that they would come back and would alight upon the wall to make observations.

But that afternoon and the next morning passed, and we saw no anxious bird parents. The young lifted up their open mouths whenever I looked into the nest and seemed to be more contented than abandoned birds usually are. The next night was unseasonably cold, and I expected to find the nestlings dead in the morning; but they were not, and, strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather on a stone wall, they seemed to be doing well. Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them, I said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the road opposite to them and watched.

I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow came slyly up and dropped some food into an open mouth and disappeared.

Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in sauntering through the woods, his hat just brushes a vireo's nest? This was my experience one morning. The nest was like a natural growth, hanging there like a fairy basket in the fork of a beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery, brown and gray wood products, just high enough to escape prowling ground enemies and low enough to escape sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety was in its artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the green-and-brown solitude. The weaver had bent down one of the green leaves and made it a part of the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist. Then the dabs of white here and there, given by the fragments of spiders' cocoons—all helped to blend it with the flickering light and shade.

I gently bent down the branch and four confident heads with open mouths instantly appeared above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile was flitting about in the branches overhead, peering down upon me and uttering her anxious "quay quay," equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Get away!" This I soon did.

Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is soon quickly over. But the red-eyed vireo sings on into September—not an ecstatic strain, but a quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at his work.



VII

WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT

It was in May during the last term of his Presidency that Roosevelt asked me to go with him down to Pine Knot, Virginia, to help him name his birds. I stayed with him at the White House the night before we started. I remember that at dinner[1] there was an officer from the British army stationed in India, and the talk naturally turned on Indian affairs. I did not take part in it because I knew nothing about India, but Roosevelt was so conversant with Indian affairs and Indian history that you would think he had just been cramming on it, which I knew very well he had not. But that British officer was put on his mettle to hold his own. In fact, Roosevelt knew more about India and England's relation to it than the officer seemed to know. It was amazing to see the thoroughness of his knowledge about India.

[1] Mr. Burroughs's memory played him false here. The incident he speaks of was at a dinner in the White House, just before starting on the Yellowstone trip, in 1903. C. B.

The next morning we started off for Virginia, taking an early train.

Pine Knot is about one hundred miles from Washington. I think we left the train at Charlottesville, Virginia, and drove about ten miles to Pine Knot; the house is a big barnlike structure on the edge of the woods, a mile from the nearest farmhouse.

Before we reached there we got out of the wagon and walked, as there were a good many warblers in the trees—the spring migration was on. It was pretty warm; I took off my overcoat and the President insisted on carrying it. We identified several warblers there, among them the black-poll, the black-throated blue, and Wilson's black-cap. He knew them in the trees overhead as quickly as I did.

We reached Pine Knot late in the afternoon, but as he was eager for a walk we started off, he leading, as if walking for a wager. We went through fields and woods and briers and marshy places for a mile or more, when we stopped and mopped our brows and turned homeward without having seen many birds.

Mrs. Roosevelt took him to task, I think, when she saw the heated condition in which we returned, for not long afterwards he came to me and said: "Oom John, that was no way to go after birds; we were in too much of a hurry." I replied, "No, Mr. President, that isn't the way I usually go a-birding." His thirst for the wild and the woods, and his joy at returning to these after his winter in the White House, had evidently urged him on. He added, "We will try a different plan to-morrow."

So on the morrow we took a leisurely drive along the highways. Very soon we heard a wren which was new to me. "That's Bewick's wren," he said. We got out and watched it as it darted in and out of the fence and sang.

I asked him if he knew whether the little gray gnatcatcher was to be seen there. I had not seen or heard it for thirty years. "Yes," he replied, "I saw it the last time I was here, over by a spring run."

We walked over to some plum-trees where there had been a house at one time. No sooner had we reached the spot than he cried, "There it is now!" And sure enough, there it was in full song—a little bird the shape of a tiny catbird, with a very fine musical strain.

As we were walking in a field we saw some birds that were new to me. Roosevelt also was puzzled to know what they were till we went among them and stirred them up, discovering that they were females of the blue grosbeak, with some sparrows which we did not identify.

In the course of that walk he showed me a place where he had seen what he had thought at the time to be a flock of wild pigeons. He described how they flew, the swoop of their movements, and the tree where they alighted. I was skeptical, for it had long been thought that wild pigeons were extinct, but that fact had not impressed itself upon his mind. He said if he had known there could be any doubt about it, he would have observed them more closely. I was sorry that he had not, as it was one of the points on which I wanted indisputable evidence. We talked with the colored coachman about the birds, as he also had seen them. His description agreed with Roosevelt's, and he had seen wild pigeons in his youth; still I had my doubts. Subsequently Roosevelt wrote me that he had come to the conclusion that they had been mistaken about their being pigeons.

One day while there, as we were walking through an old weedy field, I chanced to spy, out of the corner of my eye, a nighthawk sitting on the ground only three or four yards away. I called Roosevelt's attention to it and said, "Now, Mr. President, I think with care you can drop your hat over that bird." So he took off his sombrero and crept up on the bird, and was almost in a position to let his hat drop over it when the bird flew to a near tree, alighting lengthwise on the branch as this bird always does. Roosevelt approached it again cautiously and almost succeeded in putting his hand upon it; the bird flew just in time to save itself from his hand.

One Sunday after church he took me to a field where he had recently seen and heard Lincoln's sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the dry grass for an hour or more, waiting for the sparrow, but it did not appear.

During my visit there we named over seventy-five species of birds and fowl, he knowing all of them but two, and I knowing all but two. He taught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler, and I taught him the swamp sparrow and one of the rarer warblers; I think it was the pine warbler. If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he would have been one ahead of me.

I remember talking politics a little with him while we were waiting for the birds, and, knowing that he was expecting Taft to be his successor, I expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill his shoes.

"Oh, yes, he can," he said confidently; "you don't know him as well as I do."

"Of course not," I admitted; "but my feeling is that, though Taft is an able and amiable man, he is not a born leader."

(I am glad to say that Mr. Taft's recent course in support of the proposed League of Nations has quite brought me around to Roosevelt's estimate of him.)

Pine Knot is a secluded place in the woods. One evening as we sat in the lamplight, he reading Lord Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the man-eating lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting near with her needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's hand came down on the table with such a bang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in a slightly nettled tone, "Why, my dear, what is the matter?"

He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would almost have demolished an African lion.

It occurred to me later that evening how risky it was for the President of the United States to be so unprotected—without a guard of any kind—in that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something of this to him, suggesting that some one might "kidnap" him.

"Oh," he answered, slapping his hand on his hip pocket, "I go armed, and they would have to be mighty quick to get the drop on me."

Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and listen to the night sounds in the Virginia woods, I went out around the cabin and almost immediately heard some animal run heavily through the woods not far from the house. I thought perhaps it was a neighboring dog, but, on speaking of it to Mrs. Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men came every night at nine o'clock and stood on guard till morning, spending the day at a farmhouse in that vicinity. She did not let the President know of this because it would irritate him.

The only flower we saw there which was new to me was the Indian pink. Roosevelt seemed to know the flowers as well as he did the birds. Pink moccasin-flowers and the bird's-foot violet were common in that locality.

On our return trip, Roosevelt's secretary being on the train, Roosevelt threw himself into the dictation of many letters, the wrens and the warblers already sidetracked for the business of the Administration.

I passed another night at the White House, and in the morning early we went out on the White House grounds to look for birds, our quest seeming to attract the puzzled attention of the passers-by.

"They often stare at me as though they thought me crazy," he said, "when they see me gazing up into the trees."

"Well, now they will think I am your keeper," I said.

"Yes, and I your nurse," laughed Mrs. Roosevelt.

When I left, Roosevelt gave me a list of the birds that we had seen while at Pine Knot and hoped that I would sometime write up the trip; in fact, for years after, whenever we would meet, almost the first thing he would say was, "Have you written up our Pine Knot trip yet, Oom John?" And his disappointment at my failure to do so was always unmistakable.[2]

[2] The following letter may be of interest in this connection. C. B.

DEAR OOM JOHN:

Did you ever get the pamphlet on Concealing Coloration? If not, I will send you another. I do hope that you will include in your coming volume of sketches a little account of the time you visited us at Pine Knot, our little Virginia camp, while I was President. I am very proud of you, Oom John, and I want the fact that you were my guest when I was President, and that you and I looked at birds together, recorded there—and don't forget that I showed you the blue grosbeak and the Bewick's wren, and almost all the other birds I said I would!

Ever yours,

THEODORE ROOSEVELT



VIII

A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY

One August a few years ago (1918) I set out with some friends for a two weeks' automobile trip into the land of Dixie—joy-riders with a luxurious outfit calculated to be proof against any form of discomfort.

We were headed for the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. I confess that mountains and men that do not smoke suit me better. Still I can stand both, and I started out with the hope that the great Appalachian range held something new and interesting for me. Yet I knew it was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does not warm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one was younger. More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latter half of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more in order. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for new scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw more strongly. Yet I was fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies.

Pennsylvania is an impressive State, so vast, so diversified, so forest-clad—the huge unbroken Alleghany ranges with their deep valleys cutting across it from north to south; the world of fine farms and rural homesteads in the eastern half, and the great mining and manufacturing interests in the western, the source of noble rivers; and the storehouse of many of Nature's most useful gifts to man.

The great Lincoln Highway, of course, follows the line of least resistance, but it has some formidable obstacles to surmount, and it goes at them very deliberately; and, in a powerful car, gives one a sense of easy victory. But I smile as I remember persons with lighter cars standing beside them at the foot of those long, winding ascents, nursing and encouraging them, as it were, and preparing them for the heavy task before them. An almost perfect road, worthy of its great namesake, but an Alleghany range which you cannot get around or through gives the automobilist pause.

As we were hurled along over the great highway the things I remember with the most satisfaction were the groups or processions of army trucks we met coming east. The doom of kaiserism was written large on that Lincoln Highway in that army of resolute, slow-moving army trucks. Dumb, khaki-colored fighters on wheels, staunch, powerful-looking, a host of them, rolling eastward toward the seat of war, some loaded with soldiers, some with camp equipments, and all hinting of the enormous resources the fatuous Kaiser had let loose upon himself in this far-off land. On other highways the weapons and materials of war were converging toward the great seaports in the same way. The silent, grim, processions—how impressive they were!

Pittsburgh is a city that sits with its feet in or very near the lake of brimstone and fire, and its head in the sweet country air of the hill-tops. I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than I ever did in any other city in this country. One is fairly suffocated at times driving along the public highway on a bright, breezy August day. It might well be the devil's laboratory. Out of such blackening and blasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and of destructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of hell-fire seemed fit and natural, but much more comes out of them—much that suggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck of the lake bottoms.

We live in an age of iron and have all we can do to keep the iron from entering our souls. Our vast industries have their root in the geologic history of the globe as in no other past age. We delve for our power, and it is all barbarous and unhandsome. When the coal and oil are all gone and we come to the surface and above the surface for the white coal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and the sunshine, how much more attractive life will be! Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We may never hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can hitch them to the mountain streams, and make the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then the silver age will displace the iron age.

The western end of Pennsylvania is one vast coal-mine. The farmer has only to dig into the side of the hill back of his house and take out his winter's fuel. I was surprised to see how smooth and gentle and grassy the hills looked. It is a cemetery of the old carboniferous gods, and it seems to have been prepared by gentle hands and watched over with kindly care. Good crops of hay and grain were growing above their black remains, and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way. The shuffling and the deformation of the earth's surface which attended the laying down of the coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of that wonderful husbandman, Father Time, has smoothed it all out.

Our first camp was at Greensborough, thirty or more miles southeast of Pittsburgh, an ideal place—a large, open oak grove on a gentle eminence well carpeted with grass, with wood and water in abundance. But the night was chilly. Folding camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodily warmth, and until you get the hang of them and equip yourself with plenty of blankets, Sleep enters your tent very reluctantly. She tarried with me but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I got up, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair beside it indulged in the "long, long thoughts" which belong to age much more than to youth. Youth was soundly and audibly sleeping in the tents with no thoughts at all.

The talk that first night around the camp-fire gave us an inside view of many things about which we were much concerned. The ship question was the acute question of the hour and we had with us for a few days Commissioner Hurley, of the Shipping Board, who could give us first-hand information, which he did to our great comfort.

Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where for that night we slept indoors.

On the following day one of the big cars had an accident—the fan broke, and the iron punctured the radiator. It looked as if we should be delayed until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh. We made our way slowly to Connellsville, where there was a good garage, but the best workmen there shook their heads; they said a new radiator was the only remedy. All four arms of the fan were broken off and there was no way to mend them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle. "Give me a chance," he said, and, pulling off his coat and rolling up his sleeves, he fell to work. In two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid of drills and copper wire the master mechanic had stitched the severed arms to their stubs, soldered up the hole in the radiator, and the disabled car was again in running order.

On August the 31st we made our camp on the banks of a large, clear creek in West Virginia called Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the road from the creek seemed attractive, and I got the reluctant consent of the widow who owned it to pitch our camp there, though her patch of roasting-ears near by made her hesitate; she had probably had experiences with gypsy parties, and was not impressed in our favor even when I gave her the names of two well-known men in our party. But Edison was not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, grassy margin of the creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring, eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated our mess-tent being pitched astride a shallow gully, and our individual tents elbowing one another in the narrow spaces between the boulders. But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what the camper-out wants. Pure elements—air, water, earth—these settle the question; Camp Horseshoe Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I got my first view of the nonpareil, or painted bunting—a bird rarely seen north of the Potomac.

An interesting object near our camp was an old, unused grist-mill, with a huge, decaying overshot oaken water-wheel. We all perched on the wheel and had our pictures taken.

At our lunch that day, by the side of a spring, a twelve-year-old girl appeared in the road above us with a pail of apples for sale. We invited her into our camp, an invitation she timidly accepted. We took all of her apples. I can see her yet with her shining eyes as she crumpled the new one-dollar bill which one of the party placed in her hand. She did not look at it; the feel of it told the story to her. We quizzed her about many things and got straight, clear-cut answers—a very firm, level-headed little maid. Her home was on the hill above us. We told her the names of some of the members of the party, and after she had returned home we saw an aged man come out to the gate and look down upon us. An added interest was felt whenever we came in contact with any of the local population. Birds and flowers and trees and springs and mills were something, but human flowers and rills of human life were better. I do not forget the other maiden, twelve or thirteen years old, to whom we gave a lift of a few miles on her way. She had been on a train five times, and once had been forty miles from home. Her mother was dead and her father lived in Pennsylvania, and she was living with her grandfather. When asked how far it was to Elkins she said, "Ever and ever so many miles."

The conspicuous roadside flowers for hundreds of miles, in fact, all the way from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, were the purple eupatorium, or Joe-Pye-weed, and the ironweed—stately, hardy growths, and very pleasing to look upon, the ironweed with its crimson purple, and the eupatorium with its massive head of soft, pinkish purple.

August the 22d we reached Cheat River in West Virginia, a large, clear mountain trout-brook. It crossed our path many times that day. Every mountain we crossed showed us Cheat River on the other side of it. It was flowing by a very devious course northwest toward the Ohio. We were working south and east.

We made our camp that night on the grounds of the Cheat Mountain Club, on the banks of the river—an ideal spot. The people at the big clubhouse gave us a hospitable welcome and added much to our comfort. I found the forests and streams of this part of West Virginia much like those of the Catskills, only on a larger scale, and the climate even colder. That night the mercury dropped to thirty. On June the 24th they had a frost that killed all their garden truck. The paper outlines of big trout which covered the walls in the main room of the clubhouse told the story of the rare sport the club-members have there. Evidently Cheat River deserves a better name.

The mountains and valleys of the Virginias all present a marked contrast to those of New York and Pennsylvania. They were not rubbed down and scooped out by the great ice-sheet that played such a part in shaping our northern landscapes. The valleys are markedly V-shaped, while ours are markedly U-shaped. The valley sides are so steep that they are rarely cultivated; the farm land for the most part lies on the tops of the broad, rounded hills, though we passed through some broad, open river valleys that held miles upon miles of beautiful farms in which hay and oats were still being harvested. Everywhere were large fields of buckwheat, white with bloom, and, I presume, humming with bees.

Here and there, by the rocks and the boulders strewn over the landscape, I saw evidences of large local glaciers that had hatched in these mountains during the great Ice Age.

We made camp at Bolar Springs on August the 23d—a famous spring, and a beautiful spot. We pitched our tents among the sugar maples, and some of the party availed themselves of the public bathhouse that spanned the overflow of the great spring. The next night our camp was at Wolf Creek, not far from the Narrows—a beautiful spot, marred only by its proximity to the dusty highway. It was on the narrow, grassy margin of a broad, limpid creek in which the fish were jumping. Some grazing horses disturbed my sleep early in the morning, but on the whole I have only pleasant memories of our camp at Wolf Creek.

We were near a week in Virginia and West Virginia, crossing many times the border between the two States, now in one, then in the other, all the time among the mountains, with a succession of glorious views from mountain-tops and along broad, fertile valleys. Now we were at Warm Springs, then at Hot Springs, then at White Sulphur, or at Sweet Water Springs. Soft water and hard water, cold water and warm water, mineral water and trout-streams, companion one another in these mountains. This part of the continent got much folded and ruptured and mixed up in the building, and the elements are unevenly distributed.

I think to most of us West Virginia had always been a rather hazy proposition, and we were glad to get a clear impression of it. We certainly became pretty intimate with the backbone of the continent—or with its many backbones, as its skeleton seems to be a very multiplex affair. The backbones of continents usually get broken in many places, but they serve their purpose just as well. In fact, our old Earth is more like an articulate than a vertebrate. Its huge shell is in many sections.

One of our camps we named Camp Lee, the name of the owner of the farm. One of the boys there, Robert E. Lee, made himself very useful in bringing wood and doing other errands.

A privation, which I think Mr. Edison and I felt more than did the others, was the scanty or delayed war news; the local papers, picked up here and there, gave only brief summaries, and when in the larger towns we could get some of the great dailies, the news was a day or two old. When one has hung on the breath of the newspapers for four exciting years, one is lost when cut off from them.

Such a trip as we were taking was, of course, a kind of a lark, especially to the younger members of the party. Upon Alleghany Mountain, near Barton, West Virginia, a farmer was cradling oats on a side-hill below the road. Our procession stopped, and the irrepressible Ford and Firestone were soon taking turns at cradling oats, but with doubtful success. A photograph shows the farmer and Mr. Ford looking on with broad smiles, watching Mr. Firestone with the fingers of the cradle tangled in the oats and weeds, a smile on his face also, but decidedly an equivocal smile—the trick was not so easy as it looked. Evidently Mr. Ford had not forgotten his cradling days on the home farm in Michigan.

Camp-life is a primitive affair, no matter how many conveniences you have, and things of the mind keep pretty well in the background. Occasionally around the camp-fire we drew Edison out on chemical problems, and heard formula after formula come from his lips as if he were reading them from a book. As a practical chemist he perhaps has few, if any, equals in this country. It was easy to draw out Mr. Ford on mechanical problems. There is always pleasure and profit in hearing a master discuss his own art.

A plunge into the South for a Northern man is in many ways a plunge into the Past. As soon as you get into Virginia there is a change. Things and people in the South are more local and provincial than in the North. For the most part, in certain sections, at least, the county builds the roads (macadam), and not the State. Hence you pass from a fine stone road in one county on to a rough dirt road in the next. Toll-gates appear. In one case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for the cars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills are seen along the way, driven by overshot wheels, and they are usually at work. A man or a boy on horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind him, going to or returning from the mill, is a frequent sight; or a woman on horseback, on a sidesaddle, with a baby in her arms, attracts your attention. Thus my grandmother went to mill in pioneer days in the Catskills.

The absence of bridges over the small streams was to us a novel feature. One of the party called these fording places, "Irish bridges." They are made smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble. Another Southern feature, indicating how far behind our Northern and more scientific farming the South still is, are the groups of small haystacks in the meadows with poles sticking out of their tops, letting the rain and the destructive bacteria into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features of the South much to be commended are the large families. In a farmhouse near which we made camp one night there were thirteen children, the eldest of whom was at the front in France. The schools were in session in late August, and the schoolrooms were well filled with pupils.

No doubt there are many peculiar local customs of which the hurrying tourist gets no inkling. At a station in the mountains of North Carolina a youngish, well-clad countryman, smoking his pipe, stood within a few feet of my friend and me and gazed at us with the simple, blank curiosity of a child. There was not the slightest gleam of intelligent interest, or self-consciousness in his face; it was the frank stare of a five-year-old boy. He belongs to a type one often sees in the mountain districts of the South—good human stuff, valiant as soldiers, and industrious as farmers, but so unacquainted with the great outside world, their unsophistication is shocking to see.

It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously equipped expedition going forth to seek discomfort, for discomfort in several forms—dust, rough roads, heat, cold, irregular hours, accidents—is pretty sure to come to those who go a-gypsying in the South. But discomfort, after all, is what the camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow weary of our luxuries and conveniences. We react against our complex civilization, and long to get back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality once more.

Our two chief characters presented many contrasts: Mr. Ford is more adaptive, more indifferent to places, than is Mr. Edison. His interest in the stream is in its potential water-power. He races up and down its banks to see its fall, and where power could be developed. He never ceases to lament so much power going to waste, and points out that if the streams were all harnessed, as they could easily be, farm labor everywhere, indoors and out, could be greatly lessened. He dilates upon the benefit that would accrue to every country neighborhood if the water-power that is going to waste in its valley streams were set to work in some useful industry, furnishing employment to the farmers and others in the winter seasons when the farms need comparatively little attention. He is always thinking in terms of the greatest good to the greatest number. He aims to place his inventions within reach of the great mass of the people. As with his touring-car, so with his tractor engine, he has had the same end in view. Nor does he forget the housewife. He has plans afoot for bringing power into every household that will greatly lighten the burden of the women-folk.

Partly owing to his more advanced age, but mainly, no doubt, to his meditative and introspective cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active than is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday lunch, or to make camp at the end of the day, Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or curl up, boy fashion, under a tree and take a nap, while Mr. Ford would inspect the stream or busy himself in getting wood for the fire. Mr. Ford is a runner and a high kicker, and frequently challenged some of the party to race with him. He is also a persistent walker, and from every camp, both morning and evening, he sallied forth for a brisk half-hour walk. His cheerfulness and adaptability on all occasions, and his optimism in regard to all the great questions, are remarkable. His good-will and tolerance are boundless. Notwithstanding his practical turn of mind, and his mastery of the mechanical arts and of business methods, he is through and through an idealist. As tender as a woman, he is much more tolerant. He looks like a poet, and conducts his life like a philosopher. No poet ever expressed himself through his work more completely than Mr. Ford has expressed himself through his car and his tractor engine. They typify him; not imposing, nor complex, less expressive of power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability, and universal service, they typify the combination of powers and qualities which make him a beneficent, a likable, and a unique personality. Those who meet him are invariably drawn to him. He is a national figure, and the crowds that flock around the car in which he is riding, as we pause in the towns through which we pass, are not paying their homage merely to a successful car-builder or business man, but to a beneficent human force, a great practical idealist whose good-will and spirit of universal helpfulness they have all felt. He has not only brought pleasure and profit into their lives, but has illustrated and written large upon the pages of current history a new ideal of the business man—that of a man whose devotion to the public good has been a ruling passion, and whose wealth has inevitably flowed from the depth of his humanitarianism. He has taken the people into partnership with him, and has eagerly shared with them the benefits that are the fruit of his great enterprise—a liberator, an emancipator, through channels that are so often used to enslave or destroy.

In one respect, essentially the same thing may be said of Mr. Edison: his first and leading thought has been, What can I do to make life easier and more enjoyable to my fellow-men? He is a great chemist, a trenchant and original thinker on all the great questions of life, though he has delved but little into the world of art and literature—a practical scientist, plus a meditative philosopher of profound insight. And his humor is delicious. We delighted in his wise and witty sayings. A good camper-out, he turns vagabond very easily, can go with hair disheveled and clothes unbrushed as long as the best of us, and can rough it week in and week out and wear that benevolent smile. He eats so little that I think he was not tempted by the chicken-roosts or turkey-flocks along the way, nor by the cornfields and apple-orchards, as some of us were, but he is second to none in his love for the open and for wild nature.

Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different type—the clean, clear-headed, conscientious business type; always on his job, always ready for whatever comes; in no sense an outdoor man; always at the service of those around him; a man generous, kindly, appreciative, devoted to his family and his friends; sound in his ideas—a manufacturer who has faithfully and honestly served his countrymen.

It is after he gets home that a meditative man really makes such a trip. All the unpleasant features are strained out or transformed. In retrospect it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am aware that I was often irritable and ungracious, but my companions were tolerant, and gave little heed to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, I look upon the whole trip with unmixed pleasure.



IX

UNDER GENIAL SKIES

I. A SUN-BLESSED LAND

The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the East and West, differ from each other almost as much as day differs from night. On the coast of southern California the dominant impression made upon one is of a world made up of three elements—sun, sea, and sky. The Pacific stretches away to the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulating floor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly than they do upon the Atlantic coast. It justifies its name. The passion and fury of the Eastern seas I got no hint of, even in winter. Its rocks, all that I saw of them, are soft and friable. The languid waves rapidly wear them down. They are non-strenuous rocks, lifted up out of a non-strenuous sea. The mountains that tower four or five thousand feet along the coast are of the same character. They are young, and while they carry their heads very high, they are soft and easily disintegrated compared with the granite of our coast.

As a rule, young mountains always wear the look of age, from their deep lines and jagged and angular character, while the really old mountains wear the look of youth from their comparative smoothness, their unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing lines. Time has taken the conceit all out of them.

The annual rainfall in the Far West is only about one third of what it is on the eastern side of the continent. And the soil is curiously adapted to the climate. Trees flourish and crops are grown there under arid conditions that would kill every green thing on the Atlantic seaboard. The soil is clay tempered with a little sand, probably less than ten per cent of it by weight is sand. I washed the clay out of a large lump of it and found the sand a curious heterogeneous mixture of small and large, light and dark grains of all possible forms. The soil does not bake as do our clay soils, and keeps moist when ours would almost defy the plough. Under cultivation it works up into a good tillable condition. Its capacity to retain moisture is remarkable, as if it were made for a scant rainfall. As a crop-producing soil, it has virtues which I am at a loss to account for. Root vegetables grown here have a sweetness, and above all, a tenderness, of which we know nothing in the East. Much sunshine in our climate makes root vegetables fibrous and tough.

I more than half believe that the wonderful sweetness of the bird songs here, such as that of the meadowlark, is more or less a matter of climate; the quality of the sunshine seems to have affected their vocal cords. The clear, piercing, shaft-like note of our meadowlark contrasts with that of the Pacific variety as our hard, brilliant blue skies contrast with the softer and tenderer skies of this sun-blessed land.

II. LAWN BIRDS

To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house on the Pacific coast is to have spread out before you at nearly all hours of the day a pretty spectacle of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes, titlarks, and plovers flutter across it as thick as autumn leaves—not so highly colored, yet showing a pleasing variety of tints, while the black phoebe flits about your porch and arbor vines.

Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably ten to one of any other variety of birds. Then the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, the tree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of which I am not sure are next in number.

Two species of birds from the Far North are usually represented by a solitary specimen of each, namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and the American pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its usual trim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker in the group. It walks about like our oven-bird with the same pretty movement of the head and a teetering motion of the hind part of the body.

While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman Expedition, I found the nest of the pipit far up on the side of a steep mountain. It was tucked in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of sea and mountain such as Alaska alone can afford.

But the most conspicuous and interesting of all these lawn birds are the ring-necked plovers, or killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or more of those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the shore and of the spirit of the tender, glancing April days, running over your lawn but a few yards from you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs, that curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down movement of their bodies, their shrill, disconsolate cries as they take flight, their beautiful and powerful wings and tail, and their mastery of the air—all arrest your attention or challenge your admiration. They bring the distant and the furtive to your very door. All climes and lands wait upon their wings. They fly around the world.

The plovers are the favored among birds. Beauty, speed, and immunity from danger from birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerial creatures! Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice? Is that the motion of the waves in its body? Is that the restlessness of the surf in its behavior?

However high and far it may fly, it has to come back to earth as we all do. It comes to our lawn to feed upon earthworms. The other birds are all busy picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors in the grass, but the plover is here for game that harbors in the turf. His methods are like those of the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. He scrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about over it, making frequent drives into it with his bill, but only now and then seizing the prey of which he is in search. When he does so, he shows the same judgment which the robin does under like conditions. He pulls slowly and evenly, so as to make sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let go its hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are wise about their food-supplies.

On the beach the wild life that I see is all on wings. There are the tranquil, effortless gliding herring gulls, snow-white beneath and pearl-gray above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful to look upon—airplanes that put forth their powers so subtly and so silently as to elude both eye and ear. At low tide I see large groups of their white and gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered rocks. Fresh water is at a premium on this coast, and the thirsty gulls avail themselves of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town, which discharge on the beach.

There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged birds, the brown pelicans, usually in a line of five or six, skimming low over the waves, shaping their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set wings for a long distance, rising and falling to clear the water—coasting, at it were, on a horizontal surface, and only at intervals beating the air for more power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds with wings and forms that suggest none of the grace and beauty of the usual shore birds. They do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to part the water, but they do both very successfully. When the pelican dives for his prey, he is for the moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts the water in superb style. When he recovers himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking creature as before.

A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors—a bird that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing—is the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the face of a sea-cliff a short distance above me.

I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make above the foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions. In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrate to as great depths. One does not crave an intimate acquaintance with them, but they are interesting as a part of the multitudinous life of the shore.

III. SILKEN CHAMBERS

The trap-door spider has furnished me with one of the most interesting bits of natural history I have found on the coast. An obliging sojourner near me from one of the Eastern States had discovered a large plot of uncultivated ground above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrows of these curious animals. One afternoon he volunteered to conduct me to the place.

The ground was scantily covered with low bushy and weedy growths. My guide warned me that the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed, found it so. It not only required an "eye as practiced as a blind man's touch," it required an eye practiced in this particular kind of detective work. My new friend conducted me down into the plot of ground and, stopping on the edge of it, said, "There is a nest within two feet of me." I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I knew how, fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went over the soil inch by inch with my eyes, but to no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and brown earth at my feet that suggested a trap-door, or any other device. I stooped low, but without avail. Then my guide stooped, and with a long needle pried up a semicircular or almost circular bit of the gray soil nearly the size of a silver quarter of a dollar, which hinged on the straight side of it, and behold—the entrance to the spider's castle! I was not prepared for anything so novel and artistic—a long silken chamber, about three quarters of an inch in diameter, concealed by a silken trap-door, an inch in its greatest diameter. The under side of the door, a dull white, the color of old ivory, is slightly convex, and its top is a brownish gray to harmonize with its surroundings, and slightly concave. Its edges are beveled so that it fits into the flaring or beveled end of the chamber with the utmost nicety. No joiner could have done it better. A faint semicircular raised line of clay as fine as a hair gave the only clue. The whole effect, when the door was held open, was of a pleasing secret suddenly revealed.

Then we walked about the place, and, knowing exactly what to look for, I gave my eyes another chance, but they were slow to profit by it. My guide detected one after another, and when I failed, he would point them put to me. But presently I caught on, as they say, and began to find them unaided.

We often found the lord of the manor on duty as doorkeeper, and in no mood to see strangers. He held his door down by inserting his fangs in two fine holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather, herself (as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree of resistance surprising in an insect. If one persists with a needle, there is often danger of breaking the door. But when one has made a crack wide enough to allow one to see the spider, she lets go her hold and rushes farther down in her burrow.

Occasionally we found one about half the usual size, indicating a young spider, but no other sizes. My guide said they only emerge from their tunnel at night, and proved it by an ingenious mechanical device made of straws attached to the door. When the door was opened, the straws lifted up, but did not fall down when it was closed. Whenever he found the straw still up in the morning he knew the door had been opened in the night.

As they are nocturnal in habits, they doubtless prey upon other insects, such as sow-bugs and crickets, which the night brings forth. Two bright specks upon the top of the head appear to be eyes, but they are so small they probably only serve to enable them to tell night from day. I think these spiders are mainly guided by a marvelously acute tactile sense. They probably feel the slightest vibration in the earth or air, unless they have a sixth sense of which we know nothing.

All their work, the building and repairing of their nests, as well as all their hunting, is done by night. This habit, in connection with their extreme shyness, makes the task of getting at their life-histories a difficult one. The inside of the burrow seems coated with a finer and harder substance than the soil in which they are dug. It is made on the spot, the spider mixing some secretion of her own with the clay, and working it up into a finer product.

The trap-door sooner or later wears out at the hinge, and is then discarded and a new door manufactured. We saw many nests with the old door lying near the entrance. The door is made of several layers of silk and clay, and is a substantial affair.

The spider families all have the gift of genius. Of what ingenious devices and arts are they masters! How wide their range! They spin, they delve, they jump, they fly. They are the original spinners. They have probably been on their job since carboniferous times, many millions of years before man took up the art. And they can spin a thread so fine that science makes the astonishing statement that it would take four millions of them to make a thread the caliber of one of the hairs of our head—a degree of delicacy to which man can never hope to attain.

Trap-doors usually mean surprises and stratagems, secrets and betrayals, and this species of the arachnids is proficient in all these things.