Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II A GIFT OF GOD Nothing in Nature has appealed to me quite so much of late years as the flight of a bird. Here is one of those very familiar sights of every open-air hour of our lives which we take for granted from early childhood. So familiar is it that even watchers of birds, and those who care greatly for the beauty and wonder of Nature, may pass through life without taking much note of it. True, the breathless-looking balancing feat of the red hawk, its head pointing into the wind with the sureness of a vane, rarely grows quite familiar. It has the constant power to make us wonder. Watching the hover of the hawk, and noting how, after the feat, it would sweep in a spiral flight upward, brought straight home to me one day a sense of the glory and triumph of wings; and I have found since that there are many common aerial feats of birds and insects as curious and charming to study as the windhover's, if not so striking at the first sight. We no sooner begin to take interest in natural flight than the beauty and diversity of it are seen fourfold. The charm of it grows with the watching. Because we are earth-tied, the soaringof the sea-bird, the quiver of the kestrel, and the straight hard drive of the partridge are felt to be the most perfect of all animal feats. All that is athletic and all that is aesthetic in movement here combine. The very magic of flight sometimes seems to me to sit and work in the tip of the wing. In proportion as the strong curved wing is lengthened and tapered to a fine tip, the flier has power over the air. In saying this I have not so much our wood and field birds in thought as those of the sea. For magic in the wing tip we should watch the soaring and sailing of the gull. By granite cliffs far west of the house in the woods I have w...