BIRDS AND BEES

SHARP EYES

AND OTHER PAPERS

By John Burroughs

With An Introduction

By Mary E. Burt

And A Biographical Sketch

CONTENTS

Biographical Sketch

Introduction By Mary E. Burt

Birds

 Bird Enemies

 The Tragedies of the Nests

Bees

 An Idyl of the Honey-Bee

 The Pastoral Bees

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

Nature chose the spring of the year for the time of John Burroughs'sbirth. A little before the day when the wake-robin shows itself, thatthe observer might be on hand for the sight, he was born in Roxbury, Delaware County, New York, on the western borders of the CatskillMountains; the precise date was April 3, 1837. Until 1863 he remainedin the country about his native place, working on his father's farm, getting his schooling in the district school and neighboring academies, and taking his turn also as teacher. As he himself has hinted, theoriginality, freshness, and wholesomeness of his writings are probablydue in great measure to the unliterary surroundings of his early life, which allowed his mind to form itself on unconventional lines, and tothe later companionships with unlettered men, which kept him in touchwith the sturdy simplicities of life. 

From the very beginnings of his taste for literature, the essay was hisfavorite form. Dr. Johnson was the prophet of his youth, but he soontransferred his allegiance to Emerson, who for many years remained his"master enchanter. " To cure himself of too close an imitation ofthe Concord seer, which showed itself in his first magazine article, Expression, he took to writing his sketches of nature, and about thistime he fell in with the writings of Thoreau, which doubtless confirmedand encouraged him in this direction. But of all authors and of all men, Walt Whitman, in his personality and as a literary force, seems to havemade the profoundest impression upon Mr. Burroughs, though doubtlessEmerson had a greater influence on his style of writing. 

Expression appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1860, and most of hiscontributions to literature have been in the form of papers firstpublished in the magazines, and afterwards collected into books. He morethan once paid tribute to his teachers in literature. His first book, now out of print, was Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person, published in 1867; and Whitman: A Study, which appeared in 1896, is amore extended treatment of the man and his poetry and philosophy. Birdsand Poets, too, contains a paper on Whitman, entitled The Flight of theEagle, besides an essay on Emerson, whom he also treated incidentally inhis paper, Matthew Arnold on Emerson and Carlyle, in Indoor Studies; andthe latter volume contains his essay on Thoreau. 

In the autumn of 1863 he went to Washington, and in the followingJanuary entered the Treasury Department. He was for some years anassistant in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and laterchief of the organization division of that Bureau. For some time he waskeeper of one of the vaults, and for a great part of the day his onlyduty was to be at his desk. In these leisure hours his mind traveled offinto the country, where his previous life had been spent, and with thehelp of his pen, always a faithful friend and magician, he lived overagain those happy days, now happier still with the glamour of allpast pleasures. In this way he wrote Wake-Robin and a part of WinterSunshine. It must not be supposed, however, that he was deprived ofoutdoor pleasures while at Washington. On the contrary, he enjoyed manywalks in the suburbs of the capital, and in those days the real countrycame up to the very edges of the city. His Spring at the Capital, WinterSunshine, A March Chronicle, and other papers bear the fruit of his lifeon the Potomac. He went to England in 1871 on business for the TreasuryDepartment, and again on his own account a dozen years later. The recordof the two visits is to be found mainly in his chapters on An OctoberAbroad, contained in the volume Winter Sunshine, and in the papersgathered into the volume Fresh Fields. 

He resigned his place in the Treasury in 1873, and was appointedreceiver of a broken national bank. Later, until 1885, his businessoccupation was that of a National Bank Examiner. An article contributedby him to The Century Magazine for March, 1881, on Broken Banks and LaxDirectors, is perhaps the only literary outcome of this occupation, butthe keen powers of observation, trained in the field of nature, couldnot fail to disclose themselves in analyzing columns of figures. Afterleaving Washington Mr. Burroughs bought a fruit farm at West Park, nearEsopus, on the Hudson, and there building his house from the stonesfound in his fields, has given himself the best conditions for thathumanizing of nature which constitutes the charm of his books. He wasmarried in 1857 to a lady living in the New York village where he wasat the time teaching. He keeps his country home the year round, onlyoccasionally visiting New York. The cultivation of grapes absorbs thegreater part of his time; but he has by no means given over letters. Hiswork, which has long found ready acceptance both at home and abroad, is now passing into that security of fame which comes from its entranceinto the school-life of American children. 

Besides his outdoor sketches and the other papers already mentioned, Mr. Burroughs has written a number of critical essays on life andliterature, published in Indoor Studies, and other volumes. He has alsotaken his readers into his confidence in An Egotistical Chapter, the final one of his Indoor Studies; and in the Introduction to theRiverside Edition of his writings he has given us further glimpses ofhis private intellectual life. 

Probably no other American writer has a greater sympathy with, and akeener enjoyment of, country life in all its phases--farming, camping, fishing, walking--than has John Burroughs. His books are redolent of thesoil, and have such "freshness and primal sweetness, " that we need notbe told that the pleasure he gets from his walks and excursions is by nomeans over when he steps inside his doors again. As he tells us on morethan one occasion, he finds he can get much more out of his outdoorexperiences by thinking them over, and writing them out afterwards. 

Numbers 28, 36, and 92 of the Riverside Literature Series consist ofselections from Mr. Burroughs's books. No. 28, which is entitled Birdsand Bees, is made up of Bird Enemies and The Tragedies of the Nests fromthe volume Signs and Seasons, An Idyl of the Honey-Bee from Pepacton, and The Pastoral Bees from Locusts and Wild Honey. The Introduction, by Miss Mary E. Burt, gives an account of the use of Mr. Burroughs'swritings in Chicago schools. 

In No. 36, Sharp Eyes, and Other Papers, the initial paper, SharpEyes, is drawn from Locusts and Wild Honey, The Apple comes from WinterSunshine, A Taste of Maine Birch and Winter Neighbors from Signs andSeasons, and Notes by the Way (on muskrats, squirrels, foxes, andwoodchucks) from Pepacton. 

The collection called A Bunch of Herbs, and Other Papers, forming No. 92 of the Series, was designed with special reference to what the authorhas to say of trees and flowers, and contains A Bunch of Herbs fromPepacton, Strawberries from Locusts and Wild Honey, A March Chronicleand Autumn Tides from Winter Sunshine, A Spray of Pine and A SpringRelish from Signs and Seasons, and English Woods: A Contrast from FreshFields. 

INTRODUCTION. 

It is seldom that I find a book so far above children that I cannotshare its best thought with them. So when I first took up one of JohnBurroughs's essays, I at once foresaw many a ramble with my pupilsthrough the enchanted country that is found within its breezy pages. Toread John Burroughs is to live in the woods and fields, and to associateintimately with all their little timid inhabitants; to learn that--

 "God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear, To give sign, we and they are his children, one family here. "

When I came to use Pepacton in my class of the sixth grade, I soonfound, not only that the children read better but that they came rapidlyto a better appreciation of the finer bits of literature in theirregular readers, while their interest in their new author grew quicklyto an enthusiasm. Never was a little brother or sister more real tothem than was "Peggy Mel" as she rushed into the hive laden with stolenhoney, while her neighbors gossiped about it, or the stately elm thatplayed sly tricks, or the log which proved to be a good bedfellowbecause it did not grumble. Burroughs's way of investing beasts, birds, insects, and inanimate things with human motives is very pleasingto children. They like to trace analogies between the human and theirrational, to think of a weed as a tramp stealing rides, of Nature as atell-tale when taken by surprise. 

The quiet enthusiasm of John Burroughs's essays is much healthierthan the over-wrought dramatic action which sets all the nervesa-quiver, --nerves already stimulated to excess by the comedies andtragedies forced upon the daily lives of children. It is especiallytrue of children living in crowded cities, shut away from the woods andhills, constant witnesses of the effects of human passion, that theyneed the tonic of a quiet literature rather than the stimulant of astormy or dramatic one, --a literature which develops gentle feelings, deep thought, and a relish for what is homely and homespun, rather thana literature which calls forth excited feelings. 

The essays in this volume are those in which my pupils have expressed anenthusiastic interest, or which, after careful reading, I have selectedfor future use. I have found in them few pages so hard as to requireover much study, or a too frequent use of the dictionary. JohnBurroughs, more than almost any other writer of the time, has aprevailing taste for simple words and simple constructions. "He thatruns may read" him. I have found many children under eleven years of agewho could read a whole page without hesitating. If I discover some wordswhich I foresee will cause difficulty, I place such on the blackboardand rapidly pronounce and explain them before the reading. Generally, however, I find the text the best interpreter of its words. What followsexplains what goes before, if the child is led to read on to the end ofthe sentence. It is a mistake to allow children to be frightened awayfrom choice reading by an occasional hard word. There is no better timethan his reading lesson in which to teach a child that the hard thingsof life are to be grappled with and overcome. A mistake also, I think, is that toilsome process of explanation which I sometimes find teachersfollowing, under the impression that it will be "parrot work" (as thestock phrase of the "institutes" has it) for the pupils to read anythingwhich they do not clearly and fully comprehend. Teachers' definitions, in such cases, I have often noticed, are no better than dictionarydefinitions, and surely everybody knows that few more fruitless thingsthan dictionary definitions are ever crammed into the memory of a child. Better far give free play to the native intelligence of the child, andtrust it to apprehend, though it may not yet comprehend nor be able toexpress its apprehension in definition. On this subject I am glad toquote so high an authority as Sir Walter Scott: "Indeed I rather suspectthat children derive impulses of a powerful and important kind fromreading things which they do not comprehend, and therefore that to writedown to children's understanding is a mistake. Set them on the scent andlet them puzzle it out. "

From time to time I have allowed my pupils to give me writtenreports from memory of these essays, and have often found these littlecompositions sparkling with pleasing information, or full of thatchildlike fun which is characteristic of the author. I have marked theerrors in these exercises, and have given them back to the childrento rewrite. Sometimes the second papers show careful correction-andsometimes the mistakes are partially neglected. Very often the childwishes to improve on the first composition, and so adds new blunders aswell as creates new interest. 

There is a law of self-preservation in Nature, which takes care ofmistakes. Every human soul reaches toward the light in the most directpath open to it, and will correct its own errors as soon as it isdeveloped far enough. There is no use in trying to force maturity;teachers who trouble children beyond all reason, and worry over theirmistakes, are fumbling at the roots of young plants that will grow ifthey are let alone long enough. 

The average mechanical work (spelling, construction of sentences, writing, etc. ) is better under this method than when more time isdevoted to the mechanics and less to the thought of composition. I haveseen many reports of Burroughs's essays from the pens of children morepleasing and reliable than the essays of some professional reviewers;in these papers I often find the children adding little suggestions oftheir own; as, "Do birds dream?" One of the girls says her bird "jumpsin its sleep. " A little ten year old writes, "Weeds are unusefulflowers, " and, "I like this book because there are real things in it. "Another thinks she "will look more carefully" if she ever gets out intothe country again. For the development of close observation and goodfeeling toward the common things of life, I know of no writings betterthan those of John Burroughs. 

MARY E. BURT

JONES SCHOOL, CHICAGO, Sept. 1, 1887. 

BIRDS. 

BIRD ENEMIES. 

How surely the birds know their enemies! See how the wrens and robinsand bluebirds pursue and scold the cat, while they take little or nonotice of the dog! Even the swallow will fight the cat, and, relying tooconfidently upon its powers of flight, sometimes swoops down so nearto its enemy that it is caught by a sudden stroke of the cat's paw. Theonly case I know of in which our small birds fail to recognize theirenemy is furnished by the shrike; apparently the little birds do notknow that this modest-colored bird is an assassin. At least, I havenever seen them scold or molest him, or utter any outcries at hispresence, as they usually do at birds of prey. Probably it is becausethe shrike is a rare visitant, and is not found in this part of thecountry during the nesting season of our songsters. 

But the birds have nearly all found out the trick the jay, and when hecomes sneaking through the trees in May and June in quest of eggs, heis quickly exposed and roundly abused. It is amusing to see the robinshustle him out of the tree which holds their nest. They cry "Thief, thief!" to the top of their voices as they charge upon him, and the jayretorts in a voice scarcely less complimentary as he makes off. 

The jays have their enemies also, and need to keep an eye on their owneggs. It would be interesting to know if jays ever rob jays, or crowsplunder crows; or is there honor among thieves even in the featheredtribes? I suspect the jay is often punished by birds which are otherwiseinnocent of nest-robbing. One season I found a jay's nest in a smallcedar on the side of a wooded ridge. It held five eggs, every one ofwhich had been punctured. Apparently some bird had driven its sharp beakthrough their shells, with the sole intention of destroying them, for nopart of the contents of the eggs had been removed. It looked like a caseof revenge; as if some thrush or warbler, whose nest had suffered atthe hands of the jays, had watched its opportunity, and had in this wayretaliated upon its enemies. An egg for an egg. The jays were lingeringnear, very demure and silent, and probably ready to join a crusadeagainst nest-robbers. 

The great bugaboo of the birds is the owl. The owl snatches them fromoff their roosts at night, and gobbles up their eggs and young in theirnests. He is a veritable ogre to them, and his presence fills them withconsternation and alarm. 

One season, to protect my early cherries I placed a large stuffed owlamid the branches of the tree. Such a racket as there instantly beganabout my grounds is not pleasant to think upon! The orioles and robinsfairly "shrieked out their affright. " The news instantly spread in everydirection, and apparently every bird in town came to see that owl inthe cherry-tree, and every bird took a cherry, so that I lost more fruitthan if I had left the owl in-doors. With craning necks and horrifiedlooks the birds alighted upon the branches, and between their screamswould snatch off a cherry, as if the act was some relief to theiroutraged feelings. 

The chirp and chatter of the young of birds which build in concealed orinclosed places, like the woodpeckers, the house wren, the high-hole, the oriole, is in marked contrast to the silence of the fledglingsof most birds that build open and exposed nests. The young of thesparrows, --unless the social sparrow be an exception, --warblers, fly-catchers, thrushes, never allow a sound to escape them; and onthe alarm note of their parents being heard, sit especially closeand motionless, while the young of chimney swallows, woodpeckers, andorioles are very noisy. The latter, in its deep pouch, is quite safefrom birds of prey, except perhaps the owl. The owl, I suspect, thrustsits leg into the cavities of woodpeckers and into the pocket-like nestof the oriole, and clutches and brings forth the birds in its talons. In one case which I heard of, a screech-owl had thrust its claw into acavity in a tree, and grasped the head of a red-headed woodpecker; beingapparently unable to draw its prey forth, it had thrust its own roundhead into the hole, and in some way became fixed there, and had thusdied with the woodpecker in its talons. 

The life of birds is beset with dangers and mishaps of which we knowlittle. One day, in my walk, I came upon a goldfinch with the tip of onewing securely fastened to the feathers of its rump, by what appearedto be the silk of some caterpillar. The bird, though uninjured, wascompletely crippled, and could not fly a stroke. Its little body was hotand panting in my hands, as I carefully broke the fetter. Then itdarted swiftly away with a happy cry. A record of all the accidentsand tragedies of bird life for a single season would show many curiousincidents. A friend of mine opened his box-stove one fall to kindle afire in it, when he beheld in the black interior the desiccated forms oftwo bluebirds. The birds had probably taken refuge in the chimney duringsome cold spring storm, and had come down the pipe to the stove, fromwhence they were unable to ascend. A peculiarly touching little incidentof bird life occurred to a caged female canary. Though unmated, it laidsome eggs, and the happy bird was so carried away by her feelings thatshe would offer food to the eggs, and chatter and twitter, trying, as itseemed, to encourage them to eat! The incident is hardly tragic, neitheris it comic. 

Certain birds nest in the vicinity of our houses and outbuildings, oreven in and upon them, for protection from their enemies, but they oftenthus expose themselves to a plague of the most deadly character. 

I refer to the vermin with which their nests often swarm, and which killthe young before they are fledged. In a state of nature this probablynever happens; at least I have never seen or heard of it happening tonests placed in trees or under rocks. It is the curse of civilizationfalling upon the birds which come too near man. The vermin, or the germof the vermin, is probably conveyed to the nest in hen's feathers, or instraws and hairs picked up about the barn or hen-house. A robin's nestupon your porch or in your summer-house will occasionally become anintolerable nuisance from the swarms upon swarms of minute vermin withwhich it is filled. The parent birds stem the tide as long as they can, but are often compelled to leave the young to their terrible fate. 

One season a phoebe-bird built on a projecting stone under the eavesof the house, and all appeared to go well till the young were nearlyfledged, when the nest suddenly became a bit of purgatory. The birdskept their places in their burning bed till they could hold no longer, when they leaped forth and fell dead upon the ground. 

After a delay of a week or more, during which I imagine the parentbirds purified themselves by every means known to them, the couple builtanother nest a few yards from the first, and proceeded to rear a secondbrood; but the new nest developed into the same bed of torment that thefirst did, and the three young birds, nearly ready to fly, perished asthey sat within it. The parent birds then left the place as if it hadbeen accursed. 

I imagine the smaller birds have an enemy in our native white-footedmouse, though I have not proof enough to convict him. But one season thenest of a chickadee which I was observing was broken up in a positionwhere nothing but a mouse could have reached it. The bird had chosen acavity in the limb of an apple-tree which stood but a few yards from thehouse. The cavity was deep, and the entrance to it, which was ten feetfrom the ground, was small. Barely light enough was admitted, when thesun was in the most favorable position, to enable one to make out thenumber of eggs, which was six, at the bottom of the dim interior. Whileone was peering in and trying to get his head out of his own light, thebird would startle him by a queer kind of puffing sound. She would notleave her nest like most birds, but really tried to blow or scare theintruder away; and after repeated experiments I could hardly refrainfrom jerking my head back when that little explosion of sound cameup from the dark interior. One night, when incubation was about halffinished, the nest was harried. A slight trace of hair or fur at theentrance led me to infer that some small animal was the robber. A weaselmight have done it, as they sometimes climb trees, but I doubt if eithera squirrel or a rat could have passed the entrance. 

Probably few persons have ever suspected the cat-bird of being anegg-sucker; I do not know that she has ever been accused of such athing, but there is something uncanny and disagreeable about her, whichI at once understood, when I one day caught her in the very act of goingthrough a nest of eggs. 

A pair of the least fly-catchers, the bird which says chebec, chebec, and is a small edition of the pewee, one season built their nest whereI had them for many hours each day under my observation. The nest wasa very snug and compact structure placed in the forks of a small mapleabout twelve feet from the ground. The season before, a red squirrelhad harried the nest of a wood-thrush in this same tree, and I wasapprehensive that he would serve the fly-catchers the same trick; so, as I sat with my book in a summer-house near by, I kept my loaded gunwithin easy reach. One egg was laid, and the next morning, as I made mydaily inspection of the nest, only a fragment of its empty shell wasto be found. This I removed, mentally imprecating the rogue of a redsquirrel. The birds were much disturbed by the event, but did not desertthe nest, as I had feared they would, but after much inspection of itand many consultations together, concluded, it seems, to try again. Twomore eggs were laid, when one day I heard the birds utter a sharp cry, and on looking up I saw a cat-bird perched upon the rim of the nest, hastily devouring the eggs. I soon regretted my precipitation in killingher, because such interference is generally unwise. It turned outthat she had a nest of her own with five eggs in a spruce-tree near mywindow. 

Then this pair of little fly-catchers did what I had never seen birdsdo before; they pulled the nest to pieces and rebuilt it in a peach-treenot many rods away, where a brood was successfully reared. The nest washere exposed to the direct rays of the noon-day sun, and to shield heryoung when the heat was greatest, the mother-bird would stand above themwith wings slightly spread, as other birds have been know to do underlike circumstances. 

To what extent the cat-bird is a nest-robber I have no evidence, butthat feline mew of hers, and that flirting, flexible tail, suggestsomething not entirely bird-like. 

Probably the darkest tragedy of the nest is enacted when a snakeplunders it. All birds and animals, so far I have observed, behave ina peculiar manner toward a snake. They seem to feel something of theloathing toward it that the human species experiences. The bark of a dogwhen he encounters a snake is different from that which he gives out onany other occasion; it is a mingled note of alarm, inquiry, and disgust. 

One day a tragedy was enacted a few yards from where I was sitting witha book; two song-sparrows trying to defend their nest against a blacksnake. The curious, interrogating note of a chicken who had suddenlycome upon the scene in his walk caused me to look up from my reading. There were the sparrows, with wings raised in a way peculiarlyexpressive of horror and dismay, rushing about a low clump of grass andbushes. Then, looking more closely, I saw the glistening form of theblack snake and the quick movement of his head as he tried to seize thebirds. The sparrows darted about and through the grass and weeds, tryingto beat the snake off. Their tails and wings were spread, and, pantingwith the heat and the desperate struggle, they presented a most singularspectacle. They uttered no cry, not a sound escaped them; they wereplainly speechless with horror and dismay. Not once did they drop theirwings, and the peculiar expression of those uplifted palms, as it were, I shall never forget. It occurred to me that perhaps here was a case ofattempted bird-charming on the part of the snake, so I looked on frombehind the fence. The birds charged the snake and harassed him fromevery side, but were evidently under no spell save that of courage indefending their nest. Every moment or two I could see the head and neckof the serpent make a sweep at the birds, when the one struck at wouldfall back, and the other would renew the assault from the rear. Thereappeared to be little danger that the snake could strike and hold one ofthe birds, though I trembled for them, they were so bold and approachedso near to the snake's head. Time and again he sprang at them, butwithout success. How the poor things panted, and held up their wingsappealingly! Then the snake glided off to the near fence, barelyescaping the stone which I hurled at him. I found the nest rifled andderanged; whether it had contained eggs or young I know not. The malesparrow had cheered me many a day with his song, and I blamed myself fornot having rushed at once to the rescue, when the arch enemy was uponhim. There is probably little truth in the popular notion that snakescharm birds. The black snake is the most subtle, alert, and devilish ofour snakes, and I have never seen him have any but young, helpless birdsin his mouth. 

We have one parasitical bird, the cow-bird, so-called because it walksabout amid the grazing cattle and seizes the insects which their heavytread sets going, which is an enemy of most of the smaller birds. Itdrops its egg in the nest of the song-sparrow, the social sparrow, thesnow-bird, the vireos, and the wood-warblers, and as a rule it is theonly egg in the nest that issues successfully. Either the eggs ofthe rightful owner of the nest are not hatched, or else the young areoverridden and overreached by the parasite and perish prematurely. 

Among the worst enemies of our birds are the so-called "collectors, " menwho plunder nests and murder their owners in the name of science. Notthe genuine ornithologist, for no one is more careful of squanderingbird life than he; but the sham ornithologist, the man whose vanity oraffectation happens to take an ornithological turn. He is seized with anitching for a collection of eggs and birds because it happens to be thefashion, or because it gives him the air of a man of science. But in themajority of cases the motive is a mercenary one; the collector expectsto sell these spoils of the groves and orchards. Robbing the nestsand killing birds becomes a business with him. He goes about itsystematically, and becomes expert in circumventing and slaying oursongsters. Every town of any considerable size is infested with one ormore of these bird highwaymen, and every nest in the country round aboutthat the wretches can lay hands on is harried. Their professional termfor a nest of eggs is "a clutch, " a word that well expresses the work oftheir grasping, murderous fingers. They clutch and destroy in the germthe life and music of the woodlands. Certain of our natural historyjournals are mainly organs of communication between these human weasels. They record their exploits at nest-robbing and bird-slaying in theircolumns. One collector tells with gusto how he "worked his way" throughan orchard, ransacking every tree, and leaving, as he believed, not onenest behind him. He had better not be caught working his way through myorchard. Another gloats over the number of Connecticut warblers--a rarebird--he killed in one season in Massachusetts. Another tells how amocking-bird appeared in southern New England and was hunted down byhimself and friend, its eggs "clutched, " and the bird killed. Who knowshow much the bird lovers of New England lost by that foul deed? Theprogeny of the birds would probably have returned to Connecticut tobreed, and their progeny, or a part of them, the same, till in time thefamous songster would have become a regular visitant to New England. In the same journal still another collector describes minutely how heoutwitted three humming birds and captured their nests and eggs, --aclutch he was very proud of. A Massachusetts bird harrier boasts of hisclutch of the egg's of that dainty little warbler, the blue yellow-back. One season he took two sets, the next five sets, the next four sets, besides some single eggs, and the next season four sets, and says hemight have found more had he had more time. One season he took, inabout twenty days, three from one tree. I have heard of a collector whoboasted of having taken one hundred sets of the eggs of the marsh wren, in a single day; of another, who took in the same time, thirty nestsof the yellow-breasted chat; and of still another, who claimed to havetaken one thousand sets of eggs of different birds in one season. Alarge business has grown up under the influence of this collectingcraze. One dealer in eggs has those of over five hundred species. Hesays that his business in 1883 was twice that of 1882; in 1884 it wastwice that of 1883, and so on. Collectors vie with each other in theextent and variety of their cabinets. They not only obtain eggs in sets, but aim to have a number of sets of the same bird so as to show allpossible variations. I hear of a private collection that contains twelvesets of kingbirds' eggs, eight sets of house-wrens' eggs, four setsmocking-birds' eggs, etc. ; sets of eggs taken in low trees, high trees, medium trees; spotted sets, dark sets, plain sets, and light sets of thesame species of bird. Many collections are made on this latter plan. 

Thus are our birds hunted and cut off and all in the name of science; asif science had not long ago finished with these birds. She has weighedand measured, and dissected, and described them, and their nests, andeggs, and placed them in her cabinet; and the interest of science andof humanity now demands that this wholesale nest-robbing cease. Theseincidents I have given above, it is true, are but drops in the bucket, but the bucket would be more than full if we could get all the facts. Where one man publishes his notes, hundreds, perhaps thousands, saynothing, but go as silently about their nest-robbing as weasels. 

It is true that the student of ornithology often feels compelled to takebird-life. It is not an easy matter to "name all the birds without agun, " though an opera-glass will often render identification entirelycertain, and leave the songster unharmed; but once having mastered thebirds, the true ornithologist leaves his gun at home. This view of thecase may not be agreeable to that desiccated mortal called the "closetnaturalist, " but for my own part the closet naturalist is a person withwhom I have very little sympathy. He is about the most wearisome andprofitless creature in existence. With his piles of skins, his cases ofeggs, his laborious feather-splitting, and his outlandish nomenclature, he is not only the enemy of the birds but the enemy of all those whowould know them rightly. 

Not the collectors alone are to blame for the diminishing numbers of ourwild birds, but a large share of the responsibility rests upon quite adifferent class of persons, namely, the milliners. False taste in dressis as destructive to our feathered friends as are false aims in science. It is said that the traffic in the skins of our brighter plumagedbirds, arising from their use by the milliners, reaches to hundreds ofthousands annually. I am told of one middleman who collected from theshooters in one district, in four months, seventy thousand skins. Itis a barbarous taste that craves this kind of ornamentation. Think of awoman or girl of real refinement appearing upon the street with her headgear adorned with the scalps of our songsters!

It is probably true that the number of our birds destroyed by man is buta small percentage of the number cut off by their natural enemies; butit is to be remembered that those he destroys are in addition to thosethus cut off, and that it is this extra or artificial destruction thatdisturbs the balance of nature. The operation of natural causes keepsthe birds in check, but the greed of the collectors and milliners tendsto their extinction. 

I can pardon a man who wishes to make a collection of eggs and birdsfor his own private use, if he will content himself with one or twospecimens of a kind, though he will find any collection much lesssatisfactory and less valuable than he imagines, but the professionalnest-robber and skin collector should be put down, either by legislationor with dogs and shotguns. 

I have remarked above that there is probably very little truth inthe popular notion that snakes can "charm" birds. But two of mycorrespondents have each furnished me with an incident from his ownexperience, which seems to confirm the popular belief. One of themwrites from Georgia as follows:--

"Some twenty-eight years ago I was in Calaveras County, California, engaged in cutting lumber. One day in coming out of the camp or cabin, my attention was attracted to the curious action of a quail in the air, which, instead of flying low and straight ahead as usual, was some fiftyfeet high, flying in a circle, and uttering cries of distress. I watchedthe bird and saw it gradually descend, and following with my eye in aline from the bird to the ground saw a large snake with head erect andsome ten or twelve inches above the ground, and mouth wide open, andas far as I could see, gazing intently on the quail (I was about thirtyfeet from the snake). The quail gradually descended, its circles growingsmaller and smaller and all the time uttering cries of distress, untilits feet were within two or three inches of the mouth of the snake; whenI threw a stone, and though not hitting the snake, yet struck the groundso near as to frighten him, and he gradually started off. The quail, however, fell to the ground, apparently lifeless. I went forward andpicked it up and found it was thoroughly overcome with fright, itslittle heart beating as if it would burst through the skin. Afterholding it in my hand a few moments it flew away. I then tried to findthe snake, but could not. I am unable to say whether the snake wasvenomous or belonged to the constricting family, like the black snake. I can well recollect it was large and moved off rather slow. As I hadnever seen anything of the kind before, it made a great impression onmy mind, and after the lapse of so long a time, the incident appears asvivid to me as though it had occurred yesterday. "

It is not probable that the snake had its mouth open; its darting tonguemay have given that impression. 

The other incident comes to me from Vermont. "While returning fromchurch in 1876, " says the writer, "as I was crossing a bridge. . . Inoticed a striped snake in the act of charming a song-sparrow. They wereboth upon the sand beneath the bridge. The snake kept his head swayingslowly from side to side, and darted his tongue out continually. Thebird, not over a foot away, was facing the snake, hopping from one footto the other, and uttering a dissatisfied little chirp. I watched themtill the snake seized the bird, having gradually drawn nearer. As heseized it, I leaped over the side of the bridge; the snake glided awayand I took up the bird, which he had dropped. It was too frightened totry to fly and I carried it nearly a mile before it flew from my openhand. "

If these observers are quite sure of what they saw, then undoubtedlysnakes have the power to draw birds within their grasp. I remember thatmy mother told me that while gathering wild strawberries she had on oneoccasion come upon a bird fluttering about the head of a snake as ifheld there by a spell. On her appearance, the snake lowered its head andmade off, and the panting bird flew away. A neighbor of mine killeda black snake which had swallowed a full-grown red squirrel, probablycaptured by the same power of fascination. 

THE TRAGEDIES OF THE NESTS

The life of the birds, especially of our migratory song-birds, is aseries of adventures and of hair-breadth escapes by flood and field. Very few of them probably die a natural death, or even live out halftheir appointed days. The home instinct is strong in birds as it is inmost creatures; and I am convinced that every spring a large numberof those which have survived the Southern campaign return to their oldhaunts to breed. A Connecticut farmer took me out under his porch, oneApril day, and showed me a phoebe bird's nest six stories high. The samebird had no doubt returned year after year; and as there was room foronly one nest upon her favorite shelf, she had each season reared a newsuperstructure upon the old as a foundation. I have heard of a whiterobin--an albino--that nested several years in succession in the suburbsof a Maryland city. A sparrow with a very marked peculiarity of song Ihave heard several seasons in my own locality. But the birds do not alllive to return to their old haunts: the bobolinks and starlings run agauntlet of fire from the Hudson to the Savannah, and the robins andmeadow-larks and other song-birds are shot by boys and pot-hunters ingreat numbers, --to say nothing of their danger from hawks and owls. Butof those that do return, what perils beset their nests, even in the mostfavored localities! The cabins of the early settlers, when the countrywas swarming with hostile Indians, were not surrounded by such dangers. The tender households of the birds are not only exposed to hostileIndians in the shape of cats and collectors, but to numerous murderousand bloodthirsty animals, against whom they have no defense butconcealment. They lead the darkest kind of pioneer life, even in ourgardens and orchards, and under the walls of our houses. Not a day or anight passes, from the time the eggs are laid till the young are flown, when the chances are not greatly in favor of the nest being rifled andits contents devoured, --by owls, skunks, minks, and coons at night, andby crows, jays, squirrels, weasels, snakes, and rats during the day. Infancy, we say, is hedged about by many perils; but the infancy ofbirds is cradled and pillowed in peril. An old Michigan settler toldme that the first six children that were born to him died; malaria andteething invariably carried them off when they had reached a certainage; but other children were born, the country improved, and by and bythe babies weathered the critical period and the next six lived and grewup. The birds, too, would no doubt persevere six times and twice sixtimes, if the season were long enough, and finally rear their family, but the waning summer cuts them short, and but a few species have theheart and strength to make even the third trial. 

The first nest-builders in spring, like the first settlers near hostiletribes, suffer the most casualties. A large portion of the nests ofApril and May are destroyed; their enemies have been many months withouteggs and their appetites are keen for them. It is a time, too, whenother food is scarce, and the crows and squirrels are hard put. But thesecond nests of June, and still more the nests of July and August, areseldom molested. It is rarely that the nest of the goldfinch or thecedar-bird is harried. 

My neighborhood on the Hudson is perhaps exceptionally unfavorable asa breeding haunt for birds, owing to the abundance of fish-crows andof red squirrels; and the season of which this chapter is mainly achronicle, the season of 1881, seems to have been a black-letter oneeven for this place, for at least nine nests out of every ten that Iobserved during that spring and summer failed of their proper issue. From the first nest I noted, which was that of a bluebird, --built(very imprudently I thought at the time) in a squirrel-hole in a decayedapple-tree, about the last of April, and which came to naught, eventhe mother-bird, I suspect, perishing by a violent death, --to the last, which was that of a snow-bird, observed in August, among the Catskills, deftly concealed in a mossy bank by the side of a road that skirted awood, where the tall thimble blackberries grew in abundance, from whichthe last young one was taken, when it was about half grown, by somenocturnal walker or daylight prowler, some untoward fate seemed hoveringabout them. It was a season of calamities, of violent deaths, of pillageand massacre, among our feathered neighbors. For the first time Inoticed that the orioles were not safe in their strong, pendent nests. Three broods were started in the apple-trees, only a few yards fromthe house, where, for previous seasons, the birds had nested withoutmolestation; but this time the young were all destroyed when about halfgrown. Their chirping and chattering, which was so noticeable one day, suddenly ceased the next. The nests were probably plundered at night, and doubtless by the little red screech-owl, which I know is a denizenof these old orchards, living in the deeper cavities of the trees. Theowl could alight on the top of the nest, and easily thrust his murderousclaw down into its long pocket and seize the young and draw them forth. The tragedy of one of the nests was heightened, or at least made morepalpable, by one of the half-fledged birds, either in its attempt toescape or while in the clutches of the enemy, being caught and entangledin one of the horse-hairs by which the nest was stayed and held to thelimb above. There it hung bruised and dead, gibbeted to its own cradle. This nest was the theatre of another little tragedy later in the season. Some time in August a bluebird, indulging its propensity to peep andpry into holes and crevices, alighted upon it and probably inspected theinterior; but by some unlucky move it got its wings entangled in thissame fatal horse-hair. Its efforts to free itself appeared only toresult in its being more securely and hopelessly bound; and there itperished; and there its form, dried and embalmed by the summer heats, was yet hanging in September, the outspread wings and plumage showingnearly as bright as in life. 

A correspondent writes me that one of his orioles got entangled in acord while building her nest, and that though by the aid of a ladderhe reached and liberated her, she died soon afterward. He also founda "chippie" (called also "hair bird") suspended from a branch by ahorse-hair, beneath a partly constructed nest. I heard of a cedar-birdcaught and destroyed in the same way, and of two young bluebirds, around whose legs a horse-hair had become so tightly wound that the legswithered up and dropped off. The birds became fledged, and left the nestwith the others. Such tragedies are probably quite common. 

Before the advent of civilization in this country, the oriole probablybuilt a much deeper nest than it usually does at present. When now itbuilds in remote trees and along the borders of the woods, its nest, I have noticed, is long and gourd-shaped; but in orchards and neardwellings it is only a deep cup or pouch. It shortens it up inproportion as the danger lessens. Probably a succession of disastrousyears, like the one under review, would cause it to lengthen it againbeyond the reach of owl's talons or jay-bird's beak. 

The first song-sparrow's nest I observed in the spring of 1881 was inthe field under a fragment of a board, the board being raised from theground a couple of inches by two poles. It had its full complement ofeggs, and probably sent forth a brood of young birds, though as to thisI cannot speak positively, as I neglected to observe it further. It waswell sheltered and concealed, and was not easily come at by any of itsnatural enemies, save snakes and weasels. But concealment often availslittle. In May, a song-sparrow, that had evidently met with disasterearlier in the season, built its nest in a thick mass of woodbineagainst the side of my house, about fifteen feet from the ground. Perhaps it took the hint from its cousin, the English sparrow. The nestwas admirably placed, protected from the storms by the overhangingeaves and from all eyes by the thick screen of leaves. Only by patientlywatching the suspicious bird, as she lingered near with food in herbeak, did I discover its whereabouts. That brood is safe, I thought, beyond doubt. But it was not; the nest was pillaged one night, eitherby an owl, or else by a rat that had climbed into the vine, seekingan entrance to the house. The mother-bird, after reflecting upon herill-luck about a week, seemed to resolve to try a different system oftactics and to throw all appearances of concealment aside. She built anest few yards from the house beside the drive, upon a smooth pieceof greensward. There was not a weed or a shrub or anything whatever toconceal it or mark its site. The structure was completed and incubationhad begun before I discovered what was going on. "Well, well, " I said, looking down upon the bird almost at my feet, "this is going to theother extreme indeed; now, the cats will have you. " The desperate littlebird sat there day after day, looking like a brown leaf pressed down inthe short green grass. As the weather grew hot, her position became verytrying. It was no longer a question of keeping the eggs warm, but ofkeeping them from roasting. The sun had no mercy on her, and she fairlypanted in the middle of the day. In such an emergency the male robinhas been known to perch above the sitting female and shade her with hisoutstretched wings. But in this case there was no perch for the malebird, had he been disposed to make a sunshade of himself. I thought tolend a hand in this direction myself, and so stuck a leafy twig besidethe nest. This was probably an unwise interference; it guided disasterto the spot; the nest was broken up, and the mother-bird was probablycaught, as I never saw her afterward. 

For several previous summers a pair of kingbirds had reared, unmolested, a brood of young in an apple-tree, only a few yards from the house; butduring this season disaster overtook them also. The nest was completed, the eggs laid, and incubation had begun, when, one morning aboutsunrise, I heard cries of distress and alarm proceed from the oldapple-tree. Looking out of the window I saw a crow, which I knew to be afish-crow, perched upon the edge of the nest, hastily bolting the eggs. The parent birds, usually so ready for the attack, seemed over-comewith grief and alarm. They fluttered about in the most helpless andbewildered manner, and it was not till the robber fled on my approachthat they recovered themselves and charged upon him. The crow scurriedaway with upturned, threatening head, the furious kingbirds fairly uponhis back. The pair lingered around their desecrated nest for severaldays, almost silent, and saddened by their loss, and then disappeared. They probably made another trial elsewhere. 

The fish-crow only fishes when it has destroyed all the eggs and youngbirds it can find. It is the most despicable thief and robber amongour feathered creatures. From May to August, it is gorged with thefledglings of the nest. It is fortunate that its range is so limited. In size it is smaller than the common crow, and is a much less nobleand dignified bird. Its caw is weak and feminine--a sort of split andabortive caw, that stamps it the sneak-thief it is. This crow iscommon farther south, but is not found in this State, so far as I haveobserved, except in the valley of the Hudson. 

One season a pair of them built a nest in a Norway Spruce that stoodamid a dense growth of other ornamental trees near a large unoccupiedhouse. They sat down amid plenty. The wolf established himself in thefold. The many birds--robins, thrushes, finches, vireos, pewees--thatseek the vicinity of dwellings (especially of these large countryresidences with their many trees and park-like grounds), for the greatersafety of their eggs and young, were the easy and convenient victimsof these robbers. They plundered right and left, and were not disturbedtill their young were nearly fledged, when some boys, who had longbefore marked them as their prize, rifled the nest. 

The song-birds nearly all build low; their cradle is not upon thetree-top. It is only birds of prey that fear danger from below more thanfrom above, and that seek the higher branches for their nests. A linefive feet from the ground would run above more than half the nests, andone ten feet would bound more than three fourths of them. It is onlythe oriole and the wood pewee that, as a rule, go higher than this. Thecrows and jays and other enemies of the birds have learned to explorethis belt pretty thoroughly. But the leaves and the protective coloringof most nests baffle them as effectually, no doubt as they do theprofessional oölogist. The nest of the red-eyed vireo is one of the mostartfully placed in the wood. It is just beyond the point where the eyenaturally pauses in its search; namely, on the extreme end of the lowestbranch of the tree, usually four or five feet from the ground. One looksup and down through the tree, --shoots his eye-beams into it as he mightdischarge his gun at some game hidden there, but the drooping tip ofthat low horizontal branch--who would think of pointing his piece justthere? If a crow or other marauder were to alight upon the branch orupon those above it, the nest would be screened from him by the largeleaf that usually forms a canopy immediately above it. The nest-hunterstanding at the foot of the tree and looking straight before him, mightdiscover it easily, were it not for its soft, neutral gray tint whichblends so thoroughly with the trunks and branches of trees. Indeed, I think there is no nest in the woods--no arboreal nest--so wellconcealed. The last one I saw was a pendent from the end of a low branchof a maple, that nearly grazed the clapboards of an unused hay-barn ina remote backwoods clearing. I peeped through a crack and saw the oldbirds feed the nearly fledged young within a few inches of my face. Andyet the cow-bird finds this nest and drops her parasitical egg init. Her tactics in this as in other cases are probably to watch themovements of the parent bird. She may often be seen searching anxiouslythrough the trees or bushes for a suitable nest, yet she may stilloftener be seen perched upon some good point of observation watchingthe birds as they come and go about her. There is no doubt that, in manycases, the cow-bird makes room for her own illegitimate egg in the nestby removing one of the bird's own. When the cow-bird finds two or moreeggs in a nest in which she wishes to deposit her own, she will removeone of them. I found a sparrow's nest with two sparrow's eggs and onecow-bird's egg, another egg lying a foot or so below it on the ground. I replaced the ejected egg, and the next day found it again removed, andanother cow-bird's egg in its place; I put it back the second time, whenit was again ejected, or destroyed, for I failed to find it anywhere. Very alert and sensitive birds like the warblers often bury the strangeegg beneath a second nest built on top of the old. A lady, living in thesuburbs of an eastern city, one morning heard cries of distress from apair of house-wrens that had a nest in a honeysuckle on her front porch. On looking out of the window, she beheld this little comedy--comedy fromher point of view, but no doubt grim-tragedy from the point of viewof the wrens; a cow-bird with a wren's egg in its beak running rapidlyalong the walk with the outraged wrens forming a procession behind it, screaming, scolding, and gesticulating as only these voluble littlebirds can. The cow-bird had probably been surprised in the act ofviolating the nest, and the wrens were giving her a piece of theirsminds. 

Every cow-bird is reared at the expense of two or more song-birds. For every one of these dusky little pedestrians there amid the grazingcattle there are two more sparrows, or vireos, or warblers, the less. It is a big price to pay--two larks for a bunting-two sovereigns fora shilling; but Nature does not hesitate occasionally tocontradict herself in just this way. The young of the cow-bird isdisproportionately large and aggressive, one might say hoggish. When disturbed it will clasp the nest and scream, and snap its beakthreateningly. One hatched out in a song-sparrow's nest which was undermy observation, and would soon have overridden and overborne the youngsparrow, which came out of the shell a few hours later, had I notinterfered from time to time and lent the young sparrow a helping hand. Every day I would visit the nest and take the sparrow out from under thepot-bellied interloper and place it on top so that presently it was ableto hold its own against its enemy. Both birds became fledged and leftthe nest about the same time. Whether the race was an even one afterthat, I know not. 

I noted but two warblers' nests during that season, one of theblack-throated blue-back and one of the redstart, --the latter built inan apple-tree but a few yards from a little rustic summer-house whereI idle away many summer days. The lively little birds, darting andflashing about, attracted my attention for a week before I discoveredtheir nest. They probably built it by working early in the morning, before I appeared upon the scene, as I never saw them with material intheir beaks. Guessing from their movements that the nest was in a largemaple that stood near by, I climbed the tree and explored it thoroughly, looking especially in the forks of the branches, as the authorities saythese birds build in a fork. But no nest could I find. Indeed, how canone by searching find a bird's nest? I overshot the mark; the nest wasmuch nearer me, almost under my very nose, and I discovered it, not bysearching but by a casual glance of the eye, while thinking of othermatters. The bird was just settling upon it as I looked up from my bookand caught her in the act. The nest was built near the end of a long, knotty, horizontal branch of an apple-tree, but effectually hidden bythe grouping of the leaves; it had three eggs, one of which proved to bebarren. The two young birds grew apace, and were out of the nest earlyin the second week; but something caught one of them the first night. The other probably grew to maturity, as it disappeared from the vicinitywith its parents after some days. 

The blue-back's nest was scarcely a foot from the ground, in a littlebush situated in a low, dense wood of hemlock and beech and maple, amid the Catskills, --a deep, massive, elaborate structure, in which thesitting bird sank till her beak and tail alone were visible above thebrim. It was a misty, chilly day when I chanced to find the nest, andthe mother-bird knew instinctively that it was not prudent to leave herfour half incubated eggs uncovered and exposed for a moment. When I satdown near the nest she grew very uneasy, and after trying in vainto decoy me away by suddenly dropping from the branches and draggingherself over the ground as if mortally wounded, she approached andtimidly and half doubtingly covered her eggs within two yards of whereI sat. I disturbed her several times to note her ways. There came to besomething almost appealing in her looks and manner, and she would keepher place on her precious eggs till my outstretched hand was within afew feet of her. Finally, I covered the cavity of the nest with a dryleaf. This she did not remove with her beak, but thrust her head deftlybeneath it and shook it off upon the ground. Many of her sympathizingneighbors, attracted by her alarm note, came and had a peep at theintruder and then flew away, but the male bird did not appear upon thescene. The final history of this nest I am unable to give, as I did notagain visit it till late in the season, when, of course, it was empty. 

Years pass without my finding a brown-thrasher's nest; it is not a nestyou are likely to stumble upon in your walk; it is hidden as a miserhides his gold, and watched as jealously. The male pours out his richand triumphant song from the tallest tree he can find, and fairlychallenges you to come and look for his treasures in his vicinity. Butyou will not find them if you go. The nest is somewhere on the outercircle of his song; he is never so imprudent as to take up his standvery near it. The artists who draw those cosy little pictures of abrooding mother-bird with the male perched but a yard away in full song, do not copy from nature. The thrasher's nest I found thirty or fortyrods from the point where the male was wont to indulge in his brilliantrecitative. It was in an open field under a low ground-juniper. My dogdisturbed the sitting bird as I was passing near. The nest could beseen only by lifting up and parting away the branches. All the arts ofconcealment had been carefully studied. It was the last place you wouldthink of looking, and, if you did look, nothing was visible but thedense green circle of the low-spreading juniper. When you approached, the bird would keep her place till you had begun to stir the branches, when she would start out, and, just skimming the ground, make a brightbrown line to the near fence and bushes. I confidently expected thatthis nest would escape molestation, but it did not. Its discovery bymyself and dog probably opened the door for ill luck, as one day, notlong afterward, when I peeped in upon it, it was empty. The proud songof the male had ceased from his accustomed tree, and the pair were seenno more in that vicinity. 

The phoebe-bird is a wise architect, and perhaps enjoys as great animmunity from danger, both in its person and its nest, as any otherbird. Its modest, ashen-gray suit is the color of the rocks where itbuilds, and the moss of which it makes such free use gives to its nestthe look of a natural growth or accretion. But when it comes into thebarn or under the shed to build, as it so frequently does, the moss israther out of place. Doubtless in time the bird will take the hint, andwhen she builds in such places will leave the moss out. I noted but twonests, the summer I am speaking of: one, in a barn, failed of issue, onaccount of the rats, I suspect, though the little owl may have been thedepredator; the other, in the woods, sent forth three young. This latternest was most charmingly and ingeniously placed. I discovered it whilein quest of pond-lilies, in a long, deep level stretch of water in thewoods. A large tree had blown over at the edge of the water, and itsdense mass of up-turned roots, with the black, peaty soil filling theinterstices, was like the fragment of a wall several feet high, risingfrom the edge of the languid current. In a niche in this earthy wall, and visible and accessible only from the water, a phoebe had built hernest, and reared her brood. I paddled my boat up and came alongsideprepared to take the family aboard. The young, nearly ready to fly, werequite undisturbed by my presence, having probably been assured that nodanger need be apprehended from that side. It was not a likely place forminks, or they would not have been so secure. 

I noted but one nest of the wood pewee, and that, too, like so manyother nests, failed of issue. It was saddled upon a small dry limb of aplane-tree that stood by the roadside, about forty feet from the ground. Every day for nearly a week, as I passed by I saw the sitting bird uponthe nest. Then one morning she was not in her place, and on examinationthe nest proved to be empty--robbed, I had no doubt, by the redsquirrels, as they were very abundant in its vicinity, and appeared tomake a clean sweep of every nest. The wood pewee builds an exquisitenest, shaped and finished as if cast in a mould. It is modeledwithout and within with equal neatness and art, like the nest of thehumming-bird and the little gray gnat-catcher. The material is muchmore refractory than that used by either of these birds, being, in thepresent case, dry, fine cedar twigs; but these were bound into a shapeas rounded and compact as could be moulded out of the most plasticmaterial. Indeed, the nest of this bird looks precisely like a large, lichen-covered, cup-shaped excrescence of the limb upon which it isplaced. And the bird, while sitting, seems entirely at ease. Most birdsseem to make very hard work of incubation. It is a kind of martyrdomwhich appears to tax all their powers of endurance. They have such afixed, rigid, predetermined look, pressed down into the nest and asmotionless as if made of cast-iron. But the wood pewee is an exception. She is largely visible above the rim of the nest. Her attitude is easyand graceful; she moves her head this way and that, and seems to takenote of whatever goes on about her; and if her neighbor were to drop infor a little social chat, she could doubtless do her part. In fact, she makes light and easy work of what, to most other birds, is such aserious and engrossing matter. If it does not look like play with her, it at least looks like leisure and quiet contemplation. 

There is no nest-builder that suffers more from crows and squirrelsand other enemies than the wood-thrush. It builds as openly andunsuspiciously as if it thought the whole world as honest as itself. Its favorite place is the fork of a sapling, eight or ten feet fromthe ground, where it falls an easy prey to every nest-robber that comesprowling through the woods and groves. It is not a bird that skulks andhides, like the cat-bird, the brown-thrasher, the chat, or the cheewink, and its nest is not concealed with the same art as theirs. Our thrushesare all frank, open-mannered birds; but the veery and the hermit buildupon the ground, where they at least escape the crows, owls, and jays, and stand a better chance to be overlooked, by the red squirrel andweasel also; while the robin seeks the protection of dwellings andout-buildings. For years I have not known the nest of a wood-thrushto succeed. During the season referred to I observed but two, bothapparently a second attempt, as the season was well advanced, and bothfailures. In one case, the nest was placed in a branch that an appletree, standing near a dwelling, held out over the highway. The structurewas barely ten feet above the middle of the road, and would just escapea passing load of hay. It was made conspicuous by the use of a largefragment of newspaper in its foundation--an unsafe material to buildupon in most cases. Whatever else the press may guard, this particularnewspaper did not guard this nest from harm. It saw the egg and probablythe chick, but not the fledgeling. A murderous deed was committedabove the public highway, but whether in the open day or under coverof darkness I have no means of knowing. The frisky red squirrel wasdoubtless the culprit. The other nest was in a maple sapling, withina few yards of the little rustic summer-house already referred to. Thefirst attempt of the season, I suspect, had failed in a more secludedplace under the hill; so the pair had come up nearer the house forprotection. The male sang in the trees near by for several days beforeI chanced to see the nest. The very morning, I think, it was finished, I saw a red squirrel exploring a tree but a few yards away; he probablyknew what the singing meant as well as I did. I did not see the insideof the nest, for it was almost instantly deserted, the female havingprobably laid a single egg, which the squirrel had devoured. 

If I were a bird, in building my nest I should follow the example of thebobolink, placing it in the midst of a broad meadow, where there was nospear of grass, or flower or growth unlike another to mark its site. Ijudge that the bobolink escapes the dangers to which I have advertedas few or no other birds do. Unless the mowers come along at an earlierdate than she has anticipated, that is, before July lst, or a skunk goesnosing through the grass, which is unusual, she is as safe as bird wellcan be in the great open of nature. She selects the most monotonous anduniform place she can find amid the daisies or the timothy and clover, and places her simple structure upon the ground in the midst of it. There is no concealment, except as the great conceals the little, asthe desert conceals the pebble, as the myriad conceals the unit. Youmay find the nest once, if your course chances to lead you across itand your eye is quick enough to note the silent brown bird as she dartsquickly away; but step three paces in the wrong direction, and yoursearch will probably be fruitless. My friend and I found a nest byaccident one day, and then lost it again one minute afterward. I movedaway a few yards to be sure of the mother-bird, charging my friend notto stir from his tracks. When I returned, he had moved two paces, hesaid (he had really moved four), and we spent a half hour stoopingover the daisies and the buttercups, looking for the lost clew. Wegrew desperate, and fairly felt the ground all over with our hands, butwithout avail. I marked the spot with a bush, and came the next day, andwith the bush as a centre, moved about it in slowly increasing circles, covering, I thought, nearly every inch of ground with my feet, andlaying hold of it with all the visual power that I could command, tillmy patience was exhausted, and I gave up, baffled. I began to doubtthe ability of the parent birds themselves to find it, and so secretedmyself and watched. After much delay, the male bird appeared with foodin his beak, and satisfying himself that the coast was clear, droppedinto the grass which I had trodden down in my search. Fastening my eyeupon a particular meadow-lily, I walked straight to the spot, bent down, and gazed long and intently into the grass. Finally my eye separated thenest and its young from its surroundings. My foot had barely missed themin my search, but by how much they had escaped my eye I could not tell. Probably not by distance at all, but simply by unrecognition. They werevirtually invisible. The dark gray and yellowish brown dry grass andstubble of the meadow-bottom were exactly copied in the color of thehalf-fledged young. More than that, they hugged the nest so closely andformed such a compact mass, that though there were five of them, theypreserved the unit of expression, --no single head or form was defined;they were one, and that one was without shape or color, andnot separable, except by closest scrutiny, from the one of themeadow-bottom. That nest prospered, as bobolinks' nests doubtlessgenerally do; for, notwithstanding the enormous slaughter of the birdsduring their fall migrations by Southern sportsmen, the bobolinkappears to hold its own, and its music does not diminish in our Northernmeadows. 

Birds with whom the struggle for life is the sharpest seem to be moreprolific than those whose nest and young are exposed to fewer dangers. The robin, the sparrow, the pewee, etc. , will rear, or make the attemptto rear, two and sometimes three broods in a season; but the bobolink, the oriole, the kingbird, the goldfinch, the cedar-bird, the birds ofprey, and the woodpeckers, that build in safe retreats, in the trunksof trees, have usually but a single brood. If the boblink reared twobroods, our meadows would swarm with them. 

I noted three nests of the cedar-bird in August in a single orchard, all productive, but all with one or more unfruitful eggs in them. Thecedar-bird is the most silent of our birds having but a single finenote, so far as I have observed, but its manners are very expressive attimes. No bird known to me is capable of expressing so much silent alarmwhile on the nest as this bird. As you ascend the tree and draw near it, it depresses its plumage and crest, stretches up its neck, and becomesthe very picture of fear. Other birds, under like circumstances, hardlychange their expression at all till they launch into the air, when bytheir voice they express anger rather than alarm. 

I have referred to the red squirrel as a destroyer of the eggs and youngof birds. I think the mischief it does in this respect can hardly beover estimated. Nearly all birds look upon it as their enemy, and attackand annoy it when it appears near their breeding haunts. Thus, I haveseen the pewee, the cuckoo, the robin, and the wood-thrush pursuing itwith angry voice and gestures. A friend of mine saw a pair of robinsattack one in the top of a tall tree so vigorously that they caused itto lose its hold, when it fell to the ground, and was so stunned by theblow as to allow him to pick it up. If you wish the birds to breed andthrive in your orchard and groves, kill every red squirrel that infeststhe place; kill every weasel also. The weasel is a subtle and arch enemyof the birds. It climbs trees and explores them with great ease andnimbleness. I have seen it do so on several occasions. One day myattention was arrested by the angry notes of a pair of brown-thrashersthat were flitting from bush to bush along an old stone row in a remotefield. Presently I saw what it was that excited them--three large redweasels, or ermines coming along the stone wall, and leisurely and halfplayfully exploring every tree that stood near it. They had probablyrobbed the thrashers. They would go up the trees with great ease, andglide serpent-like out upon the main branches. When they descended thetree they were unable to come straight down, like a squirrel, but wentaround it spirally. How boldly they thrust their heads out of the wall, and eyed me and sniffed me, as I drew near, --their round, thin ears, their prominent, glistening, bead-like eyes, and the curving, snake-likemotions of the head and neck being very noticeable. They looked likeblood-suckers and egg-suckers. They suggested something extremelyremorseless and cruel. One could understand the alarm of the rats whenthey discover one of these fearless, subtle, and circumventing creaturesthreading their holes. To flee must be like trying to escape deathitself. I was one day standing in the woods upon a flat stone, in whatat certain seasons was the bed of a stream, when one of these weaselscame undulating along and ran under the stone upon which I was standing. As I remained motionless, he thrust his wedge-shaped head, and turned itback above the stone as if half in mind to seize my foot; then he drewback, and presently went his way. These weasels often hunt in packs likethe British stoat. When I was a boy, my father one day armed me withan old musket and sent me to shoot chipmunks around the corn. Whilewatching the squirrels, a troop of weasels tried to cross a bar-waywhere I sat, and were so bent on doing it that I fired at them, boy-like, simply to thwart their purpose. One of the weasels wasdisabled by my shot, but the troop was not discouraged, and, aftermaking several feints to cross, one of them seized the wounded one andbore it over, and the pack disappeared in the wall on the other side. 

Let me conclude this chapter with two or three notes about this alertenemy of the birds and the lesser animals, the weasel. 

A farmer one day heard a queer growling sound in the grass; onapproaching the spot he saw two weasels contending over a mouse; eachhad hold of the mouse pulling in opposite directions, and were soabsorbed in the struggle that the farmer cautiously put his hands downand grabbed them both by the back of the neck. He put them in a cage, and offered them bread and other food. This they refused to eat, but ina few days one of them had eaten the other up, picking his bones cleanand leaving nothing but the skeleton. 

The same farmer was one day in his cellar when two rats came out of ahole near him in great haste, and ran up the cellar wall and along itstop till they came to a floor timber that stopped their progress, whenthey turned at bay, and looked excitedly back along the course they hadcome. In a moment a weasel, evidently in hot pursuit of them, came outof the hole, and seeing the farmer, checked his course and darted back. The rats had doubtless turned to give him fight, and would probably havebeen a match for him. 

The weasel seems to track its game by scent. A hunter of my acquaintancewas one day sitting in the woods, when he saw a red squirrel run withgreat speed up a tree near him, and out upon a long branch, from whichhe leaped to some rocks, and disappeared beneath them. In a moment aweasel came in full course upon his trail, ran up the tree, then outalong the branch, from the end of which he leaped to the rocks as thesquirrel did, and plunged beneath them. 

Doubtless the squirrel fell a prey to him. The squirrel's best gamewould have been to have kept to the higher tree-tops, where he couldeasily have distanced the weasel. But beneath the rocks he stood a verypoor chance. I have often wondered what keeps such an animal as theweasel in check, for weasels are quite rare. They never need go hungry, for rats and squirrels and mice and birds are everywhere. They probablydo not fall a prey to any other animal, and very rarely to man. Butthe circumstances or agencies that check the increase of any species ofanimal are, as Darwin says, very obscure and but little known. 

BEES. 

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 

There is no creature with which man has surrounded himself that seemsso much like a product of civilization, so much like the result ofdevelopment on special lines and in special fields, as the honey-bee. Indeed, a colony of bees, with their neatness and love of order, theirdivision of labor, their public spiritedness, their thrift, theircomplex economies and their inordinate love of gain, seems as farremoved from a condition of rude nature as does a walled city or acathedral town. Our native bee, on the other hand, "the burly, dozinghumble-bee, " affects one more like the rude, untutored savage. Hehas learned nothing from experience. He lives from hand to mouth. Heluxuriates in time of plenty, and he starves in times of scarcity. He lives in a rude nest or in a hole in the ground, and in smallcommunities; he builds a few deep cells or sacks in which he stores alittle honey and bee-bread for his young, but as a worker in wax he isof the most primitive and awkward. The Indian regarded the honey-bee asan ill-omen. She was the white man's fly. In fact she was the epitome ofthe white man himself. She has the white man's craftiness, his industry, his architectural skill, his neatness and love of system, his foresight;and above all his eager, miserly habits. The honeybee's great ambitionis to be rich, to lay up great stores, to possess the sweet of everyflower that blooms. She is more than provident. Enough will not satisfyher, she must have all she can get by hook or by crook. She comes fromthe oldest country, Asia, and thrives best in the most fertile andlong-settled lands. 

Yet the fact remains that the honey-bee is essentially a wild creature, and never has been and cannot be thoroughly domesticated. Its properhome is the woods, and thither every new swarm counts on going;and thither many do go in spite of the care and watchfulness of thebee-keeper. If the woods in any given locality are deficient in treeswith suitable cavities, the bees resort to all sorts of makeshifts; theygo into chimneys, into barns and outhouses, under stones, into rocks, and so forth. Several chimneys in my locality with disused flues aretaken possession of by colonies of bees nearly every season. One day, while bee-hunting, I developed a line that went toward a farm-housewhere I had reason to believe no bees were kept. I followed it up andquestioned the farmer about his bees. He said he kept no bees, but thata swarm had taken possession of his chimney, and another had gone underthe clapboards in the gable end of his house. He had taken a large lotof honey out of both places the year before. Another farmer told me thatone day his family had seen a number of bees examining a knot-hole inthe side of his house; the next day as they were sitting down todinner their attention was attracted by a loud humming noise, whenthey discovered a swarm of bees settling upon the side of the house andpouring into the knot-hole. In subsequent years other swarms came to thesame place. 

Apparently, every swarm of bees before it leaves the parent hive sendsout exploring parties to look up the future home. The woods and grovesare searched through and through, and no doubt the privacy of many asquirrel and many a wood mouse is intruded upon. What cozy nooks andretreats they do spy out, so much more attractive than the painted hivein the garden, so much cooler in summer and so much warmer in winter!

The bee is in the main an honest citizen; she prefers legitimate toillegitimate business; she is never an outlaw until her proper sourcesof supply fail; she will not touch honey as long as honey-yieldingflowers can be found; she always prefers to go to the fountain-head, anddislikes to take her sweets at second hand. But in the fall, after theflowers have failed, she can be tempted. The bee-hunter takes advantageof this fact; he betrays her with a little honey. He wants to steal herstores, and he first encourages her to steal his, then follows the thiefhome with her booty. This is the whole trick of the bee-hunter. The beesnever suspect his game, else by taking a circuitous route they couldeasily baffle him. But the honey-bee has absolutely no wit or cunningoutside of her special gifts as a gatherer and storer of honey. She is asimple-minded creature, and can be imposed upon by any novice. Yet it isnot every novice that can find a bee-tree. The sportsman may track hisgame to its retreat by the aid of his dog, but in hunting the honey-beeone must be his own dog, and track his game through an element in whichit leaves no trail. It is a task for a sharp, quick eye, and may testthe resources of the best wood-craft. One autumn when I devoted muchtime to this pursuit, as the best means of getting at nature and theopen-air exhilaration, my eye became so trained that bees were nearlyas easy to it as birds. I saw and heard bees wherever I went. One day, standing on a street corner in a great city, I saw above the trucksand the traffic a line of bees carrying off sweets from some grocery orconfectionery shop. 

One looks upon the woods with a new interest when he suspects they holda colony of bees. What a pleasing secret it is; a tree with a heartof comb-honey, a decayed oak or maple with a bit of Sicily or MountHymettus stowed away in its trunk or branches; secret chambers wherelies hidden the wealth of ten thousand little freebooters, great nuggetsand wedges of precious ore gathered with risk and labor from every fieldand wood about. 

But if you would know the delights of bee-hunting, and how many sweetssuch a trip yields beside honey, come with me some bright, warm, lateSeptember or early October day. It is the golden season of the year, and any errand or pursuit that takes us abroad upon the hills or bythe painted woods and along the amber colored streams at such a time isenough. So, with haversacks filled with grapes and peaches and applesand a bottle of milk, --for we shall not be home to dinner, --and armedwith a compass, a hatchet, a pail, and a box with a piece of comb-honeyneatly fitted into it--any box the size of your hand with a lid will donearly as well as the elaborate and ingenious contrivance of the regularbee-hunter--we sally forth. Our course at first lies along the highway, under great chestnut-trees whose nuts are just dropping, then through anorchard and across a little creek, thence gently rising through a longseries of cultivated fields toward some high, uplying land, behind whichrises a rugged wooded ridge or mountain, the most sightly point in allthis section. Behind this ridge for several miles the country is wild, wooded, and rocky, and is no doubt the home of many wild swarms ofbees. What a gleeful uproar the robins, cedar-birds, high-holes, andcow black-birds make amid the black cherry-trees as we pass along. Theraccoons, too, have been here after black cherries, and we see theirmarks at various points. Several crows are walking about a newlysowed wheat field we pass through, and we pause to note their gracefulmovements and glossy coats. I have seen no bird walk the ground withjust the same air the crow does. It is not exactly pride; there is nostrut or swagger in it, though perhaps just a little condescension; itis the contented, complaisant, and self-possessed gait of a lord overhis domains. All these acres are mine, he says, and all these crops; menplow and sow for me, and I stay here or go there, and find life sweetand good wherever I am. The hawk looks awkward and out of place on theground; the game birds hurry and skulk, but the crow is at home andtreads the earth as if there were none to molest him or make him afraid. 

The crows we have always with us, but it is not every day or everyseason that one sees an eagle. Hence I must preserve the memory of one Isaw the last day I went bee-hunting. As I was laboring up the side of amountain at the head of a valley, the noble bird sprang from the top ofa dry tree above me and came sailing directly over my head. I saw himbend his eye down upon me, and I could hear the low hum of his plumage, as if the web off every quill in his great wings vibrated in his strong, level flight. I watched him as long as my eye could hold him. When hewas fairly clear of the mountain he began that sweeping spiral movementin which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went without once breaking hismajestic poise till he appeared to sight some far-off alien geography, when he bent his course thitherward and gradually vanished in the bluedepths. The eagle is a bird of large ideas, he embraces long distances;the continent is his home. I never look upon one without emotion; Ifollow him with my eye as long as I can. I think of Canada, of the GreatLakes, of the Rocky Mountains, of the wild and sounding sea-coast. Thewaters are his, and the woods and the inaccessible cliffs. He piercesbehind the veil of the storm, and his joy is height and depth and vastspaces. 

We go out of our way to touch at a spring run in the edge of the woods, and are lucky to find a single scarlet lobelia lingering there. It seemsalmost to light up the gloom with its intense bit of color. Besidea ditch in a field beyond we find the great blue lobelia (Lobeliasyphilitica), and near it amid the weeds and wild grasses and purpleasters the most beautiful of our fall flowers, the fringed gentian. Whata rare and delicate, almost aristocratic look the gentian has amid itscoarse, unkempt surroundings. It does not lure the bee, but it lures andholds every passing human eye. If we strike through the corner of yonderwoods, where the ground is moistened by hidden springs and where thereis a little opening amid the trees, we shall find the closed gentian, arare flower in this locality. I had walked this way many times beforeI chanced upon its retreat; and then I was following a line of bees. Ilost the bees but I got the gentians. How curiously this flower looks, with its deep blue petals folded together so tightly--a bud and yet ablossom. It is the nun among our wild flowers, a form closely veiledand cloaked. The buccaneer bumble-bee sometimes tries to rifle it ofits sweets. I have seen the blossom with the bee entombed in it. Hehad forced his way into the virgin corolla as if determined to know itssecret, but he had never returned with the knowledge he had gained. 

After a refreshing walk of a couple of miles we reach a point where wewill make our first trial--a high stone wall that runs parallel with thewooded ridge referred to, and separated from it by a broad field. Thereare bees at work there on that goldenrod, and it requires but littlemaneuvering to sweep one into our box. Almost any other creature rudelyand suddenly arrested in its career and clapped into a cage in this waywould show great confusion and alarm. The bee is alarmed for a moment, but the bee has a passion stronger than its love of life or fear ofdeath, namely, desire for honey, not simply to eat, but to carry homeas booty. "Such rage of honey in their bosom beats, " says Virgil. It isquick to catch the scent of honey in the box, and as quick to fall tofilling itself. We now set the box down upon the wall and gently removethe cover. The bee is head and shoulders in one of the half-filledcells, and is oblivious to everything else about it. Come rack, comeruin, it will die at work. We step back a few paces, and sit down uponthe ground so as to bring the box against the blue sky as a background. In two or three minutes the bee is seen rising slowly and heavily fromthe box. It seems loath to leave so much honey behind and it marks theplace well. It mounts aloft in a rapidly increasing spiral, surveyingthe near and minute objects first, then the larger and more distant, till having circled about the spot five or six times and taken all itsbearings it darts away for home. It is a good eye that holds fast to thebee till it is fairly off. Sometimes one's head will swim following it, and often one's eyes are put out by the sun. This bee gradually driftsdown the hill, then strikes away toward a farm-house half a mile away, where I know bees are kept. Then we try another and another, and thethird bee, much to our satisfaction, goes straight toward the woods. Wecould see the brown speck against the darker background for many yards. The regular bee-hunter professes to be able to tell a wild bee from atame one by the color, the former, he says, being lighter. But there isno difference; they are both alike in color and in manner. Young beesare lighter than old, and that is all there is of it. If a beelived many years in the woods it would doubtless come to have somedistinguishing marks, but the life of a bee is only a few months at thefarthest, and no change is wrought in this brief time. 

Our bees are all soon back, and more with them, for we have touchedthe box here and there with the cork of a bottle of anise oil, and thisfragrant and pungent oil will attract bees half a mile or more. When noflowers can be found, this is the quickest way to obtain a bee. 

It is a singular fact that when the bee first finds the hunter's boxits first feeling is one of anger; it is as mad as a hornet; its tonechanges, it sounds its shrill war trumpet and darts to and fro, andgives vent to its rage and indignation in no uncertain manner. It seemsto scent foul play at once. It says, "Here is robbery; here is thespoil of some hive, may be my own, " and its blood is up. But its rulingpassion soon comes to the surface, its avarice gets the better of itsindignation, and it seems to say, "Well, I had better take possessionof this and carry it home. " So after many feints and approaches anddartings off with a loud angry hum as if it would none of it, the beesettles down and fills itself. 

It does not entirely cool off and get soberly to work till it has madetwo or three trips home with its booty. When other bees come, even ifall from the same swarm, they quarrel and dispute over the box, and clipand dart at each other like bantam cocks. Apparently the ill feelingwhich the sight of the honey awakens is not one of jealousy or rivalry, but wrath. 

A bee will usually make three or four trips from the hunter's box beforeit brings back a companion. I suspect the bee does not tell its fellowswhat it has found, but that they smell out the secret; it doubtlessbears some evidence with it upon its feet or proboscis that it has beenupon honey-comb and not upon flowers, and its companions take the hintand follow, arriving always many seconds behind. Then the quantity andquality of the booty would also betray it. No doubt, also, there areplenty of gossips about a hive that note and tell everything. "Oh, didyou see that? Peggy Mel came in a few moments ago in great haste, andone of the up-stairs packers says she was loaded till she groaned withapple-blossom honey which she deposited, and then rushed off againlike mad. Apple-blossom honey in October! Fee, fi, fo, fum! I smellsomething! Let's after. "

In about half an hour we have three well-defined lines of beesestablished--two to farm-houses and one to the woods, and our box isbeing rapidly depleted of its honey. About every fourth bee goes to thewoods, and now that they have learned the way thoroughly they do notmake the long preliminary whirl above the box, but start directly fromit. The woods are rough and dense and the hill steep, and we do not liketo follow the line of bees until we have tried at least to settle theproblem as to the distance they go into the woods-whether the tree is onthis side of the ridge or in the depth of the forest on the other side. So we shut up the box when it is full of bees and carry it aboutthree hundred yards along the wall from which we are operating. Whenliberated, the bees, as they always will in such cases, go off in thesame directions they have been going; they do not seem to know that theyhave been moved. But other bees have followed our scent, and it is notmany minutes before a second line to the woods is established. This iscalled cross-lining the bees. The new line makes a sharp angle with theother line, and we know at once that the tree is only a few rodsinto the woods. The two lines we have established form two sides of atriangle of which the wall is the base; at the apex of the triangle, orwhere the two lines meet in the woods, we are sure to find the tree. Wequickly follow up these lines, and where they cross each other on theside of the hill we scan every tree closely. I pause at the foot of anoak and examine a hole near the root; now the bees are in this tree andtheir entrance is on the upper side near the ground, not two feet fromthe hole I peer into, and yet so quiet and secret is their going andcoming that I fail to discover them and pass on up the hill. Failing inthis direction, I return to the oak again, and then perceive the beesgoing out in a small crack in the tree. The bees do not know they arefound out and that the game is in our hands, and are as oblivious of ourpresence as if we were ants or crickets. The indications are that theswarm is a small one, and the store of honey trifling. In "taking up" abee-tree it is usual first to kill or stupefy the bees with the fumes ofburning sulfur or with tobacco smoke. But this course is impracticableon the present occasion, so we boldly and ruthlessly assault the treewith an ax we have procured. At the first blow the bees set up a loudbuzzing, but we have no mercy, and the side of the cavity is sooncut away and the interior with its white-yellow mass of comb-honey isexposed, and not a bee strikes a blow in defense of its all. This mayseem singular, but it has nearly always been my experience. When a swarmof bees are thus rudely assaulted with an ax, they evidently think theend of the world has come, and, like true misers as they are, each oneseizes as much of the treasure as it can hold; in other words they allfall to and gorge themselves with honey, and calmly await the issue. When in this condition they make no defense and will not sting unlesstaken hold of. In fact they are as harmless as flies. Bees are always tobe managed with boldness and decision. 

Any half-way measures, any timid poking about, any feeble attempts toreach their honey, are sure to be quickly resented. The popular notionthat bees have a special antipathy toward certain persons and a likingfor certain others has only this fact at the bottom of it; they willsting a person who is afraid of them and goes skulking and dodgingabout, and they will not sting a person who faces them boldly and has nodread of them. They are like dogs. The way to disarm a vicious dog is toshow him you do not fear him; it is his turn to be afraid then. I neverhad any dread of bees and am seldom stung by them. I have climbed upinto a large chestnut that contained a swarm in one of its cavities andchopped them out with an ax, being obliged at times to pause and brushthe bewildered bees from my hands and face, and not been stung once. I have chopped a swarm out of an apple-tree in June and taken out thecards of honey and arranged them in a hive, and then dipped out thebees with a dipper, and taken the whole home with me in pretty goodcondition, with scarcely any opposition on the part of the bees. Inreaching your hand into the cavity to detach and remove the comb youare pretty sure to get stung, for when you touch the "business end" of abee, it will sting even though its head be off. But the bee carries theantidote to its own poison. The best remedy for bee sting is honey, andwhen your hands are besmeared with honey, as they are sure to be on suchoccasions, the wound is scarcely more painful than the prick of a pin. Assault your bee-tree, then, boldly with your ax, and you will find thatwhen the honey is exposed every bee has surrendered and the whole swarmis cowering in helpless bewilderment and terror. Our tree yields only afew pounds of honey, not enough to have lasted the swarm till January, but no matter; we have the less burden to carry. 

In the afternoon we go nearly half a mile farther along the ridge toa cornfield that lies immediately in front of the highest point of themountain. The view is superb; the ripe autumn landscape rolls away tothe east, cut through by the great placid river; in the extreme norththe wall of the Catskills stands out clear and strong, while in thesouth the mountains of the Highlands bound the view. The day is warm andthe bees are very busy there in that neglected corner of the field, richin asters, flea-bane, and golden-rod. The corn has been cut, and upon astout, but a few rods from the woods, which here drop quickly down fromthe precipitous heights, we set up our bee-box, touched again withthe pungent oil. In a few moments a bee has found it; she comes upto leeward, following the scent. On leaving the box she goes straighttoward the woods. More bees quickly come, and it is not long before theline is well established. Now we have recourse to the same tactics weemployed before, and move along the ridge to another field to get ourcross line. But the bees still go in almost the same direction they didfrom the corn stout. The tree is then either on the top of the mountainor on the other or west side of it. We hesitate to make the plunge intothe woods and seek to scale those precipices, for the eye can plainlysee what is before us. As the afternoon sun gets lower the bees are seenwith wonderful distinctness. They fly toward and under the sun and arein a strong light, while the near woods which form the background arein deep shadow. They look like large luminous motes. Their swiftlyvibrating, transparent wings surround their bodies with a shining nimbusthat makes them visible for a long distance. They seem magnified manytimes. We see them bridge the little gulf between us and the woods, thenrise up over the tree-tops with their burdens, swerving neither to theright hand nor to the left. It is almost pathetic to see them labor so, climbing the mountain and unwittingly guiding us to their treasures. When the sun gets down so that his direction corresponds exactly withthe course of the bees, we make the plunge. It proves even harderclimbing than we had anticipated; the mountain is faced by a broken andirregular wall of rock, up which we pull ourselves slowly and cautiouslyby main strength. In half an hour, the perspiration streaming fromevery pore, we reach the summit. The trees here are all small, a secondgrowth, and we are soon convinced the bees are not here. Then down wego on the other side, clambering down the rocky stairways till we reachquite a broad plateau that forms something like the shoulder of themountain. On the brink of this there are many large hemlocks, and wescan them closely and rap upon them with our ax. But not a bee is seenor heard; we do not seem as near the tree as we were in the fieldsbelow; yet if some divinity would only whisper the fact to us we arewithin a few rods of the coveted prize, which is not in one of the largehemlocks or oaks that absorb our attention, but in an old stub or stumpnot six feet high, and which we have seen and passed several timeswithout giving it a thought. We go farther down the mountain and beatabout to the right and left and get entangled in brush and arrested byprecipices, and finally as the day is nearly spent, give up the searchand leave the woods quite baffled, but resolved to return on the morrow. The next day we come back and commence operations in an opening inthe woods well down on the side of the mountain, where we gave up thesearch. Our box is soon swarming with the eager bees, and they go backtoward the summit we have passed. We follow back and establish a newline where the ground will permit; then another and another, and yet theriddle is not solved. One time we are south of them, then north, thenthe bees get up through the trees and we cannot tell where they go. Butafter much searching, and after the mystery seems rather to deepen thanto clear up, we chance to pause beside the old stump. A bee comes out ofa small opening, like that made by ants in decayed wood, rubs its eyesand examines its antennae as bees always do before leaving their hive, then takes flight. At the same instant several bees come by us loadedwith our honey and settle home with that peculiar low complacent buzzof the well-filled insect. Here then is our idyl, our bit of Virgil andTheocritus, in a decayed stump of a hemlock tree. We could tear it openwith our hands, and a bear would find it an easy prize, and a rich onetoo, for we take from it fifty pounds of excellent honey. The bees havebeen here many years, and have of course sent out swarm after swarminto the wilds. They have protected themselves against the weather andstrengthened their shaky habitation by a copious use of wax. 

When a bee-tree is thus "taken up" in the middle of the day, of course agood many bees are away from home and have not heard the news. When theyreturn and find the ground flowing with honey, and piles of bleedingcombs lying about, they apparently do not recognize the place, and theirfirst instinct is to fall to and fill themselves; this done, their nextthought is to carry it home, so they rise up slowly through the branchesof the trees till they have attained an altitude that enables them tosurvey the scene, when they seem to say, "Why, this is home, " and downthey come again; beholding the wreck and ruins once more they stillthink there is some mistake, and get up a second or a third time andthen drop back pitifully as before. It is the most pathetic sight ofall, the surviving and bewildered bees struggling to save a few drops oftheir wasted treasures. 

Presently, if there is another swarm in the woods, robber-bees appear. You may know them by their saucy, chiding, devil-may-care hum. It isan ill wind that blows nobody good, and they make the most of themisfortune of their neighbors; and thereby pave the way for their ownruin. The hunter marks their course and the next day looks them up. Onthis occasion the day was hot and the honey very fragrant, and a line ofbees was soon established S. S. W. Though there was much refuse honey inthe old stub, and though little golden rills trickled down the hill fromit, and the near branches and saplings were besmeared with it where wewiped our murderous hands, yet not a drop was wasted. It was a feast towhich not only honey-bees came, but bumble-bees, wasps, hornets, flies, ants. The bumble-bees, which at this season are hungry vagrants withno fixed place of abode, would gorge themselves, then creep beneath thebits of empty comb or fragments of bark and pass the night, and renewthe feast next day. The bumble-bee is an insect of which the bee-huntersees much. There are all sorts and sizes of them. They are dull andclumsy compared with the honey-bee. Attracted in the fields by thebee-hunter's box, they will come up the wind on the scent and blunderinto it in the most stupid, lubberly fashion. 

The honey-bee that licked up our leavings on the old stub belonged to aswarm, as it proved, about half a mile farther down the ridge, and a fewdays afterward fate overtook them, and their stores in turn became theprey of another swarm in the vicinity, which also tempted Providenceand were overwhelmed. The first mentioned swarm I had lined from severalpoints, and was following up the clew over rocks and through gulleys, when I came to where a large hemlock had been felled a few years beforeand a swarm taken from a cavity near the top of it; fragments of the oldcomb were yet to be seen. A few yards away stood another short, squattyhemlock, and I said my bees ought to be there. As I paused near it Inoticed where the tree had been wounded with an ax a couple of feet fromthe ground many years before. The wound had partially grown over, butthere was an opening there that I did not see at the first glance. Iwas about to pass on when a bee passed me making that peculiar shrill, discordant hum that a bee makes when besmeared with honey. I saw italight in the partially closed wound and crawl home; then came othersand others, little bands and squads of them heavily freighted with honeyfrom the box. The tree was about twenty inches through and hollow atthe butt, or from the ax mark down. This space the bees had completelyfilled with honey. With an ax we cut away the outer ring of live woodand exposed the treasure. Despite the utmost care, we wounded the combso that little rills of the golden liquid issued from the root of thetree and trickled down the hill. 

The other bee-tree in the vicinity, to which I have referred, we foundone warm November day in less than half an hour after entering thewoods. It also was a hemlock, that stood in a niche in a wall of hoary, moss-covered rocks thirty feet high. The tree hardly reached to the topof the precipice. The bees entered a small hole at the root, which wasseven or eight feet from the ground. The position was a striking one. Never did apiary have a finer outlook or more rugged surroundings. Ablack, wood-embraced lake lay at our feet; the long panorama of theCatskills filled the far distance, and the more broken outlines of theShawangunk range filled the rear. On every hand were precipices and awild confusion of rocks and trees. 

The cavity occupied by the bees was about three feet and a half long andeight or ten inches in diameter. With an ax we cut away one side of thetree and laid bare its curiously wrought heart of honey. It was a mostpleasing sight. What winding and devious ways the bees had through theirpalace! What great masses and blocks of snow-white comb there were!Where it was sealed up, presenting that slightly dented, uneven surface, it looked like some precious ore. When we carried a large pail full ofit out of the woods, it seemed still more like ore. 

Your native bee-hunter predicates the distance of the tree by the timethe bee occupies in making its first trip. But this is no certain guide. You are always safe in calculating that the tree is inside of a mile, and you need not as a rule look for your bee's return under ten minutes. One day I picked up a bee in an opening in the woods and gave it honey, and it made three trips to my box with an interval of about twelveminutes between them; it returned alone each time; the tree, which Iafterward found, was about half a mile distant. 

In lining bees through the woods, the tactics of the hunter are topause every twenty or thirty rods, lop away the branches or cut down thetrees, and set the bees to work again. If they still go forward, he goesforward also and repeats his observations till the tree is found or tillthe bees turn and come back upon the trail. Then he knows he has passedthe tree, and he retraces his steps to a convenient distance and triesagain, and thus quickly reduces the space to be looked over till theswarm is traced home. On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where thesurface alternated between deep gulfs and chasms filled with thick, heavy growths of timber and sharp, precipitous, rocky ridges like atempest tossed sea, I carried my bees directly under their tree, andset them to work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not thirty feetdistant. One would have expected them under such circumstances to havegone straight home, as there were but few branches intervening, butthey did not; they labored up through the trees and attained an altitudeabove the woods as if they had miles to travel, and thus baffled me forhours. Bees will always do this. They are acquainted with the woods onlyfrom the top side, and from the air above they recognize home only byland-marks here, and in every instance they rise aloft to take theirbearings. Think how familiar to them the topography of the forestsummits must be-an umbrageous sea or plain where every mask and point isknown. 

Another curious fact is that generally you will get track of a bee-treesooner when you are half a mile from it than when you are only a fewyards. Bees, like us human insects, have little faith in the near athand; they expect to make their fortune in a distant field, they arelured by the remote and the difficult, and hence overlook the flower andthe sweet at their very door. On several occasions I have unwittinglyset my box within a few paces of a bee-tree and waited long for beeswithout getting them, when, on removing to a distant field or opening inthe woods I have got a clew at once. 

I have a theory that when bees leave the hive, unless there is somespecial attraction in some other direction, they generally go againstthe wind. They would thus have the wind with them when they returnedhome heavily laden, and with these little navigators the differenceis an important one. With a full cargo, a stiff head-wind is a greathindrance, but fresh and empty-handed they can face it with more ease. Virgil says bees bear gravel stones as ballast, but their only ballastis their honey bag. Hence, when I go bee-hunting, I prefer to get towindward of the woods in which the swarm is supposed to have takenrefuge. 

Bees, like the milkman, like to be near a spring. They do water theirhoney, especially in a dry time. The liquid is then of course thickerand sweeter, and will bear diluting. Hence, old bee-hunters look forbee-trees along creeks and near spring runs in the woods. I once found atree a long distance from any water, and the honey had a peculiar bitterflavor imparted to it, I was convinced, by rainwater sucked from thedecayed and spongy hemlock tree, in which the swarm was found. Incutting into the tree, the north side of it was found to be saturatedwith water like a spring, which ran out in big drops, and had a bitterflavor. The bees had thus found a spring or a cistern in their ownhouse. 

Bees are exposed to many hardships and many dangers. Winds and stormsprove as disastrous to them as to other navigators. Black spiders lie inwait for them as do brigands for travelers. One day as I was looking fora bee amid some golden-rod, I spied one partly concealed under a leaf. Its baskets were full of pollen, and it did not move. On lifting up theleaf I discovered that a hairy spider was ambushed there and had the beeby the throat. The vampire was evidently afraid of the bee's sting, andwas holding it by the throat till quite sure of its death. Virgil speaksof the painted lizard, perhaps a species of salamander, as an enemyof the honey-bee. We have no lizard that destroys the bee; but ourtree-toad, ambushed among the apple and cherry blossoms, snaps them upwholesale. Quick as lightning that subtle but clammy tongue darts forth, and the unsuspecting bee is gone. Virgil also accuses the titmouseand the woodpecker of preying upon the bees, and our kingbird has beencharged with the like crime, but the latter devours only the drones. Theworkers are either too small and quick for it, or else it dreads theirsting. 

Virgil, by the way, had little more than a child's knowledge of thehoney-bee. There is little fact and much fable in his fourth Georgic. Ifhe had ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is hard tosee how he could have believed that the bee in its flight abroad carrieda gravel stone for ballast:--

 "And as when empty barks on billows float, With Sandy ballast sailors trim the boat; So bees bear gravel stones, whose poising weight Steers through the whistling winds their steady flight;"

or that when two colonies made war upon each other they issued forthfrom their hives led by their kings and fought in the air, strewing theground with the dead and dying:--

 "Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the plain, Nor shaken oaks such show'rs of acorns rain. "

It is quite certain he had never been bee-hunting. If he had, we shouldhave had a fifth Georgic. Yet he seems to have known that bees sometimesescaped to the woods:--

 "Nor bees are lodged in hives alone, but found In chambers of their own beneath the ground: Their vaulted roofs are hung in pumices, And in the rotten trunks of hollow trees. "

Wild honey is as near like tame as wild bees are like their brothersin hive. The only difference is that wild honey is flavored with youradventure, which makes it a little more delectable than the domesticarticle. 

THE PASTORAL BEES

The honey-bee goes forth from the hive in spring like the dove fromNoah's ark, and it is not till after many days that she brings back theolive leaf, which in this case is a pellet of golden pollen upon eachhip, usually obtained from the alder or the swamp willow. In a countrywhere maple sugar is made, the bees get their first taste of sweet fromthe sap as it flows from the spiles, or as it dries and is condensedupon the sides of the buckets. They will sometimes, in their eagerness, come about the boiling place and be overwhelmed by the steam and thesmoke. But bees appear to be more eager for bread in the spring than forhoney; their supply of this article, perhaps, does not keep as wellas their stores of the latter, hence fresh bread, in the shape of newpollen, is diligently sought for. My bees get their first supplies fromthe catkins of the willows. How quickly they find them out. If but onecatkin opens anywhere within range, a bee is on hand that very hour torifle it, and it is a most pleasing experience to stand near the hivesome mild April day and see them come pouring in with their littlebaskets packed with this first fruitage of the spring. They will havenew bread now; they have been to mill in good earnest; see their dustycoats, and the golden grist they bring home with them. 

When a bee brings pollen into the hive, he advances to the cell in whichit is to be deposited and kicks it off as one might his overalls orrubber boots, making one foot help the other; then he walks off withoutever looking behind him; another bee, one of the indoor hands, comesalong and rams it down with his head and packs it into the cell as thedairymaid packs butter into a firkin. 

The first spring wild-flowers, whose shy faces among the dry leaves androcks are so welcome, yield no honey. The anemone, the hepatica, thebloodroot, the arbutus, the numerous violets, the spring beauty, thecorydalis, etc. , woo lovers of nature, but do not woo the honey-lovingbee. It requires more sun and warmth to develop the saccharine element, and the beauty of these pale striplings of the woods and groves is theirsole and sufficient excuse for being. The arbutus, lying low and keepinggreen all winter, attains to perfume, but not to honey. 

The first honey is perhaps obtained from the flowers of the red mapleand the golden willow. The latter sends forth a wild, delicious perfume. The sugar maple blooms a little later, and from its silken tasselsa rich nectar is gathered. My bees will not label these differentvarieties for me as I really wish they would. Honey from the maples, atree so clean and wholesome, and full of such virtues every way, wouldbe something to put one's tongue to. Or that from the blossoms of theapple, the peach, the cherry, the quince, the currant, --one would likea card of each of these varieties to note their peculiar qualities. Theapple-blossom is very important to the bees. A single swarm has beenknown to gain twenty pounds in weight during its continuance. Bees lovethe ripened fruit, too, and in August and September will suck themselvestipsy upon varieties such as the sops-of-wine. 

The interval between the blooming of the fruit-trees and that of theclover and the raspberry is bridged over in many localities by the honeylocust. What a delightful summer murmur these trees send forth at thisseason. I know nothing about the quality of the honey, but it ought tokeep well. But when the red raspberry blooms, the fountains of plentyare unsealed indeed; what a commotion about the hives then, especiallyin localities where it is extensively cultivated, as in places along theHudson. The delicate white clover, which begins to bloom about thesame time, is neglected; even honey itself is passed by for this modestcolorless, all but odorless flower. A field of these berries in Junesends forth a continuous murmur like that of an enormous hive. The honeyis not so white as that obtained from clover but it is easier gathered;it is in shallow cups while that of the clover is in deep tubes. Thebees are up and at it before sunrise, and it takes a brisk shower todrive them in. But the clover blooms later and blooms everywhere, andis the staple source of supply of the finest quality of honey. Thered clover yields up its stores only to the longer proboscis of thebumble-bee, else the bee pasturage of our agricultural districts wouldbe unequaled. I do not know from what the famous honey of Chamouniin the Alps is made, but it can hardly surpass our best products. Thesnow-white honey of Anatolia in Asiatic Turkey, which is regularly sentto Constantinople for the use of the grand seignior and the ladies ofhis seraglio, is obtained from the cotton plant, which makes me thinkthat the white clover does not flourish these. The white clover isindigenous with us; its seeds seem latent in the ground, and theapplication of certain stimulants to the soil, such as wood ashes, causes them to germinate and spring up. 

The rose, with all its beauty and perfume, yields no honey to the bee, unless the wild species be sought by the bumble-bee. 

Among the humbler plants, let me not forget the dandelion that soearly dots the sunny slopes, and upon which the bee languidly grazes, wallowing to his knees in the golden but not over-succulent pasturage. From the blooming rye and wheat the bee gathers pollen, also fromthe obscure blossoms of Indian corn. Among weeds, catnip is the greatfavorite. It lasts nearly the whole season and yields richly. It couldno doubt be profitably cultivated in some localities, and catnip honeywould be a novelty in the market. It would probably partake of thearomatic properties of the plant from which it was derived. 

Among your stores of honey gathered before midsummer, you may chanceupon a card, or mayhap only a square inch or two of comb, in which theliquid is as transparent as water, of a delicious quality, with a slightflavor of mint. This is the product of the linden or basswood, of allthe trees in our forest the one most beloved by the bees. Melissa, thegoddess of honey, has placed her seal upon this tree. The wild swarmsin the woods frequently reap a choice harvest from it. I have seena mountain side thickly studded with it, its straight, tall, smooth, light-gray shaft carrying its deep-green crown far aloft, like thetulip-tree or the maple. 

In some of the Northwestern States there are large forests of it, andthe amount of honey reported stored by strong swarms in this sectionduring the time the tree is in bloom is quite incredible. As a shade andornamental tree the linden is fully equal to the maple, and if it wereas extensively planted and cared for, our supplies of virgin honey wouldbe greatly increased. The famous honey of Lithuania in Russia is theproduct of the linden. 

It is a homely old stanza current among bee folk that--

 "A swarm of bees in May Is worth a load of hay; A swarm of bees in June Is worth a silver spoon; But a swarm in July Is not worth a fly. "

A swarm in May is indeed a treasure; it is, like an April baby, sureto thrive, and will very likely itself send out a swarm a month ortwo later; but a swarm in July is not to be despised; it will store noclover or linden honey for the "grand seignior and the ladies of hisseraglio, " but plenty of the rank and wholesome poor man's nectar, thesun-tanned product of the plebeian buckwheat. Buckwheat honey is theblack sheep in this white flock, but there is spirit and character init. It lays hold of the taste in no equivocal manner, especially when ata winter breakfast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat cake. Breadwith honey to cover it from the same stalk is double good fortune. It isnot black, either, but nut-brown, and belongs to the same class of goodsas Herrick's

 "Nut-brown mirth and russet wit. "

How the bees love it, and they bring the delicious odor of the bloomingplant to the hive with them, so that in the moist warm twilight theapiary is redolent with the perfume of buckwheat. 

Yet evidently it is not the perfume of any flower that attractsthe bees; they pay no attention to the sweet-scented lilac, or toheliotrope, but work upon sumach, silkweed, and the hateful snapdragon. In September they are hard pressed, and do well if they pick up enoughsweet to pay the running expenses of their establishment. The purpleasters and the golden-rod are about all that remain to them. 

Bees will go three or four miles in quest of honey, but it is a greatadvantage to move the hive near the good pasturage, as has been thecustom from the earliest times in the Old World. Some enterprisingperson, taking a hint perhaps from the ancient Egyptians, who hadfloating apiaries on the Nile, has tried the experiment of floatingseveral hundred colonies north on the Mississippi, starting from NewOrleans and following the opening season up, thus realizing a sort ofperpetual May or June, the chief attraction being the blossoms of theriver willow, which yield honey of rare excellence. Some of the beeswere no doubt left behind, but the amount of virgin honey secured musthave been very great. In September they should have begun the returntrip, following the retreating summer South. 

It is the making of the wax that costs with the bee. As with the poet, the form, the receptacle, gives him more trouble than the sweet thatfills it, though, to be sure, there is always more or less empty comb inboth cases. The honey he can have for the gathering, but the wax he mustmake himself--must evolve from his own inner consciousness. When waxis to be made the wax-makers fill themselves with honey and retire intotheir chamber for private meditation; it is like some solemn religiousrite; they take hold of hands, or hook themselves together in long linesthat hang in festoons from the top of the hive, and wait for the miracleto transpire. After about twenty-four hours their patience is rewarded, the honey is turned into wax, minute scales of which are secreted frombetween the rings of the abdomen of each bee; this is taken off and fromit the comb is built up. It is calculated that about twenty-five poundsof honey are used in elaborating one pound of comb, to say nothing ofthe time that is lost. Hence the importance in an economical point ofview, of a recent device by which the honey is extracted and the combreturned intact to the bees. But honey without the comb is the perfumewithout the rose, --it is sweet merely, and soon degenerates into candy. Half the delectableness is in breaking down these frail and exquisitewalls yourself, and tasting the nectar before it has lost its freshnessby the contact with the air. Then the comb is a sort of shield or foilthat prevents the tongue from being overwhelmed by the shock of thesweet. 

The drones have the least enviable time of it. Their foothold in thehive is very precarious. They look like the giants, the lords of theswarm, but they are really the tools. Their loud, threatening hum hasno sting to back it up, and their size and noise make them only the moreconspicuous marks for the birds. 

Toward the close of the season, say in July or August, the fiat goesforth that the drones must die; there is no further use for them. Thenthe poor creatures, how they are huddled and hustled about, trying tohide in corners and by-ways. There is no loud, defiant humming now, butabject fear seizes them. They cower like hunted criminals. I have seena dozen or more of them wedge themselves into a small space between theglass and the comb, where the bees could not get hold of them or wherethey seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter. They will alsocrawl outside and hide under the edges of the hive. But sooner or laterthey are all killed or kicked out. The drone makes no resistance, exceptto pull back and try to get away; but (putting yourself in his place)with one bee a-hold of your collar or the hair of your head, and anothera-hold of each arm or leg, and still another feeling for your waistbandswith his sting, the odds are greatly against you. 

It is a singular fact, also, that the queen is made, not born. If theentire population of Spain or Great Britain were the offspring of onemother, it might be found necessary to hit upon some device by which aroyal baby could be manufactured out of an ordinary one, or else giveup the fashion of royalty. All the bees in the hive have a commonparentage, and the queen and the worker are the same in the egg and inthe chick; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in the food; thecell being much larger, and the food a peculiar stimulating kind ofjelly. In certain contingencies, such as the loss of the queen with noeggs in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an ordinary bee, enlarge the cell by taking in the two adjoining ones, and nurse it andstuff it and coddle it, till at the end of sixteen days it comes out aqueen. But ordinarily, in the natural course of events, the young queenis kept a prisoner in her cell till the old queen has left with theswarm. Later on, the unhatched queen is guarded against the reigningqueen, who only wants an opportunity to murder every royal scion in thehive. At this time both the queens, the one a prisoner and the other atlarge, pipe defiance at each other, a shrill, fine, trumpet-like notethat any ear will at once recognize. This challenge, not being allowedto be accepted by either party, is followed, in a day or two by theabdication of the reigning queen; she leads out the swarm, and hersuccessor is liberated by her keepers, who, in her time, abdicatesin favor of the next younger. When the bees have decided that no moreswarms can issue, the reigning queen is allowed to use her stiletto uponher unhatched sisters. Cases have been known where two queens issued atthe same time, when a mortal combat ensued, encouraged by the workers, who formed a ring about them, but showed no preference, and recognizedthe victor as the lawful sovereign. For these and many other curiousfacts we are indebted to the blind Huber. 

It is worthy of note that the position of the queen cells is alwaysvertical, while that of the drones and workers is horizontal; majestystands on its head, which fact may be a part of the secret. 

The notion has always very generally prevailed that the queen of thebees is an absolute ruler, and issues her royal orders to willingsubjects. Hence Napoleon the First sprinkled the symbolic bees over theimperial mantle that bore the arms of his dynasty; and in the countryof the Pharaohs the bee was used as the emblem of a people sweetlysubmissive to the orders of its king. But the fact is, a swarm of beesis an absolute democracy, and kings and despots can find no warrant intheir example. The power and authority are entirely vested in the greatmass, the workers. They furnish all the brains and foresight of thecolony, and administer its affairs. Their word is law, and both king andqueen must obey. They regulate the swarming, and give the signal for theswarm to issue from the hive; they select and make ready the tree in thewoods and conduct the queen to it. 

The peculiar office and sacredness of the queen consists in the factthat she is the mother of the swarm, and the bees love and cherish heras a mother and not as a sovereign. She is the sole female bee in thehive, and the swarm clings to her because she is their life. Deprivedof their queen, and of all brood from which to rear one, the swarm losesall heart and soon dies, though there be an abundance of honey in thehive. 

The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she isto be disposed of they starve her to death; and the queen herself willsting nothing but royalty--nothing but a rival queen. 

The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting herto call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she isa superb creature, and looks every inch a queen. It is an event todistinguish her amid the mass of bees when the swarm alights; it awakensa thrill. Before you have seen a queen you wonder if this or that bee, which seems a little larger than its fellows, is not she, but when youonce really set eyes upon her you do not doubt for a moment. Youknow that is the queen. That long, elegant, shining, feminine-lookingcreature can be none less than royalty. How beautifully her body tapers, how distinguished she looks, how deliberate her movements! The beesdo not fall down before her, but caress her and touch her person. The drones or males, are large bees too, but coarse, blunt, broad-shouldered, masculine-looking. There is but one fact or incidentin the life of the queen that looks imperial and authoritative: Huberrelates that when the old queen is restrained in her movements by theworkers, and prevented from destroying the young queens in their cells, she assumes a peculiar attitude and utters a note that strikes every beemotionless, and makes every head bow; while this sound lasts not a beestirs, but all look abashed and humbled, yet whether the emotion is oneof fear, or reverence, or of sympathy with the distress of the queenmother, is hard to determine. The moment it ceases and she advancesagain toward the royal cells, the bees bite and pull and insult her asbefore. 

I always feel that I have missed some good fortune if I am away fromhome when my bees swarm. What a delightful summer sound it is; howthey come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees eachstriving to get out first; it is as when the dam gives way and lets thewaters loose; it is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air, and becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the eye and a soft chorusof myriad musical sounds to the ear. This way and that way they drift, now contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick aboutsome branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some other point, till finally they begin to alight in earnest, when in a few moments thewhole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming a bunch perhaps aslarge as a two-gallon measure. Here they will hang from one to three orfour hours, or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked up, when, ifthey have not been offered a hive in the mean time, they are up andoff. In hiving them, if any accident happens to the queen the enterprisemiscarries at once. One day I shook a swarm from a small pear-tree intoa tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath the tree, and putthe hive over it. The bees presently all crawled up into it, and allseemed to go well for ten or fifteen minutes, when I observed thatsomething was wrong; the bees began to buzz excitedly and to rush aboutin a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and all returned tothe parent stock. On lifting up the pan, I found beneath it the queenwith three or four other bees. She had been one of the first to fall, had missed the pan in her descent, and I had set it upon her. I conveyedher tenderly back to the hive, but either the accident terminatedfatally with her or else the young queen had been liberated in theinterim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it was ten daysbefore the swarm issued a second time. 

No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees house-hunting in thewoods. Yet there can be no doubt that they look up new quarters eitherbefore or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are wild bees andincapable of domestication; that is, the instinct to go back to natureand take up again their wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated. Years upon years of life in the apiary seems to have no appreciableeffect towards their final, permanent domestication. That every newswarm contemplates migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the factthat they will only come out when the weather is favorable to such anenterprise, and that a passing cloud or a sudden wind, after the beesare in the air, will usually drive them back into the parent hive. Oran attack upon them with sand or gravel, or loose earth or water, willquickly cause them to change their plans. I would not even say butthat, when the bees are going off, the apparently absurd practice, nowentirely discredited by regular bee-keepers but still resorted to byunscientific folk, of beating upon tin pans, blowing horns, and creatingan uproar generally, might not be without good results. Certainly not bydrowning the "orders" of the queen, but by impressing the bees aswith some unusual commotion in nature. Bees are easily alarmed anddisconcerted, and I have known runaway swarms to be brought down by afarmer ploughing in the field who showered them with handfuls of loosesoil. 

I love to see a swarm go off--if it is not mine, and if mine must go Iwant to be on hand to see the fun. It is a return to first principlesagain by a very direct route. The past season I witnessed two suchescapes. One swarm had come out the day before, and, without alighting, had returned to the parent hive--some hitch in the plan, perhaps, or maybe the queen had found her wings too weak. The next day they came outagain, and were hived. But something offended them, or else the tree inthe woods--perhaps some royal old maple or birch holding its headhigh above all others, with snug, spacious, irregular chambers andgalleries--had too many attractions; for they were presently discoveredfilling the air over the garden, and whirling excitedly around. Gradually they began to drift over the street; a moment more, and theyhad become separated from the other bees, and, drawing together in amore compact mass or cloud, away they went, a humming, flying vortex ofbees, the queen in the centre, and the swarm revolving around her as apivot, --over meadows, across creeks and swamps, straight for the heartof the mountain, about a mile distant, --slow at first, so that the youthwho gave chase kept up with them, but increasing their speed till only afox hound could have kept them in sight. I saw their pursuer laboringup the side of the mountain; saw his white shirt-sleeves gleam as heentered the woods; but he returned a few hours afterward without anyclew as to the particular tree in which they had taken refuge out of theten thousand that covered the side of the mountain. 

The other swarm came out about one o'clock of a hot July day, andat once showed symptoms that alarmed the keeper, who, however, threwneither dirt nor water. The house was situated on a steep side-hill. Behind it the ground rose, for a hundred rods or so, at an angle ofnearly forty-five degrees, and the prospect of having to chase them upthis hill, if chase them we should, promised a good trial of windat least; for it soon became evident that their course lay in thisdirection. Determined to have a hand, or rather a foot, in the chase, I threw off my coat and hurried on, before the swarm was yet fairlyorganized and under way. The route soon led me into a field ofstanding rye, every spear of which held its head above my own. Plungingrecklessly forward, my course marked to those watching from below by theagitated and wriggling grain, I emerged from the miniature forest justin time to see the runaways disappearing over the top of the hill, somefifty rods in advance of me. Lining them as well as I could, I soonreached the hill-top, my breath utterly gone and the perspirationstreaming from every pore of my skin. On the other side the countryopened deep and wide. A large valley swept around to the north, heavilywooded at its head and on its sides. It became evident at once that thebees had made good their escape, and that whether they had stopped onone side of the valley or the other, or had indeed cleared the oppositemountain and gone into some unknown forest beyond, was entirelyproblematical. I turned back, therefore, thinking of the honey-ladentree that some of these forests would hold before the falling of theleaf. 

I heard of a youth in the neighborhood, more lucky than myself on a likeoccasion. It seems that he had got well in advance of the swarm, whoseroute lay over a hill, as in my case, and as he neared the summit, hatin hand, the bees had just come up and were all about him. Presently henoticed them hovering about his straw hat, and alighting on his arm; andin almost as brief a time as it takes to relate it, the whole swarmhad followed the queen into his hat. Being near a stone wall, hecoolly deposited his prize upon it, quickly disengaged himself from theaccommodating bees, and returned for a hive. The explanation of thissingular circumstance no doubt is, that the queen, unused to such longand heavy flights, was obliged to alight from very exhaustion. It isnot very unusual for swarms to be thus found in remote fields, collectedupon a bush or branch of a tree. 

When a swarm migrates to the woods in this manner, the individual bees, as I have intimated, do not move in right lines or straight forward, like a flock of birds, but round and round, like chaff in a whirlwind. Unitedly they form a humming, revolving, nebulous mass, ten or fifteenfeet across, which keeps just high enough to clear all obstacles, exceptin crossing deep valleys, when, of course, it may be very high. Theswarm seems to be guided by a line of couriers, which may be seen (atleast at the outset) constantly going and coming. As they take a directcourse, there is always some chance of following them to the tree, unless they go a long distance, and some obstruction, like a wood, ora swamp, or a high hill, intervenes--enough chance, at any rate, tostimulate the lookers-on to give vigorous chase as long as their windholds out. If the bees are successfully followed to their retreat, twoplans are feasible: either to fell the tree at once, and seek to hivethem, perhaps bring them home in the section of the tree that containsthe cavity; or to leave the tree till fall, then invite your neighbors, and go and cut it, and see the ground flow with honey. The former courseis more business-like; but the latter is the one usually recommended byone's friends and neighbors. 

Perhaps nearly one third of all the runaway swarms leave when no oneis about, and hence are unseen and unheard, save, perchance, by somedistant laborers in the field, or by some youth ploughing on the sideof the mountain, who hears an unusual humming noise, and sees the swarmdimly whirling by overhead, and, may be, gives chase; or he may simplycatch the sound, when he pauses, looks quickly around, but sees nothing. When he comes in at night he tells how he heard or saw a swarm of beesgo over; and, perhaps from beneath one of the hives in the garden ablack mass of bees has disappeared during the day. 

They are not partial as to the kind of tree, --pine, hemlock, elm, birch, maple, hickory, --any tree with a good cavity high up or low down. Aswarm of mine ran away from the new patent hive I gave them, and tookup their quarters in the hollow trunk of an old apple-tree across anadjoining field. The entrance was a mouse-hole near the ground. 

Another swarm in the neighborhood deserted their keeper and went intothe cornice of an out-house that stood amid evergreens in the rear ofa large mansion. But there is no accounting for the taste of bees, as Samson found when he discovered the swarm in the carcass, or moreprobably the skeleton, of the lion he had slain. 

In any given locality, especially in the more wooded and mountainousdistricts, the number of swarms that thus assert their independenceforms quite a large per cent. In the Northern States these swarms veryoften perish before spring; but in such a country as Florida they seemto multiply, till bee-trees are very common. In the West, also, wildhoney is often gathered in large quantities. I noticed not long since, that some wood-choppers on the west slope of the Coast Range felled atree that had several pailfuls in it. 

One night on the Potomac a party of us unwittingly made our camp nearthe foot of a bee-tree, which next day the winds of heaven blew down, for our special delectation, at least so we read the sign. Another timewhile sitting by a waterfall in the leafless April woods I discovereda swarm in the top of a large hickory. I had the season before remarkedthe tree as a likely place for bees, but the screen of leaves concealedthem from me. This time my former presentiment occurred to me, and, looking sharply, sure enough there were the bees, going out and in alarge, irregular opening. In June a violent tempest of wind and raindemolished the tree, and the honey was all lost in the creek into whichit fell. I happened along that way two or three days after the tornado, when I saw a remnant of the swarm, those, doubtless, that escaped theflood and those that were away when the disaster came, hanging in asmall black mass to a branch high up near where their home used to be. They looked forlorn enough. If the queen was saved the remnant probablysought another tree; otherwise the bees have soon died. 

I have seen bees desert their hive in the spring when it was infestedwith worms, or when the honey was exhausted; at such times the swarmseems to wander aimlessly, alighting here and there, and perhaps in theend uniting with some other colony. In case of such union, it would becurious to know if negotiations were first opened between the parties, and if the houseless bees are admitted at once to all the rights andfranchises of their benefactors. It would be very like the bees to havesome preliminary plan and understanding about the matter on both sides. 

Bees will accommodate themselves to almost any quarters, yet no hiveseems to please them so well as a section of a hollow tree--"gums" asthey are called in the South and West where the sweet gum grows. In someEuropean countries the hive is always made from the trunk of a tree, asuitable cavity being formed by boring. The old-fashioned straw hive ispicturesque, and a great favorite with the bees also. 

The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaignof an army; the ranks are being continually depleted, and continuallyrecruited. What adventures they have by flood and field, and whathair-breadth escapes! A strong swarm during the honey season loses, onan average, about four or five thousand per month, or one hundred andfifty per day. They are overwhelmed by wind and rain, caught by spiders, benumbed by cold, crushed by cattle, drowned in rivers and ponds, andin many nameless ways cut off or disabled. In the spring the principalmortality is from the cold. As the sun declines they get chilled beforethey can reach home. Many fall down outside the hive, unable to getin with their burden. One may see them come utterly spent and drophopelessly into the grass in front of their very doors. Before they canrest the cold has stiffened them. I go out in April and May and pickthem up by the handfuls, their baskets loaded with pollen, and warm themin the sun or in the house, or by the simple warmth of my hand, untilthey can crawl into the hive. Heat is their life, and an apparentlylifeless bee may be revived by warming him. I have also picked them upwhile rowing on the river and seen them safely to shore. It is amusingto see them come hurrying home when there is a thunderstorm approaching. They come piling in till the rain is upon them. Those that are overtakenby the storm doubtless weather it as best they can in the shelteringtrees or grass. It is not probable that a bee ever gets lost bywandering into strange and unknown parts. With their myriad eyes theysee everything; and then, their sense of locality is very acute, is, indeed, one of their ruling traits. When a bee marks the place of hishive, or of a bit of good pasturage in the fields or swamps, or of thebee-hunter's box of honey on the hills or in the woods, he returns to itas unerringly as fate. 

Honey was a much more important article of food with the ancients thanit is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar, honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for themodern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the appetite ofyouth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live much inthe open air. It is a more wholesome food than sugar, and modernconfectionery is poison beside it. Beside grape sugar, honey containsmanna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferoussubstances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of wild natural breadadded. The manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungentvegetable extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the excretions anddissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system. 

Hence it is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowingwith milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things;and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat"bread and honey" while the "king was in the parlor counting out hismoney, " was doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said to haverarely eaten anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augustus one dayinquired of a centenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and body solong; to which the veteran replied that it was by "oil without and honeywithin. " Cicero, in his "Old Age, " classes honey with meat and milk andcheese as among the staple articles with which a well-kept farm-housewill be supplied. 

Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean countries, appear tohave been famous lands for honey. Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, andMount Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity, anarticle doubtless in nowise superior to our best products. Leigh Hunt's"Jar of Honey" is mainly distilled from Sicilian history and literature, Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has always been rich inbees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says the woods onthis island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had manyhives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to theisland in this respect, and abound in bees--"Flat-nosed bees" as hecalls them in the Seventh Idyl--and comparisons in which comb-honey isthe standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. His goatherdscan think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled withhoney-combs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and fed on thecombs of bees; and among the delectables with which Arsinoe cherishesAdonis are "honey-cakes, " and other tid-bits made of "sweet honey. " Inthe country of Theocritus this custom is said still to prevail: when acouple are married the attendants place honey in their mouths, by whichthey would symbolize the hope that their love may be as sweet to theirsouls as honey to the palate. 

It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess whose breastsdistilled honey; and that once when Pindar lay asleep the bees droppedhoney upon his lips. In the Old Testament the food of the promisedImmanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt about thebutter in the original), that he might know good from evil; andJonathan's eyes were enlightened, by partaking of some wood or wildhoney: "See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, becauseI tasted a little of this honey. " So far as this part of his dietwas concerned, therefore, John the Baptist, during his sojourn in thewilderness, his divinity school-days in the mountains and plains ofJudea, fared extremely well. About the other part, the locusts, or, notto put too fine a point on it, the grasshoppers, as much cannot be said, though they were among the creeping and leaping things the childrenof Israel were permitted to eat. They were probably not eaten raw, butroasted in that most primitive of ovens, a hole in the ground made hotby building a fire in it. The locusts and honey may have been servedtogether, as the Bedas of Ceylon are said to season their meat withhoney. At any rate, as the locust is often a great plague in Palestine, the prophet in eating them found his account in the general weal, andin the profit of the pastoral bees; the fewer locusts, the more flowers. Owing to its numerous wild-flowers and flowering shrubs, Palestinehas always been a famous country for bees. They deposit their honey inhollow trees as our bees do when they escape from the hive, and in holesin the rocks as ours do not. In a tropical or semi-tropical climatebees are quite apt to take refuge in the rocks, but where ice and snowprevail, as with us, they are much safer high up in the trunk of aforest tree. 

The best honey is the product of the milder parts of the temperate zone. There are too many rank and poisonous plants in the tropics. Honey fromcertain districts of Turkey produces headache and vomiting, and thatfrom Brazil is used chiefly as medicine. The honey of Mount Hymettusowes its fine quality to wild thyme. The best honey in Persia and inFlorida is collected from the orange blossom. The celebrated honey ofNarbonne in the south of France is obtained from a species of rosemary. In Scotland good honey is made from the blossoming heather. 

California honey is white and delicate and highly perfumed, and nowtakes the lead in the market. But honey is honey the world over; and thebee is the bee still. "Men may degenerate, " says an old traveler, "mayforget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactories may fail, and commodities be debased, but the sweets of the wild-flowers of thewilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will continuewithout change or derogation. "

II. SHARP EYES AND OTHER PAPERS

CONTENTS

SHARP EYES

THE APPLE

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH

WINTER NEIGHBORS

NOTES BY THE WAY. 

 I. The Weather-wise Muskrat II. Cheating the Squirrels III. Fox and Hound IV. The Woodchuck

SHARP EYES. 

Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often amusedmyself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on openingeye after eye to the number say of a dozen or more. What would he see?Perhaps not the invisible--not the odors of flowers nor the fevergerms in the air--not the infinitely small of the microscope nor theinfinitely distant of the telescope. This would require, not more eyesso much as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but wouldhe not see with augmented power within the natural limits of vision? Atany rate some persons seem to have opened more eyes than others, theysee with such force and distinctness; their vision penetrates thetangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a spent or impotentbullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how many did HenryThoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the hunter, matching hissight against the keen and alert sense of a deer or a moose, or a foxor a wolf? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open another eye whenever wesee beyond the first general features or outlines of things--wheneverwe grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this maskcovers. Science confers new powers of vision. 

Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, orthe geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyeswere added. 

Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees. The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are likewritten words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or thewriting is in cipher and he must furnish the key. A female oriole wasone day observed very much preoccupied under a shed where the refusefrom the horse stable was thrown. She hopped about among the barn fowls, scolding them sharply when they came too near her. The stable, darkand cavernous, was just beyond. The bird, not finding what she wantedoutside, boldly ventured into the stable, and was presently captured bythe farmer. What did she want? was the query. What, but a horsehairfor her nest which was in an apple-tree near by; and she was so bent onhaving one that I have no doubt she would have tweaked one out of thehorse's tail had he been in the stable. Later in the season I examinedher nest and found it sewed through and through with several long horsehairs, so that the bird persisted in her search till the hair was found. 

Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes, are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes aresharp enough to see them. Some clever observer saw this little comedyplayed among some English sparrows and wrote an account of it in hisnewspaper; it is too good not to be true: A male bird brought to hisbox a large, fine goose feather, which is a great find for a sparrowand much coveted. After he had deposited his prize and chattered hisgratulations over it he went away in quest of his mate. His next-doorneighbor, a female bird, seeing her chance, quickly slipped in andseized the feather, --and here the wit of the bird came out, for insteadof carrying it into her own box she flew with it to a near tree andhid it in a fork of the branches, then went home, and when her neighborreturned with his mate was innocently employed about her own affairs. The proud male, finding his feather gone, came out of his box in a highstate of excitement, and, with wrath in his manner and accusation onhis tongue, rushed into the cot of the female. Not finding his goods andchattels there as he had expected, he stormed around a while, abusingeverybody in general and his neighbor in particular, and then went awayas if to repair the loss. As soon as he was out of sight, the shrewdthief went and brought the feather home and lined her own domicile withit. 

I was much amused one summer day in seeing a bluebird feeding her youngone in the shaded street of a large town. She had captured a cicada orharvest-fly, and after bruising it a while on the ground flew with itto a tree and placed it in the beak of the young bird. It was a largemorsel, and the mother seemed to have doubts of her chick's ability todispose of it, for she stood near and watched its efforts with greatsolicitude. The young bird struggled valiantly with the cicada, but madeno head way in swallowing it, when the mother took it from him and flewto the sidewalk, and proceeded to break and bruise it more thoroughly. Then she again placed it in his beak, and seemed to say, "There, try itnow, " and sympathized so thoroughly with his efforts that she repeatedmany of his motions and contortions. But the great fly was unyielding, and, indeed, seemed ridiculously disproportioned to the beak that heldit. The young bird fluttered and fluttered and screamed, "I'm stuck, I'mstuck, " till the anxious parent again seized the morsel and carriedit to an iron railing, where she came down upon it for the space of aminute with all the force and momentum her beak could command. Thenshe offered it to her young a third time, but with the same result asbefore, except that this time the bird dropped it; but she was at theground as soon as the cicada was, and taking it in her beak flewsome distance to a high board fence where she sat motionless for somemoments. While pondering the problem how that fly should be broken, the male bluebird approached her, and said very plainly, and I thoughtrather curtly, "Give me that bug, " but she quickly resented hisinterference and flew farther away, where she sat apparently quitediscouraged when I last saw her. 

The bluebird is a home bird, and I am never tired of recurring to him. His coming or reappearance in the spring marks a new chapter in theprogress of the season; things are never quite the same after one hasheard that note. The past spring the males came about a week in advanceof the females. A fine male lingered about my grounds and orchard allthe time, apparently waiting the arrival of his mate. He called andwarbled every day, as if he felt sure she was within ear-shot, andcould be hurried up. Now he warbled half-angrily or upbraidingly, then coaxingly, then cheerily and confidently, the next moment in aplaintive, far-away manner. He would half open his wings, and twinklethem caressingly, as if beckoning his mate to his heart. One morning shehad come, but was shy and reserved. The fond male flew to a knot-holein an old apple-tree, and coaxed her to his side. I heard a fineconfidential warble, --the old, old story. But the female flew to a neartree, and uttered her plaintive, homesick note. The male went and gotsome dry grass or bark in his beak, and flew again to the hole in theold tree, and promised unremitting devotion, but the other said "nay, "and flew away in the distance. When he saw her going, or rather heardher distant note, he dropped his stuff, and cried out in a tone thatsaid plainly enough, "Wait a minute. One word, please, " and flew swiftlyin pursuit. He won her before long, however, and early in April the pairwere established in one of the four or five boxes I had put up for them, but not until they had changed their minds several times. As soon asthe first brood had flown, and while they were yet under their parents'care, they began another nest in one of the other boxes, the female, asusual, doing all the work, and the male all the complimenting. 

A source of occasional great distress to the mother-bird was a white catthat sometimes followed me about. The cat had never been known to catcha bird, but she had a way of watching them that was very embarrassing tothe bird. Whenever she appeared, the mother bluebird would set up thatpitiful melodious plaint. One morning the cat was standing by me, whenthe bird came with her beak loaded with building material, and alightedabove me to survey the place before going into the box. When she saw thecat, she was greatly disturbed, and in her agitation could not keep herhold upon all her material. Straw after straw came eddying down, tillnot half her original burden remained. After the cat had gone away, thebird's alarm subsided, till, presently seeing the coast clear, she flewquickly to the box and pitched in her remaining straws with the greatestprecipitation, and, without going in to arrange them, as was her wont, flew away in evident relief. 

In the cavity of an apple-tree but a few yards off, and much nearer thehouse than they usually build, a pair of high-holes, or golden-shaftedwoodpeckers, took up their abode. A knot-hole which led to the decayedinterior was enlarged, the live wood being cut away as clean as asquirrel would have done it. The inside preparations I could notwitness, but day after day, as I passed near, I heard the bird hammeringaway, evidently beating down obstructions and shaping and enlarging thecavity. The chips were not brought out, but were used rather tofloor the interior. The woodpeckers are not nest-builders, but rathernest-carvers. 

The time seemed very short before the voices of the young were heard inthe heart of the old tree, --at first feebly, but waxing stronger day byday until they could be heard many rods distant. When I put my hand uponthe trunk of the tree, they would set up an eager, expectant chattering;but if I climbed up it toward the opening, they soon detected theunusual sound and would hush quickly, only now and then uttering awarning note. Long before they were fully fledged they clambered up tothe orifice to receive their food. As but one could stand in the openingat a time, there was a good deal of elbowing and struggling for thisposition. It was a very desirable one aside from the advantages it hadwhen food was served; it looked out upon the great shining world, intowhich the young birds seemed never tired of gazing. The fresh airmust have been a consideration also, for the interior of a high-hole'sdwelling is not sweet. When the parent birds came with food the youngone in the opening did not get it all, but after he had received aportion, either on his own motion or on a hint from the old one, hewould give place to the one behind him. Still, one bird evidentlyoutstripped his fellows, and in the race of life, was two or three daysin advance of them. His voice was loudest and his head oftenest at thewindow. But I noticed that when he had kept the position too long, the others evidently made it uncomfortable in his rear, and, after"fidgeting" about a while, he would be compelled to "back down. " Butretaliation was then easy, and I fear his mates spent few easy momentsat that lookout. They would close their eyes and slide back into thecavity as if the world had suddenly lost all its charms for them. 

This bird was, of course, the first to leave the nest. For two daysbefore that event he kept his position in the opening most of the timeand sent forth his strong voice incessantly. The old ones abstained fromfeeding him almost entirely, no doubt to encourage his exit. As Istood looking at him one afternoon and noting his progress, he suddenlyreached a resolution, --seconded, I have no doubt, from the rear, --andlaunched forth upon his untried wings. They served him well and carriedhim about fifty yards up-hill the first heat. The second day after, thenext in size and spirit left in the same manner; then another, till onlyone remained. The parent birds ceased their visits to him, and for oneday he called and called till our ears were tired of the sound. Hiswas the faintest heart of all. Then he had none to encourage him frombehind. He left the nest and clung to the outer bowl of the tree, andyelped and piped for an hour longer; then he committed himself to hiswings and went his way like the rest. 

A young farmer in the western part of New York, who has a sharp, discriminating eye, sends me some interesting notes about a tamehigh-hole he once had. 

"Did you ever notice, " says he, "that the high-hole never eats anythingthat he cannot pick up with his tongue? At least this was the case witha young one I took from the nest and tamed. He could thrust out histongue two or three inches, and it was amusing to see his efforts to eatcurrants from the hand. He would run out his tongue and try to stick itto the currant; failing in that, he would bend his tongue around it likea hook and try to raise it by a sudden jerk. But he never succeeded, the round fruit would roll and slip away every time. He never seemed tothink of taking it in his beak. His tongue was in constant use to findout the nature of everything he saw; a nail-hole in a board or anysimilar hole was carefully explored. If he was held near the face hewould soon be attracted by the eye and thrust his tongue into it. Inthis way he gained the respect of a number of half-grown cats that werearound the house. I wished to make them familiar to each other, so therewould be less danger of their killing him. So I would take them both onmy knee, when the bird would soon notice the kitten's eyes, and levelinghis bill as carefully as a marksman levels his rifle, he would remain soa minute when he would dart his tongue into the cat's eye. This was heldby the cats to be very mysterious: being struck in the eye by somethinginvisible to them. They soon acquired such a terror of him that theywould avoid him and run away whenever they saw his bill turned in theirdirection. He never would swallow a grasshopper even when it was placedin his throat; he would shake himself until he had thrown it out of hismouth. His 'best hold' was ants. He never was surprised at anything, andnever was afraid of anything. He would drive the turkey gobbler andthe rooster. He would advance upon them holding one wing up as high aspossible, as if to strike with it, and shuffle along the ground towardthem, scolding all the while in a harsh voice. I feared at first thatthey might kill him, but I soon found that he was able to take care ofhimself. I would turn over stones and dig into ant-hills for him, and hewould lick up the ants so fast that a stream of them seemed goinginto his mouth unceasingly. I kept him till late in the fall, when hedisappeared, probably going south, and I never saw him again. "

My correspondent also sends me some interesting observations about thecuckoo. He says a large gooseberry bush standing in the border of an oldhedgerow, in the midst of open fields, and not far from his house, wasoccupied by a pair of cuckoos for two seasons in succession, and, afteran interval of a year, for two seasons more. This gave him a good chanceto observe them. He says the mother-bird lays a single egg, and sitsupon it a number of days before laying the second, so that he has seenone young bird nearly grown, a second just hatched, and a whole eggall in the nest at once. "So far as I have seen, this is the settledpractice, --the young leaving the nest one at a time to the number of sixor eight. The young have quite the look of the young of the dove in manyrespects. When nearly grown they are covered with long blue pin-feathersas long as darning-needles, without a bit of plumage on them. They parton the back and hang down on each side by their own weight. With itscurious feathers and misshapen body the young bird is anything buthandsome. They never open their mouths when approached, as many youngbirds do, but sit perfectly still, hardly moving when touched. " He alsonotes the unnatural indifference of the mother-bird when her nest andyoung are approached. She makes no sound, but sits quietly on a nearbranch in apparent perfect unconcern. 

These observations, together with the fact that the egg of the cuckoois occasionally found in the nests of other birds, raise the inquirywhether our bird is slowly relapsing into the habit of the Europeanspecies, which always foists its egg upon other birds; or whether, onthe other hand, it is not mending its manners in this respect. It hasbut little to unlearn or to forget in the one case, but great progressto make in the other. How far is its rudimentary nest--a mere platformof coarse twigs and dry stalks of weeds--from the deep, compact, finelywoven and finely modeled nest of the goldfinch or king-bird, and what agulf between its indifference toward its young and their solicitude! Itsirregular manner of laying also seems better suited to a parasite likeour cow-bird, or the European cuckoo, than to a regular nest-builder. 

This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees plenty of interestingthings as he goes about his work. He one day saw a white swallow, whichis of rare occurrence. He saw a bird, a sparrow he thinks, fly againstthe side of a horse and fill his beak with hair from the loosened coatof the animal. He saw a shrike pursue a chickadee, when the latterescaped by taking refuge in a small hole in a tree. One day in earlyspring he saw two hen-hawks that were circling and screaming high inair, approach each other, extend a claw, and, clasping them together, fall toward the earth flapping and struggling as if they were tiedtogether; on nearing the ground they separated and soared aloft again. He supposed that it was not a passage of war but of love, and that thehawks were toying fondly with each other. 

He further relates a curious circumstance of finding a humming-bird inthe upper part of a barn with its bill stuck fast in a crack of one ofthe large timbers, dead, of course, with wings extended, and as dry as achip. The bird seems to have died as it had lived, on the wing, and itslast act was indeed a ghastly parody of its living career. Fancy thisnimble, flashing sprite, whose life was passed probing the honeyeddepths of flowers, at last thrusting its bill into a crack in a drytimber in a hayloft, and, with spread wings, ending its existence. 

When the air is damp and heavy, swallows frequently hawk for insectsabout cattle and moving herds in the field. My farmer describes howthey attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with amowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows werevery hungry, and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of hismachine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a broodof hungry chickens. He says there was a continued rush of purple wingsover the "cut-bar, " and just where it was causing the grass to trembleand fall. Without his assistance the swallows would doubtless have gonehungry yet another day. 

Of the hen-hawk, he has observed that both male and female take part inincubation. "I was rather surprised, " he says, "on one occasion, tosee how quickly they change places on the nest. The nest was in a tallbeech, and the leaves were not yet fully out. I could see the head andneck of the hawk over the edge of the nest, when I saw the other hawkcoming down through the air at full speed. I expected he would alightnear by, but instead of that he struck directly upon the nest, his mategetting out of the way barely in time to avoid being hit; it seemedalmost as if he had knocked her off the nest. I hardly see how they canmake such a rush on the nest without danger to the eggs. "

The king-bird will worry the hawk as a whiffet dog will worry a bear. Itis by his persistence and audacity, not by any injury he is capable ofdealing his great antagonist. The king-bird seldom more than dogs thehawk, keeping above and between his wings, and making a great ado; butmy correspondent says he once "saw a king-bird riding on a hawk'sback. The hawk flew as fast as possible, and the king-bird sat upon hisshoulders in triumph until they had passed out of sight, "--tweaking hisfeathers, no doubt, and threatening to scalp him the next moment. 

That near relative of the king-bird, the great crested fly-catcher, has one well known peculiarity: he appears never to consider his nestfinished until it contains a cast-off snake-skin. My alert correspondentone day saw him eagerly catch up an onion skin and make off with it, either deceived by it or else thinking it a good substitute for thecoveted material. 

One day in May, walking in the woods, I came upon the nest of awhippoorwill, or rather its eggs, for it builds no nest, --two ellipticalwhitish spotted eggs lying upon the dry leaves. My foot was within ayard of the mother-bird before she flew. I wondered what a sharp eyewould detect curious or characteristic in the ways of the bird, so Icame to the place many times and had a look. It was always a task toseparate the bird from her surroundings though I stood within a few feetof her, and knew exactly where to look. One had to bear on with his eye, as it were, and refuse to be baffled. The sticks and leaves, and bits ofblack or dark-brown bark, were all exactly copied in the bird's plumage. And then she did sit so close, and simulate so well a shapeless decayingpiece of wood or bark! Twice I brought a companion, and guiding his eyeto the spot, noted how difficult it was for him to make out there, infull view upon the dry leaves, any semblance to a bird. When the birdreturned after being disturbed, she would alight within a few inches ofher eggs, and then, after a moment's pause, hobble awkwardly upon them. 

After the young had appeared, all the wit of the bird came into play. Iwas on hand the next day, I think. The mother-bird sprang up when I waswithin a pace of her, and in doing so fanned the leaves with her wingstill they sprang up too; as the leaves started the young started, and, being of the same color, to tell which was the leaf and which the birdwas a trying task to any eye. I came the next day, when the same tacticswere repeated. Once a leaf fell upon one of the young birds andnearly hid it. The young are covered with a reddish down like a youngpartridge, and soon follow their mother about. When disturbed, they gavebut one leap, then settled down, perfectly motionless and stupid, witheyes closed. The parent bird, on these occasions made frantic effortsto decoy me away from her young. She would fly a few paces and fallupon her breast, and a spasm, like that of death, would run through hertremulous outstretched wings and prostrate body. She kept a sharp eyeout the meanwhile to see if the ruse took, and if it did not, she wasquickly cured, and moving about to some other point tried to draw myattention as before. When followed she always alighted upon the ground, dropping down in a sudden peculiar way. The second or third day both oldand young had disappeared. 

The whippoorwill walks as awkwardly as a swallow, which is as awkward asa man in a bag, and yet she manages to lead her young about the woods. The latter, I think, move by leaps and sudden spurts, their protectivecoloring shielding them most effectively. Wilson once came upon themother-bird and her brood in the woods, and, though they were at hisvery feet, was so baffled by the concealment of the young that hewas about to give up the search, much disappointed, when he perceivedsomething "like a slight moldiness among the withered leaves, and, on stooping down, discovered it to be a young whippoorwill seeminglyasleep. " Wilson's description of the young is very accurate, as itsdowny covering does look precisely like a "slight moldiness. " Returninga few moments afterward to the spot to get a pencil he had forgotten, hecould find neither old nor young. 

It takes an eye to see a partridge in the woods motionless upon theleaves; this sense needs to be as sharp as that of smell in hounds andpointers; and yet I know an unkempt youth that seldom fails to see thebird and shoot it before it takes wing. I think he sees it as soon as itsees him and before it suspects itself seen. What a training to the eyeis hunting! To pick out the game from its surroundings, the grousefrom the leaves, the gray squirrel from the mossy oak limb it hugs soclosely, the red fox from the ruddy or brown or gray field, the rabbitfrom the stubble, or the white hare from the snow requires the bestpowers of this sense. A woodchuck, motionless in the fields or upona rock, looks very much like a large stone or bowlder, yet a keen eyeknows the difference at a glance, a quarter of a mile away. 

A man has a sharper eye than a dog, or a fox, or than any of the wildcreatures, but not so sharp an ear or nose. But in the birds he findshis match. How quickly the old turkey discovers the hawk, a mere speckagainst the sky, and how quickly the hawk discovers you if you happen tobe secreted in the bushes or behind the fence near which he alights!One advantage the bird surely has, and that is, owing to the form, structure, and position of the eye, it has a much larger field ofvision--indeed, can probably see in nearly every direction at the sameinstant, behind as well as before. Man's field of vision embraces lessthan half a circle horizontally, and still less vertically; his brow andbrain prevent him from seeing within many degrees of the zenith withouta movement of the head; the bird on the other hand, takes in nearly thewhole sphere at a glance. 

I find I see almost without effort nearly every bird within sight in thefield or wood I pass through (a flit of the wing, a flirt of the tailare enough, though the flickering leaves do all conspire to hide them), and that with like ease the birds see me, though, unquestionably, thechances are immensely in their favor. The eye sees what it has the meansof seeing, truly. You must have the bird in your heart before you canfind it in the bush. The eye must have purpose and aim. No one ever yetfound the walking fern who did not have the walking fern in his mind. Aperson whose eye is full of Indian relics picks them up in every fieldhe walks through. 

One season I was interested in the tree-frogs; especially the tiny piperthat one hears about the woods and brushy fields--the hyla of the swampsbecome a denizen of the trees; I had never seen him in this new role. But this season, having hylas in mind, or rather being ripe for them, Iseveral times came across them. One Sunday, walking amid some bushes, I captured two. They leaped before me as doubtless they had done manytimes before; but though I was not looking for or thinking of them, yetthey were quickly recognized, because the eye had been commissionedto find them. On another occasion, not long afterward, I was hurriedlyloading my gun in the October woods in hopes of overtaking a graysquirrel that was fast escaping through the tree-tops, when one of theselilliput frogs, the color of the fast-yellowing leaves, leaped near me. I saw him only out of the corner of my eye and yet bagged him, because Ihad already made him my own. 

Nevertheless, the habit of observation is the habit of clear anddecisive gazing. Not by a first casual glance, but by a steadydeliberate aim of the eye are the rare and characteristic thingsdiscovered. You must look intently and hold your eye firmly to the spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind. The sharp-shooterpicks out his man and knows him with fatal certainty from a stump, or arock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to locate, not onlyform, color, and weight, in the region of the eye, but also a facultywhich they call individuality--that which separates, discriminates, andsees in every object its essential character. This is just as necessaryto the naturalist as to the artist or the poet. The sharp eye notesspecific points and differences, --it seizes upon and preserves theindividuality of the thing. Persons frequently describe to me some birdthey have seen or heard and ask me to name it, but in most cases thebird might be any one of a dozen, or else it is totally unlike any birdfound in this continent. They have either seen falsely or else vaguely. Not so the farm youth who wrote me one winter day that he had seen asingle pair of strange birds, which he describes as follows: "They wereabout the size of the 'chippie, ' the tops of their heads were red, andthe breast of the male was of the same color, while that of the femalewas much lighter; their rumps were also faintly tinged with red. If Ihave described them so that you would know them, please write me theirnames. " There can be little doubt but the young observer had seen a pairof red-polls, --a bird related to the goldfinch, and that occasionallycomes down to us in the winter from the far north. Another time, the same youth wrote that he had seen a strange bird, the color ofa sparrow, that alighted on fences and buildings as well as uponthe ground, and that walked. This last fact shoved the youth'sdiscriminating eye and settled the case. I knew it to be a species ofthe lark, and from the size, color, season, etc. , the tit-lark. But howmany persons would have observed that the bird walked instead of hopped?

Some friends of mine who lived in the country tried to describe to me abird that built a nest in a tree within a few feet of the house. As itwas a brown bird, I should have taken it for a wood-thrush, had notthe nest been described as so thin and loose that from beneath the eggscould be distinctly seen. The most pronounced feature in the descriptionwas the barred appearance of the under side of the bird's tail. I wasquite at sea, until one day, when we were driving out, a cuckoo flewacross the road in front of us, when my friends exclaimed, "There is ourbird!" I had never known a cuckoo to build near a house, and I had nevernoted the appearance the tail presents when viewed from beneath; but ifthe bird had been described in its most obvious features, as slender, with a long tail, cinnamon brown above and white beneath, with a curvedbill, anyone who knew the bird would have recognized the portrait. 

We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for itsspecific features. I thought I knew exactly the form of the leaf of thetulip-tree, until one day a lady asked me to draw the outline of one. Agood observer is quick to take a hint and to follow it up. Most of thefacts of nature, especially in the life of the birds and animals, arewell screened. We do not see the play because we do not look intentlyenough. The other day I was sitting with a friend upon a high rockin the woods, near a small stream, when we saw a water-snake swimmingacross a pool toward the opposite bank. Any eye would have noted it, perhaps nothing more. A little closer and sharper gaze revealed the factthat the snake bore something in its mouth, which, as we went down toinvestigate, proved to be a small cat-fish, three or four inches long. The snake had captured it in the pool, and, like any other fisherman, wanted to get its prey to dry land, although itself lived mostly in thewater. Here, we said, is being enacted a little tragedy, that would haveescaped any but sharp eyes. The snake, which was itself small, had thefish by the throat, the hold of vantage among all creatures, and clungto it with great tenacity. The snake knew that its best tactics was toget upon dry land as soon as possible. It could not swallow its victimalive, and it could not strangle it in the water. For a while it triedto kill its game by holding it up out of the water, but the fish grewheavy, and every few moments its struggles brought down the snake'shead. This would not do. Compressing the fish's throat would not shutoff its breath under such circumstances, so the wily serpent tried toget ashore with it, and after several attempts succeeded in effecting alanding on a flat rock. But the fish died hard. Cat-fish do not give upthe ghost in a hurry. Its throat was becoming congested, but the snake'sdistended jaws must have ached. It was like a petrified gape. Then thespectators became very curious and close in their scrutiny, and thesnake determined to withdraw from the public gaze and finish thebusiness in hand to its own notions. But, when gently but firmlyremonstrated with by my friend with his walking-stick, it dropped thefish and retreated in high dudgeon beneath a stone in the bed of thecreek. The fish, with a swollen and angry throat, went its way also. 

Birds, I say, have wonderfully keen eyes. Throw a fresh bone or apiece of meat upon the snow in winter, and see how soon the crows willdiscover it and be on hand. If it be near the house or barn, the crowthat first discovers it will alight near it, to make sure he is notdeceived; then he will go away, and soon return with a companion. Thetwo alight a few yards from the bone, and after some delay, during whichthe vicinity is sharply scrutinized, one of the crows advances boldly towithin a few feet of the coveted prize. Here he pauses, and if no trickis discovered, and the meat be indeed meat, he seizes it and makes off. 

One midwinter I cleared away the snow under an apple-tree near the houseand scattered some corn there. I had not seen a blue-jay for weeks, yetthat very day one found my corn, and after that several came daily andpartook of it, holding the kernels under their feet upon the limbs ofthe trees and pecking them vigorously. 

Of course the woodpecker and his kind have sharp eyes; still I wassurprised to see how quickly Downy found out some bones that were placedin a convenient place under the shed to be pounded up for the hens. Ingoing out to the barn I often disturbed him making a meal off the biteof meat that still adhered to them. 

"Look intently enough at anything, " said a poet to me one day, "and youwill see something that would otherwise escape you. " I thought of theremark as I sat on a stump in an opening of the woods one spring day. Isaw a small hawk approaching; he flew to a tall tulip-tree and alightedon a large limb near the top. He eyed me and I eyed him. Then the birddisclosed a trait that was new to me: he hopped along the limb to asmall cavity near the trunk, when he thrust in his head and pulled outsome small object and fell to eating it. After he had partaken of it forsome minutes he put the remainder back in his larder and flew away. Ihad seen something like feathers eddying slowly down as the hawk ate, and on approaching the spot found the feathers of a sparrow here andthere clinging to the bushes beneath the tree. The hawk then--commonlycalled the chicken hawk--is as provident as a mouse or a squirrel, andlays by a store against a time of need, but I should not have discoveredthe fact had I not held my eye on him. 

An observer of the birds is attracted by any unusual sound or commotionamong them. In May or June, when other birds are most vocal, the jayis a silent bird; he goes sneaking about the orchards and the grovesas silent as a pickpocket; he is robbing bird's-nests and he is veryanxious that nothing should be said about it; but in the fall none soquick and loud to cry "Thief, thief!" as he. One December morning atroop of jays discovered a little screech-owl secreted in the hollowtrunk of an old apple-tree near my house. How they found the owl out isa mystery, since it never ventures forth in the light of day; butthey did, and proclaimed the fact with great emphasis. I suspect thebluebirds first told them, for these birds are constantly peeping intoholes and crannies, both spring and fall. Some unsuspecting bird hadprobably entered the cavity prospecting for a place for next year'snest, or else looking out a likely place to pass a cold night, and thenhad rushed out with important news. A boy who should unwittingly ventureinto a bear's den when Bruin was at home could not be more astonishedand alarmed than a bluebird would be on finding itself in the cavity ofa decayed tree with an owl. At any rate the bluebirds joined the jaysin calling the attention of all whom it might concern to the fact thata culprit of some sort was hiding from the light of day in the oldapple-tree. I heard the notes of warning and alarm and approached towithin eye-shot. The bluebirds were cautious and hovered about utteringtheir peculiar twittering calls; but the jays were bolder and took turnslooking in at the cavity, and deriding the poor shrinking owl. Ajay would alight in the entrance of the hole and flirt and peer andattitudinize, and then flyaway crying "Thief, thief, thief!" at the topof his voice. 

I climbed up and peered into the opening, and could just descry theowl clinging to the inside of the tree. I reached in and took him out, giving little heed to the threatening snapping of his beak. He was asred as a fox and as yellow-eyed as a cat. He made no effort to escape, but planted his claws in my forefinger and clung there with a grip thatsoon grew uncomfortable. I placed him in the loft of an out-housein hopes of getting better acquainted with him. By day he was a verywilling prisoner, scarcely moving at all, even when approached andtouched with the hand, but looking out upon the world with half-closed, sleepy eyes. But at night what a change; how alert, how wild, howactive! He was like another bird; he darted about with wide, fearfuleyes, and regarded me like a cornered cat. I opened the window, andswiftly, but as silent as a shadow, he glided out into the congenialdarkness, and perhaps, ere this, has revenged himself upon the sleepingjay or bluebird that first betrayed his hiding-place. 

THE APPLE. 

 Lo! sweetened with the summer light, The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, Drops in a silent autumn night. --TENNYSON. 

Not a little of the sunshine of our northern winters is surely wrappedup in the apple. How could we winter over without it! How is lifesweetened by its mild acids! A cellar well filled with apples is morevaluable than a chamber filled with flax and wool. So much sound ruddylife to draw upon, to strike one's roots down into, as it were. 

Especially to those whose soil of life is inclined to be a little clayeyand heavy, is the apple a winter necessity. It is the natural antidoteof most of the ills the flesh is heir to. Full of vegetable acids andaromatics, qualities which act as refrigerants and antiseptics, what anenemy it is to jaundice, indigestion, torpidity of liver, etc. It is agentle spur and tonic to the whole biliary system. Then I have read thatit has been found by analysis to contain more phosphorus than anyother vegetable. This makes it the proper food of the scholar and thesedentary man; it feeds his brain and it stimulates his liver. Nor isthis all. Besides its hygienic properties, the apple is full ofsugar and mucilage, which make it highly nutritious. It is said, "The operators of Cornwall, England, consider ripe apples nearlyas nourishing as bread, and far more so than potatoes. In the year1801--which was a year of much scarcity--apples, instead of beingconverted into cider, were sold to the poor, and the laborers assertedthat they could 'stand their work' on baked apples without meat; whereasa potato diet required either meat or some other substantial nutriment. The French and Germans use apples extensively, so do the inhabitantsof all European nations. The laborers depend upon them as an article offood, and frequently make a dinner of sliced apples and bread. "

Yet the English apple is a tame and insipid affair compared with theintense, sun-colored and sun-steeped fruit our orchards yield. The English have no sweet apple, I am told, the saccharine elementapparently being less abundant in vegetable nature in that sour andchilly climate than in our own. It is well known that the European mapleyields no sugar, while both our birch and hickory have sweet in theirveins. Perhaps this fact accounts for our excessive love of sweets, which may be said to be a national trait. 

The Russian apple has a lovely complexion, smooth and transparent, but the Cossack is not yet all eliminated from it. The only one I haveseen--the Duchess of Oldenburg--is as beautiful as a Tartar princess, with a distracting odor, but it is the least bit puckery to the taste. 

The best thing I know about Chili is not its guano beds, but this factwhich I learn from Darwin's "Voyage, " namely, that the apple thriveswell there. Darwin saw a town there so completely buried in a wood ofapple-trees, that its streets were merely paths in an orchard. The treeindeed thrives so well, that large branches cut off in the spring andplanted two or three feet deep in the ground send out roots and developinto fine full-bearing trees by the third year. The people know thevalue of the apple too. They make cider and wine of it and then fromthe refuse a white and finely flavored spirit; then by another processa sweet treacle is obtained called honey. The children and the pigs eatlittle or no other food. He does not add that the people are healthyand temperate, but I have no doubt they are. We knew the apple had manyvirtues, but these Chilians have really opened a deep beneath a deep. We had found out the cider and the spirits, but who guessed the wine andthe honey, unless it were the bees? There is a variety in our orchardscalled the winesap, a doubly liquid name that suggests what might bedone with this fruit. 

The apple is the commonest and yet the most varied and beautiful offruits. A dish of them is as becoming to the centre-table in winter aswas the vase of flowers in the summer, --a bouquet of spitzenbergs andgreenings and northern spies. A rose when it blooms, the apple is a rosewhen it ripens. It pleases every sense to which it can be addressed, thetouch, the smell, the sight, the taste; and when it falls in the stillOctober days it pleases the ear. It is a call to a banquet, it is asignal that the feast is ready. The bough would fain hold it, but it cannow assert its independence; it can now live a life of its own. 

Daily the stem relaxes its hold, till finally it lets go completely, anddown comes the painted sphere with a mellow thump to the earth, towardswhich it has been nodding so long. It bounds away to seek its bed, to hide under a leaf, or in a tuft of grass. It will now take time tomeditate and ripen! What delicious thoughts it has there nestled withits fellows under the fence, turning acid into sugar, and sugar intowine!

How pleasing to the touch! I love to stroke its polished rondure withmy hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, orthrough the early spring woods. You are company, you red-cheeked spitz, or you salmon-fleshed greening! I toy with you; press your face to mine, toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out where youlie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You are so alive! You glowlike a ruddy flower. You look so animated I almost expect to see youmove. I postpone the eating of you, you are so beautiful! How compact;how exquisitely tinted! Stained by the sun and varnished against therains. An independent vegetable existence, alive and vascular as my ownflesh; capable of being wounded, bleeding, wasting away, and almost ofrepairing damages!

How it resists the cold! holding out almost as long as the red cheeksof the boys do. A frost that destroys the potatoes and other roots onlymakes the apple more crisp and vigorous; it peeps out from the chanceNovember snows unscathed. When I see the fruit-vender on the streetcorner stamping his feet and beating his hands to keep them warm, andhis naked apples lying exposed to the blasts, I wonder if they do notache too to clap their hands and enliven their circulation. But they canstand it nearly as long as the vender can. 

Noble common fruit, best friend of man and most loved by him, followinghim like his dog or his cow, wherever he goes. His homestead is notplanted till you are planted, your roots intertwine with his; thrivingbest where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost, theplow and the pruning-knife, you are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerfulindustry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste fruit!you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor indolence, neither enervating heats nor the Frigid Zones. Uncloying fruit, fruitwhose best sauce is the open air, whose finest flavors only he whosetaste is sharpened by brisk work or walking knows; winter fruit, whenthe fire of life burns brightest; fruit always a little hyperborean, leaning towards the cold; bracing, sub-acid, active fruit. I think youmust come from the north, you are so frank and honest, so sturdy andappetizing. You are stocky and homely like the northern races. Yourquality is Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous south is not akin toyou. Not spices or olives or the sumptuous liquid fruits, but the grass, the snow, the grains, the coolness is akin to you. I think if I couldsubsist on you or the like of you, I should never have an intemperateor ignoble thought, never be feverish or despondent. So far as I couldabsorb or transmute your quality I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmth andcontentment around. 

Is there any other fruit that has so much facial expression as theapple? What boy does not more than half believe they can see with thatsingle eye of theirs? Do they not look and nod to him from the bough?The swaar has one look, the rambo another, the spy another. The youthrecognizes the seek-no-further buried beneath a dozen other varieties, the moment he catches a glance of its eye, or the bonny-cheeked Newtownpippin, or the gentle but sharp-nosed gilliflower. He goes to the greatbin in the cellar and sinks his shafts here and there in the garneredwealth of the orchards, mining for his favorites, sometimes coming plumpupon them, sometimes catching a glimpse of them to the right or left, or uncovering them as keystones in an arch made up of many varieties. In the dark he can usually tell them by the sense of touch. There isnot only the size and shape, but there is the texture and polish. Someapples are coarse grained and some are fine; some are thin-skinned andsome are thick. One variety is quick and vigorous beneath the touch;another gentle and yielding. The pinnock has a thick skin with a spongylining, a bruise in it becomes like a piece of cork. The tallow applehas an unctuous feel, as its name suggests. It sheds water like a duck. What apple is that with a fat curved stem that blends so prettilywith its own flesh, --the wine-apple? Some varieties impress me asmasculine, --weather-stained, freckled, lasting and rugged; othersare indeed lady apples, fair, delicate, shining, mild-flavored, white-meated, like the egg-drop and the lady-finger. The practiced handknows each kind by the touch. Do you remember the apple hole in thegarden or back of the house, Ben Bolt? In the fall after the bins in thecellar had been well stocked, we excavated a circular pit in the warm, mellow earth, and covering the bottom with clean rye straw, emptied inbasketful after basketful of hardy choice varieties, till there was atent-shaped mound several feet high of shining variegated fruit. Thenwrapping it about with a thick layer of long rye straw, and tucking itup snug and warm, the mound was covered, with a thin coating of earth, aflat stone on the top holding down the straw. As winter set in, anothercoating of earth was put upon it, with perhaps an overcoat of coarse drystable manure, and the precious pile was left in silence and darknesstill spring. No marmot hibernating under-ground in his nest of leavesand dry grass, more cosy and warm. No frost, no wet, but fragrantprivacy and quiet. Then how the earth tempers and flavors the apples! Itdraws out all the acrid unripe qualities, and infuses into them a subtlerefreshing taste of the soil. Some varieties perish; but the ranker, hardier kinds, like the northern spy, the greening, or the black apple, or the russet, or the pinnock, how they ripen and grow in grace, how thegreen becomes gold, and the bitter becomes sweet!

As the supply in the bins and barrels gets low and spring approaches, the buried treasures in the garden are remembered. With spade and axewe go out and penetrate through the snow and frozen earth till the innerdressing of straw is laid bare. It is not quite as clear and bright aswhen we placed it there last fall, but the fruit beneath, which thehand soon exposes, is just as bright and far more luscious. Then, as dayafter day you resort to the hole, and, removing the straw and earth fromthe opening, thrust your arm into the fragrant pit, you have a betterchance than ever before to become acquainted with your favorites by thesense of touch. How you feel for them, reaching to the right and left!Now you have got a Tolman sweet; you imagine you can feel that singlemeridian line that divides it into two hemispheres. Now a greening fillsyour hand, you feel its fine quality beneath its rough coat. Now youhave hooked a swaar, you recognize its full face; now a Vandevere or aKing rolls down from the apex above, and you bag it at once. When youwere a school-boy you stowed these away in your pockets and ate themalong the road and at recess, and again at noon time; and they, ina measure, corrected the effects of the cake and pie with which yourindulgent mother filled your lunch-basket. 

The boy is indeed the true apple-eater, and is not to be questioned howhe came by the fruit with which his pockets are filled. It belongs tohim. . . His own juicy flesh craves the juicy flesh of the apple. Sap drawssap. His fruit-eating has little reference to the state of his appetite. Whether he be full of meat or empty of meat he wants the apple justthe same. Before meal or after meal it never comes amiss. The farm-boymunches apples all day long. He has nests of them in the hay-mow, mellowing, to which he makes frequent visits. Sometimes old Brindle, having access through the open door, smells them out and makes shortwork of them. 

In some countries the custom remains of placing a rosy apple in the handof the dead that they may find it when they enter paradise. In northernmythology the giants eat apples to keep off old age. 

The apple is indeed the fruit of youth. As we grow old we crave applesless. It is an ominous sign. When you are ashamed to be seen eating themon the street; when you can carry them in your pocket and your hand notconstantly find its way to them; when your neighbor has apples and youhave none, and you make no nocturnal visits to his orchard; when yourlunch-basket is without them, and you can pass a winter's night by thefireside with no thought of the fruit at your elbow, then be assured youare no longer a boy, either in heart or years. 

The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an apple in their seasonas others with a pipe or cigar. When he has nothing else to do, or isbored, he eats an apple. While he is waiting for the train he eats anapple, sometimes several of them. When he takes a walk, he arms himselfwith apples. His traveling bag is full of apples. He offers an apple tohis companion, and takes one himself. They are his chief solace whenon the road. He sows their seed all along the route. He tosses the corefrom the car-window and from the top of the stage-coach. He would, intime, make the land one vast orchard. He dispenses with a knife. Heprefers that his teeth shall have the first taste. Then he knows thebest flavor is immediately beneath the skin, and that in a pared applethis is lost. If you will stew the apple, he says, instead of bakingit, by all means leave the skin on. It improves the color and vastlyheightens the flavor of the dish. 

The apple is a masculine fruit; hence women are poor apple-eaters. Itbelongs to the open air, and requires an open-air taste and relish. 

I instantly sympathized with that clergyman I read of, who on pullingout his pocket-handkerchief in the midst of his discourse, pulled outtwo bouncing apples with it that went rolling across the pulpit floorand down the pulpit stairs. These apples were, no doubt, to be eatenafter the sermon on his way home, or to his next appointment. They wouldtake the taste of it out of his mouth. Then, would a minister be apt togrow tiresome with two big apples in his coat-tail pockets? Would he notnaturally hasten along to "lastly, " and the big apples? If they were thedominie apples, and it was April or May, he certainly. . . . 

How the early settlers prized the apple! When their trees broke down orwere split asunder by the storms, the neighbors turned out, the dividedtree was put together again and fastened with iron bolts. In some of theoldest orchards one may still occasionally see a large dilapidated treewith the rusty iron bolt yet visible. Poor, sour fruit, too, but sweetin those early pioneer days. My grandfather, who was one of these heroesof the stump, used every fall to make a journey of forty miles for afew apples, which he brought home in a bag on horseback. He frequentlystarted from home by two or three o'clock in the morning, and at onetime both he and his horse were much frightened by the screaming ofpanthers in a narrow pass in the mountains through which the road led. 

Emerson, I believe, has spoken of the apple as the social fruit of NewEngland. Indeed, what a promoter or abettor of social intercourse amongour rural population the apple has been, the company growing more merryand unrestrained as soon as the basket of apples was passed round!When the cider followed, the introduction and good understanding werecomplete. Then those rural gatherings that enlivened the autumn in thecountry, known as "apple cuts, " now, alas! nearly obsolete, where somany things were cut and dried besides apples! The larger and moreloaded the orchard, the more frequently the invitations went round andthe higher the social and convivial spirit ran. Ours is eminently acountry of the orchard. Horace Greeley said he had seen no land inwhich the orchard formed such a prominent feature in the rural andagricultural districts. Nearly every farmhouse in the Eastern andNorthern States has its setting or its background of apple-trees, whichgenerally date back to the first settlement of the farm. Indeed, theorchard, more than almost any other thing, tends to soften and humanizethe country, and to give the place of which it is an adjunct, a settled, domestic look. The apple-tree takes the rawness and wildness off anyscene. On the top of a mountain, or in remote pastures, it sheds thesentiment of home. It never loses its domestic air, or lapses into awild state. And in planting a homestead, or in choosing a buildingsite for the new house, what a help it is to have a few old, maternalapple-trees near by; regular old grandmothers, who have seen trouble, who have been sad and glad through so many winters and summers, who haveblossomed till the air about them is sweeter than elsewhere, and bornefruit till the grass beneath them has become thick and soft from humancontact, and who have nourished robins and finches in their branchestill they have a tender, brooding look. The ground, the turf, theatmosphere of an old orchard, seem several stages nearer to man thanthat of the adjoining field, as if the trees had given back to the soilmore than they had taken from it; as if they had tempered the elementsand attracted all the genial and beneficent influences in the landscapearound. 

An apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops beside the apple. There is the crop of sweet and tender reminiscences dating fromchildhood and spanning the seasons from May to October, and making theorchard a sort of outlying part of the household. You have playedthere as a child, mused there as a youth or lover, strolled there as athoughtful, sad-eyed man. Your father, perhaps, planted the trees, orreared them from the seed, and you yourself have pruned and graftedthem, and worked among them, till every separate tree has a peculiarhistory and meaning in your mind. Then there is the never-failing cropof birds--robins, goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds, hair-birds, orioles, starlings--all nesting and breeding in its branches, and fitlydescribed by Wilson Flagg as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard. " Whetherthe pippin and sweetbough bear or not, the "punctual birds" can alwaysbe depended on. Indeed, there are few better places to study ornithologythan in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many of the birdsof the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the season. Thecuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen apples, the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds' eggs, thewoodpecker and chickadees for their food, and the high-hole for ants. The red-bird comes too, if only to see what a friendly covert itsbranches form; and the wood-thrush now and then comes out of the grovenear by, and nests alongside of its cousin, the robin. The smaller hawksknow that this is a most likely spot for their prey; and in spring theshy northern warblers may be studied as they pause to feed on the fineinsects amid its branches. The mice love to dwell here also, and hithercomes from the near woods the squirrel and the rabbit. The latter willput his head through the boy's slipper-noose any time for taste of thesweet apple, and the red squirrel and chipmunk esteem its seeds a greatrarity. 

All the domestic animals love the apple, but none so much so as the cow. The taste of it wakes her up as few other things do, and bars and fencesmust be well looked after. No need to assort them or pick out the ripeones for her. An apple is an apple, and there is no best about it. Iheard of a quick-witted old cow that learned to shake them down fromthe tree. While rubbing herself she had observed that an apple sometimesfell. This stimulated her to rub a little harder, when more apples fell. She then took the hint and rubbed her shoulder with such vigor that thefarmer had to check her and keep an eye on her to save his fruit. 

But the cow is the friend of the apple. How many trees she has plantedabout the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields andpastures. The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of herplanting. She browses them down to be sure, but they are hers, and whyshould she not?

What an individuality the apple-tree has, each variety being nearlyas marked by its form as by its fruit. What a vigorous grower, forinstance, is the Ribston pippin, an English apple. Wide branching likethe oak, and its large ridgy fruit, in late fall or early winter, is oneof my favorites. Or the thick and more pendent top of the belleflower, with its equally rich, sprightly uncloying fruit. 

Sweet apples are perhaps the most nutritious, and when baked are a feastin themselves. With a tree of the Jersey sweet or of Tolman's sweetingin bearing, no man's table need be devoid of luxuries and one of themost wholesome of all deserts. Or the red astrachan, an August apple, what a gap may be filled in the culinary department of a household atthis season, by a single tree of this fruit! And what a feast is itsshining crimson coat to the eye before its snow-white flesh hasreached the tongue. But the apple of apples for the household is thespitzenberg. In this casket Pomona has put her highest flavors. It canstand the ordeal of cooking and still remain a spitz. I recently sawa barrel of these apples from the orchard of a fruit-grower in thenorthern part of New York, who has devoted special attention to thisvariety. They were perfect gems. Not large, that had not been the aim, but small, fair, uniform, and red to the core. How intense, how spicyand aromatic!

But all the excellences of the apple are not confined to the cultivatedfruit. Occasionally a seedling springs up about the farm that producesfruit of rare beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to theapple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, I have noticed thatmost of the wild unbidden trees bear good, edible fruit. In cold andungenial districts, the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but inmore favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. I know wildapples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had, Thoreau's sauce of sharp November air to be eaten with. At the foot ofa hill near me and striking its roots deep in the shale, is a giantspecimen of native tree that bears an apple that has about the clearest, waxiest, most transparent complexion I ever saw. It is good size, andthe color of a tea-rose. Its quality is best appreciated in the kitchen. I know another seedling of excellent quality and so remarkable for itsfirmness and density, that it is known on the farm where it grows as the"heavy apple. "

I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of the apple and its treeare under obligation. His chapter on Wild Apples is a most deliciouspiece of writing. It has a "tang and smack" like the fruit itcelebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in the same manner. It has the hue and perfume of the crab, and the richness and raciness ofthe pippin. But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts and wasobliged to confess that his favorites could not be eaten in-doors. Latein November he found a blue-pearmain tree growing within the edge of aswamp, almost as good as wild. "You would not suppose, " he says, "thatthere was any fruit left there on the first survey, but you must lookaccording to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rottennow, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and thereamid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I explore amidthe bare alders, and the huckleberry bushes, and the withered sedge, andin the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry underthe fallen and decayed ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thicklystrew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen intohollows long since, and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself--aproper kind of packing. From these lurking places, everywhere within thecircumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit all wet and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and perhapsa leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript from amonastery's mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it, and atleast as ripe and well kept, if no better than those in barrels, morecrisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to yield anything, I have learned to look between the leaves of the suckers which springthickly from some horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, orin the very midst of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set, for Ido not refuse the blue-pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and asI retrace my steps, in the frosty eve being perhaps four or five milesfrom home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keepmy balance. "

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH. 

The traveler and camper-out in Maine, unless he penetrates its morenorthern portions, has less reason to remember it as a pine-tree Statethan a birch-tree State. The white-pine forests have melted away likesnow in the spring and gone down stream, leaving only patches here andthere in the more remote and inaccessible parts. The portion of theState I saw--the valley of the Kennebec and the woods about MoxieLake--had been shorn of its pine timber more than forty years before, and is now covered with a thick growth of spruce and cedar and variousdeciduous trees. But the birch abounds. Indeed, when the pine goes outthe birch comes in; the race of men succeeds the race of giants. This tree has great stay-at-home virtues. Let the sombre, aspiring, mysterious pine go; the birch has humble every-day uses. In Maine, thepaper or canoe birch is turned to more account than any other tree. Iread in Gibbon that the natives of ancient Assyria used to celebratein verse or prose the three hundred and sixty uses to which the variousparts and products of the palm-tree were applied. The Maine birch isturned to so many accounts that it may well be called the palm of thisregion. Uncle Nathan, our guide, said it was made especially for thecamper-out; yes, and for the wood-man and frontiersman generally. It isa magazine, a furnishing store set up in the wilderness, whose goods arefree to every comer. The whole equipment of the camp lies folded in it, and comes forth at the beck of the woodman's axe; tent, waterproofroof, boat, camp utensils, buckets, cups, plates, spoons, napkins, table cloths, paper for letters or your journal, torches, candles, kindling-wood, and fuel. The canoe-birch yields you its vestments withthe utmost liberality. Ask for its coat, and it gives you its waistcoatalso. Its bark seems wrapped about it layer upon layer, and comes offwith great ease. We saw many rude structures and cabins shingled andsided with it, and haystacks capped with it. Near a maple-sugar campthere was a large pile of birch-bark sap-buckets, --each bucket made ofa piece of bark about a yard square, folded up as the tinman folds upa sheet of tin to make a square vessel, the corners bent around againstthe sides and held by a wooden pin. When, one day, we were overtakenby a shower in traveling through the woods, our guide quickly strippedlarge sheets of the bark from a near tree, and we had each a perfectumbrella as by magic. When the rain was over, and we moved on, I wrappedmine about me like a large leather apron, and it shielded my clothesfrom the wet bushes. When we came to a spring, Uncle Nathan would havea birch-bark cup ready before any of us could get a tin one out of hisknapsack, and I think water never tasted so sweet as from one of thesebark cups. It is exactly the thing. It just fits the mouth and it seemsto give new virtues to the water. It makes me thirsty now when I thinkof it. In our camp at Moxie we made a large birch-bark box to keep thebutter in; and the butter in this box, covered with some leafy boughs, I think improved in flavor day by day. Maine butter needs something tomollify and sweeten it a little, and I think birch bark will do it. Incamp Uncle Nathan often drank his tea and coffee from a bark cup; thechina closet in the birch-tree was always handy, and our vulgar tinware was generally a good deal mixed, and the kitchen-maid not at allparticular about dish-washing. We all tried the oatmeal with the maplesyrup in one of these dishes, and the stewed mountain cranberries, using a birch-bark spoon, and never found service better. Uncle Nathandeclared he could boil potatoes in a bark kettle, and I did not doubthim. Instead of sending our soiled napkins and table-spreads to thewash, we rolled them up into candles and torches, and drew daily uponour stores in the forest for new ones. 

But the great triumph of the birch is of course the bark canoe. WhenUncle Nathan took us out under his little wood-shed, and showed us, orrather modestly permitted us to see, his nearly finished canoe, it waslike a first glimpse of some new and unknown genius of the woods orstreams. It sat there on the chips and shavings and fragments of barklike some shy delicate creature just emerged from its hiding-place, orlike some wild flower just opened. It was the first boat of the kindI had ever seen, and it filled my eye completely. What woodcraft itindicated, and what a wild free life, sylvan life, it promised! It hadsuch a fresh, aboriginal look as I had never before seen in any kind ofhandiwork. Its clear yellow-red color would have become the cheek of anIndian maiden. Then its supple curves and swells, its sinewy staysand thwarts, its bow-like contour, its tomahawk stem and stern risingquickly and sharply from its frame, were all vividly suggestive of therace from which it came. An old Indian had taught Uncle Nathan the art, and the soul of the ideal red man looked out of the boat before us. Uncle Nathan had spent two days ranging the mountains looking for asuitable tree, and had worked nearly a week on the craft. It wastwelve feet long, and would seat and carry five men nicely. Three treescontribute to the making of a canoe besides the birch, namely, the whitecedar for ribs and lining, the spruce for roots and fibres to sew itsjoints and bind its frame, and the pine for pitch or rosin to stop itsseams and cracks. It is hand-made and home-made, or rather wood-made, in a sense that no other craft is, except a dug-out, and it suggests ataste and a refinement that few products of civilization realize. Thedesign of a savage, it yet looks like the thought of a poet, and itsgrace and fitness haunt the imagination. I suppose its production wasthe inevitable result of the Indian's wants and surroundings, but thatdoes not detract from its beauty. It is, indeed, one of the fairestflowers the thorny plant of necessity ever bore. Our canoe, as I haveintimated, was not yet finished when we first saw it, nor yet when wetook it up, with its architect, upon our metaphorical backs and bore itto the woods. It lacked part of its cedar lining and the rosin upon itsjoints, and these were added after we reached our destination. 

Though we were not indebted to the birch-tree for our guide, UncleNathan, as he was known in all the country, yet he matched well thesewoodsy products and conveniences. The birch-tree had given him a largepart of his tuition, and kneeling in his canoe and making it shootnoiselessly over the water with that subtle yet indescribably expressiveand athletic play of the muscles of the back and shoulders, the boat andthe man seemed born of the same spirit. He had been a hunter and trapperfor over forty years; he had grown gray in the woods, had ripened andmatured there, and everything about him was as if the spirit of thewoods had had the ordering of it; his whole make-up was in a minorand subdued key, like the moss and the lichens, or like the protectivecoloring of the game, --everything but his quick sense and penetrativeglance. He was as gentle and modest as a girl; his sensibilities werelike plants that grow in the shade. The woods and the solitudes hadtouched him with their own softening and refining influence; had indeedshed upon his soil of life a rich deep leaf mould that was delightful, and that nursed, half concealed, the tenderest and wildest growths. There was grit enough back of and beneath it all, but he presentednone of the rough and repelling traits of character of the conventionalbackwoods-man. In the spring he was a driver of logs on the Kennebec, usually having charge of a large gang of men; in the winter he was asolitary trapper and hunter in the forests. 

Our first glimpse of Maine waters was Pleasant Pond, which we found byfollowing a white, rapid, musical stream from the Kennebec threemiles back into the mountains. Maine waters are for the most partdark-complexioned, Indian-colored streams, but Pleasant Pond is apale-face among them both in name and nature. It is the only strictlysilver lake I ever saw. Its waters seem almost artificially white andbrilliant, though of remarkable transparency. I think I detected minuteshining motes held in suspension in it. As for the trout they areveritable bars of silver until you have cut their flesh, when theyare the reddest of gold. They have no crimson or other spots, and thestraight lateral line is but a faint pencil mark. They appeared to bea species of lake trout peculiar to these waters, uniformly from ten totwelve inches in length. And these beautiful fish, at the time of ourvisit (last of August) at least, were to be taken only in deep waterupon a hook baited with salt pork. And then you needed a letterof introduction to them. They were not to be tempted or cajoled bystrangers. We did not succeed in raising a fish, although instructed howit was to be done, until one of the natives, a young and obliging farmerliving hard by, came and lent his countenance to the enterprise. I satin one end of the boat and he in the other; my pork was the same as his, and I maneuvered it as directed, and yet those fish knew his hookfrom mine in sixty feet of water, and preferred it four times in five. Evidently they did not bite because they were hungry, but solely for oldacquaintance' sake. 

Pleasant Pond is an irregular sheet of water, two miles or more inits greatest diameter, with high, rugged mountains rising up from itswestern shore, and low rolling hills sweeping back from its eastern andnorthern, covered by a few sterile farms. I was never tired, when thewind was still, of floating along its margin and gazing down into itsmarvelously translucent depths. The boulders and fragments of rocks wereseen, at a depth of twenty-five or thirty feet, strewing its floor, and apparently as free from any covering of sediment as when they weredropped there by the old glaciers aeons ago. Our camp was amid a densegrove of second growth of white pine on the eastern shore, where, forone, I found a most admirable cradle in a little depression, outside ofthe tent, carpeted with pine needles, in which to pass the night. Thecamper-out is always in luck if he can find, sheltered by the trees, asoft hole in the ground, even if he has a stone for a pillow. The earthmust open its arms a little for us even in life, if we are to sleep wellupon its bosom. I have often heard my grand-father, who was a soldier ofthe Revolution, tell with great gusto how he once bivouacked in a littlehollow made by the overturning of a tree, and slept so soundly that hedid not wake up till his cradle was half full of water from a passingshower. 

What bird or other creature might represent the divinity of PleasantPond I do not know, but its demon, as of most northern inland waters, isthe loon, and a very good demon he is too, suggesting something not somuch malevolent, as arch, sardonic, ubiquitous, circumventing, with justa tinge of something inhuman and uncanny. His fiery red eyes gleamingforth from that jet-black head are full of meaning. Then his strangehorse laughter by day and his weird, doleful cry at night, like that ofa lost and wandering spirit, recall no other bird or beast. He suggestssomething almost supernatural in his alertness and amazing quickness, cheating the shot and the bullet of the sportsman out of their aim. Iknow of but one other bird so quick, and that is the humming-bird, whichI have never been able to kill with a gun. The loon laughs the shot-gunto scorn, and the obliging young farmer above referred to told me hehad shot at them hundreds of times with his rifle, without effect, --theyalways dodged his bullet. We had in our party a breach-loading rifle, which weapon is perhaps an appreciable moment of time quicker thanthe ordinary muzzleloader, and this the poor loon could not or did notdodge. He had not timed himself to that species of fire-arm, and when, with his fellow, he swam about within rifle range of our camp, lettingoff volleys of his wild ironical ha-ha, he little suspected thedangerous gun that was matched against him. As the rifle cracked bothloons made the gesture of diving, but only one of them disappearedbeneath the water; and when he came to the surface in a few moments, ahundred or more yards away, and saw his companion did not follow, butwas floating on the water where he had last seen him, he took the alarmand sped away in the distance. The bird I had killed was a magnificentspecimen, and I looked him over with great interest. His glossycheckered coat, his banded neck, his snow-white breast, his powerfullance-shaped beak, his red eyes, his black, thin, slender, marvelouslydelicate feet and legs, issuing from his muscular thighs, and lookingas if they had never touched the ground, his strong wings well forwardwhile his legs were quite at the apex, and the neat, elegant model ofthe entire bird, speed and quickness and strength stamped upon everyfeature, --all delighted and lingered in the eye. The loon appears likeanything but a silly bird, unless you see him in some collection, orin the shop of the taxidermist, where he usually looks very tame andgoose-like. Nature never meant the loon to stand up, or to use hisfeet and legs for other purposes than swimming. Indeed, he cannot standexcept upon his tail in a perpendicular attitude, but in the collectionshe is poised upon his feet like a barn-yard fowl, all the wildness andgrace and alertness goes out of him. My specimen sits upon a table asupon the surface of the water, his feet trailing behind him, his bodylow and trim, his head elevated and slightly turned as if in the actof bringing that fiery eye to bear upon you, and vigilance and powerstamped upon every lineament. 

The loon is to the fishes what the hawk is to the birds; he swoops downto unknown depths upon them, and not even the wary trout can elude him. Uncle Nathan said he had seen the loon disappear and in a moment come upwith a large trout, which he would cut in two with his strong beak, andswallow piecemeal. Neither the loon nor the otter can bolt a fish underthe water; he must come to the surface to dispose of it. (I once saw aman eat a cake under water in London. ) Our guide told me he had seen theparent loon swimming with a single young one upon its back. When closelypressed it dove, or "div" as he would have it, and left the young birdsitting upon the water. Then it too disappeared, and when the old onereturned and called, it came out from the shore. On the wing overhead, the loon looks not unlike a very large duck, but when it alights itploughs into the water like a bombshell. It probably cannot take flightfrom the land, as the one Gilbert White saw and describes in his letterswas picked up in a field, unable to launch itself into the air. 

From Pleasant Pond we went seven miles through the woods to Moxie Lake, following an overgrown lumberman's "tote" road, our canoe and supplies, etc. , hauled on a sled by the young farmer with his three-year-oldsteers. I doubt if birch-bark ever made rougher voyage than that. As Iwatched it above the bushes, the sled and the luggage being hidden, itappeared as if tossed in the wildest and most tempestuous sea. When thebushes closed above it I felt as if it had gone down, or been brokeninto a hundred pieces. Billows of rocks and logs, and chasms of creeksand spring runs, kept it rearing and pitching in the most frightfulmanner. The steers went at a spanking pace; indeed, it was a regularbovine gale; but their driver clung to their side amid the brush andboulders with desperate tenacity, and seemed to manage them by signsand nudges, for he hardly uttered his orders aloud. But we got throughwithout any serious mishap, passing Mosquito Creek and Mosquito Pond, and flanking Mosquito Mountain, but seeing no mosquitoes, and brought upat dusk at a lumberman's old hay-barn, standing in the midst of a lonelyclearing on the shores of Moxie Lake. 

Here we passed the night, and were lucky in having a good roof over ourheads, for it rained heavily. After we were rolled in our blankets andvariously disposed upon the haymow, Uncle Nathan lulled us to sleep by along and characteristic yarn. 

I had asked him, half jocosely, if he believed in "spooks"; but he tookmy question seriously, and without answering it directly, proceeded totell us what he himself had known and witnessed. It was, by the way, extremely difficult either to surprise or to steal upon any of UncleNathan's private opinions and beliefs about matters and things. Hewas as shy of all debatable subjects as a fox is of a trap. He usuallytalked in a circle, just as he hunted moose and caribou, so as not toapproach his point too rudely and suddenly. He would keep on the leeside of his interlocutor in spite of all one could do. He was thoroughlygood and reliable, but the wild creatures of the woods, in pursuitof which he had spent so much of his life, had taught him a curiousgentleness and indirection, and to keep himself in the back-ground; hewas careful that you should not scent his opinions upon any subject atall polemic, but he would tell you what he had seen and known. What hehad seen and known about spooks was briefly this:--In company witha neighbor he was passing the night with an old recluse who livedsomewhere in these woods. Their host was an Englishman, who had thereputation of having murdered his wife some years before in another partof the country, and, deserted by his grown-up children, was eking outhis days in poverty amid these solitudes. The three men were sleepingupon the floor, with Uncle Nathan next to a rude partition that dividedthe cabin into two rooms. At his head there was a door that opened intothis other apartment. Late at night, Uncle Nathan said, he awoke andturned over, and his mind was occupied with various things, when heheard somebody behind the partition. He reached over and felt that bothof his companions were in their places beside him, and he was somewhatsurprised. The person, or whatever it was, in the other room moved aboutheavily, and pulled the table from its place beside the wall to themiddle of the floor. "I was not dreaming, " said Uncle Nathan; "I felt ofmy eyes twice to make sure, and they were wide open. " Presently the dooropened; he was sensible of the draught upon his head, and a woman's formstepped heavily past him; he felt the "swirl" of her skirts as she wentby. Then there was a loud noise in the room as if some one had fallentheir whole length upon the floor. "It jarred the house, " said he, "andwoke everybody up. I asked old Mr. ------ if he heard that noise. 'Yes, 'said he, 'it was thunder. ' But it was not thunder, I know that;" andthen added, "I was no more afraid than I am this minute. I never was theleast mite afraid in my life. And my eyes were wide open, " he repeated;"I felt of them twice; but whether that was the speret of that man'smurdered wife or not I cannot tell. They said she was an uncommon heavywoman. " Uncle Nathan was a man of unusually quick and acute senses, andhe did not doubt their evidence on this occasion any more than he didwhen they prompted him to level his rifle at a bear or a moose. 

Moxie Lake lies much lower than Pleasant Pond, and its waters comparedwith those of the latter are as copper compared with silver. It is veryirregular in shape; now narrowing to the dimensions of a slow movinggrassy creek, then expanding into a broad deep basin with rocky shores, and commanding the noblest mountain scenery. It is rarely that thepond-lily and the speckled trout are found together, --the fish the soulof the purest spring water, the flower the transfigured spirit of thedark mud and slime of sluggish summer streams and ponds; yet in Moxiethey were both found in perfection. Our camp was amid the birches, poplars, and white cedars near the head of the lake, where the bestfishing at this season was to be had. Moxie has a small oval head, rather shallow, but bumpy with rocks; a long, deep neck, full ofsprings, where the trout lie; and a very broad chest, with two islandstufted with pine-trees for breasts. We swam in the head, we fished inthe neck, or in a small section of it, a space about the size of theAdam's apple, and we paddled across and around the broad expanse below. Our birch bark was not finished and christened till we reached Moxie. The cedar lining was completed at Pleasant Pond, where we had the useof a bateau, but the rosin was not applied to the seams till we reachedthis lake. When I knelt down in it for the first time and put itsslender maple paddle into the water, it sprang away with such quicknessand speed that it disturbed me in my seat. I had spurred a more restiveand spirited steed than I was used to. In fact, I had never been ina craft that sustained so close a relation to my will, and was soresponsive to my slightest wish. When I caught my first large trout fromit, it sympathized a little too closely, and my enthusiasm started aleak, which, however, with a live coal and a piece of rosin, was quicklyended. You cannot perform much of a war-dance in a birch-bark canoe:better wait till you get on dry land. Yet as a boat it is not so shy and"ticklish" as I had imagined. One needs to be on the alert, as becomes asportsman and an angler, and in his dealings with it must charge himselfwith three things, --precision, moderation, and circumspection. 

Trout weighing four and five pounds have been taken at Moxie, but noneof that size came to our hand. I realized the fondest hopes I had daredto indulge in when I hooked the first two-pounder of my life, and myextreme solicitude lest he get away I trust was pardonable. My friend, in relating the episode in camp, said I implored him to row me down inthe middle of the lake that I might have room to manoeuver my fish. Butthe slander has barely a grain of truth in it. The water near us showedseveral old stakes broken off just below the surface, and my fish wasdetermined to wrap my leader about one of these stakes; it was only forthe clear space a few yards farther out that I prayed. It was not longafter that my friend found himself in an anxious frame of mind. Hehooked a large trout, which came home on him so suddenly that he hadnot time to reel up his line, and in his extremity he stretched his tallform into the air and lifted up his pole to an incredible height. Hechecked the trout before it got under the boat, but dared not come downan inch, and then began his amusing further elongation in reaching forhis reel with one hand while he carried it ten feet into the air withthe other. A step-ladder would perhaps have been more welcome to himjust then than at any other moment during his life. But the trout wassaved, though my friend's buttons and suspenders suffered. 

We learned a new trick in fly-fishing here, worth disclosing. It was notone day in four that the trout would take the fly on the surface. Whenthe south wind was blowing and the clouds threatened rain, they wouldat times, notably about three o'clock, rise handsomely. But on all otheroccasions it was rarely that we could entice them up through the twelveor fifteen feet of water. Earlier in the season they are not so lazy andindifferent, but the August languor and drowsiness were now upon them. So we learned by a lucky accident to fish deep for them, even weightingour leaders with a shot, and allowing the flies to sink nearly to thebottom. After a moment's pause we would draw them slowly up, and whenhalf or two thirds of the way to the top the trout would strike, whenthe sport became lively enough. Most of our fish were taken in thisway. There is nothing like the flash and the strike at the surface, andperhaps only the need of food will ever tempt the genuine angler intoany more prosaic style of fishing; but if you must go below the surface, a shotted leader is the best thing to use. 

Our camp-fire at night served more purposes than one; from its embersand flickering shadows, Uncle Nathan read us many a tale of his lifein the woods. They were the same old hunter's stories, except that theyevidently had the merit of being strictly true, and hence were not verythrilling or marvelous. Uncle Nathan's tendency was rather to tone downand belittle his experiences than to exaggerate them. If he ever braggedat all (and I suspect he did just a little, when telling us how heoutshot one of the famous riflemen of the American team, whom he wasguiding through these woods), he did it in such a sly, round-aboutway that it was hard to catch him at it. His passage with the riflemanreferred to shows the difference between the practical off-hand skill ofthe hunter in the woods and the science of the long-range target hitter. Mr. Bull's Eye had heard that his guide was a capital shot and had seensome proof of it, and hence could not rest till he had had a trial ofskill with him. Uncle Nathan, being the challenged party, had the rightto name the distance and the conditions. A piece of white paper the sizeof a silver dollar was put upon a tree twelve rods off, the contestantsto fire three shots each off-hand. Uncle Nathan's first bullet barelymissed the mark, but the other two were planted well into it. Then thegreat rifleman took his turn, and missed every time. 

"By hemp!" said Uncle Nathan, "I was sorry I shot so well, Mr. ------took it so to heart; and I had used his own rifle, too. He did not getover it for a week. "

But far more ignominious was the failure of Mr. Bull's Eye when he sawhis first bear. They were paddling slowly and silently down Dead River, when the guide heard a slight noise in the bushes just behind a littlebend. He whispered to the rifleman, who sat kneeling in the bow ofthe boat, to take his rifle. But instead of doing so he picked up histwo-barreled shot-gun. As they turned the point, there stood a bearnot twenty yards away, drinking from the stream. Uncle Nathan held thecanoe, while the man who had come so far in quest of this very game wastrying to lay down his shot-gun and pick up his rifle. "His hand movedlike the hand of a clock, " said Uncle Nathan, "and I could hardly keepmy seat. I knew the bear would see us in a moment more, and run. " Insteadof laying his gun by his side, where it belonged, he reached it acrossin front of him and laid it upon his rifle, and in trying to get thelatter from under it a noise was made; the bear heard it and raised hishead. Still there was time, for as the bear sprang into the woods hestopped and looked back, --"as I knew he would, " said the guide; yetthe marksman was not ready. "By hemp! I could have shot three bears, "exclaimed Uncle Nathan, "while he was getting that rifle to his face!"

Poor Mr. Bull's Eye was deeply humiliated. "Just the chance I had beenlooking for, " he said, "and my wits suddenly left me. "

As a hunter Uncle Nathan always took the game on its own terms, that ofstill-hunting. He even shot foxes in this way, going into the fields inthe fall just at break of day, and watching for them about their mousinghaunts. One morning, by these tactics, he shot a black fox; a finespecimen, he said, and a wild one, for he stopped and looked andlistened every few yards. 

He had killed over two hundred moose, a large number of them at night onthe lakes. His method was to go out in his canoe and conceal himself bysome point or island, and wait till he heard the game. In the fallthe moose comes into the water to eat the large fibrous roots of thepond-lilies. He splashes along till he finds a suitable spot, when hebegins feeding, sometimes thrusting his bead and neck several feet underwater. The hunter listens, and when the moose lifts his head and therills of water run from it, and he hears him "swash" the lily rootsabout to get off the mud, it is his time to start. Silently as a shadowhe creeps up on the moose, who by the way, it seems, never expects theapproach of danger from the water side. If the hunter accidentallymakes a noise the moose looks toward the shore for it. There is always aslight gleam on the water, Uncle Nathan says, even in the darkest night, and the dusky form of the moose can be distinctly seen upon it. When thehunter sees this darker shadow he lifts his gun to the sky and gets therange of its barrels, then lowers it till it covers the mark, and fires. 

The largest moose Uncle Nathan ever killed is mounted in the State Houseat Augusta. He shot him while hunting in winter on snow-shoes. The moosewas reposing upon the ground, with his head stretched out in front ofhim, as one may sometimes see a cow resting. The position was such thatonly a quartering shot through the animal's hip could reach its heart. Studying the problem carefully, and taking his own time, the hunterfired. The moose sprang into the air, turned, and came with tremendousstrides straight toward him. "I knew he had not seen or scented me, "said Uncle Nathan, "but, by hemp, I wished myself somewhere else justthen; for I was lying right down in his path. " But the noble animalstopped, a few yards short, and fell dead with a bullet-hole through hisheart. 

When the moose yard in the winter, that is, restrict their wanderingsto a well-defined section of the forest or mountain, trampling down thesnow and beating paths in all directions, they browse off only the mostdainty morsels first; when they go over the ground a second time theycrop a little cleaner; the third time they sort still closer, till byand by nothing is left. Spruce, hemlock, poplar, the barks of varioustrees, everything within reach, is cropped close. When the hunter comesupon one of these yards the problem for him to settle is, Where are themoose? for it is absolutely necessary that he keep on the lee side ofthem. So he considers the lay of the land, the direction of the wind, the time of day, the depth of the snow, examines the spoor, the croppedtwigs, and studies every hint and clew like a detective. Uncle Nathansaid he could not explain to another how he did it, but he could usuallytell in a few minutes in what direction to look for the game. Hisexperience had ripened into a kind of intuition or winged reasoning thatwas above rules. 

He said that most large game, deer, caribou, moose, bear, when startedby the hunter and not much scared, were sure to stop and look backbefore disappearing from sight: he usually waited for this last and bestchance to fire. He told us of a huge bear he had seen one morning whilestill-hunting foxes in the fields; the bear saw him, and got into thewoods before he could get a good shot. In her course some distance upthe mountain was a bald, open spot, and he felt sure when she crossedthis spot she would pause and look behind her; and sure enough, likeLot's wife, her curiosity got the better of her; she stopped to have afinal look, and her travels ended there and then. 

Uncle Nathan had trapped and shot a great many bears, and some of hisexperiences revealed an unusual degree of sagacity in this animal. OneApril, when the weather began to get warm and thawy, an old bear lefther den in the rocks and built a large, warm nest of grass, leaves, andthe bark of the white cedar, under a tall balsam fir that stood in alow, sunny, open place amid the mountains. Hither she conducted her twocubs, and the family began life in what might be called their springresidence. The tree above them was for shelter, and for refuge for thecubs in case danger approached, as it soon did in the form of UncleNathan. He happened that way soon after the bear had moved. Seeing hertrack in the snow, he concluded to follow it. When the bear had passed, the snow had been soft and sposhy, and she had "slumped, " he said, several inches. It was now hard and slippery. As he neared the tree thetrack turned and doubled, and tacked this way and that, and led throughthe worst brush and brambles to be found. This was a shrewd thought ofthe old bear; she could thus hear her enemy coming a long time before hedrew very near. When Uncle Nathan finally reached the nest, he found itempty, but still warm. Then he began to circle about and look for thebear's footprints or nail-prints upon the frozen snow. Not finding themthe first time, he took a larger circle, then a still larger; finally hemade a long detour, and spent nearly an hour searching for some clewto the direction the bear had taken, but all to no purpose. Then hereturned to the tree and scrutinized it. The foliage was very dense, butpresently he made out one of the cubs near the top, standing up amid thebranches, and peering down at him. This he killed. Further search onlyrevealed a mass of foliage apparently more dense than usual, but abullet sent into it was followed by loud whimpering and crying, andthe other baby bear came tumbling down. In leaving the place, greatlypuzzled as to what had become of the mother bear, Uncle Nathan followedanother of her frozen tracks, and after about a quarter of a mile sawbeside it, upon the snow, the fresh trail he had been in search of. Inmaking her escape the bear had stepped exactly in her old tracks thatwere hard and icy, and had thus left no mark till she took to the snowagain. 

During his trapping expeditions into the woods in midwinter, I wascurious to know how Uncle Nathan passed the nights, as we were twicepinched with the cold at that season in our tent and blankets. It wasno trouble to keep warm, he said, in the coldest weather. As nightapproached, he would select a place for his camp on the side of a hill. With one of his snow-shoes he would shovel out the snow till the groundwas reached, carrying the snow out in front, as we scrape the earth outof the side of a hill to level up a place for the house and yard. Onthis level place, which, however, was made to incline slightly towardthe hill, his bed of boughs was made. On the ground he had uncovered hebuilt his fire. His bed was thus on a level with the fire, and the heatcould not thaw the snow under him and let him down, or the burning logsroll upon him. With a steep ascent behind it the fire burned better, andthe wind was not so apt to drive the smoke and blaze in upon him. Then, with the long, curving branches of the spruce stuck thickly around threesides of the bed, and curving over and uniting their tops above it, ashelter was formed that would keep out the cold and the snow, and thatwould catch and retain the warmth of the fire. Rolled in his blanket insuch a nest, Uncle Nathan had passed hundreds of the most frigid winternights. 

One day we made an excursion of three miles through the woods to BaldMountain, following a dim trail. We saw, as we filed silently along, plenty of signs of caribou, deer, and bear, but were not blessed with asight of either of the animals themselves. I noticed that Uncle Nathan, in looking through the woods, did not hold his head as we did, butthrust it slightly forward, and peered under the branches like a deer orother wild creature. 

The summit of Bald Mountain was the most impressive mountain-top I hadever seen, mainly, perhaps, because it was one enormous crown of nearlynaked granite. The rock had that gray, elemental, eternal look whichgranite alone has. One seemed to be face to face with the gods of thefore-world. Like an atom, like a breath of to-day, we were suddenlyconfronted by abysmal geologic time, --the eternities past and theeternities to come. The enormous cleavage of the rocks, the appallingcracks and fissures, the rent boulders, the smitten granite floors, gaveone a new sense of the power of heat and frost. In one place wenoticed several deep parallel grooves, made by the old glaciers. In thedepressions on the summit there was a hard, black, peaty-like soil thatlooked indescribably ancient and unfamiliar. Out of this mould, thatmight have come from the moon or the interplanetary spaces, were growingmountain cranberries and blueberries or huckleberries. We were soon soabsorbed in gathering the latter that we were quite oblivious of thegrandeurs about us. It is these blueberries that attract the bears. Ineating them, Uncle Nathan said, they take the bushes in their mouths, and by an upward movement strip them clean of both leaves and berries. We were constantly on the lookout for the bears, but failed to seeany. Yet a few days afterward, when two of our party returned here andencamped upon the mountain, they saw five during their stay, but failedto get a good shot. The rifle was in the wrong place each time. Theman with the shot-gun saw an old bear and two cubs lift themselvesfrom behind a rock and twist their noses around for his scent, and thenshrink away. They were too far off for his buckshot. I must not forgetthe superb view that lay before us, a wilderness of woods and watersstretching away to the horizon on every band. Nearly a dozen lakes andponds could be seen, and in a clearer atmosphere the foot of MooseheadLake would have been visible. The highest and most striking mountain tobe seen was Mount Bigelow, rising above Dead River, far to the west, and its two sharp peaks notching the horizon like enormous saw-teeth. We walked around and viewed curiously a huge boulder on the top of themountain that had been split in two vertically, and one of the halvesmoved a few feet out of its bed. It looked recent and familiar, butsuggested gods instead of men. The force that moved the rock had plainlycome from the north. I thought of a similar boulder I had seen not longbefore on the highest point of the Shawangunk Mountains in New York, oneside of which is propped up with a large stone, as wall-builders prop upa rock to wrap a chain around it. The rock seems poised lightly, and hasbut a few points of bearing. In this instance, too, the power had comefrom the north. 

The prettiest botanical specimen my trip yielded was a little plant thatbears the ugly name of horned bladderwort (Utricularia cornuta), andwhich I found growing in marshy places along the shores of Moxie Lake. It has a slender, naked stem nearly a foot high, crowned by two ormore large deep yellow flowers, --flowers the shape of little bonnets orhoods. One almost expected to see tiny faces looking out of them. Thisillusion is heightened by the horn or spur of the flower, which projectsfrom the hood like a long tapering chin, --some masker's device. Thenthe cape behind, --what a smart upward curve it has, as if spurned bythe fairy shoulders it was meant to cover! But perhaps the most notablething about the flower was its fragrance, --the richest and strongestperfume I have ever found in a wild flower. This our botanist, Gray, does not mention; as if one should describe the lark and forget itssong. The fragrance suggested that of white clover, but was more rankand spicy. 

The woods about Moxie Lake were literally carpeted with Linnæa. I hadnever seen it in such profusion. In early summer, the period of itsbloom, what a charming spectacle the mossy floors of these remote woodsmust present! The flowers are purple rose-color, nodding and fragrant. Another very abundant plant in these woods was the Clintonia borealis. Uncle Nathan said it was called "bear's corn, " though he did not knowwhy. The only noticeable flower by the Maine roadsides at this seasonthat is not common in other parts of the country is the harebell. Itsbright blue, bell-shaped corolla shone out from amid the dry grass andweeds all along the route. It was one of the most delicate roadsideflowers I had ever seen. 

The only new bird I saw in Maine was the pileated woodpecker, or black"log cock, " called by Uncle Nathan "wood cock. " I had never before seenor heard this bird, and its loud cackle in the woods about Moxie wasa new sound to me. It is the wildest and largest of our northernwoodpeckers, and the rarest. Its voice and the sound of its hammer areheard only in the depths of the northern woods. It is about as large asa crow, and nearly as black. 

We stayed a week at Moxie, or until we became surfeited with its trout, and had killed the last Merganser duck that lingered about our end ofthe lake. The trout that had accumulated on our hands we had kept alivein a large champagne basket submerged in the lake, and the morning webroke camp the basket was towed to the shore and opened; and after wehad feasted our eyes upon the superb spectacle, every trout, twelve orfifteen in number, some of them two-pounders, was allowed to swim backinto the lake. They went leisurely, in couples and in trios, and weresoon kicking up their heels in their old haunts. I expect that thedivinity who presides over Moxie will see to it that every one of thosetrout, doubled in weight, comes to our basket in the future. 

WINTER NEIGHBORS. 

The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude, inthe winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The urban, thecultivated, is hidden or negatived. You shall hardly know a good fieldfrom a poor, a meadow from a pasture, a park from a forest. Lines andboundaries are disregarded; gates and bar-ways are unclosed; man lets gohis hold upon the earth; title-deeds are deep buried beneath the snow;the best-kept grounds relapse to a state of nature; under the pressureof the cold all the wild creatures become outlaws, and roam abroadbeyond their usual haunts. The partridge comes to the orchard for buds;the rabbit comes to the garden and lawn; the crows and jays come tothe ash-heap and corn-crib, the snow-buntings to the stack and tothe barn-yard; the sparrows pilfer from the domestic fowls; the pinegrosbeak comes down from the north and shears your maples of their buds;the fox prowls about your premises at night, and the red squirrels findyour grain in the barn or steal the butternuts from your attic. In fact, winter, like some great calamity, changes the status of most creaturesand sets them adrift. Winter, like poverty, makes us acquainted withstrange bedfellows. 

For my part, my nearest approach to a strange bedfellow is the littlegray rabbit that has taken up her abode under my study floor. As shespends the day here and is out larking at night, she is not much of abedfellow after all. It is probable that I disturb her slumbers morethan she does mine. I think she is some support to me under there-asilent wild-eyed witness and backer; a type of the gentle and harmlessin savage nature. She has no sagacity to give me or lend me, but thatsoft, nimble foot of hers, and that touch as of cotton wherever shegoes, are worthy of emulation. I think I can feel her good-will throughthe floor, and I hope she can mine. When I have a happy thought Iimagine her ears twitch, especially when I think of the sweet appleI will place by her doorway at night. I wonder if that fox chanced tocatch a glimpse of her the other night when he stealthily leaped overthe fence near by and walked along between the study and the house?How clearly one could read that it was not a little dog that had passedthere. There was something furtive in the track; it shied off away fromthe house and around it, as if eying it suspiciously; and then it hadthe caution and deliberation of the fox--bold, bold, but not too bold;wariness was in every footprint. If it had been a little dog thathad chanced to wander that way, when he crossed my path he would havefollowed it up to the barn and have gone smelling around for a bone; butthis sharp, cautious track held straight across all others, keeping fiveor six rods from the house, up the hill, across the highway towardsa neighboring farmstead, with its nose in the air and its eye and earalert, so to speak. 

A winter neighbor of mine in whom I am interested, and who perhaps lendsme his support after his kind, is a little red owl, whose retreat isin the heart of an old apple-tree just over the fence. Where he keepshimself in spring and summer I do not know, but late every fall, andat intervals all winter, his hiding-place is discovered by the jays andnut-hatches, and proclaimed from the tree-tops for the space of half anhour or so, with all the powers of voice they can command. Four timesduring one winter they called me out to behold this little ogre feigningsleep in his den, sometimes in one apple-tree, sometimes in another. Whenever I heard their cries, I knew my neighbor was being berated. The birds would take turns at looking in upon him and uttering theiralarm-notes. Every jay within hearing would come to the spot and at onceapproach the hole in the trunk or limb, and with a kind of breathlesseagerness and excitement take a peep at the owl, and then join theoutcry. When I approached they would hastily take a final look and thenwithdraw and regard my movements intently. After accustoming my eye tothe faint light of the cavity for a few moments, I could usually makeout the owl at the bottom feigning sleep. Feigning, I say, because thisis what he really did, as I first discovered one day when I cut intohis retreat with the axe. The loud blows and the falling chips did notdisturb him at all. When I reached in a stick and pulled him over on hisside, leaving one of his wings spread out, he made no attempt to recoverhimself, but lay among the chips and fragments of decayed wood, like apart of themselves. Indeed, it took a sharp eye to distinguish him. Nortill I had pulled him forth by one wing, rather rudely, did he abandonhis trick of simulated sleep or death. Then, like a detected pickpocket, he was suddenly transformed into another creature. His eyes flew wideopen, his talons clutched my finger, his ears were depressed, and everymotion and look said, "Hands off, at your peril. " Finding this game didnot work, he soon began to "play 'possum" again. I put a cover over mystudy wood-box and kept him captive for a week. Look in upon him anytime, night or day, and he was apparently wrapped in the profoundestslumber; but the live mice which I put into his box from time to timefound his sleep was easily broken; there would be a sudden rustle in thebox, a faint squeak, and then silence. After a week of captivity I gavehim his freedom in the full sunshine: no trouble for him to see whichway and where to go. 

Just at dusk in the winter nights, I often hear his soft bur-r-r-r, verypleasing and bell-like. What a furtive, woody sound it is in the winterstillness, so unlike the harsh scream of the hawk. But all the waysof the owl are ways of softness and duskiness. His wings are shod withsilence, his plumage is edged with down. 

Another owl neighbor of mine, with whom I pass the time of day morefrequently than with the last, lives farther away. I pass his castleevery night on my way to the post-office, and in winter, if the houris late enough, am pretty sure to see him standing in his doorway, surveying the passers-by and the landscape through narrow slits inhis eyes. For four successive winters now have I observed him. As thetwilight begins to deepen he rises out of his cavity in the apple-tree, scarcely faster than the moon rises from behind the hill, and sits inthe opening, completely framed by its outlines of gray bark and deadwood, and by his protective coloring virtually invisible to every eyethat does not know he is there. Probably my own is the only eye that hasever penetrated his secret, and mine never would have done so had I notchanced on one occasion to see him leave his retreat and make araid upon a shrike that was impaling a shrew-mouse upon a thorn in aneighboring tree and which I was watching. Failing to get the mouse, the owl returned swiftly to his cavity, and ever since, while goingthat way, I have been on the lookout for him. Dozens of teams andfoot-passengers pass him late in the day, but he regards them not, northey him. When I come alone and pause to salute him, he opens his eyes alittle wider, and, appearing to recognize me, quickly shrinks and fadesinto the background of his door in a very weird and curious manner. Whenhe is not at his outlook, or when he is, it requires the best powersof the eye to decide the point, as the empty cavity itself is almostan exact image of him. If the whole thing had been carefully studiedit could not have answered its purpose better. The owl stands quiteperpendicular, presenting a front of light mottled gray; the eyes areclosed to a mere slit, the ear-feathers depressed, the beak buried inthe plumage, and the whole attitude is one of silent, motionless waitingand observation. If a mouse should be seen crossing the highway, orscudding over any exposed part of the snowy surface in the twilight, theowl would doubtless swoop down upon it. I think the owl has learned todistinguish me from the rest of the passers-by; at least, when I stopbefore him, and he sees himself observed, he backs down into his den, asI have said, in a very amusing manner. Whether bluebirds, nut-hatches, and chickadees--birds that pass the night in cavities of trees--everrun into the clutches of the dozing owl, I should be glad to know. Myimpression is, however, that they seek out smaller cavities. An oldwillow by the roadside blew down one summer, and a decayed branch brokeopen, revealing a brood of half-fledged owls, and many feathers andquills of bluebirds, orioles, and other songsters, showing plainlyenough why all birds fear and berate the owl. 

The English house sparrows, that are so rapidly increasing among us, andthat must add greatly to the food supply of the owls and other birds ofprey, seek to baffle their enemies by roosting in the densest evergreensthey can find, in the arbor-vitæ, and in hemlock hedges. Soft-winged asthe owl is, he cannot steal in upon such a retreat without giving themwarning. 

These sparrows are becoming about the most noticeable of my winterneighbors, and a troop of them every morning watch me put out the hens'feed, and soon claim their share. I rather encouraged them in theirneighborliness, till one day I discovered the snow under a favoriteplum-tree where they most frequently perched covered with the scales ofthe fruit-buds. On investigating I found that the tree had been nearlystripped of its buds--a very unneighborly act on the part of thesparrows, considering, too, all the cracked corn I had scattered forthem. So I at once served notice on them that our good understanding wasat an end. And a hint is as good as a kick with this bird. The stone Ihurled among them, and the one with which I followed them up, may havebeen taken as a kick; but they were only a hint of the shot-gun thatstood ready in the corner. The sparrows left in high dungeon, and werenot back again in some days, and were then very shy. No doubt thetime is near at hand when we shall have to wage serious war upon thesesparrows, as they long have had to do on the continent of Europe. Andyet it will be hard to kill the little wretches, the only Old World birdwe have. When I take down my gun to shoot them I shall probably rememberthat the Psalmist said, "I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon thehouse-top, " and maybe the recollection will cause me to stay my hand. The sparrows have the Old World hardiness and prolificness; they arewise and tenacious of life, and we shall find it by and by no smallmatter to keep them in check. Our native birds are much different, lessprolific, less shrewd, less aggressive and persistent, less quick-wittedand able to read the note of danger or hostility--in short, lesssophisticated. Most of our birds are yet essentially wild, that is, little changed by civilization. In winter, especially, they sweep byme and around me in flocks, --the Canada sparrow, the snow-bunting, theshore-lark, the pine grosbeak, the red-poll, the cedar-bird, --feedingupon frozen apples in the orchard, upon cedar-berries, upon maple-buds, and the berries of the mountain ash, and the celtis, and upon the seedsof the weeds that rise above the snow in the field, or upon the hay-seeddropped where the cattle have been foddered in the barn-yard or aboutthe distant stack; but yet taking no heed of man, in no way changingtheir habits so as to take advantage of his presence in nature. The pinegrosbeak will come in numbers upon your porch, to get the black drupesof the honeysuckle or the woodbine, or within reach of your windows toget the berries of the mountain-ash, but they know you not; they lookat you as innocently and unconcernedly as at a bear or moose in theirnative north, and your house is no more to them than a ledge of rocks. 

The only ones of my winter neighbors that actually rap at my door arethe nut-hatches and woodpeckers, and these do not know that it is mydoor. My retreat is covered with the bark of young chestnut-trees, andthe birds, I suspect, mistake it for a huge stump that ought to holdfat grubs (there is not even a bookworm inside of it), and their loudrapping often makes me think I have a caller indeed. I place fragmentsof hickory-nuts in the interstices of the bark, and thus attract thenut-hatches; a bone upon my window-sill attracts both nut-hatches andthe downy woodpecker. They peep in curiously through the window upon me, pecking away at my bone, too often a very poor one. A bone nailed to atree a few feet in front of the window attracts crows as well as lesserbirds. Even the slate-colored snow-bird, a seed-eater, comes and nibblesit occasionally. 

The bird that seems to consider he has the best right to the bone bothupon the tree and upon the sill is the downy woodpecker, my favoriteneighbor among the winter birds, to whom I will mainly devote theremainder of this chapter. His retreat is but a few paces from my own, in the decayed limb of an apple-tree which he excavated several autumnsago. I say "he" because the red plume on the top of his head proclaimsthe sex. It seems not to be generally known to our writers uponornithology that certain of our woodpeckers--probably all the winterresidents--each fall excavate a limb or the trunk of a tree in whichto pass the winter, and that the cavity is abandoned in the spring, probably for a new one in which nidification takes place. So far as Ihave observed, these cavities are drilled out only by the males. Wherethe females take up their quarters I am not so well informed, though Isuspect that they use the abandoned holes of the males of the previousyear. 

The particular woodpecker to which I refer drilled his first hole in myapple-tree one fall four or five years ago. This he occupied till thefollowing spring when he abandoned it. The next fall he began a holein an adjoining limb, later than before, and when it was about halfcompleted a female took possession of his old quarters. I am sorry tosay that this seemed to enrage the male, very much, and he persecutedthe poor bird whenever she appeared upon the scene. He would fly at herspitefully and drive her off. One chilly November morning, as I passedunder the tree, I heard the hammer of the little architect in hiscavity, and at the same time saw the persecuted female sitting atthe entrance of the other hole as if she would fain come out. She wasactually shivering, probably from both fear and cold. I understood thesituation at a glance; the bird was afraid to come forth and brave theanger of the male. Not till I had rapped smartly upon the limb with mystick did she come out and attempt to escape; but she had not gone tenfeet from the tree before the male was in hot pursuit, and in a fewmoments had driven her back to the same tree, where she tried toavoid him among the branches. A few days after, he rid himself of hisunwelcome neighbor in the following ingenious manner: he fairly scuttledthe other cavity; he drilled a hole into the bottom of it that let inthe light and the cold, and I saw the female there no more. I did notsee him in the act of rendering this tenement uninhabitable; but onemorning, behold it was punctured at the bottom, and the circumstancesall seemed to point to him as the author of it. There is probably nogallantry among the birds except at the mating season. I have frequentlyseen the male woodpecker drive the female away from the bone upon thetree. When she hopped around to the other end and timidly nibbled it, he would presently dart spitefully at her. She would then take upher position in his rear and wait till he had finished his meal. Theposition of the female among the birds is very much the same as that ofwoman among savage tribes. Most of the drudgery of life falls upon her, and the leavings of the males are often her lot. 

My bird is a genuine little savage, doubtless, but I value him as aneighbor. It is a satisfaction during the cold or stormy winter nightsto know he is warm and cosy there in his retreat. When the day is badand unfit to be abroad in; he is there too. When I wish to know if heis at home, I go and rap upon his tree, and, if he is not too lazy orindifferent, after some delay he shows his head in his round doorwayabout ten feet above, and looks down inquiringly upon me--sometimeslatterly I think half resentfully, as much as to say, "I would thank younot to disturb me so often. " After sundown, he will not put his headout any more when I call, but as I step away I can get a glimpse of himinside looking cold and reserved. He is a late riser, especially if itis a cold or disagreeable morning, in this respect being like the fowls;it is sometimes near nine o'clock before I see him leave his tree. Onthe other hand, he comes home early, being in if the day is unpleasantby four P. M. He lives all alone; in this respect I do not commend hisexample. Where his mate is I should like to know. 

I have discovered several other woodpeckers in adjoining orchards, eachof which has a like home and leads a like solitary life. One of them hasexcavated a dry limb within easy reach of my hand, doing the work alsoin September. But the choice of tree was not a good one; the limb wastoo much decayed, and the workman had made the cavity too large; a chiphad come out, making a hole in the outer wall. Then he went a fewinches down the limb and began again, and excavated a large, commodiouschamber, but had again come too near the surface; scarcely more than thebark protected him in one place, and the limb was very much weakened. Then he made another attempt still farther down the limb, and drilled inan inch or two, but seemed to change his mind; the work stopped, andI concluded the bird had wisely abandoned the tree. Passing there onecold, rainy November day, I thrust in my two fingers and was surprisedto feel something soft and warm: as I drew away my hand the bird cameout, apparently no more surprised than I was. It had decided, then, tomake its home in the old limb; a decision it had occasion to regret, fornot long after, on a stormy night, the branch gave way and fell to theground. 

 "When the bough breaks the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all. "

Such a cavity makes a snug, warm home, and when the entrance is on theunder side if the limb, as is usual, the wind and snow cannot reachthe occupant. Late in December, while crossing a high, wooded mountain, lured by the music of fox-hounds, I discovered fresh yellow chipsstrewing the new-fallen snow, and at once thought of my woodpeckers. Onlooking around I saw where one had been at work excavating a lodge in asmall yellow birch. The orifice was about fifteen feet from the ground, and appeared as round as if struck with a compass. It was on the eastside of the tree, so as to avoid the prevailing west and northeastwinds. As it was nearly two inches in diameter, it could not have beenthe work of the downy, but must have been that of the hairy, or else theyellow-bellied woodpecker. His home had probably been wrecked by someviolent wind, and he was thus providing himself another. In digging outthese retreats the woodpeckers prefer a dry, brittle, trunk, not toosoft. They go in horizontally to the centre and then turn downward, enlarging the tunnel as they go, till when finished it is the shape of along, deep pear. 

Another trait our woodpeckers have that endears them to me, and that hasnever been pointedly noticed by our ornithologists, is their habitof drumming in the spring. They are songless birds, and yet all aremusicians; they make the dry limbs eloquent of the coming change. Didyou think that loud, sonorous hammering which proceeded from the orchardor from the near woods on that still March or April morning was onlysome bird getting its breakfast? It is downy, but he is not rapping atthe door of a grub; he is rapping at the door of spring, and the drylimb thrills beneath the ardor of his blows. Or, later in the season, in the dense forest or by some remote mountain lake, does that measuredrhythmic beat that breaks upon the silence, first three strokesfollowing each other rapidly, succeeded by two louder ones with longerintervals between them, and that has an effect upon the alert ear asif the solitude itself had at last found a voice--does that suggestanything less than a deliberate musical performance? In fact, ourwoodpeckers are just as characteristically drummers as is the ruffedgrouse, and they have their particular limbs and stubs to which theyresort for that purpose. Their need of expression is apparently justas great as that of the song-birds, and it is not surprising that theyshould have found out that there is music in a dry, seasoned limb whichcan be evoked beneath their beaks. 

A few seasons ago a downy woodpecker, probably the individual one who isnow my winter neighbor, began to drum early in March in a partly decayedapple-tree that stands in the edge of a narrow strip of woodland nearme. When the morning was still and mild I would often hear him throughmy window before I was up, or by half-past six o'clock, and he wouldkeep it up pretty briskly till nine or ten o'clock, in this respectresembling the grouse, which do most of their drumming in the forenoon. His drum was the stub of a dry limb about the size of one's wrist. Theheart was decayed and gone, but the outer shell was hard and resonant. The bird would keep his position there for an hour at a time. Betweenhis drummings he would preen his plumage and listen as if for theresponse of the female, or for the drum of some rival. How swift hishead would go when he was delivering his blows upon the limb! His beakwore the surface perceptibly. When he wished to change the key, whichwas quite often, he would shift his position an inch or two to a knotwhich gave out a higher, shriller note. When I climbed up to examine hisdrum he was much disturbed. I did not know he was in the vicinity, but it seems he saw me from a near tree, and came in haste to theneighboring branches, and with spread plumage and a sharp note demandedplainly enough what my business was with his drum. I was invading hisprivacy, desecrating his shrine, and the bird was much put out. Aftersome weeks the female appeared; he had literally drummed up a mate; hisurgent and oft-repeated advertisement was answered. Still the drummingdid not cease, but was quite as fervent as before. If a mate could bewon by drumming she could be kept and entertained by more drumming;courtship should not end with marriage. If the bird felt musical before, of course he felt much more so now. Besides that, the gentle deitiesneeded propitiating in behalf of the nest and young as well as in behalfof the mate. After a time a second female came, when there was warbetween the two. I did not see them come to blows, but I saw one femalepursuing the other about the place, and giving her no rest for severaldays. She was evidently trying to run her out of the neighborhood. Nowand then she, too, would drum briefly as if sending a triumphant messageto her mate. 

The woodpeckers do not each have a particular dry limb to which theyresort at all times to drum, like the one I have described. The woodsare full of suitable branches, and they drum more or less here andthere as they are in quest of food; yet I am convinced each one has itsfavorite spot, like the grouse, to which it resorts, especially in themorning. The sugar-maker in the maple-woods may notice that theirsound proceeds from the same tree or trees about his camp with greatregularity. A woodpecker in my vicinity has drummed for two seasons ona telegraph pole, and he makes the wires and glass insulators ring. Another drums on a thin board on the end of a long grape-arbor, and onstill mornings can be heard a long distance. 

A friend of mine in a Southern city tells me of a red-headed woodpeckerthat drums upon a lightning-rod on his neighbor's house. Nearly everyclear, still morning at certain seasons, he says, this musical rappingmay be heard. "He alternates his tapping with his stridulous call, andthe effect on a cool, autumn-like morning is very pleasing. "

The high-hole appears to drum more promiscuously than does the downy. Heutters his long, loud spring call, whick--whick--whick--whick, and thenbegins to rap with his beak upon his perch before the last note hasreached your ear. I have seen him drum sitting upon the ridge of thebarn. The log cock, or pileated woodpecker, the largest and wildest ofour Northern species, I have never heard drum. His blows should wake theechoes. 

When the woodpecker is searching for food, or laying siege to somehidden grub, the sound of his hammer is dead or muffled, and is heardbut a few yards. It is only upon dry, seasoned timber, freed of itsbark, that he beats his reveille to spring and wooes his mate. 

Wilson was evidently familiar with this vernal drumming of thewoodpeckers, but quite misinterprets it. Speaking of the red-belliedspecies, he says: "It rattles like the rest of the tribe on the deadlimbs, and with such violence as to be heard in still weather more thanhalf a mile off; and listens to hear the insect it has alarmed. " Helistens rather to hear the drum of his rival or the brief and coyresponse of the female; for there are no insects in these dry limbs. 

On one occasion I saw downy at his drum when a female flew quicklythrough the tree and alighted a few yards beyond him. He pausedinstantly, and kept his place, apparently without moving a muscle. Thefemale, I took it, had answered his advertisement. She flitted aboutfrom limb to limb (the female may be known by the absence of the crimsonspot on the back of the head), apparently full of business of her own, and now and then would drum in a shy, tentative manner. The male watchedher a few moments and, convinced perhaps that she meant business, struckup his liveliest tune, then listened for her response. As it came backtimidly but promptly, he left his perch and sought a nearer acquaintancewith the prudent female. Whether or not a match grew out of this littleflirtation I cannot say. 

Our smaller woodpeckers are sometimes accused of injuring the apple andother fruit trees, but the depredator is probably the larger and rareryellow-bellied species. One autumn I caught one of these fellows inthe act of sinking long rows of his little wells in the limb of anapple-tree. There were series of rings of them, one above another, quitearound the stem, some of them the third of an inch across. They areevidently made to get at the tender, juicy bark, or cambium layer, nextto the hard wood of the tree. The health and vitality of the branch areso seriously impaired by them that it often dies. 

In the following winter the same bird (probably) tapped a maple-tree infront of my window in fifty-six places; and when the day was sunny, andthe sap oozed out, he spent most of his time there. He knew the goodsap-days, and was on hand promptly for his tipple; cold and cloudydays he did not appear. He knew which side of the tree to tap, too, andavoided the sunless northern exposure. When one series of well-holesfailed to supply him, he would sink another, drilling through the barkwith great ease and quickness. Then, when the day was warm, and the sapran freely, he would have a regular sugar-maple debauch, sitting thereby his wells hour after hour, and as fast as they became filled sippingout the sap. This he did in a gentle, caressing manner that was verysuggestive. He made a row of wells near the foot of the tree, and otherrows higher up, and he would hop up and down the trunk as these becamefilled. He would hop down the tree backward with the utmost ease, throwing his tail outward and his head inward at each hop. When thewells would freeze or his thirst become slaked, he would ruffle hisfeathers, draw himself together, and sit and doze in the sun on the sideof the tree. He passed the night in a hole in an apple-tree not far off. He was evidently a young bird not yet having the plumage of the maturemale or female, and yet he knew which tree to tap and where to tap it. I saw where he had bored several maples in the vicinity, but no oaksor chestnuts. I nailed up a fat bone near his sap-works: the downywoodpecker came there several times a day to dine; the nut-hatch came, and even the snow-bird took a taste occasionally; but this sap-suckernever touched it; the sweet of the tree sufficed for him. Thiswoodpecker does not breed or abound in my vicinity; only stray specimensare now and then to be met with in the colder months. As springapproached, the one I refer to took his departure. 

I must bring my account of my neighbor in the tree down to the latestdate; so after the lapse of a year I add the following notes. The lastday of February was bright and springlike. I heard the first sparrowsing that morning and the first screaming of the circling hawks, andabout seven o'clock the first drumming of my little friend. His firstnotes were uncertain and at long intervals, but by and by he warmed upand beat a lively tattoo. As the season advanced he ceased to lodge inhis old quarters. I would rap and find nobody at home. Was he out on alark, I said, the spring fever working in his blood? After a time hisdrumming grew less frequent, and finally, in the middle of April, ceasedentirely. Had some accident befallen him, or had he wandered away tofresh fields, following some siren of his species? Probably the latter. Another bird that I had under observation also left his winter-quartersin the spring. This, then, appears to be the usual custom. The wrens andthe nut-hatches and chickadees succeed to these abandoned cavities, andoften have amusing disputes over them. The nut-hatches frequently passthe night in them, and the wrens and chickadees nest in them. I havefurther observed that in excavating a cavity for a nest the downywoodpecker makes the entrance smaller than when he is excavating hiswinter-quarters. This is doubtless for the greater safety of the youngbirds. 

The next fall, the downy excavated another limb in the old apple-tree, but had not got his retreat quite finished, when the large hairywoodpecker appeared upon the scene. I heard his loud click, click, earlyone frosty November morning. There was something impatient and angryin the tone that arrested my attention. I saw the bird fly to the treewhere downy had been at work, and fall with great violence upon theentrance to his cavity. The bark and the chips flew beneath hisvigorous blows, and before I fairly woke up to what he was doing, he hadcompletely demolished the neat, round doorway of downy. He had made alarge ragged opening large enough for himself to enter. I drove him awayand my favorite came back, but only to survey the ruins of his castlefor a moment and then go away. He lingered about for a day or two andthen disappeared. The big hairy usurper passed a night in the cavity, but on being hustled out of it the next night by me, he also left, butnot till he had demolished the entrance to a cavity in a neighboringtree where downy and his mate had reared their brood that summer, andwhere I had hoped the female would pass the winter. 

NOTES BY THE WAY. 

I. THE WEATHER-WISE MUSKRAT

I am more than half persuaded that the muskrat is a wise little animal, and that on the subject of the weather, especially, he possesses somesecret that I should be glad to know. In the fall of 1878 I noticed thathe built unusually high and massive nests. I noticed them in severaldifferent localities. In a shallow, sluggish pond by the roadside, which I used to pass daily in my walk, two nests were in process ofconstruction throughout the month of November. The builders worked onlyat night, and I could see each day that the work had visibly advanced. When there was a slight skim of ice over the pond, this was broken upabout the nests, with trails through it in different directions wherethe material had been brought. The houses were placed a little to oneside of the main channel, and were constructed entirely of a species ofcoarse wild grass that grew all about. So far as I could see, from firstto last they were solid masses of grass, as if the interior cavity ornest was to be excavated afterward, as doubtless it was. As they emergedfrom the pond they gradually assumed the shape of a miniature mountain, very bold and steep on the south side, and running down a long gentlegrade to the surface of the water on the north. One could see that thelittle architect hauled all his material up this easy slope, and thrustit out boldly around the other side. Every mouthful was distinctlydefined. After they were two feet or more above the water, I expectedeach day to see that the finishing stroke had been given and the workbrought to a close. But higher yet, said the builder. December drewnear, the cold became threatening, and I was apprehensive that winterwould suddenly shut down upon those unfinished nests. But the wiserats knew better than I did; they had received private advices fromheadquarters that I knew not of. Finally, about the 6th of December, thenests assumed completion; the northern incline was absorbed or carriedup, and each structure became a strong massive cone, three or fourfeet high, the largest nest of the kind I had ever seen. Does it mean asevere winter? I inquired. An old farmer said it meant "high water, "and he was right once, at least, for in a few days afterward we had theheaviest rainfall known in this section for half a century. The creeksrose to an almost unprecedented height. The sluggish pond became aseething, turbulent watercourse; gradually the angry element crept upthe sides of these lake dwellings, till, when the rain ceased, aboutfour o'clock they showed above the flood no larger than a man's hat. During the night the channel shifted till the main current swept overthem, and next day not a vestige of the nests was to be seen; theyhad gone down-stream, as had many other dwellings of a less temporarycharacter. The rats had built wisely, and would have been perfectlysecure against any ordinary high water, but who can foresee a flood? Theoldest traditions of their race did not run back to the time of such avisitation. 

Nearly a week afterward another dwelling was begun, well away from thetreacherous channel, but the architects did not work at it with muchheart; the material was very scarce, the ice hindered, and before thebasement-story was fairly finished, winter had the pond under his lockand key. 

In other localities I noticed that where the nests were placed on thebanks of streams, they were made secure against the floods by beingbuilt amid a small clump of bushes. When the fall of 1879 came, themuskrats were very tardy about beginning their house, laying thecorner-stone--or the corner-sod-about December 1st, and continuing thework slowly and indifferently. On the 15th of the month the nest was notyet finished. This, I said, indicates a mild winter; and, sure enough, the season was one of the mildest known for many years. The rats hadlittle use for their house. 

Again, in the fall of 1880, while the weather-wise were wagging theirheads, some forecasting a mild, some a severe winter, I watched withinterest for a sign from my muskrats. About November 1st, a monthearlier than the previous year, they began their nest, and worked at itwith a will. They appeared to have just got tidings of what was coming. If I had taken the hint so palpably given, my celery would not have beenfrozen in the ground, and my apples caught in unprotected places. When the cold wave struck us, about November 20th, my four-legged"I-told-you-so's" had nearly completed their dwelling; it lacked onlythe ridge-board, so to speak; it needed a little "topping out, " to giveit a finished look. But this it never got. The winter had come to stay, and it waxed more and more severe, till the unprecedented cold of thelast days of December must have astonished even the wise muskrats intheir snug retreat. I approached their nest at this time, a white moundupon the white, deeply frozen surface of the pond, and wondered ifthere was any life in that apparent sepulchre. I thrust my walking-sticksharply into it, when there was a rustle and a splash into the water, as the occupant made his escape. What a damp basement that house has, Ithought, and what a pity to rout out a peaceful neighbor out of his bedin this weather and into such a state of things as this! But water doesnot wet the muskrat; his fur is charmed, and not a drop penetratesit. Where the ground is favorable, the muskrats do not build thesemound-like nests, but burrow into the bank a long distance, andestablish their winter-quarters there. 

Shall we not say, then, in view of the above facts, that this littlecreature is weather-wise? The hitting of the mark twice might bemere good luck; but three bull's-eyes in succession is not a merecoincidence; it is a proof of skill. The muskrat is not found in the OldWorld, which is a little singular, as other rats so abound there, andas those slow-going English streams especially, with their grassy banks, are so well suited to him. The water-rat of Europe is smaller, but ofsimilar nature and habits. The muskrat does not hibernate like somerodents, but is pretty active all winter. In December I noticed in mywalk where they had made excursions of a few yards to an orchard forfrozen apples. One day, along a little stream, I saw a mink track amidthose of the muskrat; following it up, I presently came to blood andother marks of strife upon the snow beside a stone wall. Looking inbetween the stones, I found the carcass of the luckless rat, with itshead and neck eaten away. The mink had made a meal of him. 

II. CHEATING THE SQUIRRELS. 

FOR the largest and finest chestnuts I had last fall I was indebted tothe gray squirrels. Walking through the early October woods one day, Icame upon a place where the ground was thickly strewn with very largeunopened chestnut burs. On examination I found that every bur had beencut square off with about an inch of the stem adhering, and not onehad been left on the tree. It was not accident, then, but design. Whosedesign? The squirrels'. The fruit was the finest I had ever seen in thewoods, and some wise squirrel had marked it for his own. The burs wereripe, and had just begun to divide, not "threefold, " but fourfold, "toshow the fruit within. " The squirrel that had taken all this pains hadevidently reasoned with himself thus: "Now, these are extremely finechestnuts, and I want them; if I wait till the burs open on the tree thecrows and jays will be sure to carry off a great many of the nuts beforethey fall; then, after the wind has rattled out what remain, there arethe mice, the chipmunks, the red squirrels, the raccoons, the grouse, tosay nothing of the boys and the pigs, to come in for their share; so Iwill forestall events a little; I will cut off the burs when they havematured, and a few days of this dry October weather will cause everyoneof them to open on the ground; I shall be on hand in the nick of time togather up my nuts. " The squirrel, of course, had to take the chances ofa prowler like myself coming along, but he had fairly stolen a march onhis neighbors. As I proceeded to collect and open the burs, I washalf prepared to hear an audible protest from the trees about, for Iconstantly fancied myself watched by shy but jealous eyes. It is aninteresting inquiry how the squirrel knew the burs would open if left toknow, but thought the experiment worth trying. 

The gray squirrel is peculiarly an American product, and might servevery well as a national emblem. The Old World can beat us on rats andmice, but we are far ahead on squirrels, having five or six species toEurope's one. 

III. FOX AND HOUND. 

I STOOD on a high hill or ridge one autumn day and saw a hound run a foxthrough the fields far beneath me. What odors that fox must have shakenout of himself, I thought, to be traced thus easily, and how great theirspecific gravity not to have been blown away like smoke by the breeze!The fox ran a long distance down the hill, keeping within a few feet ofa stone wall; then turned a right angle and led off for the mountain, across a plowed field and a succession of pasture lands. In aboutfifteen minutes the hound came in full blast with her nose in the air, and never once did she put it to the ground while in my sight. When shecame to the stone wall she took the other side from that taken by thefox, and kept about the same distance from it, being thus separatedseveral yards from his track, with the fence between her and it. At thepoint where the fox turned sharply to the left, the hound overshot a fewyards, then wheeled, and feeling the air a moment with her nose, tookup the scent again and was off on his trail as unerringly as fate. Itseemed as if the fox must have sowed himself broadcast as he went along, and that his scent was so rank and heavy that it settled in the hollowsand clung tenaciously to the bushes and crevices in the fence. I thoughtI ought to have caught a remnant of it as I passed that way some minuteslater, but I did not. But I suppose it was not that the light-footed foxso impressed himself upon the ground he ran over, but that the sense ofthe hound was so keen. To her sensitive nose these tracks steamedlike hot cakes, and they would not have cooled off so as to beundistinguishable for several hours. For the time being she had but onesense: her whole soul was concentrated in her nose. 

It is amusing when the hunter starts out of a winter morning to see hishound probe the old tracks to determine how recent they are. He sinkshis nose down deep in the snow so as to exclude the air from above, thendraws a long full breath, giving sometimes an audible snort. If thereremains the least effluvium of the fox the hound will detect it. Ifit be very slight it only sets his tail wagging; if it be strong itunloosens his tongue. 

Such things remind one of the waste, the friction that is going on allabout us, even when the wheels of life run the most smoothly. A foxcannot trip along the top of a stone wall so lightly but that he willleave enough of himself to betray his course to the hound for hoursafterward. When the boys play "hare and hounds" the hare scatters bitsof paper to give a clew to the pursuers, but he scatters himself muchmore freely if only our sight and scent were sharp enough to detect thefragments. Even the fish leave a trail in the water, and it is said theotter will pursue them by it. The birds make a track in the air, onlytheir enemies hunt by sight rather than by scent. The fox baffles thehound most upon a hard crust of frozen snow; the scent will not hold tothe smooth, bead-like granules. 

Judged by the eye alone, the fox is the lightest and most buoyantcreature that runs. His soft wrapping of fur conceals the muscular playand effort that is so obvious in the hound that pursues him, and hecomes bounding along precisely as if blown by a gentle wind. His massivetail is carried as if it floated upon the air by its own lightness. 

The hound is not remarkable for his fleetness, but how he willhang!--often running late into the night and sometimes till morning, from ridge to ridge, from peak to peak; now on the mountain, nowcrossing the valley, now playing about a large slope of uplying pasturefields. At times the fox has a pretty well-defined orbit, and the hunterknows where to intercept him. Again he leads off like a comet, quitebeyond the system of hills and ridges upon which he was started, and hisreturn is entirely a matter of conjecture; but if the day be not morethan half spent, the chances are that the fox will be back before night, though the sportsman's patience seldom holds out that long. 

The hound is a most interesting dog. How solemn and long-visaged heis--how peaceful and well-disposed! He is the Quaker among dogs. Allthe viciousness and currishness seem to have been weeded out of him;he seldom quarrels, or fights, or plays, like other dogs. Two strangehounds, meeting for the first time, behave as civilly toward each otheras if two men. I know a hound that has an ancient, wrinkled, human, far-away look that reminds one of the bust of Homer among the Elginmarbles. He looks like the mountains toward which his heart yearns somuch. 

The hound is a great puzzle to the farm dog; the latter, attracted byhis baying, comes barking and snarling up through the fields bent onpicking a quarrel; he intercepts the hound, snubs and insults and annoyshim in every way possible, but the hound heeds him not; if the dogattacks him he gets away as best he can, and goes on with the trail; thecur bristles and barks and struts about for a while, then goes back tothe house, evidently thinking the hound a lunatic, which he is for thetime being--a monomaniac, the slave and victim of one idea. I saw themaster of a hound one day arrest him in full course to give one of thehunters time to get to a certain runaway; the dog cried and struggled tofree himself and would listen neither to threats nor caresses. Knowinghe must be hungry, I offered him my lunch, but he would not touch it. Iput it in his mouth, but he threw it contemptuously from him. We coaxedand petted and reassured him, but he was under a spell; he was bereft ofall thought or desire but the one passion to pursue that trail. 

IV. THE WOODCHUCK

Writers upon rural England and her familiar natural history make nomention of the marmot or woodchuck. In Europe this animal seems tobe confined to high mountainous districts, as on our Pacific slope, burrowing near the snow line. It is more social or gregarious than theAmerican species, living in large families like our prairie-dog. Inthe Middle and Eastern States our woodchuck takes the place, in somerespects, of the English rabbit, burrowing in every hillside and underevery stone wall and jutting ledge and large bowlder, from whence itmakes raids upon the grass and clover and sometimes upon the gardenvegetables. It is quite solitary in its habits, seldom more than oneinhabiting the same den, unless it be a mother and her young. It is notnow so much a wood chuck as a field chuck. Occasionally, however, oneseems to prefer the woods, and is not seduced by the sunny slopes andthe succulent grass, but feeds, as did his fathers before him, uponroots and twigs, the bark of young trees, and upon various wood plants. 

One summer day, as I was swimming across a broad, deep pool in the creekin a secluded place in the woods, I saw one of these sylvan chucks amidthe rocks but a few feet from the edge of the water where I proposed totouch. He saw my approach, but doubtless took me for some water-fowl, or for some cousin of his of the muskrat tribe; for he went on with hisfeeding, and regarded me not till I paused within ten feet of him andlifted myself up. Then he did not know me; having, perhaps, never seenAdam in his simplicity, but he twisted his nose around to catch myscent; and the moment he had done so he sprang like a jumping-jack andrushed into his den with the utmost precipitation. 

The woodchuck is the true serf among our animals; he belongs to thesoil, and savors of it. He is of the earth, earthy. There is generallya decided odor about his dens and lurking-places, but it is not at alldisagreeable in the clover-scented air, and his shrill whistle, as hetakes to his hole or defies the farm dog from the interior of the stonewall, is a pleasant summer sound. In form and movement the woodchuck isnot captivating. His body is heavy and flabby. Indeed, such a flaccid, fluid, pouchy carcass, I have never before seen. It has absolutely nomuscular tension or rigidity, but is as baggy and shaky as a skinfilled with water. Let the rifleman shoot one while it lies basking ona sidelong rock, and its body slumps off, and rolls and spills down thehill, as if it were a mass of bowels only. The legs of the woodchuck areshort and stout, and made for digging rather than running. The latteroperation he performs by short leaps, his belly scarcely clearing theground. For a short distance he can make very good time, but heseldom trusts himself far from his hole, and when surprised in thatpredicament, makes little effort to escape, but, grating his teeth, looks the danger squarely in the face. 

I knew a farmer in New York who had a very large bob-tailed churn-dog bythe name of Cuff. The farmer kept a large dairy and made a great deal ofbutter, and it was the business of Cuff to spend nearly the half of eachsummer day treading the endless round of the churning-machine. Duringthe remainder of the day he had plenty of time to sleep, and rest, andsit on his hips and survey the landscape. One day, sitting thus, hediscovered a woodchuck about forty rods from the house, on a steepside-hill, feeding about near his hole, which was beneath a large rock. The old dog, forgetting his stiffness, and remembering the fun he hadhad with woodchucks in his earlier days, started off at his highestspeed, vainly hoping to catch this one before he could get to his hole. But the woodchuck, seeing the dog come laboring up the hill, sprang tothe mouth of his den, and, when his pursuer was only a few rods off, whistled tauntingly and went in. This occurred several times, the olddog marching up the hill, and then marching down again, having had hislabor for his pains. I suspect that he revolved the subject in his mindwhile he revolved the great wheel of the churning-machine, and thatsome turn or other brought him a happy thought, for next time he showedhimself a strategist. Instead of giving chase to the woodchuck whenfirst discovered, he crouched down to the ground, and, resting his headon his paws, watched him. The woodchuck kept working away from the hole, lured by the tender clover, but, not unmindful of his safety, lifted himself up on his haunches every few moments and surveyed theapproaches. Presently, after the woodchuck had let himself down from oneof these attitudes of observation, and resumed his feeding, Cuff startedswiftly but stealthily up the hill, precisely in the attitude of a catwhen she is stalking a bird. When the woodchuck rose up again, Cuff wasperfectly motionless and half hid by the grass. When he again resumedhis clover, Cuff sped up the hill as before, this time crossing a fence, but in a low place, and so nimbly that he was not discovered. Again thewood chuck was on the outlook, again Cuff was motionless and hugging theground. As the dog nears his victim he is partially hidden by a swell inthe earth, but still the woodchuck from his outlook reports "all right, "when Cuff, having not twice as far to run as the 'chuck, throws allstealthiness aside and rushes directly for the hole. At that moment thewoodchuck discovers his danger, and, seeing that it is a race for life, leaps as I never saw marmot leap before. But he is two seconds too late, his retreat is cut off, and the powerful jaws of the old dog close uponhim. 

The next season Cuff tried the same tactics again with like success; butwhen the third woodchuck had taken up his abode at the fatal hole, the old churner's wits and strength had begun to fail him, and he wasbaffled in each attempt to capture the animal. 

The woodchuck always burrows on a side-hill. This enables him to guardagainst being drowned out, by making the termination of the hole higherthan the entrance. He digs in slantingly for about two or three feet, then makes a sharp upward turn and keeps nearly parallel with thesurface of the ground for a distance of eight or ten feet farther, according to the grade. Here he makes his nest and passes the winter, holing up in October or November and coming out again in April. This isa long sleep, and is rendered possible only by the amount of fat withwhich the system has become stored during the summer. The fire of lifestill burns, but very faintly and slowly, as with the draughts allclosed and the ashes heaped up. Respiration is continued, but at longerintervals, and all the vital processes are nearly at a standstill. Digone out during hibernation (Audubon did so), and you find it a mereinanimate ball, that suffers itself to be moved and rolled aboutwithout showing signs of awakening. But bring it in by the fire, and itpresently unrolls and opens its eyes, and crawls feebly about, and ifleft to itself will seek some dark hole or corner, roll itself up again, and resume its former condition.